A drug that is popularly used to treat high blood pressure and stroke could also be used to rejuvenate dopamine neurons in the brain, according to US scientists.
The finding could enable doctors to add isradipine to their arsenal of weapons against Parkinson’s disease, where the death of dopamine-releasing nerve cells causes debilitating movement difficulties in […]

Children who are given antibiotics during the first year of life may be at significantly greater risk of developing asthma, researchers here found.
In a longitudinal cohort study, the odds of developing asthma by age 7 was 1.86 (95% confidence interval 1.02 to 3.37) for children who received antibiotics for nonrespiratory infections in their first year, […]

Low Levels of Male Hormone May be More Dangerous Than Previously Thought.
Low testosterone may lead to a greater risk of death, according to a study presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Toronto.
Men with low testosterone had a 33 percent greater death risk over their next 18 years of life compared […]

Iowa has reported its earliest case of West Nile virus since the disease first showed up in humans in the Hawkeye State in 2001.
However, state health officials aren’t sure whether the victim, a Woodbury County woman, was infected this year or late last fall. The woman, who was seen by a doctor in the past […]

Three members of the so-called Bali nine drug traffickers have been denied the opportunity of appearing at the last day of their final appeal hearing to challenge their death sentences.
A criminologist from the University of Indonesia, Professor Andi Hamzah, told Denpasar’s District Court that on appeal Indonesia’s Supreme Court was wrong to sentence Si Yi […]

Not only won’t folic acid prevent colorectal cancer in people with a history of colon polyps, new research suggests that the vitamin supplement may actually help those cancers grow.
Three years after taking one milligram of folic acid daily, those with a history of polyps had a 32 percent higher risk of having an advanced adenoma […]

The commonly used cancer drug Avastin helped slow tumor growth in patients with advanced forms of lung cancer, the leading cancer killer worldwide, a study presented on Saturday found.
The drug kept tumors from growing for a few weeks, but some experts said it was a significant if incremental step forward in an effort to find […]

Folic acid - a vitamin that prevents birth defects in babies - appears to sharply reduce the risk of stroke in adults as well, according to new research.
The study, published in today’s edition of The Lancet, found that people who took folic acid supplements saw their risk of stroke fall by about 18 per cent.
Those […]

A key Republican senator is pressing drug companies to cooperate with his investigation into the pricing and marketing of anemia drugs given to kidney patients.
After years of record profits assisted by federal payment polices, the drug companies Johnson & Johnson, which makes Procrit and Aranesp, and Amgen […]

After uncovering the secret lives of people who walk, eat and become aggressive while asleep, scientists are now turning to another bedtime phenomenon: “sleepsex.”
Reports of sexual behavior while asleep have become so common that experts on Friday released a classification system that allows doctors to better document these cases.
People who engage in sleepsex “don’t remember […]