A study, published on Monday in the medical journal JAMA, found that the number of abortions using pills obtained outside the formal health system soared in the six months after the national right to abortion was overturned. Another report, published last week by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, found that […]
Read MoreTag: your-feed-health
Long Before Amsterdam’s Coffee Shops, There Were Hallucinogenic Seeds
In 2011, archaeologists in the Netherlands discovered an ancient pit filled with 86,000 animal bones at a Roman-Era farmstead near the city of Utrecht. It fell to Martijn van Haasteren, an archaeozoologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, to sort through them. Deep into the cataloging process, Mr. van Haasteren was cleaning the […]
Read MoreFirst U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill Will Be Available Soon
Why It Matters The medication, called Opill, which was approved for over-the-counter sale by the Food and Drug Administration last year, will be the most effective birth control method available without a prescription, research shows — more effective than condoms, spermicides and other nonprescription methods. Reproductive health experts said that its availability could be especially […]
Read MoreMore Young People Are on Multiple Psychiatric Drugs, Study Finds
The News Growing numbers of children and adolescents are being prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs to take simultaneously, according to a new study in the state of Maryland. The phenomenon is increasing despite warnings that psychotropic drug combinations in young people have not been tested for safety or studied for their impact on the developing brain. […]
Read MoreCould Your Cat Give You the Plague?
Officials in Deschutes County, Ore., announced last week that a local resident had been diagnosed with the plague — and that the resident had probably been infected by a pet cat. The cat, which was symptomatic, died from the infection, but the human patient is currently recovering, said Emily Horton, a public health program manager […]
Read MoreCancer Diagnosis Like King Charles’s Is Not Unheard-Of
A patient checks into the hospital for a routine procedure to treat an enlarged prostate. And, unexpectedly, a test done in the hospital — perhaps a blood test or an X-ray or an examination of the urethra and the bladder — finds a cancer. Apparently, something like that happened to King Charles III. When the […]
Read MoreAlternative Therapies Like Meditation and Acupuncture Are on the Rise
The doctor is in. So is the yogi. A sharp shift in health care is taking place as more than one-third of American adults now supplement or substitute mainstream medical care with acupuncture, meditation, yoga and other therapies long considered alternative. In 2022, 37 percent of adult pain patients used nontraditional medical care, a marked […]
Read MoreVertex Experimental Drug Cuts Off Pain at the Source, Company Says
Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston announced Tuesday that it had developed an experimental drug that relieves moderate to severe pain, blocking pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on peripheral nerves — those outside the brain and the spinal cord — making it unlike opioids. Vertex says its new drug is […]
Read MoreTeen Drug and Alcohol Use Linked to Mental Health Distress
The News Teenagers who use cannabis, alcohol and nicotine are more likely to have underlying psychiatric symptoms, and worse symptoms, than their peers who are not regularly using substances, new research has found. The research, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, found that such substances are linked to an array of symptoms and conditions, including anxiety, […]
Read MoreTop Cancer Center Seeks to Retract or Correct Dozens of Studies
A prominent cancer center affiliated with Harvard said it will ask medical journals to retract six research papers and correct dozens of others after a British scientist and blogger found that work by some of its top executives was rife with duplicated or manipulated data. The center, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of […]
Read MoreResearchers Scramble to Keep Dog Aging Project Alive
In late 2019, scientists began searching for 10,000 Americans willing to enroll their pets in an ambitious new study of health and longevity in dogs. The researchers planned to track the dogs over the course of their lives, collecting detailed information about their bodies, lifestyles and home environments. Over time, the scientists hoped to identify […]
Read MoreWomen With Depression During or After Pregnancy Face Greater Suicide Risk, Even Years Later
What the research shows A research team analyzed records of nearly a million women in Sweden’s national medical registries from 2001 through 2017, comparing 86,551 women who had perinatal depression with 865,510 women who did not. The groups were matched by age and year they gave birth. In two studies, the team found that depression […]
Read MoreMore Women Who Are Not Pregnant Are Ordering Abortion Pills Just in Case
Why It Matters The practice, known as advance provision, is relatively new and has increased significantly since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the national right to abortion. In the study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers evaluated data from Aid Access, a telehealth organization that has long provided abortion pills […]
Read MoreBird Flu Is Still Causing Havoc. Here’s The Latest.
