Welcome to Benchmarks, your weekly dose of news and notes from the Mass General research community. With over 9,500 individuals working across more than 30 departments, centers and institutes, there is more research news than we can get to each week. Here are some highlights:

• Research in the News
• How Napping May Be Beneficial to Brain Health
• Doctors Are Leaving Academic Medicine. Most of Them Are Women.
• Infertility Tied to More Severe Menopause Symptoms in Midlife
• Tweets of the Week (or Xs of the past seven days)
• This Week in Mass General History
• How Mass General Paved the Way for Social Workers in Hospitals

Research in the News

How Napping May Be Beneficial to Brain Health

Here’s some good news for those of you who like to take naps. And some not so good news for those of us who hardly nap at all.

Mass General researcher Hassan Dashti, PhD, was the co-author of an article on The Conversation website that summarized the findings of a recent study in Sleep Health.

Using a technique called Mendelian randomization, Dashti and collaborators Valentina Paz and Victoria Garfield analyzed data from 380,000 people aged 40-69 from the UK Biobank.

The researchers found that individuals who took more frequent naps had a larger total brain volume compared to non-nappers.

Brains shrink gradually and naturally with age, but this process is accelerated in people with neurocognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Some studies have shown that people with cognitive impairments can experience a decrease in brain volume.

The larger brain volumes found in people who take frequent naps suggest that naps may act as a safeguard, compensating for inadequate sleep and helping to preserve brain health, the team writes. Read more.

Doctors Are Leaving Academic Medicine. Most of Them Are Women.

There are more and more women entering medical school, and most medical school classes are comprised of more than 50% women.

However, a new study led by Mass General’s Ya-Wen Chen, MD, MPH, and Cassandra Kelleher, MD, found that across all stages of academic careers, women were 25% more likely to leave academic medicine than men.

Women are also less likely to hold academic ranks and leadership positions in academia.

Despite equal numbers of women and men graduating from medical school, the higher attrition rate from academia for women ultimately means less representation of women in the academic workforce, the team writes.

The study also calls into question a hypothesis that has been proposed to explain why women have higher rates of attrition from academia.

It is often suggested that family obligations are the main factor associated with female physicians leaving academic hospitals.

However, the researchers found that higher attrition rates for women persisted throughout all career stages, suggesting that family obligations are unlikely to wholly explain this gender disparity. Read more.

Infertility Tied to More Severe Menopause Symptoms in Midlife

Women with a history of infertility are likely to experience more severe menopausal symptoms at midlife, according to a study in the journal Menopause.

In the study, Victoria Fitz, MD, a clinical fellow in the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mass General, and colleagues examined longitudinal associations between history of infertility and menopausal symptoms in midlife.

The analysis included 695 midlife women participants in Project Viva. Participants were enrolled from 1999 to 2002 during pregnancy and were followed for 18 years.

The researchers found that women with prior infertility were more likely to score above the median on the Menopause Rating Scale—meaning that their symptoms were more severe than most—and had higher odds of reporting depression and irritability. Read more.

Tweets of the Week (or Xs of the past seven days)

This Week in Mass General History

How Mass General Paved the Way for Social Workers in Hospitals

August 7, 1926 (The Mercury, Hobart, Tasmania)— The Women’s Column in the Mercury Newspaper of Hobart, Tasmania, discusses a recent book, The Social Worker, which was written by Mass General clinician Richard Clark Cabot, MD.

“In his own medical work and after many years’ experience, Cabot became convinced that the social agent [the female social worker], with her facilities for entering the homes and schools and workshops of the people, and gaining their confidence and friendship, is at least as important in the campaign against disease and evil as the doctor himself.

With this in mind, Cabot established in 1905 a “full-time, paid social worker at the Massachusetts General Hospital, to cooperate with me and the other physicians in the dispensary, first in deepening and broadening our comprehensions of the patients, and so improving our diagnosis, and second in helping to meet their needs, economic, mental or moral, either by her own efforts or by calling to her aid the group of allied already organized in the city for the relief of the unfortunate wherever found.”

Within 13 years of Cabot establishing a social worker position at Mass General, 200 other hospitals in the United States started to incorporate social work into their clinical care, some of them employing 40 or 50 paid social workers for the needs of a single hospital.

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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