all Department of Society, Human Development, and Health stories

Income Inequality Associated with Double Disease Burden of Overnourishment and Undernourishment in India

404132862 — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:39:19 -0400

It has been known that countries with rapidly developing economies may experience a double-disease burden that results from undernutrition and overnutrition. People living in poverty experience diseases that result from a lack of resources, while affluent individuals may suffer from diseases that result from an abundance of resources.

Anger can break your heart

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:28:18 -0400

Think about this the next time someone cuts you off in traffic or in a grocery store line: Anger can bring on a heart attack or stroke.

That's the conclusion of several studies at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere. One study of 1,305 men with an average age of 62 revealed that the angriest men were three times more likely to develop heart disease than the most placid ones.

Child enrichment program still pays off after 15 years

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:25:57 -0400

Researchers have detected the lasting benefits of early childhood education 15 years after the program ended. What may have seemed like three years of fun and games at the time for the low-birth weight, premature infants translated into higher achievement scores in math and reading for the intervention group at age 18.

They also tended to have fewer risky behaviors. The study, led by Marie McCormick and published in the March 2006 Pediatrics, is believed to be the largest and most rigorous of its kind.

"Early educational intervention works," said McCormick, the Sumner and Esther Feldberg professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston.

Violence as a health problem

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:21 -0400

"Are we a nation in which violence is out of control and will plague us and will interfere with our freedom?" asks Felton Earls, professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at Harvard School of Public Health. "Violence reduces confidence that all the other things that we stand for are working to make this a successful country - it tests the very foundation of a society."

A self-described child of the 1960s, Earls has spent much of the past 15 years trying to understand violence in society. In a Nov. 17, 2005 lecture, he posed the question: "Is violence a medical problem?" but he didn't answer it. "Researchers ask questions," he said. "Only after time, research, and experience should you be in the position to answer the question. I can say that violence is a health problem, but I'm cautious about answering the question of whether it's a medical problem."

Violence is commonly understood to be a public health problem, which means that it's a problem that can be studied among populations and the structures, institutions, and regulations that affect those populations. Medical problems are focused on individuals. Clearly, the effects of violence are often medical problems, but violence itself?

A study, whose authors include Earls and School of Public Health research fellow Jeffrey Bingenheimer, which appeared in the May 27, 2005, issue of Science, suggests that violence acts as a social infectious disease. The study looked at adolescents who witnessed or have been victims of life-threatening gun violence. "We were interested in what happens when young people witness close-up violent episodes in their families or in their neighborhoods," said Earls. "And what's the likelihood that witnessing such an event will mobilize them in such a way as to have them become perpetrators of violence." What they found was that even after controlling for a huge number of variables - including aggression, drug use, gender, and ethnicity - that those who witnessed firearm violence were three times more likely to perpetrate firearm violence within two years than their peers who didn't witness the violence. Thus, violence can be viewed as a disease that "infects" its witnesses.

The ramifications for violence prevention are profound: "If we can stop a violent incident, not only have we stopped a victim from being injured," said Earls, "but we have diminished the probability that a whole network of witnessing peers will perpetrate violence. You can actually break down the cycle in which exposure leads to violent incidence."

Intimate partner violence

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:18:13 -0400

The study's lead author, Megan Gerber, a practicing physician at Cambridge Health Alliance and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, notes: "Our study hopes to raise physician awareness of how common domestic violence is in practice, especially among women who exhibit adverse health behaviors. Physicians regularly screen for tobacco and alcohol use in their practices, however routine assessment for domestic violence has been much more controversial, and many clinicians do not regularly ask their patients about it."

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a major public health problem in the United States and victims are commonly encountered in medical settings. Many barriers exist to clinician-initiated screening for IPV. However, smoking and problem drinking are conditions that clinicians commonly screen for and both have been strongly associated with IPV in prior studies. By estimating the predicted probability of 12-month and lifetime IPV for a given patient based on whether she presents with these conditions, this study gives clinicians information that can help them identify patients at risk for IPV.

More TV means fewer veggies

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:33:53 -0400

Harvard researchers tracked 548 sixth and seventh graders from public schools for 19 months. The children were asked to fill out surveys to determine the time they spent per day watching television, movies or videos; time spent per day on physical activities and how many fruits and vegetables they consumed daily. The average amount of TV viewing per day was three hours and total fruit and vegetable consumption among the participants decreased by one-third of a serving per day, going from just over 4.25 servings to 3.9 servings. The recommended number of servings per day is five. "Children's TV programming bombards kids with commercials, targeted to their demographic, primarily for sweetened foods and drinks. Commercials advocating for fruit and vegetable consumption are rare. The findings in this study help build a case for using television to disseminate messages about healthy eating and nutrition and the consequences of poor diet," said Steven Gortmaker, senior author. The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the National Institutes of Health Public Training Grant. The study appeared in the December 2003 issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Dying to drink

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:23:28 -0400

Henry Wechsler, lecturer on social psychology in the Department of Health and Social Behavior and director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Studies Program, defines binge drinking as having five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more drinks in a row for women at least once in the past two weeks.

