Disease

Coverage of infectious and chronic diseases — their causes, mechanisms, epidemiology, prevention strategies, and the latest science on how the body fights back.

The British tabloids are running wild with the story of a 20-year-old woman who had her thumb amputated because of a rare form of cancer. The cause, we are told, was her incessant nail-biting.
Plasma surrounds the white and red blood cells accounting for slightly more than half of your total blood volume. It is the home of the “secretome,” a host of proteins that serve as inter-cell communicators.
Nothing controls our blood sugar as well as the pancreas, that should be no surprise.
Anti-vaxxers insist that measles is just a harmless childhood infection. After the Disneyland outbreak, anti-vaxxers derided public health concerns by referring to it as "Mickey Mouse Measles." The facts indicate otherwise.
A new report published in BMJ Journal: Injury Prevention opts to reframe how we interpret data on preventable, premature deaths by using an “en
The MMR vaccine protects against three viral diseases: measles, mumps, and rubella, hence it's name.
High blood pressure, hypertension, is a pervasive health problem in the U.S. and globally. It consumes significant amounts of health dollars and is a co-morbidity or risk factor for many of the chronic diseases that ‘plague’ Western society.
As a vascular surgeon many of my patients had diabetes and in evaluating their surgical risk I was taught a rough rule of thumb:  the chronologic age of a patient with diabetes added to the duration of their diabetes was a good measure of the
Gender disparity, the real and the “not really” is to be found everywhere.
We've officially gone full circle. There was a time when people feared that artificial sweeteners caused cancer. (They don't.) Now, researchers claim that artificial sweeteners prevent cancer. Do they?