Noted

Same-sex marriage bans may be hazardous to the mental health of the people they exclude. In the American Journal of Public Health, psychology graduate student Mark L. Hatzenbuehler ’01 and his colleagues reported a significant increase in several psychiatric disorders among gay, lesbian, and bisexual residents of states that have adopted such policies: mood disorders alone rose 36.6 percent, cases of generalized anxiety disorder more than doubled. During the period of the study, no increase occurred among heterosexuals or among gay residents of states without such bans.

Screening techniques developed at Yale and other institutions may help inform women diagnosed with the most common form of breast cancer (ductal carcinoma in situ) whether their cancer is likely to return and spread after a lumpectomy. In theJournal of the National Cancer Institute, School of Public Health biostatistician Annette M. Molinaro and her colleagues report a preliminary study suggesting that the way the cancer was detected and the presence of certain biomarkers “are the two most important factors that predict higher risk of subsequent invasive cancer.” If validated by further studies, the tests could help many women avoid arduous courses of chemotherapy and radiation.

The genome’s regulation of a living organism is often compared to the way a computer operating system manages data. The analogy isn’t quite apt, says biomedical informatics professor Mark Gerstein. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gerstein and his colleagues show that the control networks of organisms are organized in a more stable arrangement than those of the Linux operating system—so, thankfully, organisms don’t crash if a piece of code is corrupted by mutation.

Using stem cells derived from the uterine lining, reproductive endocrinologist Hugh S. Taylor ’83 and his colleagues have repaired parts of the brain damaged by the progressive neurological disorder Parkinson’s disease—at least in mice. The preliminary study, in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, showed that the human endometrial cells could be transformed into dopamine-secreting nerve cells and successfully transplanted.