health - "study published"

The fight against the liver disease hepatitis C has been at something of an impasse for years, with more than 150 million people currently infected, and traditional antiviral treatments causing nasty side effects and often falling short of a cure. Using a novel technique, medical and engineering researchers at Stanford University have discovered a vulnerable step in the virus' reproduction process that in lab testing could be effectively targeted with an obsolete antihistamine.The new research will be published in the Aug. 31 online version of Nature Biotechnology.read more

Men are more prone to - and likely to die of - heart disease compared with women of a similar age - and sex hormones are to blame, according to a new University of Leicester led study.The findings of a study by Dr Maciej Tomaszewski, New Blood Lecturer in Cardiovascular medicine in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leicester, suggest that this 'male disadvantage' may be related to the sex-specific effects of naturally occurring sex hormones.read more

Body weight and fertility have long known to be related to each other - women who are too thin, for example, can have trouble becoming pregnant. Now, a master switch has been found in the brain of mice that controls both, and researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say it may work the same way in humans.read more

Many nursing mothers who have been hospitalized for breast abscesses are afflicted with the 'superbug' methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, but according to new research by UT Southwestern Medical Center physicians, conservative treatment can deal with the problem.The study focused on hospitalized women with mastitis, and showed that MRSA was much more likely to be found in those who had both mastitis (an inflammation of the milk glands) and abscesses (pockets of infection).read more

An international study led by Canadian researchers has found that telmisartan, a medication used to lower blood pressure, reduced the outcome of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke in people who are unable to tolerate a widely available and effective standard treatment.read more

The tick-tock of your biological clock may have just gotten a little louder. The number of genes under control of the biological clock in a much-studied model organism is dramatically higher than previously reported. The new study implies that the clock may be much more important in living things than suspected only a few years ago.

The widely-held perception that the influenza vaccination reduces overall mortality risk in the elderly does not withstand careful scrutiny, according to researchers. The vaccine does confer protection against specific strains of influenza, but its overall benefit appears to have been exaggerated by a number of observational studies that found a very large reduction in all-cause mortality among elderly patients who had been vaccinated.

Programs targeting at-risk kids must tackle a constellation of issues in order to be effective. 'To really improve adolescent health, programs should seek to reduce risk taking, improve social capital and improve levels of affluence,' said co-author of a new study.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Mature brains need a continuous supply of new nerve cells to sustain functions like smelling and memory, an experiment with mice in Japan has shown.

Researchers have broken the code of an enzyme that plays a key role in the growth of most cancers, opening a path that potentially leads to a new class of anti-cancer drugs, according to a study released Sunday.