For how we live.
Digital adherence gadgets promise to fix forgotten doses. In a 53,480-person randomised trial, low-cost reminder devices did not raise adherence at all. Text reminders did more, but on short, self-reported trials.
Higher whole-grain intake is consistently linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer and early death, with benefit rising up to about seven servings a day. Refined grains show no such signal.
Implanted electrodes now decode attempted speech into text for people who cannot speak. Results are striking — up to 62 words a minute — but come from single participants, need brain surgery, and remain research.
People who eat nuts have lower rates of heart disease and early death in large cohorts, and a Mediterranean diet with nuts cut cardiovascular events in one trial. Most of the evidence is observational.
The official figure is 0.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight a day — but that number is a floor to prevent deficiency, not a target for optimal health, and that distinction drives most of the argument.
Whole fruit is linked to lower type 2 diabetes risk, sugary drinks to clearly higher risk, and fruit juice sits closer to the drinks than to the fruit it comes from.
The fear that soy fuels breast cancer is not supported by the human data; if anything, soy food intake tracks with lower recurrence and death after diagnosis. Its other health claims are weaker.
WHO's 10 September update records 963 more confirmed cases and 481 more deaths in the DRC since late August, with the case fatality ratio holding near 48%.
The prequalification is about delivery, not efficacy: a cheaper, multi-dose presentation of RSVpreF meant to make large-scale rollout feasible where almost all RSV deaths occur.
A trial in India found calling tuberculosis survivors was non-inferior to visiting them, on a combined measure. Split into survivors and their contacts, the picture reverses for the group at highest risk.
A six-month regimen for drug-resistant tuberculosis matched the standard of care in South Africa. Four days of antibiotics matched eight in African children hospitalised with severe pneumonia.
The federal program enrols nearly 140,000 responders and survivors, most certified for a 9/11-related illness. Cohort data show a heavy, still-growing burden — and hint the program itself lowers mortality.
The phrase is used loosely and argued about fiercely. At its core is a genuine dilemma: experiments that make a pathogen more dangerous can also be the ones that warn us fastest.
A, B, C, D and I are not school marks. They encode how strong the evidence is, whether to screen at all — and in the US, whether insurance has to pay for it.
A section 564 declaration, prompted by a July determination from the Secretary of War, opens the door to authorising unapproved drugs for acute pain in combat and CBRN casualties.
In PROPEL 3, children on once-daily infigratinib grew 1.74 cm/year faster than those on placebo over 52 weeks. It is a pill, not an injection — but the endpoint is growth speed, not long-term health.
In an 81-child trial, vosoritide raised annualised growth velocity by 2.33 cm a year against placebo in hypochondroplasia, which has no targeted treatment. The endpoint is growth speed, not final height.
Toilet seats and mirrors that read your heart and blood pressure are real engineering. The published validation is mostly small, single-lab or company-run — and outcome evidence is absent.
Two trials of oveporexton, an orexin receptor agonist for narcolepsy type 1, met their wakefulness endpoint and cut cataplexy sharply. Side effects were near-universal.
In the largest network meta-analysis, EMDR and trauma-focused CBT were the most effective treatments for adults with PTSD. The evidence is graded moderate-to-low, and the eye movements may not be why it works.
Restrictive English schools cut phone use during the school day but not overall — and teenagers' wellbeing was no better than at schools that allow phones. What tracks with worse mental health is heavy, problematic use.
The largest meta-analysis puts the incidence attributable to the drug at about 15% — one in six or seven. Critics who reanalysed part of it put it above 50%. The gap is about what counts as evidence.
Registry and responder cohorts document persistent PTSD and depression, a symptom peak more than a decade after the attacks, and a burden that compounds with chronic physical illness.
Additives such as carboxymethylcellulose stabilise processed food. A large cohort links some to slightly higher heart-disease risk, and a small trial shows one disturbs the gut — but proof of harm is not settled.
TRIC-I-HF randomised 360 older patients with severe tricuspid regurgitation. Adding transcatheter repair to medical therapy cut a composite of death or heart-failure hospitalisation through three years.
A 1,695-patient trial tested whether metoprolol helps people with COPD and no cardiovascular indication. It missed its primary endpoint — but, unlike an earlier trial, showed no signal of harm.
Twenty-five years of cohort data show the alkaline dust caused an acute cough syndrome and a real, largely permanent drop in lung function, graded by how much each person breathed.
For heart disease and death, dairy looks roughly neutral to modestly favourable in large cohorts, and the long-standing warning against whole-fat dairy is not well supported by outcome data.
Across nearly 1.1 million people, each extra daily cup tracks with lower diabetes risk in a clear dose-response. It is consistent and large — and still only observational.
Health authorities converge on a ceiling — under 10% of daily calories, and lower is better still. Large cohorts single out sugary drinks as the form most clearly tied to dying earlier.
A randomised trial found the Portfolio diet cut LDL cholesterol by about 13%, and a large cohort study links closer adherence to lower cardiovascular risk. Its authors' industry funding belongs in the record.
Two meta-analyses find evening exercise leaves sleep largely unchanged or slightly improved. The real exception is vigorous exercise finishing within about an hour of bedtime.
A prescribed home apnea test can diagnose clear-cut cases, and one under-mattress sensor flagged severe apnea with 86% sensitivity — but both miss milder disease and events a lab would catch.
OSPREY implanted every participant, then randomly decided whose device was switched on. That design answers a question most implant studies leave open, and it has limits the authors state plainly.
