Overdosing on narcotic pain relievers resulted in over 15,500 deaths in the USA in 2009, the FDA informed, a 300% rise over the last two decades. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it has joined other health professional organizations in encouraging doctors to seek training in how to safely prescribe opioid pain medications...

Life expectancy among some women in the U.S. is steadily declining, according to the latest research published in the journal Health Affairs. The study indicates that in almost half of the country's counties, women under the age of 75 are dying at rates higher than before...

HIV infection is linked to a 50% increased risk of heart attack. The finding came from a new study that involved data from over 82,000 veterans and was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine...

The World Health Organization estimates that there are over 360 million people in the world living with disabling hearing loss. As people are living longer than they did in the past, the prevalence of hearing loss has also gone up. Close to a third of people above the age of 65 live with hearing loss...

A gene associated with obesity and overeating is also linked to the most fatal skin cancer, malignant melanoma. The finding came from a new study conducted by Cancer Research UK experts at the University of Leeds, England, and was published in Nature Genetics...

Attempting to prevent HIV infection via vaginal gels or daily medicine has proven to be ineffective in the southern African region that is devastated by a high number of cases of the disease, because people did not use the medicine as required...

Blood banks consider six weeks to be the standard shelf life of blood for use in transfusion. Now a new small study from the US adds further evidence to suggest this timescale should be shortened to three weeks, because after that red cells in stored blood lose their ability to deliver oxygen where it is most needed...

Hitting the gym close to bedtime could be the key to a decent night of sleep, according to a new study carried out by the National Sleep Foundation. The annual 2013 Sleep in America poll was conducted with a sample of 1,000 adults ranging in age from 23 to 60 years. The most complete data available was determined using U.S. Census data from 2010...

There are three million diabetics in the UK, accounting for 4.6% of the nation's population, according to recent analysis by Tesco and Diabetes UK. Over the last year 132,000 more people have been diagnosed with diabetes. There are an estimated 850,000 people with type 2 diabetes who haven't been diagnosed living in the UK...

Using two asthma medications combined in a single inhaler provides superior rescue and preventive treatment than guideline-based treatments among adults whose asthma symptoms are not well controlled, according to two large, randomized clinical trials that were published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. This new therapy is known as SMART (Single Inhaler Maintenance and Reliever Therapy)...

Kids with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) are at risk of still having the disorder in adulthood. ADHD does not go away in many cases, and children with the disorder are more likely to have other psychiatric conditions later in life, according to a new study...

Delivering oestrogen through skin patches may offer a safer and easier way to treat prostate cancer than current hormone therapies, says new research from the UK...

Pregnancy commonly changes the size and shape of a woman's feet, researchers from the University of Iowa reported in the March issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. The authors added that the change is permanent. Women commonly develop flat feet during pregnancy, possibly because the extra weight flattens out the arch of the foot...

A baby who received antiretroviral therapy within 30 hours of birth has been cured, researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported at the 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA...

Tumors in melanoma patients cause the body's immune defense to weaken to a point where it's not able to kill cancerous cells in the tumor, according to new research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation...

Queen Elizabeth II has been admitted to hospital with a stomach bug, Buckingham Palace informed yesterday. A palace spokesperson said she was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital with symptoms of gastroenteritis. According to Buckingham Palace, the Queen has been hospitalized as a precaution, while an assessment of the symptoms of her gastroenteritis is made...

A collaboration project between Cancer Research UK and the Citizen Science Alliance is focusing on creating a new mobile game app that could accelerate cures for cancer. The new and exciting idea will let people use their smartphones to play a fun game that will also provide important scientific data for researchers...

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) conducted a workshop aimed at a coordinated EU approach to tackling medication errors, which included proposals on how such errors are reported and prevented...

Failure to treat drug dependence effectively is leading to unnecessary deaths and soaring social costs, according to drug rehabilitation specialists...

Twenty-three percent of women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms, researchers from the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute...