News by Subject Medicine & Health

Vitamin C may reduce the harm done to lungs in infants born to mothers who smoke during their pregnancy, according to a randomized, controlled trial published online in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

New research from the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute supports the need for dietary and lifestyle interventions before overweight and obese women become pregnant.

As Catholic health care systems expand nationwide, little is known about the reproductive outcomes of their patients compared to patients in other settings, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Newborns with vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, a team of Australian and Danish researchers has reported. The discovery could help prevent some cases of the disease by treating vitamin D deficiency during the earliest stages of life. The study found newborns with vitamin D deficiency had a 44 percent increased risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

Microglia are important to brain function, and also seem to play a role in disease. New work offers the most comprehensive accounting of brain microglia to date and opens a new chapter in brain exploration. The researchers performed RNA sequencing of 76,000 individual cells -- the most comprehensive accounting to date -- and spatially mapped them. Their findings could help scientists tell whether microglia are contributing to disease or trying to repair the brain, informing treatment strategies.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics (BDR) and collaborators have described for the first time the development of the hagfish inner ear. Published in the journal Nature, the study provides a new story for inner ear evolution that began with the last common ancestor of modern vertebrates.

A parent's exposure to dirty air before conception might spell heart trouble for the next generation, a new animal study suggests.

Conditions encountered in the womb can have life-long impact on health. Scientists previously assumed this is because embryos respond to adverse conditions by programming their gene expression. Now scientists report a radically different alternative. Rather than being programmed by the environment, random differences in gene expression may provide some embryos with a survival advantage. The researchers found that a specific part of the DNA methylation pattern was missing among famine-exposed individuals.