Another such review examined how the number of prenatal visits affected infant mortality. Seven studies involved more than 60,000 women in countries of varying income. There was no difference in high-income countries in the number of deaths of those who had more or fewer visits (although the number of deaths over all was low). In…
Photo Credit Getty Images When girls come in for their physical exams, one of the questions I routinely ask is “Do you get your period?” I try to ask before I expect the answer to be yes, so that if a girl doesn’t seem to know about the changes of puberty that lie ahead, I…
On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to solve the case of a previously healthy 67-year-old gardener who abandoned his garden one summer, alarming his wife and adult children. For weeks this vibrant and energetic man had been the last one out of bed — something his family had never seen before. And his days were…
I don’t eat breakfast. It’s not that I dislike what’s offered. Given the choice of breakfast food or lunch food, I’d almost always choose eggs or waffles. It’s just that I’m not hungry at 7:30 a.m., when I leave for work. In fact, I’m rarely hungry until about lunchtime. So, other than a morning cup…
Once Andrew’s illness was diagnosed, he needed a bone-marrow transplant as swiftly as possible. First the doctors had to kill the leukemic cells in Andrew’s bone marrow with chemotherapy, then replace them with a donor’s cells. Andrew’s 3-year-old sister, Lea, and his 5-year-old brother, Wills, were tested, and in the family’s first bit of luck…
You may know there’s added sugar in your Coke or cookies. But did you know that it’s in your salad dressing, pasta sauce and bread? The Food and Drug Administration came out Friday with its new template for nutrition labels. One big change was the addition of a line for “added sugar,” to be placed…
Others expressed concern about the environmental and economic implications of a longer life span. “Ah, the unintended consequences of extending life — overpopulation, increasing stress on an already stressed environment, increasing stress on an already stressed retirement system,” wrote Thomas G. Smith, in Cadillac, Mich. “Humans are the most destructive of all species, and the…
Lorch sat with Grace and Joe in a cream-colored exam room, a red biohazard box nestled under one counter, and explained that all the standard treatments had been exhausted. He told them about an experimental trial for aggressive thyroid cancers that hadn’t responded to standard treatments, and Grace agreed to enroll. The drug, everolimus, was…
In the years following his breakthrough, Warburg became convinced that the Warburg effect occurs because cells are unable to use oxygen properly and that this damaged respiration is, in effect, the starting point of cancer. Well into the 1950s, this theory — which Warburg believed in until his death in 1970 but never proved —…
Bathed in a nutrient-rich broth suffused with growth factors, the cells will double and redouble in an incubator over the course of the following two weeks, forming a lush outgrowth of malignant cells — cancer abstracted in a dish. A computer, taught to count and evaluate cells, will then determine whether any of the drugs…