Health & Medicine

Stress during pregnancy may raise the risk of asthma in offspring, according to researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Interventional radiologists have opened the door to an encouraging potential future treatment for the nearly 200,000 women who are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year: image-guided, multiprobe cryotherapy.

Multitudes of people worldwide begin each day with a cup of steaming hot coffee. Although it is sometimes referred to as "the devil's brew," coffee contains several nutrients (eg, calcium) as well as hundreds of potentially biologically active compounds (eg, polyphenols) that may promote health.

Rhesus monkey babies born to mothers who had the flu while pregnant had smaller brains and showed other brain changes similar to those observed in human patients with schizophrenia, a study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found.

Nanoparticles provide a targeted version of photothermal therapy for cancer.

Conventional biological wisdom holds that living cells interact with their environment through an elaborate network of chemical signals. As a result many therapies for the treatment of cancer and other diseases in which cell behavior goes awry focus on drugs that block or disrupt harmful chemical signals. Now, a new road for future therapies may have been opened with scientific evidence for a never seen before way in which cells can also sense and respond to physical forces.

The usual excuse of "lack of time" for not doing enough exercise is blown away by new research published in The Journal of Physiology.

Increasing calcium intake is a common--yet not always successful--strategy for reducing bone fractures. But a study supported in part by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) underscores the importance of vitamin D and its ability to help the body utilize calcium. The study also may explain why increasing calcium alone isn't always successful in dealing with this problem.

The humble papaya is gaining credibility in Western medicine for anticancer powers that folk cultures have recognized for generations.

A new method of growing arteries could lead to a "biological bypass"—or a non-invasive way to treat coronary artery disease, Yale School of Medicine researchers report with their colleagues in the April issue of Journal of Clinical Investigation.

A newly discovered ability for people to taste fat could hold the key to reducing obesity, Deakin University health researchers believe.

Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that Vitamin D is crucial to activating our immune defenses and that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells - will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.

More Americans now drink sugar-sweetened sodas, sport drinks and fruit drinks daily, and this increase in consumption has led to more diabetes and heart disease over the past decade, researchers reported at the American Heart Association's 50th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

The population of the UK is ageing. Sixteen per cent of the UK population is 65 or older, and for the first time, there are more people over the age of 65 than there are under the age of 18. This raises a lot of questions on issues such as pension provision, health care and wellbeing.

The saying "You're only as old as you feel" really seems to resonate with older adults, according to research from Purdue University.