Web of Health News

Yet another investigational medication to treat Alzheimer's disease has failed. The bad news regarding the drug Dimebon was announced Wednesday in a statement from Pfizer and Medivation, the two pharmaceutical companies developing the product.

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GlaxoSmithKline tells doctors in Canada to stop using a batch of its swine flu, amid reports of severe side effects.  One in 20,000 people have suffered adverse reactions to the batch of GlaxoSmithKline's Pandemrix vaccine, which is five times higher than expected. 

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Divorce has a lingering, detrimental impact on health that even remarriage cannot fully repair, work suggests.

A Chicago study involving 8,652 people aged 51 to 61 found divorced people have 20% more chronic illnesses such as cancer than those who never marry.

The figure only drops to 12% for those who remarry, researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour.

They say we start adulthood with a "health stock" that is kept or eroded depending on our marital experience.

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A test to predict pregnancies at risk of common complications could soon be available to couples before they even try to conceive.  Most complications stem from problems with the placenta, with these genes a key factor in determining placental development. Pre-eclampsia affects as many as one in 10 pregnancies, presenting as high blood pressure and protein in the mother's urine.

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The research, from Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine, found genetic variations in Mexican Mestizos — people of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry who represent more than 80% of that country's population — that could affect their risk of diseases and their response to treatments.

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Sanofi-Aventis SA began work Tuesday on a euro350 million ($477 million) plant that is to be devoted to production of the world's first vaccine against dengue fever, a public health threat for some two-fifths of the worlds population.

The company says its vaccine plant in this town north of the French city of Lyon is the largest single industrial investment it has ever made. By 2013 it is hoped the plant will begin turning out a dengue vaccine that the company is currently testing.

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(CNN) -- A medical student will be arraigned Tuesday on a murder charge in Boston Municipal Court in connection with the death of a woman who may have been contacted through a Craigslist ad, police said.

Philip Markoff, 22, who has no criminal record, also was charged with the armed robbery and kidnapping of another victim, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said Monday evening.

Markoff is a second-year student at Boston University School of Medicine, according to BU.

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Moscow: Russian doctors who operated on a man who they thought had lung cancer were surprised to find a tree growing inside his lung. 

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ON MARCH 22, The Sunday Age published an article that included an interview with Janet Fraser, a leading home birth advocate.

Ms Fraser, in the early stages of labour at the time of the interview, revealed that at no time during the pregnancy had she consulted a health professional — and that she intended delivering the baby at home without an attending midwife.

On March 27, Ms Fraser reportedly delivered a baby girl in a water birth.

An ambulance was called when the infant reportedly suffered a cardiac arrest and wasn't breathing.

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PITTSBURGH, April 10 (UPI) -- Stem cell-based therapies might be an effective way to treat human corneal blindness and vision impairment due to scarring, U.S. researchers said.

ST. LOUIS, April 3 (UPI) -- Sleep, already recognized as a promoter of long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning, U.S. researchers said.

Scientists pinpoint a genetic mutation which may trigger up to 70% of cases of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer.

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Destroying abnormal stem cells could be a way to kill off bowel cancer in its very earliest stages, say UK experts.

Immature cells line the gut and normally replace and repair the tissue but malfunctions can lead to cancer.

Scientists believe detecting and obliterating these rogue cancer stem cells as soon as they appear could be a potent new anti-cancer strategy.

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Doctors may soon be able to patch up damaged bones and joints anywhere in the body with a simple shot in the arm.

A team at Keele University is testing injectible stem cells that they say they can control with a magnet.

Once injected these immature cells can be guided to precisely where their help is needed and encouraged to grow new cartilage and bone, work on mice shows.

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Researchers at the University of B.C. have developed a “vampire battery” — a fuel cell that can generate power from a drop of human blood plasma.

The discovery means that pacemakers and other implanted medical devices may one day be able to run on electricity generated by a patient’s blood, rather than on batteries that require regular surgical replacement.

The device, known as a microbial fuel cell, has not yet been tested in the human body or in animal trials. But tests conducted with human blood plasma show the concept is sound.

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 A new study in the Journal of Personality theorizes that it is not necessarily wealth that facilitates procreation but a more basic and deeply ingrained evolutionary trait — having a Type A personality. The study finds that adolescents who say they always take charge, tell others what to do, anger quickly, get into fights easily, and walk, talk and eat fast end up having more kids than others when they grow up.

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According to new research, multiple births are a risk factor for postpartum depressive symptoms in mothers. The study was published April 1 in the journal Pediatrics.

