General

Her first intervention was at the dawn of open-heart surgery. This month she got a newly available pulmonary valve, placed with a tiny incision. In 1958, Susie Knudsen became a 12-year-old trailblazer as one of the first children anywhere to undergo open-heart surgery.  After she suffered a heart attack in […]

Middle schoolers who spend time on smartphones, laptops and tablets in the hour before bed are likely to sleep poorly and be more tired the next day, leading them to use media devices at bedtime even more. Those are among the findings of a study published by the National Sleep Foundation by […]

Rice University bioengineers collaborated on a six-year study that systematically analyzed how the surface architecture of breast implants influences the development of adverse effects, including an unusual type of lymphoma. Every year, about 400,000 people receive silicone breast implants in the United States. According to FDA data, most of those […]

How do you kill tumor cells that can’t be targeted? Get their more susceptible neighbors to help. The Rice University lab of synthetic chemist K.C. Nicolaou, in collaboration with AbbVie Inc., has created unique antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that link a synthetic uncialamycin analogue to antibodies that target cancer cells. Once they enter the […]

Communities surrounding the Salton Sea, the inland body of water straddling California’s Riverside and Imperial counties, show high rates of asthma due, possibly, to high aerosol dust levels resulting from the sea shrinking over time. Scientists suspect, however, the Salton Sea plays an additional role in pulmonary health. A University […]

Adolescents who stopped studying maths exhibited greater disadvantage – compared with peers who continued studying maths – in terms of brain and cognitive development, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 133 students between the ages of 14-18 took part in an […]

A team of University of Oxford researchers, funded by the British Heart Foundation, have identified an entirely new risk factor for congenital heart disease (CHD). Using an animal model system, researchers have shown that if the mother is severely iron deficient and anaemic during early pregnancy, this greatly increases the […]

A new study led by the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford will research whether a daily tablet could help protect the millions of people worldwide with type 2 diabetes from developing cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the leading global killer, causing approximately 18 million deaths […]

Women who will develop potentially life-threatening disorders during pregnancy can be identified early when hormone levels in the placenta are tested, a new study has shown. Nearly all of the organ systems of the mother’s body need to alter their function during pregnancy so that the baby can grow. If […]

Scientists have identified key molecular events in the developing human embryo between days 7 and 14 – one of the most mysterious, yet critical, stages of our development. The second week of gestation represents a critical stage of embryo development, or embryogenesis. Failure of development during this time is one of the […]

Researchers have shown why people with mental health disorders, including anorexia and panic disorders, experience physical signals differently. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, found that the part of the brain which interprets physical signals from the body behaves differently in people with a range of mental health disorders, […]

Scientists working to understand the cellular processes linking high cholesterol to breast cancer recurrence and metastasis report that a byproduct of cholesterol metabolism causes some cells to send out cancer-promoting signals to other cells. These signals are packaged in membrane-bound compartments called extracellular vesicles. Reported in the journal Endocrinology, the […]