Medicine

Medicine

When Matt Hillier was in his 20s, he went camping with a friend who was a nurse. In the morning she told him she had been shocked by the snoring coming from his tent. She basically said, For a 25-year-old non-smoker who's quite skinny, you snore pretty loudly,' says Hiller, now 32. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.

He wasn't crazy. His body had literally turned into a brewery. Cases like this have been mere medical anecdotes for decades, but they have just received the most solid scientific validation yet. A study published in Nature Microbiology, conducted by researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego and Massachusetts General Hospital, has finally identified what happens inside the gut of these patients. More importantly, it has found a treatment that works: a stool transplant.

You know that moment when you walk into a room and completely forget why you went there? Or when someone you've known for years walks up to you at the grocery store and their name just... vanishes from your brain? Last week, I spent ten minutes searching for my reading glasses while they were sitting on top of my head. My first thought wasn't "oh, silly me." It was "Is this how it starts?"

Around half a million Irish people suffer from what is called 'temporomandibular disorder', with women affected at a higher rate than men. Discomfort, clicking and pain in the jaw can be at best a nuisance, and at worst debilitating. People who suffer from temporomandibular disorder (TMD), which refers to a variety of conditions that affect the jaw area, can experience stress, chronic pain and poor sleep.

The findings of a study conducted on a sample of 2.7 million people in Sweden over a 35 year period, and published this Thursday in the medical journal BMJ, suggest that the male to female ratio of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has decreased over time. In early childhood, before the age of 10, the male to female ratio is 3:1 (the most widely accepted ratio a few years ago was 4:1).

For more than a decade, doctors and researchers have announced that a handful of people around the world have been cured of HIV. Each of these patients has experienced long-term viral control - in some cases for over a decade - without antiretroviral therapy (ART), as AIDSMap notes, though some doctors describe them as being in "remission." While the patients have shown no signs of HIV since stopping ART, at least some uncertainty remains as to whether the virus could eventually rebound in them.

The discovery, combined with her fibrocystic breasts -a common, noncancerous condition that can cause lumps and cysts-meant that she needed a more comprehensive diagnostic exam to investigate the symptoms. But her insurance covered just a basic screening mammogram, so she paid thousands of dollars out of pocket for the in-depth imaging, which includes an ultrasound.

For 22 years, I ran around with small bags of saline water on my chest a fact I shared with only a handful of close friends. I felt ashamed of having chosen artificial enhancement. I'm an outdoorsy mountain runner. At 56, I want to model ageing naturally, but having breast implants ran counter to that. Now they are gone, thanks to explant surgery implant removal without replacement.

Low back pain is the most common and debilitating of all pain complaints. Heavy lifting can cause it, but so can sitting at a desk all day, especially if you have bad posture and poor back support. Think hunching over a laptop at your dining table. Most times, an acute injury causing lower back pain will get better on its own in a matter of weeks. But it also can become a more lasting problem, especially as you age. Now some new science suggests one reason for this could be that we've been approaching the inflammation that comes with back pain all wrong.

It started out small, like little coarse black chin hairs popping up everywhere, as though I were one of the three little pigs. Now, it's an incredibly irritable itch down in the deep recesses of my ear. My ears have always been a little extra waxy, but the itching is new, and I honestly didn't think much of it until a recent episode of the podcast Good Hang.

To make their discovery, researchers examined donated eye tissue from more than 100 people who had died with Alzheimer's, mild cognitive impairment or no signs of dementia. They were looking specifically for C. pneumoniae, because previous research has already linked it to Alzheimer's. The bacteria has also been detected in brain tissue from patients who died with the condition, sometimes found close to the sticky amyloid plaques and tangles believed to drive memory loss and confusion.

For decades, the gold standard for the coma-induction phase of euthanasia was thiopental. It was swift, reliable, and highly concentrated and rapidly induced a deep coma. In 2011, however, the European Union banned the export of drugs used for capital punishment, including thiopental. In the wake of the ban, manufacturers withdrew or tightly controlled supplies to avoid association with executions, making the drug increasingly difficult to obtain. "Thiopental is very difficult to get now," Horikx said.

'Stem cell-based' treatments and just the latest aesthetic treatment marketed to those seeking to maintain or obtain youthful skin, but what exactly is involved and what's the evidence that they work It's hard to keep track of the number of scientifically based beauty treatments on offer these days. Most are aimed at middle-aged females with disposable incomes, who are willing to splash large amounts of money on their skin to counter the effects of time.

Remember when you first noticed your parents' hands trembling slightly as they poured coffee or signed a check? I started paying attention after my mother mentioned it during one of our Sunday calls, brushing it off as "just getting older." But that conversation sent me down a research rabbit hole that revealed something fascinating: those tiny tremors that appear after 60 aren't always what they seem, and knowing the difference between normal aging and something more serious could change everything.

Adults who sleep fewer than seven hours each night are more likely to experience health problems.

I caught myself doing it again last week-meticulously applying sunscreen to my face while completely ignoring my neck. It wasn't until I saw a photo from my friend's wedding that I noticed the difference. My face looked smooth and even-toned, but my neck? Let's just say it was telling a different story. The fine lines and slight sagging made me realize I'd been treating my neck like it was somehow immune to aging. Turns out, I've had it backward this whole time.

At 48, the Los Angeles-based celebrity OB-GYN of clients like the Kardashians and Rihanna went in for a routine mammogram. The doctor spotted and ordered a biopsy of a lesion of atypical cells in her left breast that could become cancerous over time. Aliabadi was told that everything was fine and to come back in six months.

The University of California Irvine's new healthcare campus has a long list of innovative features, from its combined inpatient-outpatient surgical suite to its outdoor chemotherapy infusion terrace to an entire floor dedicated to staff only. The one thing it doesn't have is a gas line.

While we are profoundly grateful to have Shea in our lives and love her immeasurably, we also recognize that we have a moral obligation to find her genetic parents, she wrote. Our joy over her birth is further complicated by the devastating reality that her genetic parents whom we do not yet know or possibly another family entirely, may have received our genetic embryo. We are heartbroken, devastated, and confused.

Quinton Aaron's family has confirmed that he "had a spinal stroke," only days after a viral GoFundMe Page claimed he was "fighting for his life" and had a severe blood infection. Aaron, 41, starred as NFL footballer Michael Oher in the big screen adaptation of Michael Lewis's popular book,The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, Oher's adoptive mother who helped lift him out of poverty.