Post Archive by Year

Honestly, the innovations in medical research never cease to amaze me. One of the best recent examples comes from ­Imperial College London, where staff have been busy coming up with a novel way to heal scars. This isn’t a small … Read More

Thanks to Davina ­McCall, the ­menopause is ­finally emerging from ­the darkness. ­Excellent. What saddens me is I wrote a book on ­menopause in 1994 aiming to help women manage it – and nothing changed. Davina felt forced to go over … Read More

Fitness tests are useful tools for predicting your risk of heart ­attack and diabetes – but they can be complicated. The most accurate ones have been limited to top athletes working out on treadmills in labs. But now we could … Read More

Urinary tract infections are one of the most common types of infection, and are linked to millions of deaths worldwide each year. But despite being so ­prevalent, early signs of a UTI can be challenging to recognise because symptoms – … Read More

China has a smoking problem, and Professor Liming Li from Beijing’s Peking University doesn’t pull his punches, ­saying: “About two-thirds of young Chinese men become ­smokers, and most start before they are 20. Unless they stop, about half of them … Read More

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