Category Health/Medical

Chronic pain, pain that persists or returns for more than three months, can affect people’s emotional well-being and is often accompanied by difficulty concentrating or remembering things. While they can be effective for some patients, available treatments for chronic pain do not always relieve all the other symptoms associated with it.

Some medical researchers have been exploring the potential of dietary interventions to relieve chronic pain and other connected symptoms. One of these is intermittent fasting, which entails alternating set periods of eating with periods during which people drink only water or unsweetened tea and coffee.

Researchers at Zhengzhou University and its First Affiliated Hospital recently conducted a...

For people living with diabetes, managing blood sugar can mean constantly watching the clock, keeping meals and medications on schedule and staying alert to changes in glucose levels. While little can be done about timed meals, researchers have developed a biological system that detects rising blood sugar levels and automatically responds by releasing medication to bring glucose back down.

In a recent study published in...

Research from the University of East Anglia shows how our memories change with age and why specific details associated with past events can fade over time. The new study reveals that as people age, they not only remember fewer details from their past—but also struggle more when switching between different types of memories.

The work is published in the journal Psychology and Aging. It points to a shift in how we remember things as we age—where vivid, moment-specific recollections gradually give way to broader, more generalized knowledge.

Rather than portraying memory decline as a simple loss, the study offers a nuanced picture of aging cognition and sheds light on how memory evolves over a lifetime...

What do “epigenetic clocks” actually measure? These lab tests have become popular tools for studying biological aging, or how the body’s cellular function changes at a faster or slower rate than expected. However, the underlying biology behind each of these measurements has remained largely unknown until now.

A recent USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology-led study published in npj Aging shows that five of the most widely used epigenetic clocks measure different aspects of biological aging. The research team also developed new gene expression-based clocks to complement existing epigenetic clocks, which show even stronger predictive power for age-related disease and mortality.

Biology versus the calendar
Scientists have long known that people ag...