Can you look at a chest X-ray and tell if someone has asthma?
The Obama administration released a draft of guidelines for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research Friday.
I have had painful periods for the past couple of years and have also had ovarian cysts. I had a couple of larger cysts removed about five years ago and was told I had endometriosis at that time. I continue to have pain and now have been told I have a 7 cm cyst on the right ovary. My doctor recommends removing both ovaries and the uterus. I'm just researching the pros and cons. Was wondering if there are any major issues I should be concerned about if I had the uterus and both ovaries removed. I am 42 and do not plan to have children. Given the history of pain and previous cysts, is it a good idea to go ahead and remove everything? Thanks for your time. Melissa
Biotechs working on cell treatments seem poised to profit from President Obama's decision to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and the $15 billion in stimulus money marked for scientific research. But for investors, the best way to play the sector might be the companies that make the tools used by biotechs.
The Humane Society has accused a federally funded primate center of mistreating chimpanzees and other primates, saying that some animals showed signs of psychosis and self-mutilation.
It's like winning the lottery, then being told you have just a week to spend it. And, oh yeah, don't waste any of it.
Here is a breakdown of who gained, who lost and who survived in the final economic stimulus bill that the House and Senate are expected to vote on Friday:
Whatever you do, don't call him Dr. House.
People with a stable mood and better capacity to handle stressful situations without anxiety have a reduced risk of developing dementia, according to a study published this week in the journal Neurology.
What is the best age to begin using a bed-wetting alarm?
Can you look at a chest X-ray and tell if someone has asthma?
The Obama administration released a draft of guidelines for federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research Friday.
I have had painful periods for the past couple of years and have also had ovarian cysts. I had a couple of larger cysts removed about five years ago and was told I had endometriosis at that time. I continue to have pain and now have been told I have a 7 cm cyst on the right ovary. My doctor recommends removing both ovaries and the uterus. I'm just researching the pros and cons. Was wondering if there are any major issues I should be concerned about if I had the uterus and both ovaries removed. I am 42 and do not plan to have children. Given the history of pain and previous cysts, is it a good idea to go ahead and remove everything? Thanks for your time. Melissa
Biotechs working on cell treatments seem poised to profit from President Obama's decision to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and the $15 billion in stimulus money marked for scientific research. But for investors, the best way to play the sector might be the companies that make the tools used by biotechs.
The Humane Society has accused a federally funded primate center of mistreating chimpanzees and other primates, saying that some animals showed signs of psychosis and self-mutilation.
It's like winning the lottery, then being told you have just a week to spend it. And, oh yeah, don't waste any of it.
Here is a breakdown of who gained, who lost and who survived in the final economic stimulus bill that the House and Senate are expected to vote on Friday:
Whatever you do, don't call him Dr. House.
People with a stable mood and better capacity to handle stressful situations without anxiety have a reduced risk of developing dementia, according to a study published this week in the journal Neurology.
What is the best age to begin using a bed-wetting alarm?
As well as their potential for creating effective therapies for debilitating diseases, embryonic stem cells could open the door to improved pharmaceutical drug testing, according to a leading British stem cell researcher.
Asthma affects 22 million Americans. It can cause wheezing, breathlessness and coughing. Asthma attacks are preventable, but they cannot be eliminated. Even though the condition is treatable, thousands die from complications each year. The National Institutes of Health provides guidelines for helping asthmatics cope with their illness. These guidelines, released in August 2007, include an "asthma action plan" for parents and schools, and recommendations to help keep asthmatics healthy.
My name is Otis W. Brawley, M.D. I am an oncologist or cancer doctor.
A National Institutes of Health study from November 2007 found that in youth with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the brain matures in a normal pattern. However, it is delayed three years in some regions, on average, compared with youth without the disorder. The researchers used a new image analysis technique that allowed them to pinpoint the thinning and thickening of sites in the cortex of the brains of hundreds of children and teens with and without the disorder. The findings bolster the idea that ADHD results from a delay in the maturation of the cortex.
Here's something that should outrage you: Every day, more than 1,500 Americans die of cancer. Our federal government knows how to prevent many of these losses. Tragically, its attention has simply been elsewhere.
When Dr. Danielle Ofri first read the headlines, she was horrified: Doctors were prescribing placebos to their patients instead of real medicine. How awful, she thought. How deceptive.
cientists for the first time have peered into people's brains to directly measure the ebb and flow of a substance notorious for its role in Alzheimer's disease
As we enter the final months of the longest presidential campaign in American history, it seems clear that the issue of the education of our nation's children is virtually absent from John McCain and Barack Obama's rhetoric.
Getting enough rest should be as simple as just shutting your eyes.
The apparent suicide of former government researcher Bruce Ivins is the latest development in the mystery of the anthrax attacks of 2001. Letters laced with the bacteria brought the disease into the forefront, sparking fear across America.
Plans for a large-scale trial of a potential AIDS vaccine are being dropped in favor of a smaller, more focused study, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday
Teen pregnancies rose in the United States for the first time since 1991, the National Institutes of Health reported Friday.
They want to pay me for the use of my body. No, I'm not vain, nor is anyone trying to push me into prostitution. They want me (and you) to be subjects in medical studies.
Three decades ago, in a bleak stretch of the 1970s, an economic phenomenon emerged that was as ugly as its name: stagflation. It was the sound of the world hitting a wall, a combination of no growth and inflation. It created an existential crisis for the global economy, leading many to argue that the world had reached its limits of growth and prosperity. That day of reckoning was postponed, but now, after a 30-year hiatus, at least a mild bout of stagflation has returned, and matters could get much worse. We are back to the future, with the question we asked 30 years ago: How can we combine robust economic growth with tight global supplies of such critical commodities as energy, food, and water? It's worth comparing the earlier episode of stagflation with our current travails to help us find our way. In fact, this time the resource constraints will prove even harder to overcome than in the last round, since the world economy is much larger and the constraints are much tighter than
One minute, Dr. Bernadine Healy was a perfectly healthy woman, in bed with her husband watching the Oscar De La Hoya fight on HBO. A few hours later, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
Walter Kukull, of the U.S. National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center, talks potentiallly preventing Alzheimer's disease
Dr. Anne Nedrow gets the e-mails every day -- e-mails from women patients linking to Web sites of dubious quality.
A government researcher said Monday that experimental blood substitutes are linked to an increased risk of heart attack and death, and suggested that studies on people should be halted.
A large study offers the strongest evidence yet that a diet the government recommends for lowering blood pressure can save people from heart attack and stroke
A government laptop computer stolen last month held unencrypted medical records of 2,500 participants in a government study, Susan Shirin, deputy director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) told CNN Monday.
Dr. Bernadine Healy can't even count the number of women who've complained to her about how tough it is to make the decision about hormone replacement therapy.
Craig Venter has built the first man-made genome. Soon those genes may cause a cell to come alive. This tiny organism will be Venter's own -- and that's just the start
Is it just me or does everyone hear the "Jaws" theme in his or her head when arriving at a holiday buffet? The only question is whether I'm the shark going on attack or it's some sort of mating call to those extra pounds that will no doubt settle somewhere on my body. It's probably a combination.
A new study finds that the brains of kids with ADHD mature more slowly than average. The question is, do they catch up?
It's hard to believe now, but once upon a time, Michelle Duggar was a new mom. Now the Arkansas mother is famous for having 17 children, but she can still remember how her first child had a huge belly button when he was born 19 years ago.
Forget Rolaids. For the 70 million Americans who suffer from gastrointestinal diseases -- and rack up $100 billion in medical costs each year -- a better solution is at hand: the SmartPill.
More than 30 percent of American adults have abused alcohol or suffered from alcoholism at some point in their lives, and few have received treatment
Over the past decade the medical world has been the beneficiary of some of the most promising advances in virtual reality technologies, transforming the lives of patients and medical students as well as equipping doctors with more efficient tools and means of treatment.
Eating seafood during pregnancy could help your child's development, according to a new study in the British journal Lancet.
When Jean Horgan complained of heart palpitations, her doctor told her it was just nerves.
