News by Subject Medicine & Health

It is well understood that mortality rates increase with age. Whether you live in Tokyo, rural Tennessee or the forests of Papua, New Guinea, the older you are, the more likely you are to succumb to any number of different ailments.

A study of search and rescue dogs led by the School of Veterinary Medicine showed little difference in longevity or cause of death between dogs at the disaster site and dogs in a control group.

Middle-aged Americans are now reporting more pain than the elderly. This finding is confined to the two-thirds of the U.S. population without a four-year college degree.

New research suggests that Black women experience longer waits for treatment initiation than white women after a breast cancer diagnosis, and their duration of treatment is prolonged. The findings are published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Using data from humans and other mammals, a team of scientists including researchers from the Santa Fe Institute has developed one of the first quantitative models that explains why sleep times across species and during development decrease as brains get bigger. Crucially, the model identifies a sharp transition at around 2.4 years of age, where sleep patterns change in humans as the primary purpose of sleep shifts from reorganization, which is essentially learning, to repair.

A healthy quality Mediterranean-like diet partially modifies the association between obesity and cardiovascular mortality, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine by Karl Michaëlsson of Uppsala University, Sweden, and colleagues.

A new analysis of period life expectancy around the world shows that the COVID-19 pandemic could cause a short-term decline in life expectancy in many regions of the world.

Higher viral loads are associated with a greater risk of death among cancer and non-cancer patients hospitalized with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), researchers report September 15 in the journal Cancer Cell. Among hospitalized COVID-19 patients, those with hematologic malignancies who had recently been treated for cancer had the highest levels of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19.

New research from UBC finds that after a night of shorter sleep, people react more emotionally to stressful events the next day--and they don't find as much joy in the good things. This has important health implications: previous research shows that being unable to maintain positive emotions in the face of stress puts people at risk of inflammation and even an earlier death.