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THE ban on public smoking has caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10%, a study has found.

Canada may divide its nuclear agency into two units in a bid to resolve the global shortage of medical isotopes, which are used for medical imaging to diagnose cancer and heart disease, Canada's natural resources minister said Friday.

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension. In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn't care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant's close friends, colleagues, and family members. 'They asked for follow-up purposes,' Christakis says. 'If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down.' Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of reference

Inside TV : Bad news for Maura Tierney fans today: The actress has dropped out of NBC's upcoming dramedy 'Parenthood' to continue her treatment for breast cancer .

CELLS at St Leonard's police station are set to have the phone number for a mental health line painted inside them in a bid to help prisoners at risk from suicide.

Cancer and its treatment causes discomfort on many levels, but controlling pain can speed recovery for children battling the disease, say pain management experts at St. Jude Children's Research hospital. Tumors press on nerves, bones and organs; radiation can damage the skin and mucus membranes; and chemotherapy agents can inflict harsh side effects. Additionally, acute pain increases a patient's heart and respiratory rates, metabolism, blood pressure and stress hormones.

Mayo Clinic researchers say that 'teachable software' designed to mimic the human brain may help them diagnose cardiac infections without an invasive exam. Those findings are being presented today at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in San Francisco. Endocarditis -- an infection involving the valves and sometimes chambers of the heart -- can be a problem in patients with implanted medical devices. It is serious and can be deadly.

Recent research to block the effects of endothelin, a powerful substance that constricts blood vessels and stimulates cell growth, has led to successful treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension and provides hope for treating other chronic diseases. The usefulness of the new drugs to treat congestive heart failure is much less clear, said Professor Matthias Barton, M.D. of the Department of Medicine at the University of Zurich School of Medicine. Dr.

Nearly every pregnant woman wonders at some point if she is carrying more than one baby. If only you could peek inside! Even after an ultrasound shows that there is...