Health & Medicine

  1. Health & Medicine

    Curbing Cancer? Low-Fat Diet During Adolescence Cuts Hormones, Possibly Breast Cancer Risk

    Cutting back on cheeseburgers and French fries could spare girls more than extra pounds. A low-fat diet also reduces young girls’ sex hormone concentrations, a new study finds. What’s more, researchers say, the adolescent drop in hormones that are known to spur breast cancer in adults might stave off the disease later in life. More […]

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Too Much of a Good Thing: Excess vitamin A may hike bone-fracture rate

    Dietary studies suggest that people who consume large amounts of vitamin A in foods or multivitamins are more likely to suffer hip fractures than are people who ingest modest amounts.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Do liver stem cells come from bone marrow?

    Tests of liver tissue from people who've received liver or blood-marrow transplants show that stem cells in bone marrow can populate the liver as liver cells.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Getting the Bugs Out of Blood

    Researchers are developing methods for inactivating all sorts of pathogens that could be found in blood, including West Nile virus, an emerging infection recently brought to the United States from Africa.

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  5. Health & Medicine

    C-Minus—The Fallout of Parents’ Smoking

    Children who live with smokers may need more oranges and other rich sources of vitamin C, a new study concludes. It finds that exposure to even a little secondhand smoke significantly depresses concentrations of this important vitamin. Oranges are usually the first food that most people think of when asked to name sources of vitamin […]

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Blood-Clot Surprise: Finding might explain a danger of Viagra

    An amendment to the blood-clotting pathway might link Viagra to heart attacks in some users.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Nifty Spittle: Compound in bat saliva may aid stroke patients

    An anticlotting molecule in the saliva of vampire bats combats strokelike brain damage in mice.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Herbal Activity

    The Alternative Medicine Foundation offers a searchable database that provides scientific and general information about the biochemical activity of a variety of herbs, from Achillea (Yarrow) to Ziziphus (Jujube). The entry for each herb includes warnings about dangers to human health and links to relevant abstracts in the scientific literature. Go to: http://www.herbmed.org

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Stroke protection: A little fish helps

    As little as one serving of fish per month offers protection against the most common form of stroke.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Drug protects mouse eggs from radiation

    Mice protected by a drug from radiation-induced sterility have normal offspring.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Cheap hypertension drug works best

    An old-fashioned pill for preventing high blood pressure and some heart disease appears to work better than new, more expensive drugs.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Silencing a gene slows breast-tumor fighter

    The protein encoded by the HOXA5 gene plays a key role in fighting breast cancer, helping to switch on cancer-suppressing genes.

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