Harvard University

“It makes me free”: participant perspectives on HIV prevention and contraception delivery at hair salons in Durban, South Africa

Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use is low among women, particularly in South Africa (SA), where HIV incidence remains high. Providing integrated HIV prevention with other sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in community settings may promote uptake and engagement....

Spread and Sustainability of an Antimicrobial Stewardship Initiative Within a Pediatric Network

BACKGROUND: Projects employing performance feedback with education have been used to improve antimicrobial prescribing practices, but improvements may not be sustainable after the active intervention. We sought to determine whether ongoing clinical decision support (CDS) could su...

Proposing a Grand Bargain for More Affordable Employer-Sponsored Insurance

This JAMA Forum discusses current tax policy, reinsurance for employer coverage, and what could be included in a grand bargain.

M3: Conversational LLMs simplify secure clinical data access, understanding, and analysis

Large-scale clinical databases offer opportunities for medical research, but their complexity creates barriers to effective use. The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-IV), one of the world’s largest open-source electronic health record databases, traditionally re...

“Provided power is there, it will be a good initiative”: healthcare provider perspectives on diagnostic screening for curable STIs during pregnancy in Botswana

Diagnostic screening for curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs) during antenatal care has the potential to improve health outcomes among women and infants in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). To inform roll-out and scale up of antenatal STI screening in LMICs, it...

A medically grounded LLM agent–based tool to detect patient safety events in medical records

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible promise in medicine. While LLMs may be particularly useful in areas requiring extensive review of clinical records, their use remains limited due to their tendency to hallucinate and fabricate information. Hallucination issues, a...

Model-based estimation of the population contrast response function in human visual cortex

Contrast determines how strong visual stimuli drive neural responses and, in turn, how well we can see. This contrast-response relationship is nonlinear, with gain control mechanisms acting to compress responses to high-contrast stimuli, effectively setting the contrast range tha...

Mitochondria-Associated Transcription Precedes Oxidative Phosphorylation in Human Embryos

Abstract Mitochondria undergo significant structural and functional changes during human pre-implantation embryogenesis, yet the transcriptional activity of both nuclear-encoded mitochondria-associated genes and mitochondrially transcribed genes across this developmental window r...

Auditing sex/gender disparities in emergency triage with LLM-based paired comparisons

We present a domain-agnostic paired-comparison approach that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify sex/gender-related asymmetries in documented clinical decision-making. The method trains an LLM to emulate observed decisions, then evaluates sex-swapped pairs in which only...

COVID-19 lockdown and coverage of maternal health and nutrition care in rural West Bengal, India: a single interrupted time-series analysis

Abstract While COVID-19 lockdowns globally disrupted healthcare, the extent of changes in India’s maternal health and nutrition services coverage in rural settings requires further empirical investigation. Utilizing data from 57,371 pregnancies recorded between January 2012 and D...

Longitudinal predictors of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in autism: Examining relationships with ritualistic behavior and social diagnostic features

Abstract Autistic youth commonly experience co-occurring mental health conditions. Core autism features have been linked to internalizing and externalizing symptoms, yet longitudinal pathways remain unclear. This study examined how ritualistic and social diagnostic features predi...

Detectability of solid particle injections into the stratosphere with satellite solar occultation instruments

Stratospheric aerosol injections (SAI) have been proposed as a potential climate intervention to mitigate some effects of global warming. This method involves the idea of injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Other ideas include the injection of solid particles, like a...

Impacts of ivermectin mass drug administration for malaria control on smallholder pig health and productivity in Mozambique

Abstract As part of a larger clinical trial testing ivermectin mass drug administration (iMDA) in humans and pigs for malaria vector control in Mozambique, this study evaluates ivermectin’s effects on gastrointestinal nematode burden, daily weight gain and economic outcomes in tr...

Widespread Loss of Heterozygosity and Endoreduplication in Odontogenic Myxoma

Odontogenic myxoma (OM) is an uncommon, locally aggressive odontogenic neoplasm with characteristic histologic and clinico-radiographic features but with potential for histologic overlap with other odontogenic and non-odontogenic entities and a non-specific immunoprofile. Widespr...

Alcohol consumption and cardiovascular health: balancing assumed benefits with the available evidence

1. The distinction between the well-established harms of high total alcohol intake versus purported cardiovascular benefits of small amounts of wine seems crucial [1–3]. Ethanol at high doses is a ...

Prioritizing Global Health Education in Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowships: An Applicant Survey

Abstract Background Global Health (GH) is expanding, offering an increasing number of opportunities for engagement to trainees in medical schools and residency programs. This expansion of opportunities has not yet reached those at the fellowship level, particularly in Critical Ca...

Menopausal hormone therapy and primary liver cancer: long-term follow-up of the women’s health initiative randomized trials

Abstract Background: Long-term results on liver cancer incidence and mortality are reported from two Women’s Health Initiative randomized trials evaluating menopausal hormone therapy. Methods: 16,608 postmenopausal women with a uterus were randomized to conjugated equine estrogen...

EBV reactivation priming of the peripheral immune system in multiple sclerosis relapse

Despite decades of research, the cellular and molecular events preceding multiple sclerosis (MS) relapse remain incompletely understood. Here, in this observational study of longitudinal blood samples from patients with relapsing-remitting MS, we used single-cell RNA sequencing,...

Measuring the Carbon Footprint for Health Systems and Suppliers: A Collaborative Field Study by Providence and Becton Dickinson

The carbon emissions from assets owned by health systems are a small fraction of their total carbon footprint. The emissions produced by their suppliers of products and services - such as electricity and transportation - are typically more than 10 times a hospital's direct emissi...

A Mixed Methods Quality Improvement Evaluation of a Dedicated Virtual Rounding Team for Home Hospital Care

Background Importance Home hospital is the delivery of acute, hospital-level care at home as a substitute for traditional brick-and-mortar care. Most past literature includes a care model where home hospital providers visit the patient at home. Due to the inefficiencies of travel...