Studies and Analyses

A study by Italian researchers of motorway tollgate attendants has demonstrated that traffic pollution damages the quality of sperm in young and middle-aged men.

In research published today (Wednesday 30 April) in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] the research team from the University of Naples say their work should prompt studies on other types of workers exposed to similar levels of pollution and alert health authorities to pollution’s insidious health e

A survey on contraception by French researchers has found that a third of the pregnancies among women in their study were unplanned and that two-thirds of these pregnancies occurred in contraception users.

A fifth of the unplanned pregnancies happened among women using the Pill and a tenth among women using the IUD (intra-uterine device) – both theoretically highly effective medical methods of contraception, said principal investigators Dr Nathalie Bajos and Dr Nadine Job-Spira of the INSERM

Drivers who are overweight or underweight are at greater risk of suffering an injury in a road accident than people of average size, according to a study of deaths and injuries from motor vehicle accidents in New Zealand.

The study appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE), edited in the Department of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol.

Dr Gary Whitlock and colleagues studied people who had been seriously injured or killed betwe

A new study suggests that lead may be harmful even at very low blood concentrations. The study, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, will appear in the April 17 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The five-year study found that children who have blood lead concentration lower than 10 micrograms per deciliter suffer intellectual impairment from the exposure. The researchers also discovered that the amount of impai

Drivers talking on cell phones are nearly twice as likely as other drivers involved in crashes to have rear-end collisions, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Crashes involving cell phone use, however, are less likely to result in fatalities or serious injuries than crashes not involving the devices.

Almost 60 percent of licensed N.C. drivers have used a cell phone while behind the wheel, investigators from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) fo

The phrase, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” has its roots in a passage of the Bible (Matthew 6:3). If there is truth to this old saying, the reasons may have as much to do with the way the brain obtains information from the arms as it does from the observations of ancient scribes.

Background

Most individuals are either left- or right-handed. How the skills they have learned from the dominant arm (or hand) are transferred to the non-dominant arm ha