Medical Xpress news

Nicotine e-cigarettes are more effective at helping people quit smoking than many conventional methods, including nicotine gum and patches, behavioral support or no support at all, an updated Cochrane review finds.

Commercial baby foods in spouted pouches—intended to boost nutritional intake from the age of 6 months onward—are often more like sugary drinks and smoothies than nutritious food, finds an analysis of U.K. products, published ...

The heart powers a busy highway of arteries and vessels, providing a constant to-and-fro passage for blood. During a heart attack, this passage becomes blocked, usually when a blood clot forms on plaque in a coronary artery ...

The human brain continuously receives information from inside the body that helps detect physical needs and emotional states, such as a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, hunger, thirst, pain and body temperature. Its ...

Inspired by the work of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School and the development of the COVID vaccine, Marcus Ruscetti, Ph.D., and Chaitanya Naimesh Parikh, Ph.D. '26, have developed an immunotherapy ...

Patients with sickle cell disease are often hesitant to undergo transformative gene therapy—the current lengthy process requires multiple hospital visits to collect enough stem cells. Researchers from Boston Children's Hospital ...

In a new study published in Nature Communications, Boston Children's Hospital researchers identified a new target responsible for scar formation in the bone marrow of patients with a type of blood cancer known as myelofibrosis. ...

Glaucoma is an eye disease that causes progressive damage to the optic nerve, leading to vision loss. One major risk factor is an increase in intraocular pressure (IOP), or pressure inside the eye. This pressure fluctuates ...

Brain cells that produce the protective coating around nerve fibers can become dysfunctional with age and may actively contribute to cognitive decline, according to new research.

Loneliness can reprogram the brain in ways that increase alcohol consumption, according to a new preclinical study led by Northwestern University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The scientists identified, for ...

In the early 1990s, researchers studying nonhuman primates discovered a population of brain cells they called "mirror neurons." These specialized brain cells fired when the animal performed an action and also when the animal ...

Stem cells possess the unique ability to self-renew and transform into different types of cells. For example, rare hematopoietic stem cells found in bone marrow can become any type of blood cell. Throughout life, they can ...