Certain hormone replacement therapy pills appear to increase the risk of heart disease and serious blood clots in women going through menopause, a new study says. Estrogen/progestin pills increased women’s risk of heart disease by 21% and risk of life-threatening blood clots by 61%, researchers found. Similarly, the synthetic hormone pill tibolone increased risk of…  read on >  read on >

Geoffrey Pointing says its hard to describe the distress of an asthma or COPD flare-up. “Honestly, when you’re having a flare up, it’s very difficult to tell anybody how you feel – you can hardly breathe,” Pointing, 77, of Banbury, England, said in a news release.  But an existing injectable drug might make these attacks…  read on >  read on >

Ultraprocessed foods have been linked to a myriad of health issues, and a new study suggests that the autoimmune skin disease psoriasis might be added to that list. “Results of this study showed an association between high ultraprocessed food intake and active psoriasis status,” concluded a team led by Dr. Emilie Sbidian, a dermatologist at…  read on >  read on >

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist and critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the nation’s largest medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health. In a statement late Tuesday, Trump said Bhattacharya will work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., potential head of the Department of Health…  read on >  read on >

Folks with irregular sleep patterns might have an increased risk of a heart attack or stroke, a new study says. People who doze off and wake up at extremely varied times day by day have a 26% increased risk of a potentially fatal heart-related health emergency, results show. This elevated risk occurred whether or not…  read on >  read on >

Bouncing a soccer ball off the head during play could be doing real damage to the brain, a new study suggests. MRI brain scans of male and female soccer athletes suggests that lots of “heading” could damage areas of the brain already known to be linked to debilitating concussion-linked conditions, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy…  read on >  read on >

Men with heart risk factors tend to lose their brain health more quickly than women with similar heart risks, a new study finds. These men face brain decline as early as their mid-50s, while women are most susceptible from their mid-60s onward, researchers report in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. “These results suggest…  read on >  read on >

Already the go-to drug of choice for millions with type 2 diabetes, metformin might also fight lung cancer if those patients have it as well, new research shows. Metformin appears to help boost the benefits of immunotherapy drugs used to fight lung tumors, according to a team led by Dr. Sai Yendamuri. He directs thoracic…  read on >  read on >