Health & Medicine
- Life
Gene profiles may predict TB prognosis
A molecular profile may help doctors predict who will get sick from TB infections.
- Health & Medicine
Traffic may drive some people to diabetes
Urban air pollution — especially the particles and gases emitted by heavy traffic — can increase a senior citizen’s risk of developing type-2 diabetes, according to a new German study. If confirmed, its authors say, pollution would represent a “novel and potentially modifiable risk factor” for the metabolic disorder.
- Health & Medicine
Teen hearing loss rate worsens
The percentage of adolescents with some decline has increased since the 1990s, a study shows.
- Health & Medicine
The high cost of diabetes
Although an estimated 7.8 percent of Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes, patients with this metabolic disease rack up 23 percent of hospital costs nationwide, a new federal analysis finds. Their collective hospital bill in 2008, the most recent year for which data were available: almost $83 billion.
- Life
Muscles remember past glory
Extra nuclei produced by training survive disuse, making it easier to rebuild lost strength.
- Health & Medicine
Want a baby? Relax . . .
Scientists have just confirmed what obstetricians knew anecdotally for years — that women under stress can have a difficult time getting pregnant. What’s new: Biochemical markers quantified the degree of stress — and potentially the type — affecting fertility.
- Tech
Research trials pose challenge to medical privacy
How — or even whether — to share a medical data collected on research subjects poses a growing dilemma. Certainly, doctors would benefit from knowing if their patients had been receiving medicines, physical therapies or dietary supplements. Or if a patient had a history of drug abuse, mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases or engaging in risky behaviors. But in the wrong hands, such sensitive data could compromise an individual’s ability to keep a job — even retain shared custody rights to children during a contentious divorce.
- Health & Medicine
Delivering a knockout
Scientists have finally succeeded in genetically engineering rats.
- Health & Medicine
Spindles foster sound slumber
In “a very clever study,” researchers show that distinctive brain signals help sustain sleep in noisy environments.
- Health & Medicine
‘Miracle’ tomato turns sour foods sweet
Pucker no more: That seems to be one objective of research underway at a host of Japanese universities. For the past several years, they’ve been developing bio-production systems to inexpensively churn out loads of miraculin — a natural taste-altering protein that makes sour foods seem oh so sweet. Their newest biotech reactor: grape tomatoes.
- Health & Medicine
Chicken poses significant drug-resistant Salmonella threat
More than one-in-five retail samples of raw chicken collected in Pennsylvania hosted Salmonella, a new study found — twice the prevalence reported in a 2007 U.S. Food and Drug Administration survey. And where the bacteria were present, more than half were immune to the germicidal activity of at least one antibiotic. Nearly one-third were resistant to three or more.
- Health & Medicine
Drumming up anthrax
Mention anthrax and about the last thing that comes to mind is whether there’s a drum in the room. Yet tom-toms — or at least the stretched animal hides on their heads — can sometimes spew toxic anthrax spores into the air. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently highlighted the case of a previously healthy 24-year-old woman who nearly died, last December, after attending a “drumming circle” in New Hampshire.