Radcliffe conference presents research on lethal school violence

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:22:26 -0400

Educators, policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and adolescent-development specialists came to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on May 21, 2002, for the National Conference on Lethal School Violence. The conference centerpiece was the report "Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence," a qualitative and quantitative study of incidents of lethal school shootings released by the National Academies of Science on May 17. The report, commissioned by Congress, studied six incidences of lethal school violence in the 1990s. While the conference offered no quick fixes or easy answers, researchers found that spotlight-grabbing culprits such as family instability and violent media images played a role in some but not all of the shootings.

Research suggests optimistic attitude can reduce risk of heart disease in older men

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:48 -0400

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, working with colleagues from the Department of Veterans Affairs, studied some 1,306 Boston area men who were part of the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study. In 1986, the volunteers completed a questionnaire that judged whether they were optimistic or pessimistic. They all were healthy individuals with no known chronic medical conditions when the study began. The men were followed for an average of 10 years after filling out the questionnaire. Study participants with the highest levels of optimism accounted for less than half the number of cases of angina, nonfatal and fatal heart attacks during the course of the study when compared to pessimistic men. “Most of the evidence for the notion that ‘thinking positively' is good for your health has been anecdotal - this study provides some of the first hard medical evidence for this idea in the arena of heart disease,” said Laura Kubzansky, assistant professor of health and social behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study was supported in part by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and from the National Institute for Aging.

HIV-1 infected children benefit greatly from combination therapy

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:17:34 -0400

Combination therapy including protease inhibitors has been available since 1996 for adults with HIV-1 infection. The therapy has slowed the progression of HIV-1 and drastically reduced the rate of mortality in adults. But how does the combination therapy work in children with HIV-1 infection? In the first prospective study in the United States to look at the effect of combination therapy among HIV-1 infected children and adolescents, researchers from the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group and the Harvard School of Public Health found that mortality rates among the study participants were dramatically reduced. “The study documents very substantial reductions in mortality among children and adolescents -- prior to this we had evidence of improvements in viral loads, and a sense of reduced death -- but now we have clear evidence,” said Steven Gortmaker, professor in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study. The research was supported by grants from the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Pediatric-Perinatal HIV Clinical Trials Network of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

How media violence touches children

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:16 -0400

Children and adolescents are consuming more television than ever before. The average 8- to 18-year-old spends nearly seven hours each day involved with some form of media. Kids are also more violent than ever before. At the turn of the last century, children and adolescents were most likely to die of environmental causes, especially infectious diseases. In the year 2000, violence -- suicide, homicide, accidents, and assaults -- was the leading cause of death among young people. Michael Rich, a moviemaker turned pediatrician, is one of a number of researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School who have been studying the effects of the media on the mental and physical health of children and adolescents.

Dating violence linked with teen pregnancy, suicide attempts

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:14:32 -0400

About one in five girls experience physical or sexual dating violence, according to a new study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. These girls are significantly more likely to engage in other behaviors that pose serious health risks. Girls who have experienced such violence are more likely to become pregnant as teen-agers, to attempt suicide, to use drugs including alcohol and cocaine, and to try to control their weight in unhealthy ways, including abuse of diet pills and laxatives. "The finding of such a high prevalence of dating violence against adolescent girls throws a spotlight on the need for all of us to do more to prevent and intervene in this violence to reduce both the immediate risks of injury to young women and the very serious risks to their health that may follow," said Jay Silverman, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. The research was supported by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the W.T. Grant Foundation.

Children from working-class families twice as likely to be depressed adults

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:13:02 -0400

Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have an elevated risk of depression throughout their lifetimes, even if they become more professionally successful than their parents. That's the conclusion of a study conducted by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Stephen Gilman and colleagues. The study also suggests that girls raised in working-class households are more likely to develop depression as adults than boys in similar households. Gilman points out that the majority of participants in the study did not develop depression, indicating that childhood factors are only part of the story of major depression.

Depiction of alcohol, tobacco use in G-rated animated films still high

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:12:56 -0400

Alcohol and tobacco use is depicted as normal behavior in nearly half of G-rated animated feature films. While researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health say that this is a slight decline, they note that "trends do not provide a strong indication of a commitment from the film industry to eliminate the depiction of alcohol and tobacco use in G-rated animated films." These films also offer no warnings about the effect on health from using these substances.

Increased consumption of soda promotes childhood obesity

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:04:40 -0400

Soft drinks are currently the leading source of added sugars in the daily diet of young Americans. Now, researchers have conducted the first long-term study to examine soda consumption and its precise impact on children's body weight. Their findings show that for each additional daily serving of a sugar-sweetened soft drink, the incidence of obesity was significantly increased. The study's authors found that, during the time of the study, 57 percent of the children increased their daily intake of sugar-sweetened soft drinks. More than half drank nearly a full extra serving per day. Researchers also found that the odds of becoming obese increased 1.6 times for each additional can or glass of sugar-sweetened soft drink consumed above the daily average.