Heart defects run in my family. I lost two infant sisters to hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a congenital defect in which the left side of …
Category: Diseases + conditions
A beautiful blood clot
Check out this gorgeous image - a colorized scanning electron micrograph - of a blood clot. Red blood cells are shown in red; leukocytes are …
Ovarian cancer overview in Wall Street Journal
I recently wrote about biochemist Pat Brown's study of the natural history of serous ovarian cancer. He showed new, much more sensitive diagnostic tests are …
The trouble with trials
Yesterday, as part of its "Forty Years' War" series on the fight against cancer, the New York Times tackled the problem of clinical trials. Nobody's …
Ovarian cancer tests flawed
I realized a long time ago that there's a downside to someone like me - a complete hypochondriac - covering the cancer beat at a …
Fighting diabetes in fat mice
Twin brothers working in labs 2,260 miles apart are part of a team of scientists who found a simple way to reverse the effects of …
The cancer no one talks about – until now
It's the disease that nobody wanted to talk about. But now with the recent death of actress Farrah Fawcett from anal cancer, a lot of …
Mourning and learning
Yesterday was a busy day for celebrity media coverage, with actress Farrah Fawcett losing her battle with cancer and King of Pop Michael Jackson dying …
The link between teen depression and suicide
Teen suicide often gets sensationalized by the media, says Frances Wren, MD, a child psychiatrist who directs the Child and Adolescent Depression Clinic at Lucile …
It's official: There's a swine-flu pandemic
The World Health Organization has officially declared a swine-flu pandemic. While somewhat anti-climactic from a news perspective, the action does promise to spur accelerated development …
Old blood scores against new pig-brewed flu
It looks as though older people have been around long enough to have been exposed to influenza viruses at least somewhat similar to the H1N1 …
Finding the key to surviving breast cancer
A woman who is diagnosed with breast cancer must run through a thicket of decisions. She can choose a variety of drug regimens, some more …
Why this fear of vaccines?
An insightful post by John Trimmer on the site "Ars Technica" highlights a fascinating analysis in PLoS Biology about why many have come to believe …
Hold that phone
Don't take that call just yet. Researchers in Turkey who tested the cellular phones of 200 doctors and nurses in hospital intensive care units and …
What World of Warcraft can show about pandemics
There's an incredibly interesting post on Health Disparities discussing the Corrupted Blood virtual pandemic on World of Warcraft, the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. …
New AIDS czar a good fit
Amid the furor over swine flu, a very important bit of health policy news seems to have been buried. President Obama just appointed a new …