Playing with toy blocks may lead to improved language development in middle- and low-income children, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
A glitch in the production and folding of molecules deep within the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas may be responsible for the death of those cells and the onset of diabetes, new animal research suggests.
Severely obese women should lose weight during pregnancy, while obese women who are pregnant should gain less weight than currently recommended, a Saint Louis University study finds.
Pregnant women who have very low cholesterol may face a greater risk of delivering their babies prematurely than women with more moderate cholesterol levels, a team led by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reported today.
In a case of alleged medical negligence, an Indian surgeon left a towel in the abdomen during caeserean operation performed on a woman who later died at her house in Bihar’s Darbhanga district, official sources said.
A new Kaiser Permanente study, the first integrated survey of maternal depression, shows that more than one in seven women are depressed at some time during the nine months before becoming pregnant, during pregnancy, or in the nine months after childbirth.
WHO is expanding its programme to train health care staff in low- and middle-income countries in essential emergency, basic surgery and anaesthesia skills. The programme, which already exists in 22 countries, will boost the capacity of first-level health facilities (rural or district hospitals and health centres) to deal with simple but essential surgery in a growing number of developing regions.
Birds, fish and amphibians can do something that humans and other mammals generally cannot: re-grow damaged or lost inner ear hair cells. Loss of these cells causes hearing deficiencies and disabling balance problems in an estimated 250 million people worldwide.
Deeper voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers, according to a new study from researchers with Harvard University, McMaster University and Florida State University. This is the first study to examine the correlation between voice pitch and child bearing success, and the results point to the role of voice pitch in Darwinian fitness in humans.
Men who have lower-pitched voices have more children than do men with high-pitched voices, researchers have found. And their study suggests that for reproductive-minded women, mate selection favors men with low-pitched voices.