When it comes to filling prescriptions for new medications, a new study finds that about one in four of us never actually complete the task. After analyzing approximately 425,000 CVS Caremark e-prescriptions for new drugs issued nationwide, researchers from the Brigham and Women s Hospital in Boston found that 24 percent of such scripts were never filled.

Perhaps the most important point of Shawn Lawrence Otto s Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America is that the voting public can, in fact, take up arms against politicians who would sway their constituents with sheerly rhetorical claims about public policy decisions that should be based instead on the relevant science.

It turns out that losing weight and keeping it off is not only a question of willpower. New research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine investigated the issue by limiting 50 obese or overweight adult men and women to a very low-calorie liquid diet for 10 weeks. After reintroduction of regular foods, the participants were followed for an additional year to determine whether they could keep the excess weight off, and how their physiology changed.

If there is anyone who still isn t convinced that tanning beds significantly increase a person s risk of skin cancer, a recent study provides even more conclusive evidence. Conducted by researchers from Harvard University and Brigham and Women s Hospital in Boston, the study followed over 70,000 nurses from 1989 to 2009 and tracked their tanning bed habits during high school, college, and between the ages of 25 and 35.

Used pacemakers may be a safe option for poor patients in developing countries, a new study suggests.

Although the premise may seem logical screen people routinely for lung cancer in order to treat it early regular chest X-rays do not in any way reduce lung cancer mortality, a recent report in JAMA confirms.

Rotavirus is a virus that causes inflammation of the stomach and intestines, resulting in the kind of severe diarrhea, vomiting, and fever that lead to dehydration and too often death in young children. Because the virus is responsible for an estimated half-million deaths each year in children younger than five years old, the World Health Organization recommends routine use of the rotavirus vaccine in all countries.

Very few women whose breast cancer was detected by routine mammography have actually had their lives saved by the screening, conclude the authors of a study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

While there's a well established link between HPV and cervical, genital, anal, and pharyngeal cancer, Dr. Kenichi Fujise, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, has found that women infected with the virus also have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. While Dr.

We were pleased to hear that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended routine vaccination for pre-teen boys against the human papillomavirus (HPV). A CDC panel approved routine HPV vaccination for pre-teen girls in 2006, but compliance rates have been much lower than ideal.