Caring for a spouse, parent or other family member who is battling severe mental or physical illness is a labor of love, but one that has its own emotional toll. Previous research has shown that untrained, primary caregivers who are looking after family face an increased possibility of several physical and psychological health issues—including an [...]
Researchers at University of North Carolina at Greensboro are examining whether urine tests might provide another alternative to (colonoscopy and virtual colonoscopy) for colon cancer screening. In an initial study, published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research, investigators recruited 123 participants—60 who had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and 63 who had [...]
Three years ago, a medical mistake almost cost actor Dennis Quaid’s twin children their lives. As the Associated Press reports, at “Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Thomas and Zoe Quaid were accidentally given an overdose of the blood thinner heparin.” For the next 41 hours Quaid says his children’s lives hung in the balance. [...]
Though at least 10 partial facial transplants have been performed by plastic surgeons around the globe—beginning with surgery on a 38-year-old woman in France in 2005—last month surgeons at a hospital in Spain performed the first ever full facial transplant, according to the Associated Press. After a 24-hour procedure that involved a staff of 30 [...]
A blood test may offer heart transplant patients a less invasive way to assess rejection risk, according to a study published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine. As with most organ donations, heart transplants can potentially be rejected by a recipient’s body. To minimize rejection risk, organ recipients are routinely placed on [...]
Though the unruly behavior of inebriated sports stars may spark some righteous indignation (remember the hubbub about Canada’s women’s Olympic ice hockey team celebrating their gold on the ice?) and make for good tabloid headlines, when it comes to influencing fans’ own drinking habits, those alcohol-infused shenanigans have little impact. That’s the finding of new [...]
Though a handful of studies on the risks of cell phone radiation have prompted some lawmakers to propose legislation that would outfit mobile devices with warning labels (like packs of cigarettes), and some companies are already marketing radiation diverting phone covers, in the scientific community there remains little consensus over the health effects of low-level [...]
Dreaming about tomorrow’s big presentation, or how you’ll tackle certain questions on an exam later this week may seem like a sign that your anxiety over the pending challenge has seeped its way into your subconscious—yet, according to new research published in the journal Cell Biology dreaming about something you’ve learned may actually be an [...]
As my colleague Alice Park reported today for TIME, a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that consuming too much added sugar—which Park explains is “any sugar that a food doesn’t contain in its natural state, provides no nutritional value and serves only as a source of empty [...]
A new analysis from clinical epidemiologist Dr. Richard Lilford of the U.K.’s University of Birmingham and critical care physician Dr. Peter Provonost of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine suggests that death rates are a poor measure of the quality of care at a hospital. Writing in the British Medical Journal Lilford and Provonost argue [...]
