Vitamin D can increase likelihood that breast cancer will disappear with chemotherapy

For people with advanced heart failure, left ventricular assist devices, or LVADs, can be a literal lifesaver.

The activity of the human brain is known to be closely connected to other physiological signals, such as heart rate and breathing. A study by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and other institutes reveals that a global spatiotemporal pattern in the brain (i.e. a pattern in brain activity that repeats itself across the brain and over time) is a central component of these brain-body interactions.

On June 11, 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a slate of eight new members to serve on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on national vaccine policy.

SGLT2 inhibitors have become a major drug used to treat diabetes, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease. However, there have been questions as to whether it is safe to use these drugs in patients after a recent heart attack due to concerns about harming kidney function in potentially unstable patients.

Vaccinated patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who developed acute kidney injury had better outcomes than unvaccinated patients with the same condition, new research suggests. The study found vaccinated patients were less likely to stay on dialysis after discharge, and more likely to survive, than unvaccinated patients.

A newly published analysis reveals that individuals with severe depression who received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) were 34% less likely to die by suicide compared to those treated with standard alternatives such as anti-depressant medication.

Children exposed before birth to synthetic compounds called "forever chemicals" had higher blood pressure during their teenage years, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The study was also presented at the Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) Conference in Boston.

Earned sick leave—short-term, paid time off for employees who are sick or injured or must care for sick or injured family members—has been found to reduce the spread of infectious diseases in the workplace and increase employee access to preventive care.

There are more than 100,000 people on organ transplant lists in the U.S., some of whom will wait years to receive one—and some may not survive the wait. Even with a good match, there is a chance that a person's body will reject the organ. To shorten waiting periods and reduce the possibility of rejection, researchers in regenerative medicine are developing methods to use a patient's own cells to fabricate personalized hearts, kidneys, livers, and other organs on demand.

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science has developed a detachable acoustic lens that allows for easy adjustment of the focal length in ultrasonic inspection equipment. Much like swapping lenses on a DSLR camera to improve image quality, this technology enables users to optimize the resolution of ultrasonic imaging systems for specific inspection tasks. The innovation is expected to significantly enhance accuracy in both medical diagnostics and industrial safety inspections.

Although psychosomatic medicine is regarded as a branch of psychiatry in many countries, some of its diagnostic concepts are not fully encompassed by mainstream psychiatric diagnostic systems. When these two systems are integrated, the interrelationships among various diagnoses and their associations with psychopathologies remain to be elucidated.

Scientists say they have new experimental evidence of a novel role for bilirubin, a natural yellow pigment found in the body, in protecting humans from the worst effects of malaria and potentially other infectious diseases. The findings could advance the search for drugs that mimic the pigment bilirubin, or deliver it to the body to help protect people from severe forms of some infections.

The human body is naturally equipped with defenses to fight off viral infections. For a virus to successfully infect it, it must first overcome these defenses. To do so, viruses have evolved specialized tools—proteins known as "virulence factors"—that help them shut down or dodge the immune system and cause disease.

The architecture and processes underlying visual word recognition represent some of the most intricate systems in human cognition. The seemingly simple act of reading a word involves not only a complex interplay between cognitive layers but also relationships between the word's spelling, phonology, and meaning.

It is well known that both scarcity of resources and expectations of efficacy influence preferences and decisions in health care. But how do these two factors (scarcity and expectations) affect when both are combined? Why, for example, were specific groups of patients (mainly elderly and disabled) so obviously discriminated against during the COVID-19 pandemic, when medical resources were particularly scarce?

Both diagnostic and therapeutic use of the microbiota will become reality within the next 5–10 years. It emerges from an "informative" article published in Cell, written by doctors for doctors, to inform clinicians that a series of valuable diagnostic and therapeutic applications based on the microbiome could be just around the corner and bridge the communication gap between basic researchers and clinicians, which is slowing down their implementation.

Regulatory authorities issued precautionary recommendations following the ORAL Surveillance trial, which demonstrated an elevated risk of cancer with tofacitinib, compared to TNF inhibitors (TNFi).

Social determinants of health (SDH), such as socioeconomic status and educational background are factors that are increasingly recognized as critical contributors to health outcomes in chronic diseases. Understanding how certain factors impact different rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) is important, and new research into this for both systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and inflammatory arthritis was presented at the EULAR 2025 congress in Barcelona.