It is mid-March 2020. James is a 29-year-old junior doctor working in a London hospital. Last week, James cared for a man who had become sick after returning from abroad. The man had been treated in isolation and is now improving. However, James has since become unwell. He developed a cough and fever, but then rapidly became breathless.
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Although quitting smoking during the first trimester of pregnancy reduces the risk of low birth weight, it isn’t enough to protect the unborn child from being born shorter and with smaller brain size, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. The study looked at 1.4 million mother-child pairs in Finland, analysing the effect of maternal smoking on newborns’ body size and body proportions when the mother had smoked only during the first trimester as opposed to continued smoking. The findings were published in BMJ Open yesterday.
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An estimated 28,000 to 36,000 deaths a year in the UK are attributed to long-term exposure to air pollution. Exposure to air pollution can cause a range of serious health complications, including lung cancer, heart disease and stroke. Pollution can come from a variety of sources, including wood burning fires and fossil fuels. But research shows that pollution from traffic might actually be worse for our health than pollution from any other source.
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A new pilot trial led by Keele University to help GPs decide which treatment to offer patients with common aches and pains has shown promising initial findings to help reduce painkiller prescriptions and the use of X-rays.
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A considerable amount of development takes places in the brains of young children. Children experience a steep increase in their cognitive skills—including self-regulation—at an early age. What exactly is self-regulation? And why is it so important—especially for children?
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Guidelines on reporting suicide are aimed at preventing further suicides and minimising distress to the bereaved. Here Dr. Alexandra Pitman (UCL Psychiatry) writes about her research looking at how relatives of suicide victims respond to news, and speaks to others in the field.
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Socioeconomics might impact the chance of surviving a cardiac arrest, suggests a new study that found survival rates are lower in heavily black than in heavily white neighborhoods, and in low- and middle-income areas compared with wealthy ones.
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For the first time in more than 100 years life expectancy has failed to increase across the country, and for the poorest 10% of women it has actually declined, according to a new report from Professor Sir Michael Marmot and the UCL Institute of Health Equity.
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Middle-aged and older adults who drank sugary beverages daily were at greater risk of developing abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride levels compared to those who rarely drank those beverages, according to a new epidemiological study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
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San Francisco’s women firefighters are exposed to higher levels of certain toxic PFAS chemicals than women working in downtown San Francisco offices, shows a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco, and Silent Spring Institute.
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