Category: Health

Frankenstein’s creature is coming back to life – again. As Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece airs on Netflix, we provide an anatomist’s perspective of her tale of reanimation. Could an assembled body ever breathe, bleed or think? When Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, anatomy was a science on the edge […]

An international trial found that patients with early-stage breast cancer who underwent a mastectomy, removal of the breast, had similar 10-year survival rates whether or not they received radiotherapy. The trial was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC). Guiding treatment discussions Experts say the findings should help guide treatment discussions, as many patients who […]

You may have heard that vaping is the “safer” choice than smoking. But what if the very thing designed to protect your health also puts your heart at risk? Vaping does not exist in isolation. It is part of a wider story about smoking, inequality and the growing burden of heart disease in the UK. […]

Estimates indicate one in five children under three are either zero-dose or have missed vaccinations because of the war, putting them at risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. The catch-up campaign aims to inoculate these children against measles, mumps, and rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, polio, rotavirus and pneumonia. It will be carried out by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Palestine refugee agency, UNRWA, the World Health […]

Five initiatives have today been announced that will bring together a fragmented health data landscape. They will receive investment from the UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). One of the schemes, the Open Psychiatry Project, will bring together diverse datasets on how genes, cells and molecules […]

Some of the world’s healthiest and longest-living people follow the practice of hara hachi bu — an eating philosophy rooted in moderation. This practice comes from a Japanese Confucian teaching which instructs people to only eat until they’re around 80% full. More recently, it’s been gaining attention as a strategy for weight loss. But while […]

Around one in five mothers experience perinatal depression. This condition involves depressive episodes during pregnancy or just after birth – often with lasting effects on both mother and child. Yet despite its prevalence, identifying who is at risk of experiencing perinatal depression remains one of the greatest challenges in maternal health. More than half of […]

A group of scientists in the UK recently demanded that bacon and ham products carry health warnings similar to those on cigarettes. These experts argue that these meats, which are often preserved with chemicals called nitrites, pose a cancer risk that successive UK governments have failed to address. They are urging the government to act […]

The increased use reflects a major health success that has allowed millions of young people to avoid unintended pregnancy and exercise choice over their futures, but UNFPA said that “for far too many, the basic human right to choose whether to have children continues to be undermined.” ‘Contraceptives save lives’ The unavailability of contraception leads […]

If you’ve sat in a nail salon recently, you may well have encountered TPO or trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide to give it its full chemical name. You won’t have seen the name on the bottle. But if you’ve had your gelled fingers under a blue-violet lamp, TPO could well have been part of the process. TPO […]