Maybe it’s the stress of competing for every potential date, or the feeling that you’ve settled for second best. But new research this month suggests that coming of age in an environment where men outnumber women might be so stressful that it affects men’s health even decades after puberty has run its course.
Researchers from Harvard, UC San Diego and UC Irvine report that they’ve found a way to regenerate crucial nerve connections following an injury to the spinal cord — at least in mice.
Until now there’s never been a good way to treat paralysis. Once an axon — the long thread-like fiber of a nerve cell — has been damaged, the …
Imagine you’d spent your whole life in therapy. Daphne Merkin, writing in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, paints a fascinating view of exactly that life. Merkin saw her first shrink as a kid, and then spent the next 45-odd years visiting a series of psychoanalysts, building intense but one-sided relationships over and over again, …
Summer vacation is over, and Wellness will be publishing as usual again starting this week. Welcome back!
Sometimes it seems that every day offers a new, contradictory health finding. One day screening for prostate cancer is recommended; the next it’s not. One day the hot new superfood is acai berries. The next it’s dark chocolate, red wine, or fatty fish. Just about every new diet plan or exercise regime raises doubts about effectiveness or …
Europeans’ ability to digest dairy after infancy evolved just 7,500 years ago, spreading out from central Europe — not northern Europe, as previously believed — across the continent and into western Asia.
Researchers in Britain and China are using a new method to measure the rate of genetic mutation among humans — and it seems that all people in the world likely carry at least some new mutations.
For their study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, the researchers enlisted the help of two Chinese men whose families …
Hip fractures may be one of the most devastating injuries that humans face, but they’re also less frequent than they used to be. Today Canadian researchers announce that the hip-fracture rate fell 31.8% for Canadian women and 25% for Canadian men between 1985 and 2005. (A decline has also been noted in the U.S., but over a shorter …
A new headline-grabbing report from the White House claims that swine flu could plausibly infect up to 50% of Americans, causing flu symptoms among some 60 to 120 million of them, and leading to as many as 1.8 million hospitalizations and 30,000 -90,000 deaths.
Where, exactly, do numbers like these come from? The new report was put …
The American Heart Association is urging Americans not to eat so much sugar — a major villain in the country’s obesity epidemic, and a possible cause of other risk factors for heart disease too, including high blood pressure. Adult women should generally eat no more than six teaspoons per day of added sugars (100 calories) and men …
Babies born too small are more likely to have low bone mineral density when they grow up, a new study reports today in the Public Library of Science journal, PLoS Medicine.
Researchers in Helsinki, Finland, followed 144 Finns, now aged 18 – 27, who were all born preterm (before 37 weeks of gestation) and with very low birth weight …
Ever wonder how all that fat and protein in a low-carb diet could be good for you, even though you’re losing weight? A new study today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that, well, in fact, it isn’t.
Mice that were fed a high protein, high fat diet — designed to resemble a human low-carb diet …
Women with high levels of the hormone testosterone tend to be less risk averse and more likely to pick risky business careers than women with lower testosterone levels, a new study shows. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago took saliva samples in 2006 from roughly 500 MBA students at the University …
