Category: Health

Giulio_Fornasar/Shutterstock.com Midlife can bring an unsettling realisation for many women: the years spent caring for others, raising children, managing work, running households and maintaining family life have taken a toll on their bodies. Women in midlife may face a greater risk of chronic health issues due to decades of what psychologists call “self-silencing” – putting […]

Anna Litvin/Shutterstock.com It is easy to overlook the fact that over 90% of medical treatments are not backed by strong evidence. People can find it frustrating – even infuriating – when a review concludes that the evidence for a treatment is too weak to say whether it helps or harms. This has been the case […]

Aschmidtyphotographer/Shutterstock.com The first human case of H9N2 influenza virus (bird flu) has been reported in Europe. A human infection was recorded by the Italian Ministry of Health on March 25, 2026. As an influenza virologist, I can explain what this means and why I am not particularly worried by it – yet. What do we […]

The UK has recently seen a resurgence of meningococcal B (MenB) disease, with a cluster of cases in Kent described as “unprecedented” by the health secretary, Wes Streeting. As attention turns from the current MenB outbreak to how to prevent future outbreaks, another challenge is also growing: gonorrhoea is becoming harder to treat as antibiotic […]

Pressmaster/Shutterstock.com Taylor Little became so badly addicted to her smartphone that she felt she had lost many of her teenage years. “I was literally trapped by addiction at age 12 and lost my teenage years because of it,” she said. Her addiction was to social media, which led to suicide attempts and prolonged depression. Molly […]

Men are more likely to die by suicide globally. One of the strongest predictors of death by suicide is self-harm. This is when a person physically hurts themselves as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories or overwhelming situations and experiences. Preventing self-harm could potentially reduce deaths by suicide. But our recent […]

Millions of people are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots for advice on everything from cooking to tax returns. Increasingly, they are also asking chatbots about their health. But as the UK’s chief medical officer recently warned, that may not be wise when it comes to medical decisions. In a recent study, colleagues and I […]

Women with long COVID had more than double the risk of developing cardiovascular disease compared with women without long COVID. TetianaKtv/ Shutterstock Most people who get COVID recover within a few weeks. But for some, symptoms persist for months – a condition now known as long COVID. While it’s often associated with fatigue, breathlessness and […]

I heard about the new BBC drama Babies the week before it aired and was keen to watch it, not least because miscarriage is so rarely portrayed on screen – particularly as a central storyline. I enjoyed it, insofar as that word can be applied to such a devastating subject. The series offers a raw, […]

Tormentil grows wild across the UK, Ireland and Europe. Ihor Hvozdetskyi/ Shutterstock Long before we had modern antibiotics to rely on, people often turned to traditional medicines from plants to treat infections. The root of tormentil (Potentilla erecta), a small yellow wildflower that grows across Ireland, the UK and Europe, was used for centuries in […]