Here are some statistics that might give you a reality check: Nearly one in three Americans over the age of 20 have high blood pressure. That means that about 74.5 million people in this country are hypertensive. In addition, the ailment leads to 300,000 annual deaths in the U.S. and is a precursor to heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure, and kidney failure, according to the American Heart Association.

Two preliminary studies published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology suggest that common blood pressure drugs known as beta-blockers may increase survival in women with breast cancer, or make it less likely that they develop aggressive breast cancer or die from it.

As young adults eagerly count the days until their 21st birthday, it’s quite obvious that, for most, the occasion becomes just a formality commemorating their first legal alcoholic drink after many years of illegal experimentation in college, or even with family at home. And it is exactly for this reason that Dr. David J. Hanson, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Potsdam, argues that the drinking age should be lowered to 18.

Bayer’s Yaz and Yasmin, two popular brands of birth-control pills that contain drospirenone (a synthetic progestin), are currently under investigation by the FDA, the agency announced Tuesday.

A new study should allay the fears of women who take osteoporosis drugs. The Swedish study, just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that the class of drugs known as bisphosphonates (including Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, Atelvia, and Reclast) caused only one atypical femoral fracture for every 2,000 people who used them in a year.

While sports drinks add calories to kids’ diets, so-called “energy drinks” may introduce an unsafe amount of caffeine into their systems. Holly J. Benjamin and Marcie Beth Schneider, specialists in adolescent and sports medicine, published a study on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, stating as much.

Medical researchers have noted in men a sharp rise in a type of throat cancer increasingly linked to HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus. Though the virus is best known for causing cervical cancer, a new study by the National Cancer Institute found a 225 percent increase in the incidence of HPV-positive oropharynx cancers (those affecting the back of the tongue and tonsil area) in men from 1988 to 2004.

In what has quickly become the first big health scare of the summer season, the World Health Organization (WHO) — via their cancer evaluation affiliate, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — released a statement yesterday that classifies the radiofrequency electromagnetic fields associated with cell phones in their category IIB, meaning “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” One news source after another picked up and ran with the story, and links accumulated on Twitter feeds and Fa

A recent Reuters Health story, headlined “Vitamins won’t prevent pregnancy complication,” reported on the failure of vitamins C and E to prevent preeclampsia (a serious elevation of maternal blood pressure late in pregnancy) when taken prenatally. However, ACSH's Dr.

One in sixteen U.S. preschoolers has a vision problem, according to a study published in Ophthalmology.