Anyone who's had a loved one die of lung cancer has probably asked, why isn't there a way to screen for that disease? Especially as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month winds down, millions of Americans have been reminded that mammograms save lives. If it works for breast cancer, why can't something like that be done for the No. 1 cancer killer?
Here are some of the companies whose shares were active late Thursday:
Instead of using surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation, researchers from the National Institutes of Health are finding so-far limited but inspiring success in a new approach for fighting cancer, using the immune system to attack the tumors the way it would a cold or flu.
Mixed message
Four years ago, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee weighed around 300 pounds.
Teenagers are more concerned about damaging their hearing with portable music players than adults, but more than half say they're not going to cut down on listening time and a third say they're not going to turn down the volume.
The 3 1/2-hr. conference call brought together nearly two dozen of the nation's best minds on the subject of air quality -- and many of them were steamed. As the scientists of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, they are rarely overruled on their recommendations about how the government should react to the latest and best research on the dangers of dirty air. Seven months ago, they warned the EPA in a letter that unless it made at least modest reductions in the amount of airborne soot, thousands of Americans would die prematurely each year. But last December, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, citing "the best available science," ignored their counsel. On the phone call last week, an exasperated Dr. James Crapo, professor of medicine at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center, told his fellow scientists, "We need to write another letter and this time take a stronger stand."
Sanofi Pasteur expanded its bird flu contact with the U.S. government and shipped out thousands of experimental vaccine doses to build up stockpiles against the specter of a pandemic, the company said on Monday.
In a handful of warehouses, at secret locations in the United States, sit containers of vaccine that health officials fervently hope could head off an outbreak of the killer flu.
Picking stocks is an inexact science--so inexact you can be wrong even when you're right. Just consider the story we did on health-care stocks back in May 2004. (See "Rx for Investors" on fortune.com.) We argued that the health-care sector would continue to outpace the broader stock market, just as it has since the mid-1990s, serving the medical needs of an aging populace. "There's no denying the sheer market potential of 75 million trick-kneed, Prevacid-popping, ointment-loving consumers," we wrote. "You can almost hear the cash registers ring." Well, a year and a half later, the only thing ringing has been alarm bells. Concerns about drug patent expirations and meager new-product pipelines have sidetracked pharmaceutical stocks. Pharma industry tracker IMS Health expects growth in drug sales in 2006 to be the lowest in ten years. And in the medical devices arena, fierce competition and increased pricing pressure are crimping earnings growth. The Feds aren't helping either: In September, Guidant, Medtron
Concerns about drug patent expirations and meager new-product pipelines have sidetracked pharmaceutical stocks -- which makes six undervalued stocks a buy.
President Bush, in a speech Tuesday at the National Institutes of Health, said the United States must be prepared to detect bird flu outbreaks anywhere in the world, stockpile vaccines and anti-viral drugs and be ready to respond at the federal, state and local levels in the event a pandemic reaches the United States.
With nearly 40 million people with AIDS worldwide, why aren't drug companies pouring everything they have into a cure for what some health workers call "the disease of mass destruction?"
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures many of the nation's banks, has alerted 6,000 current and former employees that personal information may have been released and that some individuals could be the victims of identity theft.
One word: diabetes.
Health experts warn that things are falling into place for a global flu pandemic like the one in 1918 that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. They say it might not be quite as extreme, but by all calculations, will be very dangerous.
It is 2020. Life expectancy is still in the 80s and the world record life span is still 122.
Much of the marvel of medicine has to do with discovery. Mapping the human genome, the complete sequence of DNA, gave scientists a blueprint for building a person, making it the No. 1 medical story, according to a distinguished panel CNN gathered to rank the top 25 medical stories of the past quarter-century.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to users of the over-the-counter pain reliever naproxen Monday after federal researchers found an increased number of heart attacks and strokes among users.
Biotech is booming again, and the scramble among states and cities to lure life-sciences firms and their young, affluent workforces has intensified. But attracting biotech can be an expensive and r...
Menopause is a normal part of a woman's life that is brought on by declining levels of estrogen and progesterone, which trigger the end of regular menstrual cycles.