AD109 cut the apnoea-hypopnoea index by four events an hour more than placebo over 26 weeks. It did not improve fatigue, and one in five participants stopped because of side effects.
An individual-participant meta-analysis found metformin given in pregnancy did not lower the odds of gestational diabetes, though it modestly lengthened gestation and reduced preterm birth.
The E-MOTIVE trial, across 80 hospitals and 210,132 births in four African countries, paired objective blood measurement with a first-response bundle — and severe outcomes fell sharply.
The 2025 USPSTF statement keeps a B recommendation for women 65+ and for higher-risk younger postmenopausal women. The fracture benefit is real but small, and evidence gaps remain.
In a study of 750 women, those with 'low' ovarian-reserve hormones were no less likely to conceive. Professional guidance says the test shouldn't be used to counsel women who aren't already infertile.
A Cochrane review of 48 trials found treatment may lift pregnancy rates from about 21% to 22–48%, but couldn't confirm a live-birth benefit. Microsurgery had the fewest recurrences.
Low testosterone is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It splits into testicular and pituitary causes — and Klinefelter syndrome, the commonest genetic cause, is found in only about a quarter of the men who have it.
Modern techniques fail less than 1% of the time. The best meta-analysis found no link to aggressive or fatal prostate cancer; a 2-million-man registry still sees a small excess, most likely from extra testing.
Exogenous testosterone switches off the body's own signals to the testes. In a male-contraceptive trial, 95.9 per 100 men fell to near-zero sperm counts. The effect is usually, but not always, reversible.
A child with a suspected concussion should be removed from play and not return the same day. But prolonged strict rest is no longer advised, and light activity within days can speed recovery.
An injection at birth prevents a rare but often catastrophic bleeding disorder. Pooled surveillance data put late-onset bleeding at a median of 35 per 100,000 unprotected infants — and near zero after the shot.
Back sleeping, a firm flat surface, and room-sharing without bed-sharing are the core of the American Academy of Pediatrics' safe-sleep guidance. Roughly 3,500 US infants still die in sleep each year.
The blood test known as NIPT is a strong screen for Down syndrome but not a diagnosis. In a general-risk population a positive result was correct about 81% of the time — and much less often for rarer conditions.
Pooled trials show a small boost to oxygen uptake and exercise tolerance from dietary nitrate. The effect shrinks toward zero in the most trained athletes.
Training light loads with a limb cuff grows muscle about as well as heavy lifting, trials show. For maximal strength the evidence is mixed, and heavy weights may still edge it.
A 2024 meta-regression found strength gains barely track how close you stop to failure, while muscle growth rises the nearer you get. Two trials put the size gap close to zero.
A meta-analysis of 8,459 athletes found programmes with the exercise cut hamstring injuries by about half. In elite football, where the injury keeps rising, most squads leave it out.
Started early and at high enough doses, zinc lozenges may cut a cold short by a day or two. But the evidence leans on a handful of small trials, formulation matters, and prevention claims are weaker.
Small trials suggest curcumin can modestly reduce arthritis pain, sometimes on par with painkillers — but the evidence is thin, and turmeric supplements are linked to a rising number of serious liver injuries.
Saving starch for the end of a meal reliably blunts the glucose rise afterwards in small trials — but the evidence is short-term, low-certainty, and silent on whether it changes long-term control.
Pooled trials show foam rolling briefly improves flexibility and eases muscle soreness, but its effects on strength, power and recovery are small to negligible — and the injury and 'fascia' claims are unsupported.
The signalling that builds muscle in youth appears to speed ageing and cancer. People with lifelong GH deficiency avoid both — and GH given to healthy older adults raises harms without extending life.
Epigenetic clocks estimate a 'biological age' from DNA methylation. A 2022 study found technical noise alone could shift the result by up to 9 years between replicates of the same sample.
The only long randomised trial of calorie restriction in non-obese adults improved cardiometabolic risk and modestly slowed one measure of biological ageing. Participants never hit the 25% target.
Dietary spermidine tracks with markedly lower mortality in one population study. The first year-long randomised trial of a spermidine supplement found no effect on memory.
Exposure is real and universal. One human study links plastics in artery plaque to worse outcomes. No causal harm is established, and the measurements are still maturing.
A tyre-wear chemical that kills coho salmon at trace levels is now measured in most people's urine. What that means for human health is only beginning to be studied.
In a draft TSCA evaluation open for comment until 3 November, EPA preliminarily found the industrial solvent poses unreasonable risk to health. IARC classifies it as a Group 1 human carcinogen.
A Chinese birth cohort of 1,278 pairs found higher prenatal temperatures and heatwaves — especially in the second trimester — tracked with higher creatinine and urea in early childhood.
A closed-loop system links a glucose sensor to an insulin pump so software doses automatically. In the pivotal 6-month trial it raised time in target range by 11 points over a standard pump — a bounded gain, not a cure.
An autonomous AI for diabetic retinopathy hit 87.2% sensitivity in primary care. A smartphone acuity test agreed with a reference chart to within 0.07 logMAR. Both are triage, not diagnosis.
In a prospective African validation, TB-detection AI matched radiologists but neither hit the WHO sensitivity target. In an Indian field programme, AI-led screening lifted case-finding sharply.
Smart rings and watches measure peripheral skin temperature and report drift from your own baseline, not a thermometer reading. That makes them decent trend sensors and poor fever detectors.
