Attention all Americans: Too many are at risk of succumbing before your time to the nation’s leading killer, cardiovascular disease. Translation: heart attacks and strokes. After a decades-long drop, the cardiovascular death rate has all but stalled and, frighteningly, has even reversed in a young group of people — adults aged 35 to 64, among…
Even before the microbiome craze — the hope that the bacteria in your gut holds the key to good health — people were ingesting cultures of living micro-organisms to treat a host of conditions. These probiotics have become so popular that they’re being marketed in foods, capsules and even beauty products. Probiotics have the potential…
An innovative approach uses a biocompatible material to encapsulate probiotic bacteria and combines them with antibiotics to tackle treatment-resistant infections. A new approach for battling treatment-resistant bacteria proved successful in petri dish experiments. Every year, over 2 million people in the United States develop infections that are resistant to treatment, and approximately 23,000 people die…
BRUSSELS — The trade group Safer Phosphates would seem to have a pitch-perfect message for an environmentally conscious European Union. It advocates cleaner soil and healthier food, with a website showing pristine fields of wheat. It is also supporting legislation that would place tighter regulations on fertilizer. But the group is not run by environmentalists.…
JOHANNESBURG — Congolese rebels have killed 15 civilians and abducted a dozen children in an attack in the center of the latest outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, Congo’s military said Sunday. The violence threatened to again force the suspension of efforts to contain the virus. The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo…
Phone snubbing is a social phenomenon which is spreading so that many feel there must be a special word for it. The obvious choice is “phubbing” (Millennials will be long remembered for coining new words like “bae” or “fomo”) as an instantly recognized hybrid word. To cross the t’s it means that somebody pays more…
Cancer develops due to mutations in our DNA. However, until now, little has been known about how mutations build up in healthy tissue over time. A new study provides fresh detail. Genetic mutations in healthy tissue are more common than previously thought. As people age, mutations in their DNA slowly build up. Mutations in healthy…
ATLANTA — For the upscale urban audience at a campaign town hall here, it would have been enough for Stacey Abrams to pitch Medicaid expansion as a moral issue — the health-care-as-human-right argument that appeals to progressives everywhere. Instead, Ms. Abrams, the Democrat in the tossup race for Georgia governor, stuck to the pragmatic line…
Women with an aggressive type of breast cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy plus chemotherapy, rather than chemo alone, a major study has found. The results are expected to change the standard of care for women like those in the clinical trial, who had advanced cases of “triple-negative” breast cancer. That form of the…
Image People who spend a lot of time in the health care system have some advice for the rest of us.CreditSaul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images If the health care system seems confusing to you, you are not alone. In a large recent survey of the most seriously ill people in America, we learned that…