Buying new clothes for an upcoming holiday trip may top your to-do list, but packing the right medications can mean addressing health needs with ease rather than scrambling to find an all-night drugstore in a strange city. Prescription medications are the top priority, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bring enough… read on >
A full moon may spell extra danger for motorcyclists, a new study suggests. Momentary distractions are a common cause of crashes. Because a full moon can be a major distraction and occurs about 12 times a year, researchers decided to investigate whether full moons might be linked to more motorcyclists’ deaths. “Glancing at the full… read on >
The flu may be dangerous enough, but it’s even more of a threat for women who are pregnant. All women should get the annual flu vaccine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises. If you do develop the flu while pregnant, the CDC suggests: Begin treatment as soon as possible. Antiviral drugs work… read on >
As winter rolls into town, so does the flu and all its miserable symptoms. Yet, doctors and women alike have long noticed that men tend to bemoan those symptoms more than women. The phenomenon even has a name: the “man flu.” So, are men just whiny wimps? No, a new analysis out of Canada suggests,… read on >
Decades after the danger was first recognized, young children are still being injured or even killed by the cords in window blinds. Researchers found that between 1990 and 2015, nearly 17,000 U.S. children younger than 6 years landed in the ER for injuries related to window blinds. Most often, the injuries were not serious. However,… read on >
The chance of dying from a common heart rhythm disorder is higher for people treated at rural rather than urban hospitals, a new study finds. The researchers analyzed data from hospitalizations for the heart ailment known as atrial fibrillation — or a-fib — in the United States between 2012 and 2014. A-fib can lead to… read on >
Coming just days after reports of a gene therapy that pushed the bleeding disorder hemophilia B into remission, new research suggests the same could be true for adults with the “A” form of the disease. That’s significant because, due to the complexities of the gene responsible for hemophilia A, experts had thought it might be… read on >
If your pooch responds well to your smiling face, the “love hormone” oxytocin might have something to do with it, new research suggests. Produced naturally by humans and dogs, the hormone “influences what the dog sees and how it experiences the thing it sees,” said study co-author Sanni Somppi. She’s a graduate student at the… read on >
Hospital operating rooms produce thousands of tons of greenhouse gases each year, but changing the type of anesthesia used in surgery can help lower those emissions, researchers report. For the study, investigators assessed the carbon footprint of operating rooms at three hospitals: Vancouver General Hospital in Canada; University of Minnesota Medical Center in the United… read on >
As a parent, you may worry most about your kids when they aren’t with you. But many of the falls that send a million children to the ER each year happen at home. Plenty of these accidents involve falls from beds, chairs, baby walkers, bouncers, changing tables and high chairs. Some of these injuries are… read on >
