Medical Xpress news

Medical Xpress / Severe narcolepsy found to damage a second brain region

For nearly 25 years, scientists believed they knew what caused the most severe form of narcolepsy. A new UCLA Health study now suggests they were only half correct. In a study published in Nature Communications, UCLA Health ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Host genetics and sex can steer flu toward greater virulence, mouse experiments reveal

During the early stages of a pandemic, viruses tend to evolve in ways that enhance their ability to reproduce and spread, rather than to evade the host's immune system. The genetics and sex of the host influence how a novel ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Treatment of rare childhood epilepsy could begin before birth

Research has shown early diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy disorders can improve outcomes. The question of when to administer treatment so it gets ahead of the disease, however, has remained stubbornly elusive. A new Northwestern ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Intranasal breast milk therapy clears first safety test in brain-injured newborns

Between December 2024 and February 2025, 10 newborns with hypoxic-ischemic brain injury were treated with breast milk administered through the nasal passages using a special method at Semmelweis University in Budapest. A ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Predicting genetic risk for type 1 diabetes just got more accurate thanks to machine learning study

In people with type 1 diabetes (T1D), the immune system shuts down the body's ability to make the hormone insulin, responsible for regulating blood sugar and providing cells with glucose to produce energy. As a result, they ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Two people, same weight, vastly different futures: New tool exposes obesity danger before disease strikes

The study, published in Nature Medicine, shows that future risk of 18 obesity-related diseases can be predicted using 20 commonly collected health measures, such as blood test results and demographic information. The tool ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / The language of helplessness: How we write about ourselves reveals symptoms of depression

People struggling with symptoms of depression are less likely to perceive themselves as active initiators of their activities, which is directly reflected in the way they express themselves. Analyzing the way people construct ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Medicine faces an AI reckoning: What happens when machines seem more empathetic than doctors?

A new perspective published in JAMA challenges the growing narrative that artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to replace physicians, arguing instead that the technology exposes deeper structural failures in modern health ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / ALS may stem partly from failed protein cleanup in motor neurons

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that causes the progressive loss of motor neurons, which in most cases leads to respiratory failure within three to five years after diagnosis. In this context, ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Scientists discover new way to make drug-resistant cancer treatable again

Cancer cells survive by repairing damage to their DNA—even damage that would normally be fatal. One of their most important defense systems is homologous recombination, a high-precision repair pathway that fixes broken DNA ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / Does vaping help people quit smoking? Maybe, findings suggest

A new review paper in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, finds that while research has previously found that vaping is associated with subsequently quitting smoking, that may not always be true. In fact, it appears studies limited ...

Apr 30, 2026
Medical Xpress / A study in 1.4 million women expands knowledge on endometriosis and its biological complexity

Endometriosis, a chronic inflammatory disease that affects approximately one in ten women of reproductive age—around 190 million worldwide—remains poorly understood from a biological perspective, which has historically hindered ...

Apr 30, 2026