Health and Medicine

Fear of needles and the discomfort of daily injections could soon be a thing of the past for women undergoing IVF treatment thanks to a new device which can administer hormones without a needle injection.

Dr Stuart Lavery, a Subspeciality Fellow in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at the Hammersmith Hospital in London, UK, told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Vienna today (Wednesday 3 July) that a team at the hospital had achieved the first pregnanci

Every day accident and emergency units have to treat patients who have taken some sort of drug overdose. To give treatment doctors need to know what the patient has taken. The circumstances can make often this difficult to ascertain quickly.

Researchers are developing a new kind of biosensor, which can determine in minutes if a patient’s blood contains a particular compound, for example paracetamol. Currently this type of examination needs to be carried out in a laboratory, which is expens

The oral medications most widely used to lower blood-sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes are likely to increase the risk of spasm of the coronary arteries, reports a University of Chicago-based research team in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Constricted arteries increase blood pressure and decrease blood flow to the heart, causing chest pain and even sudden death, shows the study, which focused on mice with a genetic defect that duplicates the actions of these

Women having their babies by caesarean section could find it harder to become pregnant later, a study has found. Researchers in Bristol have discovered that once women have had a caesarean and then try to get pregnant again, the risk of it taking more than a year to conceive another baby increases.

The seven thousand women were all part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), popularly known as Children of the 90s, which has monitored the health and development of ov

Fears about the impact of surrogacy on the well-being of children and families appear to be unfounded, according to findings from the world’s first controlled, systematic investigation of surrogate families, the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology heard on Monday 1 July.

In fact, the mothers of children born via a surrogacy arrangement show more warmth towards their babies and are more emotionally involved than is the case in families where the chil

Research from Duke University Medical Center suggests there might be a link between at least one drug used to treat schizophrenia and the onset of diabetes, a disease widely recognized as one of the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S.
The drug, olanzapine (trade name Zyprexa), belongs to a relatively new family of medications called atypical antipsychotics, which are used to treat schizophrenia, paranoia and manic-depressive disorders. Other drugs in this class include clozapine,