Feeds
A technology originally developed for premature babies may be helping to save some of the sickest swine flu patients by rerouting their blood so their lungs can rest.
First mammograms. Now — in an apparent coincidence — Pap smears.
Tom Dougherty jokes that he takes "get-lost walks." To his wife, Cleo, it's a constant fear: When will his Alzheimer's get bad enough that she has to end his 4-mile daily strolls?
Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries — signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
French scientists mixed gene therapy and bone marrow transplants in two boys to seemingly halt a brain disease that can kill by adolescence. The surprise ingredient: They disabled the HIV virus so it couldn't cause AIDS, and then used it to carry in the healthy new gene.
Nurses were training women in rural Mexico to examine their breasts for cancer when one raised her hand to object. If she lost her breast, Harvard public health specialist Felicia Knaul recalls the woman saying, "My man would leave me" — and with him, the family's income.
Independent health advisers begin monitoring safety of the swine flu vaccine on Monday, an extra step the government promised in this year's unprecedented program to watch for possible side effects.
Vaccinating more children might help slow the evolution of the constantly changing flu virus, government scientists reported Thursday.
Some of the millions who travel to Saudi Arabia next month for the annual hajj will be greeted with face masks, hand sanitizer and fever checks as health officials strive to stem the spread of swine flu during the world's largest pilgrimage.
Call it a genetic patch job for worn lungs: Canadian researchers took donated lungs deemed too damaged to transplant and repaired them with outside-the-body gene therapy.
Labor is becoming less of a late-night surprise, but some hospitals are starting to tighten the rules for elective deliveries — because some babies are being delivered too early.
Visiting a loved one in the hospital? Better check on new flu limits first. Hospitals around the country are turning away visiting children and tightening restrictions on adults, too, in hopes of limiting spread of swine flu in the hallways — although there's little science the limits work.
The government's latest figures show swine flu is widespread across the country and increasing in almost every state. It's now caused at least 95 children's deaths since April.
Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle — and then watched it beat — by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks. Think of Dr. Kenneth Chien as a heart mechanic. "We're making a heart part and (eventually) we're going to put the part in," is how he describes the work by his team of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers.
A major report confirms what health officials long have believed: Bans on smoking in restaurants, bars and other gathering spots reduce the risk of heart attacks among nonsmokers.
Grilled chicken replaced the hot dogs. Strawberries instead of cookies at snack time. No more fruit juice — water or low-fat milk only. This is the new menu at a Delaware day care center, part of a fledgling movement to take the fight against obesity to pudgy preschoolers.
Estrogen fuels breast cancer yet doctors can't measure how much of the hormone is in a woman's breast without cutting into it. A Canadian invention might change that: A lab-on-a-chip that can do the work quickly with just the poke of a small needle.
Swine flu vaccinations began Monday with squirts up the noses of health care workers in Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee — it just tickled, shrugged one — as the government opened a massive effort to immunize over half the nation in a few months.
They call it kangaroo care: A premature baby nestles skin-to-skin against mom's bare, warm chest. In Malawi, mothers' bodies take the place of too-pricey incubators to keep these fragile newborns alive.
It's hard for pregnant women to escape the message: You're at extra risk from swine flu — it could trigger premature labor, hospitalize you for weeks, even kill you — so be among the first in line for vaccine next month. But only about one in seven pregnant women gets a flu shot each winter.
More than 3,000 people a day have a heart attack. If you're one of them the day after your swine flu shot, will you worry the vaccine was to blame and not the more likely culprit, all those burgers and fries?
Some doctors tell patients they have "stage zero" breast cancer. Others call it a precancer.
Coughed on by somebody with the flu? Duke University researchers are developing a test to determine — with a mere drop of blood — who will get sick before the sniffling and fever set in. And they're turning to hundreds of dorm-dwelling freshmen this fall to see if it works.
More than 35 million people around the world are living with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says the most in-depth attempt yet to assess the brain-destroying illness — and it's an ominous forecast as the population grays.
Studies of the new swine flu vaccine show children 10 and older will need just one shot for protection — but younger kids almost certainly will need two.
Log In | Register
