It’s no secret that second hand smoke poses serious health hazards, but the damage can be especially insidious among children, setting them up for possible heart disease later in life.
Medicine
One Stop Flu Shot: Hope for a Universal Influenza Vaccine
Perhaps there’s a silver lining to last year’s H1N1 pandemic flu outbreak: those who were infected and survived appear to have developed ‘super flu’ antibodies that may help researchers develop an influenza inoculation that could …
Closely Spaced Pregnancies May Contribute to Autism
As researchers continue to learn more about autism—its causes and risk factors—it is increasingly clear that there isn’t a single driver for the developmental disorder, and no simple answer to why rates of the condition …
Study: Women With Circumcised Partners May Have Lower HPV Risk
Sexual health specialists have long focused on circumcision as a potential safeguard against acquiring HIV. In fact, a 2006 clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that medical circumcision reduced …
Daughters Care What their Moms Think, Especially Regarding the HPV Vaccine
Girls really do care what their moms think, even once they’re all grown up. That’s the message that a new study is conveying after researchers found that college-age women are more likely to report getting the human …
Study Linking Vaccines to Autism Is “Fraudulent”
It’s unfortunate but true that sometimes the hard facts of science don’t turn out to be so grounded in reality after all. Scientific fraud is certainly not new, but manipulation of medical data is always troubling, and …
Study: Treatment Success for Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) has always been a bit of a mystery.
4 Ways Americans Are Healthier Already
January is the month in which magazines and newspapers tell us how to change our unhealthy ways. That’s not news. What is headline-worthy is that Americans seem to be taking the advice. Indeed, as it turns out, we may not be the …
You May Be Less Bald Than You Think
Not long ago, I was having dinner with a friend in his late 20s, and when the topic somehow turned to hair loss, his panic was palpable. “I don’t even want to talk about it,” he said, shuddering and putting a hand to his …
New Way to Investigate Crime: A DNA Test for Hair Color
Never mind what the sleuths on CSI would have you believe, finding DNA at the scene of a crime can sometimes be a dead end. Your genome may readily reveal your susceptibility to certain diseases or even the consistency of your …
Want to Live Longer? Start Walking — Quickly
There is certainly no shortage of sophisticated machinery that can measure how healthy you are, from scanners to genetic and molecular tests that can expose the inner workings of your cells, but doctors may soon be relying on …
No Pain, Little Brain: Anesthesia Is More Like Coma Than Sleep
Every day, some 60,000 patients enter a state more like coma than sleep when they undergo general anesthesia — according to an unsettling study published Dec. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Study: Colonoscopy Is Worth the Discomfort
Screening for cancer is the best way to prevent many forms of the disease, particularly in skin and breast tissue, among other cancers, but the tests aren’t always the easiest to endure.