When it comes to regular exercise, even the most cautious fitness fanatics may experience sprains or strains, which can derail their program. But what's the difference between the two injuries, and when do you need to see a physician?
A woman's fitness on a treadmill exam may help determine a woman's risk of heart disease, a study suggests.
The federal government is halting a large study looking at the use of estrogen because the hormone replacement appears to have no impact on heart disease and may even cause adverse health effects, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.
South Korean researchers reported Thursday they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells, the universal cells that scientists expect will result in breakthroughs in medical research.
With the bull market in ruins around us, many investors have never felt more bewildered. And they are asking agonized questions: How could I have lost so much money so fast? Can I do better somehow...
First it was kidney failure and diabetes. Then, for a 40-year-old Michigan woman this June, the diabetes led to foot ulcers and gangrene. One toe had to be amputated, then a second, then a third.
On our tour of your investing brain, the first stop is the amygdala (a-MIG-duh-luh), deep in the forward lower area of the brain. (There's one on the left side and one on the right.)
In May, experts from the National Institutes of Health urged Americans to get aggressive with high cholesterol. If the NIH recommendations are followed, we could see a 25% increase in the number of...
In the past few years Rockville, Md., a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., has become one of the biggest hubs of biotech research, especially in the cutting-edge field of genomics. Why Rockville? Th...
For most of us, medical problems will be blessedly routine, and the local hospital is just fine. But when your condition is rare or complicated, you can save your life by finding the hospital that ...
Want to see steam rise? Ask a small business owner about the cost of health insurance. You'll get an earful. Insurers charge small outfits the highest rates for the least coverage. And with that he...
In 1998 biotechnology's jauntiest visionary, J. Craig Venter, stunned fellow scientists by declaring that a company he was forming would decode human DNA's sequence of chemical building blocks by t...
Few media circuses surpass the one that swept through the University of Utah Medical Center in 1982 after it announced the implantation of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in Barney Clark. Millions tu...
BEHIND the red brick walls of two unprepossessing buildings in a science park in Rockville, Maryland, l35 scientists and entrepreneurs are laying the groundwork for a new epoch in biology and medic...
If you scoff at alternative medicine, you may want to think again. In October, the usually staid National Institutes of Health issued research grants of $30,000 each to test the effectiveness of 30...
Mary Lou Wilson, 57, used to be fat, sick, and tired -- all the time. Since she began treating herself with herbs a couple of years ago, she says she has lost 83 pounds, works 16 hours a day -- and...
THE WINSOME schoolgirl at right below, Jennifer Darling, 17, of Mansfield, Massachusetts, suffers from one of the most terrifying and mysterious conditions challenging modern medicine. It goes by t...
The reference in our headline is to political correctness (not personal computers), and the principal PC mugger in this case turns out to be Bernadine P. Healy, director of the National Institutes ...
One day back in the golden 1950s, when a juvenile version of the present writer was learning the ropes at FORTUNE, he found himself at a staff meeting called to discuss conflicts of interest. Eons ...
BUGS -- viruses and bacteria -- cause most minor diseases, and some of the major ones like AIDS. But many of the real killers and cripplers, including cancer, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, a...
WHEN HIS PARENTS brought 3-month-old Jacob Stark to UCLA's medical school last winter, he was stricken with infantile spasms, a pernicious form of epilepsy that starts at birth. Dozens of times a d...
When the Surgeon General endorsed condoms as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS, sales soared. Now makers of spermicides containing nonoxynol 9 may be in for similar increases. Reason: Recent...
A TELEVISION INTERVIEWER intercepts a woman as she emerges from a Manhattan office building. She is 30ish, white, an executive, well tailored, well spoken, and so well informed about AIDS that not ...
Among the most promising drugs intended to fight AIDS is Burroughs Wellcome's AZT (FORTUNE, September 15). Proof of AZT's promise came when the National Institutes of Health announced that the drug...
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE the power of a health fad. Calcium, that mundane mineral, is suddenly glamorous. Companies are touting decades-old products as rich in calcium and rolling out new ones to cash i...
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