THE MEDICAL NEWS

In a study recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from Berlin, Potsdam, and Jena present a new method for analyzing the epigenome, the genome's control system that determines which genes are switched on and off.

Climate change is making droughts more frequent, prolonged, and intense in many regions of the world, increasing the need to understand their effects on health.

A recent study from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, shows that physical activity declines substantially with age, even among older adults who are in good physical condition.

Everyone knows the number. Eight hours. It sits on wellness dashboards, on pediatric handouts, on the label of the melatonin bottle in the medicine cabinet.

​Transplant medicine still depends on a limited supply of donor organs, while many retrieved grafts are discarded because ischemia, cold storage, and reperfusion can rapidly damage their cells.

A narrative review found that moderate wine intake has repeatedly been associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, with proposed mechanisms involving ethanol and grape-derived polyphenols, but the evidence remains largely observational and cannot establish causation. The authors argue that drinking pattern, beverage type, age, cancer risk, and risk-modeling choices all influence…

What did ordinary people really eat in premodern Japan, beyond the dishes described in cookbooks and the bones discarded at urban waste pits? Reconstructing past diets at the level of individual food items is remarkably difficult.

A scoping review of 54 studies found that coffee and several coffee-derived bioactive compounds influence pathways linked to skeletal muscle metabolism, including insulin signaling, mitochondrial function, oxidative stress, inflammation, glucose uptake, and protein turnover. Human studies reported associations with greater muscle mass and lower frailty or functional impairment, but most evidence …