A persistently noisy workplace more than doubles an employee’s risk of serious heart disease, suggest new findings in the journalOccupational and Environmental Medicine. The researchers base their findings on a sample of more than 6,000 employees, aged from 20 upwards, who had been part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between […]
Not content with erections, Pfizer have been funding left-of-field studies for other potential applications for their money-spinning erectile dysfunction treatment. The latest finding to come from Pfizer’s, er, benevolence? That the drug can enhance fetal growth – at least in pregnant ewes. The research started as a joke between two Texas AgriLife Research scientists which […]
The subtle but relentless pressures of human evolution could explain the rise of disorders such as autism, autoimmune diseases, and reproductive cancers, say scientists who believe that evolutionary perspectives should be part of medical school curricula. The researchers, from Yale University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the Boston University School of Medicine, speculate […]
A study by researchers at Victoria University (Australia) into penis size and body image found that men with a larger-than-average penis had higher self esteem and better overall general health. Interestingly, the study also found that while size does matter to men, it matters chiefly in relation to how they shape up compared with other […]
A person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and hypertension is known to be linked to obesity, and now researchers have established that being overweight can also affect a person’s brain. In the journal Human Brain Mapping, Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology, and colleagues compared the brains of people who were obese, […]
The latest American Journal of Human Biology contains details of two studies that contend that poor nutrition and stress – stemming back to the days of slavery – could help explain black-white differences in cardiovascular health in the United States. In one study, researchers from Northwestern University explain how nutrients and hormones present in the […]
In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Peninsula Medical School in the UK report a significant relationship between urine concentrations of the environmental estrogen bisphenol A (BPA) and cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities. Used in the manufacture of plastic consumer products such as baby […]
Two psychiatric conferences in Europe have been told that child abuse can cause schizophrenia. The man behind the contentious theory, University of Manchester researcher Paul Hammersley, described his theory as “an earthquake” that will radically change the psychiatric profession. Working in conjunction with New Zealand clinical psychologist Dr John Read, Hammersley gathered evidence from 40 […]
We may be significantly underestimating air pollution’s role in causing early death, say a team of researchers who have just finished analyzing twenty years of data from locales around Los Angeles. Taking in 260 L.A. neighborhoods, the epidemiologists found that pollution’s chronic health effects are two to three times greater than earlier believed. Their study, […]
A group of scientists in the United Kingdom has found that 3 out of 12,674 stored appendix and tonsil samples showed evidence of the prion protein associated with vCJD. They urge caution, however, about the way the results are interpreted. The study, appearing in The Journal of Pathology, was designed to help health policymakers estimate […]
