Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    Making Bone: Novel form of vitamin D builds up rat skeleton

    A newly synthesized form of Vitamin D induces bone-making cells to capture calcium and fortify bone mass in rats, suggesting it might work against osteoporosis in people.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    ‘Bubble’ babies thrive on gene therapy

    Gene therapy to repair mutations that thwart development of essential immune cells has helped three babies to overcome severe combined immunodeficiency, in which a child is born without a functional immune system.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Calcium may become a dieter’s best friend

    Enriching the diet with calcium, especially from dairy products, can switch the body's fat cells from storing calories to burning them.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Attention Loss: ADHD may lower volume of brain

    Brain-scan data show that the brains of children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are slightly smaller than those of their peers who are free of psychiatric disorders.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    Inducing eye-tumor cells to self-destruct

    By restarting the subdued self-destruct signal in cancer cells, researchers studying eye cancers have found a way to stop these cancers in cell cultures and in a rabbit model.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Move your head, hurt your golf game

    Right-handed golfers using a conventional grip move their head and eyes more during putts than they do when using a cross-handed or one-handed grip, suggesting these alternative grips might work better.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Making the optic nerve sprout anew

    A compound made during inflammation, a natural reaction to injury, can induce optic nerve regeneration in a lab-dish concoction including rat retinal ganglion cells.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    FDA Launches Acrylamide Investigations

    You knew french fries and potato chips werent health foods. Sure, theyre veggies, but their deep-fat frying adds scads of fat. Depending on whos doing the cooking, that fat can be the saturated type, which can lead to clogged arteries. But until April, who could have suspected that these oh-so-yummy golden-brown spuds were also laced […]

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Catching macular degeneration early

    Scientists have developed a test that uses the eye's ability to adapt to darkness as a test for age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in elderly people.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    A Prized Worm

    This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to researchers who pioneered the use of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans as an animal model for exploring basic processes involved in the development and behavior of multicellular organisms. Learn more about the remarkable C. elegans from a Vanderbilt University news feature about this “elegant worm” […]

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Stressing out

    A gene variant reduces people's response to the stress hormone cortisol, and people with the variant are less likely to have risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Asthma pressure may shrink airways

    Mechanical stress from constricting muscles could cause airway-lining cells to reproduce, eventually thickening the lining and narrowing the air passage.

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