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Inflammation: It’s Not Always A Bad Thing

January 2nd, 2011 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Uncategorized
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A number of buzz-words appear repeatedly in health claims, such as natural, antioxidants, organic, and inflammation. Inflammation has been implicated in a number of chronic diseases, including diabetes, Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, atherosclerosis, and even cancer. Inflammation has been demonized, and is usually thought of as a bad thing. But it is not all bad.

In a study in Nature Medicine in September 2011, a research group led by Dr. Umut Ozcan at Children’s Hospital Boston (a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School) reported that two proteins activated by inflammation are crucial to maintaining normal blood sugar levels in obese and diabetic mice. This could be the beginning of a new paradigm. Ozcan says Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Real-Time Drug Safety Reports

September 27th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed an iPhone application that keeps you up-to-date with drug safety reports and allows you to submit any side effects directly to the FDA.

The app, called MedWatcher can keep a list of medications for which you receive both official FDA alerts and news from other channels. Users can report side effects straight from the app and view other submitted reports. The researchers hope to lower the barrier to reporting side effects, increasing the participation in safety surveillance.

Reports of serious adverse events are reviewed by members of the Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and then submitted to the FDA. The app was developed using technology from the Outbreaks Near Me app, which we covered one year ago. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*