In 2016, Jessica Wright became one of the first children to be diagnosed by the 100,000 Genomes Project, a program that provides whole-genome sequencing services for patients. She suffered from an unknown disease that caused epilepsy and affected her motor control. No treatment seemed to work. After years of numerous medical tests—from MRI scans to […]
Read MorePutting something electric into the wet and sticky environment of the stomach proved quite the design task. According to James McRae, a graduate student in Traverso’s lab and another coauthor on the study, the electrodes needed to stick to the mucus lining of the stomach to successfully pass electric stimuli. The problem is that the […]
Read MoreIn January 2021, mathematician Hannah Fry was diagnosed with cervical cancer. When she received her diagnosis, the oncologist told her there was still uncertainty whether the cancer was already at stage three and had spread to the lymph nodes. If it hadn’t, Fry’s chances of survival were 90 percent. If it had spread, however, those […]
Read MoreI felt like a thawing glacier. Still chilly, I contacted my colleague, Jo-e Sutton, a certified holistic health practioner. She surprised me with her enthusiasm. “Zoom sessions are the greatest blessings that have come from this dark time.” “Really? How so?” I asked. “It saves so much time,” she replied with gusto, “It used to take […]
Read MoreIt just so happens—and Fletcher maintains that this timing was a coincidence—that as he was mulling over the prospect of a low-fat, low-sugar doughnut, the UK government was limbering up to introduce legislation to restrict how and where unhealthy foods are sold. The new rules, which came into force in October 2022, ban the sale of certain […]
Read MoreTo doctors and nurses working 75 years ago, when the UK’s National Health Service was founded, a modern ward would be completely unrecognizable. Fast-forward into the future, and hospitals are likely to look very different again. These are some of the changes you’re likely to see in years to come. Fully autonomous surgical robots Researchers […]
Read MoreLast summer, in various cities in the UK, more than 40,000 people visited the Dreamachine, a large space designed to induce hallucinatory experiences with white stroboscopic light and electronic music. “We had guardians there to guide and relax people at the beginning through breathing exercises,” says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex […]
Read MoreIt is allergy season once again. If you are one of the 81 million Americans with hay fever, spring is a mixed blessing. Yes, the days are longer, but they are accompanied by itchy eyes, runny noses, and an endless hunt for antihistamines. On days when the pollen count is highest, seasonal allergies are like an […]
Read MoreNearly 30 years ago, when the first effective Alzheimer’s drugs were approved, optimism was in the air. True, the drugs didn’t slow the underlying disease, but they made a meaningful difference to symptoms. It seemed like disease-modifying drugs would be coming any day. “The story was, within a few years, we should have drugs that will […]
Read MoreMenopause may be entering public consciousness (although, bewilderingly, it’s not a mandatory part of the curriculum in 41 percent of UK university medical schools), but many other areas of women’s health suffer from an information gap for both clinicians and patients. According to the Women’s Health Strategy findings, only 8 percent of respondents felt that they […]
Read MoreThe success of that surgery emboldened Hachach-Haram to turn her research project into a proper company. She raised money, hired a team to develop the technology, and spent the next couple of years relentlessly proselytizing at conferences about the digital operating room. “I would fly 10 hours just to give a 10-minute talk,” she says. […]
Read MoreIn the months after giving birth to my son in March 2019, my Fitbit started recording some unusual heart rate readings. Pregnancy causes the resting heart rate to rise about 20 beats per minute, then the rate falls back to its usual levels in the weeks following childbirth. Instead, my resting heart rate continued to steadily […]
Read MoreAfter more than three years, over 6 million hospitalizations, and 1.1 million American deaths, the Biden Administration has officially declared an end to the federal Covid-19 public health emergency as of May 11, 2023. In a fact sheet summarizing the decision, the US Department of Health and Human Services stated that since January 2021, Covid-19-related hospitalizations […]
Read MoreMeans restriction works in part because suicide is often an unplanned act. The time between a suicidal impulse arising and a person acting on that impulse can be as little as five minutes. A person who dies by suicide has traditionally been represented as someone at the end of a long, tortured battle with depression, but […]
Read MoreJellybean continues to defy expectations. The 5-year-old Labrador retriever mix jumps up and down from her favorite spot on the couch and walks around the living room with such ease, it’s as if she hadn’t ever had metastatic cancer. Her owners, Patricia and Zach Mendonca, still can’t quite believe the miracle. “She’s got a little […]
Read MoreThe emergency stage of Covid-19 is over—at least in official terms. The World Health Organization declared an end to the Covid global health emergency last week, and the US will end its federal public health emergency for Covid on Thursday. These announcements come a full year after the European Union moved to end its emergency declaration. As global […]
Read MoreGoogle plans to apply artificial intelligence to this problem to better identify, categorize, and segregate sound sources. In simple terms, this should enable hearing aids and implants to cut down on background noise, making speech and other sounds the person actually wants to hear much clearer. Another vital element is the fitting and personalization of […]
Read MoreIn a declaration in federal court in 2021, Quentin Van Meter, the president of the American College of Pediatricians, described the organization as a “secular, scientific medical association,” whose “views are not religious as such.” The College has also targeted donors, physicians, and other clinicians based solely on their political leanings, documents show. The group […]
Read MoreWheezing after getting on the treadmill. Gulping down air while doing chores. Breathlessness is one of the many scary and frustrating symptoms that can linger in Covid patients months after their initial infection. But while these symptoms were a mystery at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists are slowly unraveling their causes—moving us closer to […]
Read MoreIn the intensive care ward of Radboud University Medical Center, a sprawling hospital in the southeastern Netherlands, Paul Verweij was worried. The physician-scientist was accustomed to dealing with very sick patients; as chair of medical microbiology, his job was to identify dire pathogens so the right treatments could be prescribed. One group of patients had the […]
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