By Daily Mail Reporter British women could put motherhood on hold for decades thanks to new medical development which allows eggs to be frozen for years. An updated method of freezing eggs could transform fertility treatments and boosts the hopes of women who fear they could become infertile due to disease. However, the discovery could also come in for criticism as it would allow women to become mothers well into their 50s. Read more….

28% of women with two or more offspring have children by more than one man, analysis showed FRIDAY, April 1 (HealthDay News) — More than one-quarter of women in the United States with two or more children have had children with different men, a new study shows. University of Michigan demographer Cassandra Dorius analyzed data from nearly 4,000 women who were past their child-bearing years and had been interviewed more than 20 times over 27 years as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The analysis revealed that 28 percent of the women with two or more children had children...

By James Gallagher Treating Parkinson’s disease with gene therapy has been shown to be successful in clinical trials for the first time, say US researchers. The illness causes uncontrolled shaking, stiffness and slow movement as part of the brain dies. The small study in The Lancet Neurology used a virus to add genes to brain cells, which resulted in reduced symptoms for half of patients. Parkinson’s UK welcomed the study, but said further research was needed. The disease affects 120,000 people in the UK, mostly in the over-50s. There is no cure, although drugs and deep brain stimulation...

Retroviral link to debilitating illness looking shaky, but critics still bank on anti-HIV drugs “Very clearly something is going on in the majority of people being treated,” she said. “Most don’t notice they are taking them.” Physicians who work with HIV patients say antiretroviral drugs can cause significant side effects and that efficacy cannot be determined through anecdotes. The chasm between the WPI and its supporters and many in the scientific community is emblematic of a new, modern-day dynamic in which patients keep close tabs on the work of researchers and...

Type 2 Patients May Inject Less Insulin in the Future If Vicki Taniwaki eats three meals in a day, she will have “stuck” herself with insulin at least five times by the time she goes to bed at night. Taniwaki has been diagnosed with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. She must take two basal injections, or background insulin, and three bolus injections, an insulin to control her glucose levels after meals, every single day of her life. But, as normal as this routine has become for Taniwaki, who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in August 2007, she said there is certainly room for error with...

Scientists say they have found a new way to predict lung cancer – by looking at a person’s toenail clippings. Experts at the University of San Diego in California have found that measuring nicotine levels in clippings can give a fairly accurate idea of future risk. Slow-growing toenails provide a barometer of chronic smoke exposure the American Journal of Epidemiology says. Men with the highest readings were over three times as likely to get lung cancer as those with the lowest. Toenails not only spot which smokers are most at risk but also which non-smokers are as well. The researchers...

Scientists have developed a new way to measure whether a person is too fat without having people step on the scale. The new measure, called the Body Adiposity Index, or BAI, relies on height and hip measurements, and it is meant to offer a more flexible alternative to body mass index, or BMI, a ratio of height and weight, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. BMI has been used to measure body fat for the past 200 years, but it is not without flaws, Richard Bergman of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues wrote in the journal Obesity. Read more…

A growing number of teens and young adults say they’ve never had sexual contact with another person, according to the largest and most in-depth federal report to date on sexual behavior, sexual attraction and sexual identity in the USA. The study, released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics, reports that 27% of young men and 29% of young women ages 15-24 say they’ve never had a sexual encounter. That’s up slightly from 22% for both males and females, in the government’s last such survey released in fall 2005, based on 2002 data. The new findings, from...

A non-surgical autopsy technique which could remove the need to open up the body to determine a cause of death has been developed. It involves a scanner and a small incision in the neck and has so far been shown to be 80% accurate in determining the cause of death. Conventional post-mortem examinations require cutting open the body so the vital organs can be inspected. The method has been developed by the University of Leicester. The conventional autopsy process can be distressing for the family and is opposed by some communities on religious grounds. The University of Leicester team use a Computed...

Discovering how a rare cancer heals itself could lead to new treatments for other types of the disease, claim scientists. Researchers believe they have found a key gene involved in Ferguson-Smith disease, otherwise known as multiple self-healing squamous epithelioma (MSSE), a skin cancer that grows rapidly but then a few weeks later, inexplicably, heals itself. They believe that by finding out how the faults in the gene TGFBR1 cause the cancer and then subsequently heal it could give valuable insights into beating other types of tumour. Read more…