Over the last three years, a highly contagious, often deadly form of bird flu has taken a staggering toll on animals around the globe. The virus, known as H5N1, has infected birds in more than 80 countries. It has infiltrated big commercial poultry farms and tiny backyard henhouses, affecting 72 million farmed birds in the […]
Read MoreA Simple Way to Save Premature Babies
How It Works: Doctors wait to cut the cord. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists already recommends delaying clamping by 30 to 60 seconds for both full-term and preterm newborns. Preterm babies are those born before 37 weeks of gestation. In preterm infants, delayed clamping leads to improved circulation, less need for blood transfusions […]
Read MoreAn ‘Unsettling’ Drop in Life Expectancy for Men
Background: The life expectancy gap has substantially widened — and shrunk — before. At the turn of the 20th century, women had a life expectancy just two years higher than men, Dr. Yan said. But over the next 75 years, that gap began to widen, largely because more men smoked and developed cardiovascular disease or […]
Read MoreIf You’ve Ever Heard a Voice That Wasn’t There, This Could Be Why
Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers. Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the […]
Read MoreScientists Offer a New Explanation for Long Covid
Why It Matters: New ways to diagnose and treat long Covid. This is one of several new studies documenting distinct biological changes in the bodies of people with long Covid — offering important discoveries for a condition that takes many forms and often does not register on standard diagnostic tools like X-rays. The research could […]
Read MoreWearables Track Parkinson’s Better Than Human Observation, Study Finds
The News An Oxford University researcher and her team showed that digital wearable devices can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease in an individual more effectively than human clinical observation can, according to a newly published paper. By tracking more than 100 metrics picked up by the devices, researchers were able to discern subtle changes […]
Read MoreScientists Use CRISPR to Make Chickens More Resistant to Bird Flu
Scientists have used the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR to create chickens that have some resistance to avian influenza, according to a new study that was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday. The study suggests that genetic engineering could potentially be one tool for reducing the toll of bird flu, a group of […]
Read MoreA New Way to Prevent S.T.I.s: A Pill After Sex
Why It Matters: Rates of S.T.I.s are skyrocketing. In 2021, there were 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, more than 700,000 cases of gonorrhea and nearly 177,000 cases of syphilis in the United States, together tallying up to $1.1 billion in direct medical costs. (Rates of babies born with syphilis also soared that year, with nearly […]
Read MoreIn the Big City, Wildlife Researchers Are On the Prowl
Early one morning last month, Laura Dudley Plimpton found herself in Forest Park, in Queens, staring at a pair of captured raccoons. It was not the first time that Ms. Plimpton, an ecologist at Columbia University, had caught two of them in a cage trap designed for one. But typically when that happened, she would […]
Read MoreOnline Marijuana Shops Make It Easy for Minors to Buy, Study Finds
The Numbers The research examined the age-verification policies and other practices of 80 online dispensaries, based in 32 states, that sell marijuana to American customers. The study found that 18.8 percent of dispensaries, or nearly one in five, “required no formal age verification at any stage of the purchasing process.” And that more than 80 […]
Read MoreArsenic Preserved the Animals, But Killed the Museum
Usually, you go to the zoo to look at live animals. But at the Great Plains Zoo in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, people also went to see the dead ones. The attraction, called the Delbridge Museum of Natural History, hosted one of the most impressive taxidermy collections in the country, with some 150 animals from […]
Read MoreCRISPR, 10 Years On: Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life
Ten years ago this week, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published the results of a test-tube experiment on bacterial genes. When the study came out in the journal Science on June 28, 2012, it did not make headline news. In fact, over the next few weeks, it did not make any news at all. Looking […]
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