Medical Health

“Surprisingly, this age group has the highest rate of smoking compared to any other age group,” psychology professor Robin Mermelstein, principal investigator of the 5-year study, noted in a UIC podcast. “In fact, smoking starts to escalate between the ages of 18 and 24, and even though many young adults think about quitting and [...]

“Compulsory HIV testing and forced sterilization are counter-productive to the Rwandan government’s goal of improved reproductive health,” said Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.
“Provisions in the current bill that increase stigma, rely on coercion, and deny individuals their reproductive rights should be removed,” he said.
The [...]

WHO brought together over 20 independent experts beginning Wednesday for the three-day meeting in Geneva.
“They will be working together to describe and predict the behavior and impact of the pandemic, and demonstrate potential outcomes of proposed intervention efforts,” spokeswoman Aphaluck Bhatiasevi told The Associated Press.
The meeting comes as it becomes clearer that actual [...]

Shares of the French drugmaker, which have stumbled in the past week over Lantus concerns, rose 3.1 percent in Paris after the FDA also said patients should not stop taking their therapy without consulting a physician.
In a communication posted on its website, the agency questioned four recently published studies over the cancer [...]

“Our data add to evidence that environmental influences during intrauterine life alter the trajectory of skeletal development in the offspring,” study presenter Dr. Zoe Cole of the University of Southampton told Reuters Health.
When the researchers assessed the diets of 198 pregnant women, two general patterns began to emerge. The first was a [...]

Nonpharmacological interventions such as acupuncture, Montessori methods, and massage have all been used to manage agitation and promote relaxation in patients with dementia, the authors explain. A number of studies have tested the effects of these approaches, but the studies had significant limitations.
Dr. Li-Chan Lin from National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, and colleagues [...]

With Congress out of session for a week, Obama urged participants at a question-and-answer session in a Washington suburb to be wary of “scare tactics” and hugged a woman who said she did not have health insurance or money of her own to treat a tumor.
“You are what is going to drive [...]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered Pfizer, which makes Chantix, and GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Zyban, to place a warning highlighting the “risk of serious mental health events” when taking the drugs, including behavior changes, depression, hostility and suicidal thoughts.
“The risk of serious adverse events while taking these products must be [...]

Three studies by a multinational group of researchers analyzed the DNA of 10,000 people with schizophrenia, and 20,000 without, and found 30,000 common gene variations linked with the mental illness.
They also show just how complex such diseases are, the researchers told a news conference.
“It’s like we’ve got a ’join-the-dots picture’, [...]

Only about 18 percent of such patients live long enough to leave the hospital, researchers found. Blacks fared worse than whites a disparity only partly explained by more of them being treated in hospitals that did a poorer job of CPR.
Results were published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Lance Becker, a [...]