THE MEDICAL NEWS

As another new year gets under way many of us will be looking for a way of boosting how we feel but is it better to hit the gym or mediate in nature? Now new research by Swansea experts has provided the largest ever comparison of wellbeing-focused interventions delivered to adults.

During World War II, Sweden was officially neutral, but life at home was anything but untouched by the conflict. A new study from Stockholm University shows that the war years fundamentally changed Swedish thoughts about sexual health, helping turn the condom from one protective option among many into the dominant safeguard against venereal disease.

A multidisciplinary team has uncovered a key mechanism that allows the human bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae-responsible for atypical pneumonia and other respiratory infections-to obtain cholesterol and other essential lipids directly from the human body.

Women and people with anxiety are both prone to low confidence in their own abilities, but a new study by University College London (UCL) researchers has found that the two groups are prone to two distinct types of underconfidence.

Novel hybrid polymer nanocarriers enable effective vaccine delivery in the lungs and the targeted activation of immune cells.

A new single-cell profiling technique has mapped pre-malignant gene mutations and their effects in solid tissues for the first time, in a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center.

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have revealed how the popular, low-carb ketogenic diet protects against epilepsy seizures and possibly neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

High blood pressure becomes more common after age 40years yet new research from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College Dublin shows that many people in Ireland with hypertension are still not optimally diagnosed or treated based on European Gudelines.

When agitated dementia patients wander or shout through the night, families and caregivers understandably feel the need to treat this frightening and potentially dangerous behavior. Antipsychotic medications are often resorted to with such patients, contributing to increases in antipsychotic treatment rates among older people.

Oncologists have achieved some immune system responses in patients with pancreatic cancers using various combinations of vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs, but it's not always clear which therapy is inducing what type of response.