Post Archive by Month

As the parent or grandparent of a teenager, would you ever be convinced that gaming for several hours a day would be completely harmless? No, I thought you wouldn’t. Well, consider the OxWell Student Survey, one of the largest school surveys of … Read More

We have a problem. More and more people are living with several medical conditions, sometimes many. But medical education and training, delivery, guidelines and even research, focus on one disease at a time. There’s a mismatch between what ­patients experience … Read More

We now find ourselves in the age of lab-grown mini organs. Recently I wrote about these mini brains playing tennis. Now it’s lab-grown mini eyes which researchers hope will help them ­look at how blindness develops. The 3D ‘mini eyes’, known as ­organoids, were … Read More

This may sound too strange to be true, but breast cells have their own electrical language. Yes, honestly. A report I read contained a video of breast cancer cells twinkling away like the evening sky on a starry night. What’s … Read More

Leprosy is an ancient infection, common in biblical times, ­causing such disfiguring disease that sufferers were exiled to ­isolated colonies miles from anywhere. But now it seems that the ­destructive bacterium that causes it, ­mycobacterium leprae, could be a force … Read More

Recently, the NHS called on ­surgeons to delay carrying out major ­surgery because blood banks were too low to service any more operations. So this new ­research from Bristol University where lab-grown red blood cells have been transfused into another … Read More

A useful mantra for pregnant women is “your baby is what you eat”. And a new study brings this home, led by ­researchers at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, US. They’ve shown, as … Read More

Dyslexia is known to run in families – partly because of genetic factors – but until now little was known about the specific genes that relate to the risk of it developing. So if I were a parent, anxious and … Read More

Heart surgery is tricky and it’s often hard to know when it’s the best time for the op. Any biomarker that could signal the body is in optimum condition would be a major step forward. So it’s excellent news that doctors … Read More

Destruction of the bone marrow, where all our blood cells are formed, is a perpetual hazard of chemotherapy. That’s why your white blood cells are constantly checked while you’re on it. When their levels fall too far it means your bone … Read More