Fewer women had mammograms done in 2005, and a recent study published in the journal Cancer suggests that the decline is linked to a decreased use of hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms. In order to investigate the drop in mammograms, researchers from the National Cancer Institute looked at data from more than 7,000 women who were interviewed in 2005.

Eye exams and tests of long-term blood sugar control are routine methods of managing diabetes: hemoglobin A1C tests offer a picture of a diabetic person s blood sugar levels over the course of several months, while regular eye exams can spot and allow for early treatment of the damaged retinal blood vessels associated with diabetes.

A U.K. study just published in The Lancet suggests that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring could soon become standard practice for patients thought to have high blood pressure. The method requires a patient to wear a blood pressure cuff for a 24-hour period, which takes readings automatically at hourly and half-hourly intervals, and generates a report from the recorded data when the patient returns the device.

Pregnant women of normal weight who were taking a multivitamin four weeks prior to and eight weeks after their last menstrual cycle had a 20 percent lower risk of delivering a preterm or small-for-age baby. Those are the results of a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition of 36,000 Danish women conducted by researchers from the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

Flavored milk hasn t soured after all: This September, parents and kids will find that the chocolate- and strawberry-infused varieties will contain fewer calories and less sugar.

An article in the current issue of TIME magazine poses the question, How Safe is Tobacco that Melts in Your Mouth? They are referring, of course, to new dissolvable tobacco products currently being assessed by the FDA. Since R.J.

Good news for heart attack patients who wind up in the emergency room and require an artery-opening procedure called an angioplasty: nearly all of the procedures are now performed within the recommended 90 minutes from hospital arrival.

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that doctors are screening women for cervical cancer far more frequently than guidelines recommend. In fact, 67 to 85 percent of six-hundred office-based doctors surveyed opted to screen their patients on a yearly basis instead of the recommended three years.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology, writes biologist Nina V.

Dr. Oz is urging fans across the country to publicly dump soaps and toothpastes containing it; the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has filed a lawsuit to hasten FDA regulation of it; Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) has proposed to ban it; but there remains no scientific evidence that the antibacterial chemical triclosan is harmful to humans.