About 100 million Americans—one in three people—suffer from ongoing pain that impacts their daily lives. Chronic pain has fueled a pain treatment crisis resulting in the overprescribing of risky opioids. The tragic deaths of celebrities such as Prince have brought the issue to public awareness in a way that statistics can't.
Lower back pain is the greatest source of global disability, ahead of nearly 300 other conditions, leading to huge levels of healthcare costs and suffering. And the effects go far beyond pain, weakness and stiffness – they also have a huge impact the social and family lives of sufferers.
Just over 50 years ago, a highly contagious but seemingly harmless virus swept through the United States, infecting as many as 12.5 million people. In both adults and children, the virus presented as a mild illness, but caused birth defects in some babies born to women who were infected while pregnant.
For people in northern countries enjoying summer sun, I hate to put a dampener on things but winter’s coming. The cold months can seem to go on forever, yet scientists are uncovering a new reason to be grateful for them.
Researchers are testing a non-invasive way to determine if treatments for Parkinson’s slow or stop the progression of the disease.
We used to think of “addiction”, or what we now call dependence, as a moral failing. This had the result of blaming the person who was addicted – it was a matter of willpower and they just weren’t trying hard enough. So the obvious solution was shaming and scolding until they did.
People who have both hepatitis B and HIV may have a greater chance of developing liver cancer at a young age, according to our new study.
Hepatitis means inflammation of the liver. While we usually think of hepatitis A to E viruses, anything that causes inflammation or damage to the liver can be considered as a form of hepatitis.
It is well recognised that increasing rates of type 2 diabetes are mainly driven by obesity and lifestyle factors. But that’s not the whole story. Genetics and epigenetics – changes in gene expression – also play an important role.
It’s well-known that those with autism spectrum disorders including Asperger’s syndrome develop difficulties with social communication and show stereotyped patterns of behaviour.
Essential organs tasked with keeping us alive and reproducing – such as the heart, brain or uterus – may have evolved better protection against cancer than larger and paired organs, we have proposed.
The most common question I get asked is “Will my child get Alzheimer’s disease?” In my experience, this concern is one of the biggest worries for sufferers, and given the devastating effects of the disease, it is not hard to see why it is a difficult thought to contemplate.
Specific aspects of the Amish environment are associated with changes to immune cells that appear to protect children from developing asthma, report researchers.
Most Eastern styles of medicine pay just as much attention to the patient’s state of mind as to the state of his or her tissues and organs. This insight and acknowledgment of the whole person rather than reducing us to our individual body parts is based on healing methods centuries old that survive because they work.
In late July, an international team of researchers announced that they had identified evidence of cancer in the fossilized remains of a biological relative of human beings who lived about 1.7 million years ago.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 and revolutionised the treatment of bacterial infections. Ever since then we have been searching for new antibiotics to address the myriad of infections humans encounter and the growing risk of resistance to them.
A new breast cancer study shows that tumors can mutate in response to treatments that reduce estrogen levels in the body.
Recent calls for the introduction of a vaccine against chickenpox (varicella-zoster virus infection) following a severe case of the disease in Cambridge, England may surprise many parents who consider the disease to be a mild illness that “everyone gets”.
Type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, with an estimated 29 million people in the U.S. having the disease and another 86 million considered prediabetic. With an estimated cost of US$245 billion, prevention becomes critically important to stem the tide of increasing diabetes prevalence.
A recent report by the Mental Health Network, found that 19% of adults had been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, while as many as one in four people experience a mental health problem in any given year.
Anger can be very quick, powerful, reactive, and can make us do things we typically wouldn’t do. There is nothing inherently wrong with anger as an emotion, but nowhere is anger less helpful, more common, and potentially more dangerous than when we are behind the wheel of a car.
Antiretroviral therapy has revolutionised the lives of people living with HIV. In many countries, the life expectancy for someone living with the virus is now almost the same as someone who isn’t infected.
A new analysis of the medical records of more than 5.5 million older adults admitted to nursing homes between 2011 and 2014 shows that those with delirium face an increased risk of death. They’re also more likely to be readmitted to the hospital.