Post Archive by Month

Should performance-related pay schemes come with a government health warning? A study led by Aberdeen University suggests they should – it found that ­workers who rely on performance-related pay (PRP) are at a higher risk of chronic stress, heart ­disease and poor mental health. The study … Read More

Back pain blights the lives of many people, especially as they get older. So I’m ­delighted to hear about BOOST – Better Outcomes for Older people with ­Spinal Trouble – one of the most joined-up projects I’ve come across recently. Exeter … Read More

Given the lives we lead it’s ­impossible to avoid stress ­altogether, but up to a point stress can improve our ­performance. When stress is ­unremitting, it’s another story. “On short timescales, the stress response restores the body’s balance. Over longer … Read More

Now, here’s an interesting one. The detection of bowel cancer is increased to almost 100% by testing for it twice, rather than just once. The simple faecal immunochemical test, or FIT, is used to detect blood in bowel movements that isn’t visible to the … Read More

The menopause can be hugely ­disruptive and damaging for women and their families, and cause issues with their work life too – yet there is still a ­frightening lack of information about what people should expect. In 2019, the Department … Read More

With Alzheimer’s and ­Parkinson’s we often refer to the brain cells “communicating” with each other through connections, and how that communication ceases when those connections are destroyed. But what if they actually “talked” to one another? Researchers claim that listening to the “conversations” of … Read More

The original research into the effect that weight loss had on type 2 diabetes was startling – it cured it! Hardly believable. Now researchers have gathered data from a three-year extension of that landmark Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT) and it’s thrown … Read More

Dementia comes in different forms but a common feature is the build-up in the brain of clusters of abnormal proteins which leads to the eventual death of brain cells. One of the ways our body rids itself of these toxic … Read More

The North/South divide ­deepens, and it doesn’t surprise me that a new report, involving University of Manchester researchers, has found a continuing pattern of lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and worse health and wellbeing in the North of England … Read More

Spider webs are such incredibly ­intricate things, you can’t help but be impressed. And as well as being clever ways to catch a fly, webs could be used to patch up severed nerves. Yes, repairing damaged nerves with silk from silk … Read More