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Tom Dougherty jokes that he takes "get-lost walks." To his wife, Cleo, it's a constant fear: When will his Alzheimer's get bad enough that she has to end his 4-mile daily strolls?
Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries — signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Nurses were training women in rural Mexico to examine their breasts for cancer when one raised her hand to object. If she lost her breast, Harvard public health specialist Felicia Knaul recalls the woman saying, "My man would leave me" — and with him, the family's income.
Labor is becoming less of a late-night surprise, but some hospitals are starting to tighten the rules for elective deliveries — because some babies are being delivered too early.
Visiting a loved one in the hospital? Better check on new flu limits first. Hospitals around the country are turning away visiting children and tightening restrictions on adults, too, in hopes of limiting spread of swine flu in the hallways — although there's little science the limits work.
Grilled chicken replaced the hot dogs. Strawberries instead of cookies at snack time. No more fruit juice — water or low-fat milk only. This is the new menu at a Delaware day care center, part of a fledgling movement to take the fight against obesity to pudgy preschoolers.
Swine flu vaccinations began Monday with squirts up the noses of health care workers in Indiana, Illinois and Tennessee — it just tickled, shrugged one — as the government opened a massive effort to immunize over half the nation in a few months.
It's hard for pregnant women to escape the message: You're at extra risk from swine flu — it could trigger premature labor, hospitalize you for weeks, even kill you — so be among the first in line for vaccine next month. But only about one in seven pregnant women gets a flu shot each winter.
Coughed on by somebody with the flu? Duke University researchers are developing a test to determine — with a mere drop of blood — who will get sick before the sniffling and fever set in. And they're turning to hundreds of dorm-dwelling freshmen this fall to see if it works.
Flu season's in full swing two months early this year — and nearly all the cases are the new swine flu strain that so far is targeting mostly children and younger adults.
If you pay the mechanic $1,000 to fix your transmission and it breaks again next week, the garage should find and fix the problem for free. So if you get an infection following open-heart surgery because the doctor forgot an antibiotic, why are you charged extra to clear up the wound?
Fever, chills, vomiting: It starts like a stomach bug or the flu. But bacterial meningitis can go on to kill terrifyingly fast — one of the few infections in the U.S. where someone can feel fine in the morning and be dead by night. And prime targets are tweens, teens and college freshmen.
It costs $1,400 to cover the oozing sore on the diabetic's foot with a piece of artificial skin, helping it heal if patients keep pressure off that spot. So when Medicare paid for the treatment but not the extra $100 for a simple walking cast to protect it, an artificial skin maker last year started giving free casts to some needy patients.
Exercise your hips to help achy knees? If you've got knee arthritis, your whole leg starts subtly shifting out of alignment as you favor the sore spot.
Sit for hours amid the sneezing in an emergency room this fall, and if you didn't arrive with swine flu you just might leave with it.
Thousands of families carry the gene that causes sickle cell disease and don't know it — even though almost every newborn today is tested for what's called "sickle cell trait," and starting this summer more college athletes are getting tested, too.
Most parents like the idea of vaccinating children against swine flu at school, but they're not so eager to roll up their own sleeves.
The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?
Has the recession cut heart-healthy seafood and leafy greens out of your budget? Are you squeezing boxed meals or fast food between two jobs?
Baby Riley Matthews wheezed noisily on the exam table. "He's belly-breathing," the emergency-room doctor said worriedly — Riley's little abdomen was markedly rising and falling with each breath, a sign of respiratory distress.
The doctor had barely pulled away the needle when a blister appeared on Tracey Berg-Fulton's abdomen: An experimental shot was revving up the 24-year-old's immune system — part of a bold quest to create a vaccine-like therapy for diabetes.
Drinking during pregnancy can seriously harm a baby's brain, yet thousands of mothers-to-be still do. Now scientists have begun testing whether a prenatal nutrient might offer those babies a little protection, part of a growing quest for ways to reverse the damage.
It isn't just the thunder thighs that shrink after obesity surgery. Melting fat somehow thins bones, too.
Think your job's tedious? Try beheading 100 mosquitoes an hour.
Baby-protecting folic acid is getting renewed attention: Not only does it fight spina bifida and some related abnormalities, new research shows it also may prevent premature birth and heart defects.
Gardasil: Marketing Trumps Science…Billions Spent; Risks Remain UnknownThe vaccine is "100 percent effective" against "only two strains of HPV (human papillomavirus) that causes cervical cancer. And those two account for just 70 percent of all cases. The vaccine has no effect on the viral strains which account for the other 30 percent."
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