Category Health/Medical

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), an inexpensive test found in many doctors’ offices may soon be used to screen for hidden heart disease.

Structural heart disease, including valve disease, congenital heart disease, and other issues that impair heart function, affects millions of people worldwide. Yet in the absence of a routine, affordable screening test, many structural heart problems go undetected until significant function has been lost.

“We have colonoscopies, we have mammograms, but we have no equivalents for most forms of heart disease,” says Pierre Elias, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and medical director for artificial intelligence at NewYork-Presbyterian.

Elias...

Long-term musical training may mitigate the age-related decline in speech perception by enhancing cognitive reserve, according to a study published in PLOS Biology by Claude Alain from the Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, Canada, and Yi Du from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Normal aging is typically associated with declines in sensory and cognitive functions...

Exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in early life, including during gestation and infancy, results in a higher preference for sugary and fatty foods later in life, according to an animal study being presented Sunday at ENDO 2025, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are substances in the environment (air, soil or water supply), food sources, personal care products and manufactured products that interfere with the normal function of the body’s endocrine system...

Research led by Naval Medical University’s Changzheng Hospital in China reports that an off-the-shelf cell therapy built from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) loosened life-limiting skin and organ scarring in a woman with systemic sclerosis.

Systemic sclerosis progressively suffocates tissue through immune misfires, collapsed micro-vessels, and runaway collagen conditions that resist standard immunosuppressants, biologics, and anti-fibrotic drugs while driving a 40% 10-year mortality.

Cell-based approaches such as hematopoietic-stem-cell transplants and CAR-T therapies have shown promise but carry high toxicity or labor-intensive custom manufacturing, leaving clinicians and patients in search of safe...