Health and Medicine

The barrier that ‘good parents’ can provide for their children against the drugs culture is beginning to break down in cities where drugs are most freely available, researchers have found.

But the international study, led by Newcastle University in England, concluded that having a caring mother was the single most important factor in preventing youngsters from taking drugs.

The study, funded by the European Commission, found that 14 and 15 year-olds were far less likely to have drug

A team of researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has cured mice with diabetes type 1 for the first time. In the experiment, the diabetic mice completely recovered from the disease after having suffered excesses of glucose in their blood. Although the mice used were transgenic, the researchers are sure that there will soon be a genic therapy based on this discovery that will cure non-transgenic mice with diabetes type 1, and which, within a few years, will also be able to cure pe

Work on developing a prototype wearable ’artificial pancreas’ to improve care and lifestyle for diabetic people is showing “very encouraging results” at City University, London.

The European Commission-funded project mimics the way that insulin is naturally delivered in the body and could mean that people with Type 1 diabetes – often babies and young children – could have their blood glucose levels much closer to normal than is currently possible.

“We have been developing

Researchers of the Hospital of San Sebastian and the Biomedicine Institute of Valencia have discovered the genetic basis of hereditary epilepsy. The work leaded by the researchers Adolfo Lopez de Munain and Jordi Perez Tur has analysed the effect of the gene called LGI1/Epitempina.

Temporal lateral epilepsy is the type of epilepsy that affects the side of the brain. The main characteristic of this type of epilepsy is that patients hear some noises before they lose consciousness. Many researc

Teaching mothers how to implement controlled crying techniques can reduce infant sleep problems and symptoms of postnatal depression, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

Researchers at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia identified 156 mothers of infants aged 6-12 months with severe sleep problems.

Mothers in the intervention group received advice on the use of controlled crying methods. They also received a sleep management plan, information about normal sleep patte

The promising link between certain properties in human hair which could have potentially helped in diagnosis of breast cancer is “dubious” according to research published today in the Institute of Physics journal, Physics in Medicine and Biology. Dr Mark Sutton of the McGill University in Canada and colleagues have found no clear association between peaks seen in what is known as small angle x-ray scattering and the risk of breast cancer, as had been reported previously in the journal Nature (James e