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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Pedestrians are about twice as likely to get run over by hybrid cars than other types of automobiles, NPR points out, and, in part, this has been attributed to the fact that, when the cars are being powered by their electric engines, they are very quiet. Too quiet, in fact, according to researchers and even developers who have proposed
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A new study combining DNA barcoding and mercury analysis finds that, mercury content in tuna sushi told in supermarkets and restaurants varies by species, and that, in some cases, exceeds recommended amounts. The study, published online today in the journal Biology Letters was based on 100 samples of both akami (lean red tuna) and toro
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More than a quarter of all Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military, according to a new report highlighted by the Associated Press. That many Americans are too tubby to meet the basic entry requirements for military service isn’t new—in 2008 roughly 12,000 would-be soldiers failed the initial
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Public health researchers have been working to highlight the dangers of excessive salt consumption for decades, and in the last year alone studies have underscored just how big a salt habit Americans have: on average, we consume up to twice the recommended amount of sodium each day, significantly increasing our risk for hypertension and
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Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Northern Ohio Poison Control Center argue that smokeless tobacco pellets manufactured by Camel look and taste so much like candy that their appeal to small children could put them at risk for poisoning. In a study released today by the
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