State Health Secretary Mary Selecky joined other national health leaders in Washington, D.C., on Monday to launch a new stop-smoking campaign.
Smokers have heard all of the life-saving reasons why they should quit. The free program, called EX, wants to make current smokers ex-smokers by targeting how they can quit.
In 2006-2007, the anti-smoking [...]
CHICAGO — Leading doctors urged a return to older, tried-and-true treatments for high cholesterol after hearing full results Sunday of a failed trial of Vytorin.Millions of Americans already take the drug or one of its components, Zetia. But doctors were stunned to learn that Vytorin failed to improve heart disease even though it worked as [...]
The connection between belly fat and the brain intensified last week. Many Americans have obsessed about abdominal fat for, oh, decades. A new study from the Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente Division of Research revealed that people who have large waistlines in their 40s are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia conditions in [...]
Larry Hagman, J.R. Ewing himself, spent Wednesday night watching his two granddaughters, ages 13 and 16, play in the unexpected springtime snow that fell in their Capitol Hill neighborhood.
It was a pleasure that would have been denied the actor, most famous for his television roles in “Dallas” and the earlier show, “I Dream of Jeannie,” [...]
CHICAGO — The largest-ever study of the long-term consequences of premature birth finds that children born early have higher death rates in childhood and are more likely to be childless in adulthood.
Experts called the research significant because it followed 1.2 million Norwegian births over decades. It also raises questions about future risks for even tinier [...]
THE CLAIM:
Grapefruit increases the risk of breast cancer.
THE FACTS:
A recent e-mail chain has some people concerned about grapefruit. The messages refer to a 2007 study in The British Journal of Cancer that found an increased risk of breast cancer among postmenopausal women who ate large amounts of grapefruit.
In the group of [...]
WASHINGTON — You’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, and the doctor is discussing treatment options. Should the cost be a deciding factor?
Chemotherapy costs are rising so dramatically that later this year, oncologists will get their first guidelines on how to have a straight talk with patients about the affordability of treatment choices, a topic too [...]
THE CLAIM:
Cold water boils more quickly than hot water
THE FACTS:
The claim is repeated so often that many people accept it as fact. But according to scientists, the notion that a body of cold water will reach boiling temperature more quickly than an identical body of hot water under the same parameters is [...]
Climbing more than 1,300 stairs or 69 stories in about 10 minutes does not seem like a healthy idea for anyone, especially if you are coming off bronchitis and a stomach flu. But that’s what personal trainer Kourtney Dexter attempted and completed at the March 16 Big Climb event at Columbia Center.
The event, in [...]
As an avid skier, Dr. Mark Liponis remembers getting his first portable music player back in 1979.
“The days of Suzy Chapstick,” said Liponis, laughing over the phone from his Canyon Ranch Resorts office in Lenox, Mass., where he is medical director. “I probably have about five (iPod-type devices) by now.”
Liponis is less the tech [...]
