Category Archive

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

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