Health and Medicine

Scientists make strides in the study of women’s sports injuries.

Straighter legs and knock-knees may be causing female athletes to tear knee ligaments more frequently than males. The finding could help coaches to shape women’s training to reduce such injuries.

When researchers at the University of North Carolina spotted that women land with their knees straighter and closer together than do men, they asked the athletes to spring on and off platforms that measure force in sev

Severe headaches are not a sign of high blood pressure, as is commonly thought, finds research in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. If anything, high blood pressure seems to reduce the risk of these headaches, the study shows.

The findings are based on the blood pressure readings of over 22,000 adults who responded to a survey 11 years later in 1995 to 1997 about headache frequency.

The questionnaire showed that 28 per cent of them suffered repeated headaches, of

Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are of zoonotic origin , and the closest simian relatives of HIV-1 and HIV-2 have been found in the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys) respectively. Given that humans come in frequent contact with primates in many parts of subsaharan Africa, particularly through hunting and handling primate bushmeat the possibility of additional zoonotic transfers of primate lentiviruses from species other than chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys has to be co

Scientists have developed a blood test that may reveal changes in the brain caused by Alzheimer’s disease. The technique, tested so far only in mice, predicts the amount of amyloid plaque (formed from clumps of proteins that kill surrounding cells) in an animal’s brain. The research, detailed in a report in the current issue of the journal Science, holds promise for the development of predictive methods to diagnose the disease years ahead of the onset of clinical symptoms.

David Holtzman of

Women with early breast cancer could avoid needless chemotherapy thanks to work carried out in Chicago on identifying biochemical markers which indicate whether or not cancer is likely to spread to other parts of the body, the 3rd European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona heard today (Saturday 23 March).

Ruth Heimann, Associate Professor in the department of radiation and cellular oncology at the University of Chicago, USA, said that patients with early breast cancer which has not sprea

The first clinical trial in Europe of a revolutionary approach to diagnosing breast cancer has just got under way at one of the UK’s leading breast cancer centres.
The research involves a minute endoscope, no thicker than a few strands of human hair, which can pass through the nipple and search for the earliest signs of cancer within the breast.

Consultant breast surgeon, Dr Nicolas Beechey-Newman from Guy’s Hospital in London, told a news briefing at the 3rd European Breast Cancer Confe