Health and Medicine

Peptic ulcer surgery seems to increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, finds research in the Journal of Clinical Pathology.

Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer, largely because the prognosis is so poor.

Dutch researchers monitored the progress of 2633 patients who underwent surgery for the removal of a peptic or duodenal ulcer between 1931 and 1960. A preliminary analysis suggested that these patients had double the risk of developing pancrea

A woman’s fertility starts declining as early as her late 20s – not in her 30s as was previously thought, according to a study published today (Tuesday 30 April) in Human Reproduction*, Europe’s leading journal of reproductive medicine.
The finding comes from a US-Italian study of 782 healthy couples who were using natural family planning methods to avoid pregnancy.

US-based lead author Dr David Dunson said that, to his knowledge, this was the first study to observe that a woman’s fertil

A team including researchers at the Total Defense Research Institute, NBC Defense, in Umeå, Sweden, and the Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, are publishing in this week’s issue of Science new findings that show that the protein Ymt is of crucial importance for the capacity of the plague bacterium to survive and spread the plague via flea vectors. Professor Åke Forsberg and visiting researcher Dr. Peter Cherepanov are studying the properties that enable the plague bacterium Yersinia

Major new research examining the use of virtual surgery could revolutionise the way surgeons are trained in the future.

Experts use to believe that virtual reality, which allows trainee surgeons to feel and see exactly what they would if they were in the operating theatre, may help improve surgical skills, but it hadn’t been proved – until now.

The innovative research, by world experts from Yale University and Queen’s University Belfast, has shown that surgeons who trained o

Findings from the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee (AVEC) do not suggest a high frequency of medically important adverse events associated with anthrax vaccination

Between March 1998 and March 2002 525,000 US military personnel were vaccinated against anthrax. In the case of an outbreak, this vaccine could be extended to civilians, as occurred in December 2001. The Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee (AVEC), a civilian panel of physicians and scientists set up to monitor the safety of vaccinati

Just under one per cent of all Germans suffer from schizophrenia. The susceptibility to contracting this severe psychological disease is inherited; various studies indicate that a gene on chromosome 1 shares responsibility for the outbreak of the disease. However, in what is the biggest control study to date, which is being published in the May edition of the prestigious scientific journal Science, the researchers conclude that the suspect gene plays a less important role than was expected. Centres o