Medicine, Health, and Nursing

It is believed that appendix is a vestigial organ and its removal is one of the most commonly performed surgeries. However, two research groups headed by Professor Gabrielle Belz of Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and Professor Eric Vivier at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, France, believe that a healthy appendix might have the potential of saving a person’s life. Read more about their research here.

Researchers from Umeå University in Sweden collaborated with researchers from the Netherlands and the US to discover a new method of detecting and classifying cancer at an early stage through blood test. They took blood samples from 283 individuals of which 228 people had some form of cancer and 55 showed no evidence of cancer. Read more about their research here.

Antibiotic resistance is a global concern. The Centers for Diseases Control perceive improved use of antibiotics through identifying the best combination of drugs as one of the ways of controlling the problem. However, since the number of antibiotics is extremely large, the application of this method is difficult. To resolve this problem, the researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have developed a mathematical approach inspired by Darwinian evolution to analyze antibiotic resistance. Read more about their research here.

Cuba has become the first country to be certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) for eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Read on to learn more about this.

It is known that Vitamin D is essential for bone health and muscle function. However, there is a widespread belief that vitamin D levels are related to depression although it is not backed by any study. To investigate this claim, researchers at the Oregon State University led by David Kerr studied 185 healthy women in the age group of 18 and 25. Read more about their research here.

Chemicals known as emulsifiers are commonly added in most processed foods to enhance the foods' texture. Emulsifiers are considered safe but read on to find out what an immunologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta found after he and his colleagues fed common emulsifiers to healthy mice.    

Douglas E. Brash, clinical professor of therapeutic radiology and dermatology at Yale School of Medical, and his colleagues discovered that skin damage from ultraviolet radiation (UV) continues hours after sun exposure. Read on to find out more about this study. 

Chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition characterized by long-term disabling tiredness, has remained an unclassified disease for long. The existence and definition of this disease have been debated and doubted even my medical professionals. Now the panel of the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) has produced an influential report on how the disease should be diagnosed. Read on to find out more. 

A joint team headed by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot led a study that found links between the use of sugar substitutes such as saccharine and obesity. It is also the first study to suggest that sweeteners cause metabolic disorders. Read on to find out more.

Researchers from New York University Langone Medical Center found that low doses of antibiotics in the early life of mice led to obesity when they grew up due to long-lasting consequences of the antibiotics on gut microbes. Read on to find out more.