Research

IT'S A SMOGGY SUMMER DAY. The air feels thick. Most people know their lungs might suffer on such days. But increasingly, medical researchers are seeing harmful effects from air pollution on the heart, as well. "Inhaling a heart attack" is how one publication put it. Air pollution has both short- and long-term effects that can injure the heart and blood vessels, causing or exacerbating strokes, congestive heart failure, clogged arteries and other problems, research has shown.

By J. Larry Jameson As a scientist and leader of an academic medical center, I call on Congress to approach proposed debt-reduction negotiations by trimming with a scalpel rather than a saw. Blunt cuts will have life-threatening consequences and dampen the tremendous economic benefits of the biomedical research engine. The pace of biomedical research is accelerating. Examples of recent breakthroughs at Penn Medicine underscore why we should be apprehensive about losing research momentum.

Philadelphia researchers have detected part of the virus that causes cervical cancer in a surprising place: a congenital brain malformation that causes an intractable form of epilepsy in children. This is the first study to uncover evidence of the microbe - human papillomavirus (HPV) - in the brain. It is also the first to suggest that an infection in the fetal brain leads to the malformation, which has no known genetic or environmental cause. Peter Crino, a neurologist in the Shriners Hospitals Pediatric Research Center at Temple University, conducted the study with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.

Raymond P. Hill Jr., 27, of Havertown, a former research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania, died Wednesday, Jan. 9, in San Francisco of an overdose of prescribed medication. A lively man who showed great promise, Mr. Hill had struggled with depression and addiction for several years, his family said. On Dec. 31, he went to California on a spiritual journey to clear his head, he told his family in an e-mail. He planned to enter a Caron Foundation drug-rehab center in January, said his mother, Cass.

For years, neurologist William Young of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital's Headache Center has heard his patients say how bad they felt when other people did not take their migraines seriously. "Every day, I hear stories of the ignorant or mean-spirited things people say to them about having their disease," he said. "People make it obvious that they think they're morally weak because they're not functioning well because of a mere headache. " He says the federal government has the same attitude when it comes to researching the condition, which affects 12 percent of the adult population and can leave some people in terrible pain more days than not. So, when an intern asked about a research topic, Young jumped at the chance to study stigma in migraine patients.

Charles Yeo could hardly have been mistaken for a preacher, not with the white lab coat. But as the surgeon mingled among the crowd in a ground floor auditorium at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, one could see why he referred to the mid-November gathering as "almost a religious experience. " It was the fifth annual Pancreatic Cancer symposium, a chance for survivors and those recently diagnosed to learn about the latest advances and - not least - to give each other moral support.

When a young child gets a cold - congestion, a sore throat, and runny nose, maybe with greenish goo - many parents head to the drugstore for a bottle of children's cold medicine. Don't bother. It's worth it to give children lots of fluid and acetaminophen or ibuprofen if they are uncomfortable. But research has repeatedly shown that cold medicines do not work for children younger than 6, and give only a negligible benefit for children 6 to 12. Parents in my pediatric practice typically express surprise - because these medications appear to work, though that's really just cold symptoms naturally waxing and waning throughout the day - and frustration that there isn't a medicine to just make the cold go away.

  Foreclosure filings fell 3 percent nationally in 2012 from 2011's levels and were 36 percent below their 2010 peak, RealtyTrac reported Thursday. Filings did increase in New Jersey (up 55 percent) and Pennsylvania (up 28 percent) last year, the Irvine, Calif.-based real-estate information firm said, but were still below the levels of 2010, considered a record year for foreclosures nationwide. States experiencing hefty increases in 2012, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania, were those in which the courts handle foreclosures, said RealtyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist.

When the United States started requiring background checks in 1994 for people buying handguns from dealers, it was a rare chance to see whether a gun-control measure really worked. Some states already required background checks, so researchers could conduct a real-life experiment: comparing homicide rates in those states with rates in ones where the requirement was new. The result? No difference. Homicides went down by a similar amount in both groups during the ensuing four years, suggesting that other factors - not the background checks - were at work.

MATTHEW ELLIS started popping painkillers as a teenager and switched to heroin a few years later. It was simple economics, and a common progression among today's opiate addicts - the recreational drug dabbler turned full-time junkie. That's usually when the nightmare takes hold. You start living life one injection at a time. Everything else - career, family, self-respect - is prioritized behind the next little wax-paper bag of dope. "I was hopelessly addicted to heroin," said Ellis, 25, a carpenter's assistant and father of two young boys.