Health

For years, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have worked to bring the latest medical advances and treatment to their neighbors in Upper Manhattan.

The first years of Matthew La Croix’s life were consumed with hospital visits. By the time Matthew was 3 in 2010, he needed a bone marrow transplant to survive.

Gay men lead healthier, less stress-filled lives when states offer legal protections to same-sex couples, according to a new study examining the effects of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

It’s not every day that a professor buys a breathalyzer. But Barron H. Lerner, whose latest book is a cultural history of drunken driving, wanted to know what a .08 blood alcohol concentration—the nation’s legal limit for drivers—really means.

Health costs exceeding $14 billion dollars and involving 21,000 emergency room visits, nearly 1,700 deaths, and 9,000 hospitalizations are among the staggering impacts of six climate change-related events in the United States during the last decade, according to a first-of-its-kind study published in November 2011 edition of the journal Health Affairs.

Kelly Posner is trying to save lives. As director of the Center for Suicide Risk Assessment, she led a team from Columbia’s Department of Psychiatry in developing a tool that successfully predicts suicidal intent.

Rep. Charles Rangel and other political and community leaders from throughout Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights joined Columbia University Medical Center’s leadership Monday to formally welcome Drs. Rafael Lantigua and Dennis Mitchell to their new positions as Dean’s Special Advisors for Community Health Affairs.

Columbia University has been awarded a five-year, $3.7 million federal grant for a five-year program to implement the Summer Public Health Scholars Program, a partnership among Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, College of Dental Medicine, School of Nursing and the Mailman School of Public Health.

At age 5, Morris Kaunda Michael fled with his family from war-torn Sudan for a refugee camp in northern Kenya. Now he is graduating from Columbia Engineering with an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and planning to go to medical school. 

Why is a cure for cancer so elusive? Brent Stockwell, an associate professor with a joint appointment in chemistry and biological sciences and an Early Career Scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, believes the main culprit is “undruggable proteins”—the 85 percent of the proteins in the human body that are not treatable with traditional drugs. 

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School lead by Professor Elisa Konofagou have been developing a new method, Electromechanical Wave Imaging (EWI), that is the first non-invasive direct technique to map the electrical activation of the heart.