Most people who get a prescription for opioid painkillers to ease the pain of an operation or dental procedure fill it right away. But a new study shows that some fill these prescriptions more than a month later—long after the acute pain from their care should have subsided. In 2019, 1% of opioid prescriptions from dentists and surgeons were filled […]

Strong Women’s Chloe Gray is on a mission to better look after her body. In the first of a new series, she tries acupuncture (despite a fear of needles) to see if it can finally help her destress.  I hate needles – I always have. So when I found myself lying on an acupuncturist’s table, having sharp metal pins stuck into […]

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body; they attack healthy cells at the same time as tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have designed a method to keep one promising cancer drug from wreaking such havoc. The team has engineered a new "masked" […]

Your virtual visit with your doctor is at 1:00 p.m. It's now 1:20 p.m. and your physician has not yet logged in. Do you call the clinic? Hang up and log back in? Groan in frustration? Being stuck in a virtual waiting room and staring at a blank computer or device screen is a huge dissatisfier among telemedicine patients. To […]

New research demonstrates that by killing essential gut bacteria, antibiotics ravage athletes’ motivation and endurance. The UC Riverside-led mouse study suggests the microbiome is a big factor separating athletes from couch potatoes. Other studies have examined the way that exercise affects the microbiome, but this study is one of few to examine the reverse — how gut bacteria also impact […]

Programmed cell death is an important tool that an organism uses to keep itself healthy. When a cell does not function as it should, various stress reactions are activated. The goal of these reactions is to restore the original cell function. One example is autophagy, a process in which the cell partially digests itself to gain energy, which it can […]

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Females on the liver transplant waiting list are disadvantaged by the sodium-adjusted Model for End-stage Liver Disease score (MELDNa) currently employed to guide allocation decisions, but a sex-adjusted MELDNa score would help address the inequity and decrease mortality for both sexes, researchers say. Dr. Julia Sealock of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee and […]

The APOE4 gene is the most powerful genetic factor driving a person’s risk for developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. “It probably increases your risk two or threefold if you have one APOE4 copy, and if you have two APOE4 copies, it probably increases your risk about tenfold,” said Dr. Michael Greicius, a professor of neurology at Stanford Medicine. But that story […]

The WHO said Wednesday that hundreds of monkeypox cases have surfaced beyond the African countries where the disease is typically found, warning the virus has likely been spreading under the radar. “Investigations are ongoing, but the sudden appearance of monkeypox in many countries at the same time suggests there may have been undetected transmission for some time,” World Health Organization […]

Children who play team sports are less likely to suffer depression or anxiety but individual ones like tennis raise the risk, study finds Researchers found team sport players are fifth less likely to suffer depression However, those who only play individual sports are 15% more likely to anxious  Findings suggest team sports may be ‘vehicle to support’ child mental health […]