Welcome to Benchmarks, your (now almost reliably) weekly dose of news and notes from the Mass General research community.
With over 9,500 people working in research across more than 30 departments, centers and institutes at Mass General, there’s more news than we can get to each week. Here are a few highlights:
- Research in the News
- What’s New and Exciting at the Martinos Center?
- Pober to be Recognized for Contributions to William Syndrome Research and Care
- Time Magazine Showcases Mass General Research Study on Alcohol and Heart Health
- Tweets of the Week
- This Week in Mass General History
- A Drop of Blood Will Tell the Story
Research in the News
What’s New and Exciting at the Martinos Center?
Bruce Rosen, MD, PhD, director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, was recently featured in a new video discussing the center’s plans for the near future.
“This next year is going to be a very exciting year for the center because we have several new instruments that we’ve been developing through support from the NIH Brain Initiative that will be coming online sometime within the next 12 months,” Rosen says.
“One of them is the next generation of scanner to map the human connections in the brain. That’s our connectome, and we’re calling it Connectome 2.0. That’s going to be an amazing device, more than four times as powerful as the previous connectome, which was almost five times more powerful than anything else that was on the planet before we developed that. That’s very exciting.”
Pober to be Recognized for Contributions to William Syndrome Research and Care
Barbara Pober, MD, will be honored this November at a fundraiser in Brooklyn to support the Anthony Filippazo Grant for Williams Syndrome Research, established by the Williams Syndrome Association.
The aim of the grant is to deepen the understanding of Williams syndrome, a genetic condition characterized by cardiovascular disease, developmental delays and learning challenges, and to investigate new drugs that could enhance outcomes for patients.
Pober, director of the Williams Syndrome Program at Mass General for Children, and has been a pivotal figure in research and clinical care for individuals with Williams syndrome since 1987.
Time Magazine Showcases Mass General Research Study on Alcohol and Heart Health
An article in Time Magazine highlighted a recent research study led by Ahmed Tawakol, MD, that identified the pathway through which moderate alcohol use provides cardiovascular benefits.
Looking at brain scans from more than 1,000 study participants, the team discovered that light-to-moderate drinkers experienced an ongoing dampening of activity in the amygdala, while the activity of the prefrontal cortex was normal when alcohol was not in their systems.
Though the data didn’t let the researchers see whether or not this effect on the amygdala faded eventually if people stopped drinking entirely, this dampening of the amygdala’s activity was associated with a 22% reduction in cardiovascular disease.
When the researchers looked specifically at light-to-moderate drinkers with a history of anxiety-a condition characterized by an overactive stress network-the effect doubled. Rather than the 22% reduction, “people with prior anxiety had a 40% reduction in heart disease,” says Tawakol. “That gave us support for what we found on imaging.”
“I know that a lot of people will hear that and say, ‘Well, I’m anxious. That’s why I drink-I guess there’s a benefit,'” he adds. “But there is no safe quantity of alcohol.”
There are better ways than alcohol to take advantage of this stress-reducing pathway such as exercise, Tawakol says. Read more.
Tweets of the Week
Editor’s note: For the time being, we will not be calling these “the Xs of the week.” It’s too soon and change is hard.
This Week in Mass General History
A Drop of Blood Will Tell the Story
July 25, 1924 (San Bernadino Sun)—Science is rapidly reducing everything to exactness. One by one the things that have been uncertain and indefinite in past ages are being measured and marked, and they take their places according to rule, always ready for the yardstick to declare their quality.
The latest thing that has run wild and unregulated throughout the ages to be corralled by science and reduced to subjection is intoxication. There has never been a definition of that word, or of the plainer Saxon for the same thing, “drunk.”
Pathologists of the Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that the exact effect of alcohol upon the human blood may be ascertained by testing his blood.
A perfectly comatose individual may be restored to complete consciousness within an hour by the use of carbon dioxide gas, and then a drop of his blood can be analyzed and the exact quantity of alcohol he took to produce his condition ascertained.
There is now no more need of more or less expert human testimony founded upon personal observation and experience. A drop of blood will tell the story.
About the Mass General Research Institute
Research at Massachusetts General Hospital is interwoven through more than 30 different departments, centers and institutes. Our research includes fundamental, lab-based science; clinical trials to test new drugs, devices and diagnostic tools; and community and population-based research to improve health outcomes across populations and eliminate disparities in care.
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