The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has announced new mammography guidelines this week. While the task force previously encouraged screenings for women beginning at 40, it has now pushed the threshold to 50. Concerns over frequent false positives ...
Crude methods of detecting swine flu have so far provoked hand-wringing and no small amount of ridicule. Planeloads of travelers to China have had laser beams aimed at their foreheads, landing some under quarantine (and spurring a YouTube minifest of ...
They’ll take the blood from the mother’s arm. Photograph of a woman giving blood by Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Getty Images. Amniocentesis, in which a needle is thrust into a woman’s womb in order to test for fetal abnormalities, can be nerve-wracking. ...
You can do almost anything on the Internet these days. What about getting a good night’s sleep? It might be possible, some researchers say. Web-based programs to treat insomnia are proliferating, and two small but rigorous studies suggest that online ...
And now come a few new products in lady care that manage to top the charts for ingenuity. Some, but not all, are suspect, and the oddest are worth anatomizing for their entertainment value and, sometimes, kernels of scientific creativity. Below is a ...
Then in the 1970s, a drive to cut back mastectomies became intertwined with feminism and patients’ rights. In 1990, the National Institutes of Health declared radiation and a lumpectomy—in which a malignant lump is removed but much of the breast spared— ...
Not too long ago, baby-in-a-box technology seemed imminent. In the late 1990s, scientists in Japan startled the world with a freestanding artificial womb: an acrylic, fluid-filled incubator. The scientists used it to gestate goats that had been removed ...
New research published today sheds light on an old scientific puzzle: Why is cancer so rare in people with Down Syndrome? It turns out that a gene on chromosome 21, which Down syndrome patients have an extra copy of, may help to suppress tumors by ...
In the last couple of months, the lure of stimulus funding has aroused such a carnival-esque atmosphere that many biomedical scientists have ceased doing much actual research. These scientists already rely on government grants, of course, especially ...
Doctors and researchers regularly rely on CT scanners to create images of body parts like brains, chests and knees. But an artist-turned-medical-student in Manhattan is using one such machine to peer into the meat and guts of cultural icons like the ...
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