Health & Medicine
- Health & Medicine
Standing Up to Gravity
Studies in space can help physicians better understand a disorder in which patients get faint or dizzy while standing.
- Health & Medicine
Nerve cells of ALS patients harbor virus
Fragments of viral genetic material show up with unusually high frequency in nerve tissue of patients with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, suggesting a link between the virus and this lethal illness.
- Health & Medicine
Efficient Germ: Human body boosts power of cholera microbe
Some genes in the cholera-causing bacterium Vibrio cholerae are activated and others are silenced when the microbe passes through the human gut, changes that make the bacterium more virulent.
- Health & Medicine
Transplant Triumph: Cloned cow kidneys thrive for months
Cow kidneys and other tissue made by cloning ward off immune rejection after transplantation into cows.
- Health & Medicine
Dieting woes tied to hunger hormone
A rise in the appetite-enhancing hormone ghrelin after weight loss may explain why dieters regain pounds.
- Health & Medicine
Arthritis drug fights Crohn’s disease
The inflammation-fighting drug infliximab can hold off the painful symptoms of Crohn's disease for as long as a year in many patients.
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- Health & Medicine
Operation overload: Kids’ backpacks
Sixth-graders in Italy routinely carry school backpacks that equal, on average, 22 percent of their body weight, a finding researchers link to an earlier report that more than 60 percent of children in this age group had experienced low-back pain more than once.
- Health & Medicine
Hysterectomy often improves sex life
A study of more than 1,000 women who had hysterectomies finds that after the operation, women generally wanted and had sex more often, were more likely to reach orgasm, experienced less vaginal dryness, and were less likely to have pain during sex than was the case before surgery.
- Health & Medicine
Glutamate glut linked to multiple sclerosis
The chemical glutamate can overwhelm nervous-system cells called oligodendrocytes, adding to the nerve damage caused by wayward immune cells in multiple sclerosis.
- Health & Medicine
Learning from leprosy’s nerve damage
The bacterium that causes leprosy directly damages a protective sheathing around many nerve cells.
- Health & Medicine
What Activates AIDS?
New studies suggest that a natural process called immune activation—the signaling that alerts immune cells of foreign invaders—plays a key role in explaining why infection with the human immunodeficiency virus progresses to AIDS more quickly in some people than in others.
