Hot MedFax

Want to avoid ovarian cancer ?  Stay close to your ideal weight. That's the conclusion of a new study out of two cancer centers, which found that obesity is linked to ovarian cancer.  Several studies have been done on this, but this is the first time the suspicion has been confirmed.  One of the most deadly cancers a woman can get, ovarian cancer is diagnosed in over 22,000 women a year, over 14,000 of whom die. The reason it's such a killer is that it's a hard disease to detect.  No exact diagnosis tool can tell when you might be developing it, like breast, leading to early treatment and cure.  Most often it's found in an advanced stage, because the symptoms  can mimic many other illnesses (bloating, indigestion, nausea, feelings of pressure in the pelvis or lower back, fatigue).  By the time the cancer is diagnosed, it's often too late to treat successfully. So how heavy is too heavy?  Experts say a body mass index (BMI) of over 25 ind...

While we know way too many children and teens are killed by guns (last count: 11,000  people, many of them younger than 12, in 2013, according to Slate, which took up the accounting after Newtown), did you know that a lmost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization? Michelle Healy at USA Today reports that a new study shows that six percent of the 7,391 young hospitalizations analyzed resulted in a death, quoting February's  Pediatrics , released today. "Every day, 20 of our children are hospitalized for firearms injury, often suffering severe and costly injuries, clearly shows that this is a national public health problem," Robert Sege, director of the Division of Family and Child Advocacy at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study, tells Healy. I don't know about you but I have a horrifying thing to say.  I am becoming numb to all the mass murders and drive-by shootings of innocent children who ju...

Sadly, our food inspection rules, though somewhat tightened recently, will not prevent you from getting sick if you consume a contaminated food that has somehow slipped through the ropes. Food-borne illnesses cause about one in six Americans to get very sick every year, with 128,000 hospitalizations, and an estimated 3,000 deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as Deborah Kotz reports at The Boston Globe. My sister, who's never met a vegetable she didn't like, became seriously ill with food poisoning (doctors thought it might have been the arugula) about a week before her first son was due.  Happily, the baby was born healthy, though there was some concern initially that the contamination might have contributed to a neurological problem. Kotz writes that the introduction of federal laws to regulate food safety, including rules on how produce is grown, harvested, and distributed throughout the country has officials hoping "they w...