Nine months after delivery, mothers of multiple births had 43 percent greater odds of having moderate or severe postpartum depressive symptoms compared with mothers of single babies, the study said.

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BOSTON, March 24 (UPI) -- Black women are three times more likely to develop an aggressive"triple negative"breast tumor compared with women of other racial backgrounds,

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KARACHI,Mar 25(IPS)-Health experts in Pakistan are now concentrating ongetting women from all strata of society to space births.  Read more:

It is safe for most healthy women to eat a light diet during labour, contradicting previous thinking.  Read more:

PITTSBURGH, March 20 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers are testing a vaccine to prevent colon cancer in those already at high risk for the disease.

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BOSTON, March 12 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say that physicians can ask one single question of patients to identify unhealthy alcohol use.

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Migraines substantially raise the low risk of a stroke during pregnancy, a US study suggests. 

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The thickness of a person's neck may provide as many clues to their risk of heart problems as their waist, a study suggests.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Severe depression may silently break a seemingly healthy woman's heart. Doctors have long known that depression is common after a heart attack or stroke, and worsens those people's outcomes. Monday, Columbia University researchers reported new evidence that depression can lead to heart disease in the first place.

The depressed women were more than twice as likely to experience sudden cardiac death - death typically caused by an irregular heartbeat.  The big surprise: Sudden cardiac death seemed more closely linked with antidepressant use than with the depression symptoms the women reported.

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We all know what went through our minds when Jade Goody was recently admitted to a hospice. That's it, we thought, the endgame; when a person goes into one of those places, they never come out. It is true that people who go into hospices have terminal illnesses, but less known is that more than half return home (Goody had intended to do the same but was transferred to hospital for emergency surgery. She is said to be in the final days of her fight against cervical cancer and was at the Royal Marsden on Saturday having undergone a Christening with her sons in the hospital chapel).

People do not go to hospices only to die. They visit for pain management, daycare or to give carers a break. The average stay is 13 days. But these details are often lost in our dread of the word “hospice” because we see it as signalling that all hope is gone.

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NEWARK, N.J., March 5 (UPI) -- Cell phone use has a significant adverse effect on pedestrian and motor vehicle fatalities, U.S. researchers said.

MILWAUKEE, March 2 (UPI) -- Patients with upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage admitted to the hospital during a weekend had higher mortality, U.S. researchers said.

LOS ANGELES, March 3 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers have identified a specific gene variant that links increased genetic risk for autism with gastrointestinal conditions.

The effectiveness of many over-the-counter cold medicines for children under 12 has been put in doubt by a government agency.

Young children who spend more than two hours a day watching TV double their risk of developing asthma, a study finds.

Unhappy children are more likely to grow up to become adults who are permanently sick or disabled, a UK study has suggested.

The King's College London-led research looked at over 7,100 people born between 1950 and 1955.

Researchers found those described as "miserable" or "unhappy" by teachers were five times more likely to be off work through ill-health in middle age.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Obese adolescents have the same risk of premature death in adulthood as people who smoke more than 10 cigarettes a day, Swedish researchers said.

Women going for routine breast cancer screening are being misled about the risks of being misdiagnosed, a recent report suggested. But it's vital to get the numbers in context, says Michael Blastland in his regular column.

Say that routine screening is 90% accurate. Say you have a positive test. What's the chance that your positive test is accurate and you really have cancer?

The surprise is that it's impossible to answer that question correctly with the information given. But many doctors think otherwise. They think a positive test that's 90% accurate means it's 90% likely to mean cancer. Not so.

Long working hours may raise the risk of mental decline and possibly dementia, research suggests. The Finnish-led study was based on analysis of 2,214 middle-aged British civil servants. It found that those working more than 55 hours a week had poorer mental skills than those who worked a standard working week.

The American Journal of Epidemiology study found hard workers had problems with short-term memory and word recall. Employees with long working hours also had shorter sleeping hours, reported more symptoms of depression and used more alcohol than those with normal working hours.

Abuse in early childhood permanently alters how the brain responds to stress, a Canadian study suggests.

Doctors in the UK are launching a first comprehensive study into the scale of potentially fatal dehydration in breastfed babies.  Severe hypernatraemic dehydration is a rare but potentially fatal condition. It has been suggested that the number of cases may be rising as more women heed the "Breast is Best" message.

Vitamin D could prevent multiple sclerosis say researchers who found it interacts with a gene known to increase risk of the condition.