Medicine

Medicine

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk's weight-loss pill on Monday, giving the Danish drugmaker a leg up in the race to market a potent oral medication for shedding pounds as it looks to regain lost ground from rival Eli Lilly. The pill is 25 milligrams of semaglutide, the same active ingredient in injectable Wegovy and Ozempic, and will be sold under the brand name Wegovy. Novo already sells an oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, Rybelsus.

U.S. regulators on Monday gave the green light to a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval handed drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge over rival Eli Lilly in the race to market an obesity pill. Lilly's oral drug, orforglipron, is still under review. Both pills are GLP-1 drugs that work like widely used injectables to mimic a natural hormone that controls appetite and feelings of fullness.

The big picture: The Danish drugmaker said participants in a 64-week clinical trial saw an average weight loss of about 17% if they stayed on the daily pill, reduced their calorie intake and increased exercise. That's compared to 3% average weight loss among trial participants who received a placebo. Between the lines: The active ingredient in oral Wegovy will be manufactured in North Carolina, Novo Nordisk said.

Our household of five has been hit hard by the virus and it has been gruelling My household (bar one) has the flu and I can attest to it being utterly horrendous.

64-year-old Pamela Mansfield sways her feet to the rhythm of George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care." Mansfield is still recovering much of her mobility after a recent neck surgery, but she finds a way to move to the music floating from a record player that was wheeled into her room. "Seems to be the worst part is the stiffness in my ankles and the no feeling in the hands," she says. "But music makes everything better."

Thirteen major hospitals will use a device that cleans patients' blood that has become corrupted by toxins as a result of them developing acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). ACLF is a severe and hard-to-treat form of liver disease linked to obesity, alcohol and hepatitis, in which patients suddenly deteriorate and have to be admitted to intensive care. Three out of four people affected are only diagnosed when it has already become life-threatening.

A popular myth is that you should try to suck out the venom, but that can actually make things worse, according to Jared Ross, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and professor at the University of Missouri. Ross explains that sucking doesn't create enough suction to remove venom and instead increases blood flow to the area, which can cause the venom to spread.

If President Donald Trump wanted Americans to take away one message about autism, it was this: Blame Tylenol. During his September press conference on the subject, Trump warned pregnant women more than a dozen times not to take the drug, even though two massive studies had found no meaningful association with the disorder in children. He also spread false rumors that "essentially no autism" can be found in Cuba or among the Amish.

Whatever mixture of genetics, temperament, trauma, and environment leads someone to use cannabis daily, such frequency almost inevitably results in addiction, that seemingly mysterious bending of the will and reward toward continued cannabis use despite adverse consequences. For example, money might be rewarding as a means to buy more cannabis, but no longer be very rewarding in and of itself. Or being high might become more desired than good grades or excelling at sports. The mind bends toward getting high as its preferred state.

In 2035, AIs are more than co-pilots in medicine, they have become the frontline for much primary care. Gone is the early morning scramble to get through to a harassed GP receptionist for help. Patients now contact their doctor's AI to explain their ailments. It quickly cross-checks the information against the patient's medical history and provides a pre-diagnosis, putting the human GP in a position to decide what to do next.

Maura Derrane has been on our screens for three decades and has spent the last 14 co-hosting the 'Today' show with Dáithí Ó Sé - she talks to Kirsty Blake Knox about the programme's success and why Christmas is hard after losing her sister to cancer For many experiencing grief and loss, Christmas can be a challenging time. And that's something broadcaster Maura Derrane knows well.

A pathologist studies an extremely thin slice of human tissue under a microscope, searching for visual signs that reveal whether cancer is present and, if so, what type and stage it has reached. To a trained specialist, examining a pink, swirling tissue sample dotted with purple cells is like grading a test without a name on it -- the slide contains vital information about the disease, but it offers no clues about who the patient is.

I was twenty-three and-as I was prone to doing in those years-hadn't eaten anything all day. When I arrived at the downtown hotel room where a friend was hosting a birthday party, the tangy chips beckoned. I crunched on them by the fistful. But by the time I'd emptied the bag, something felt terribly wrong. It wasn't just my cheeks puckering from the acerbity. My jaw stiffened. My ears rang.

A twice-weekly cocktail of three messenger RNAs can rejuvenate the weary immune systems of aged mice and boost responses to vaccination and cancer treatments, a study has found. The treatment provides a needed boost to immune cells called T cells, which coordinate immune responses and kill infected cells. As people age, their ability to produce T cells wanes, and the ones they have become less effective.

Erections result from relaxation of the arteries that carry blood into the penis. As those arteries relax, they expand, allowing extra blood to flow into the organ, which produces an erection hydraulically. Starting in the 1980s, researchers showed that ED was often a result of cardiovascular disease (CVD), arterial narrowing that reduces blood flow around the body. When CVD limits blood flow through the heart, the result is heart disease, in the brain, stroke, and in the penis, ED.

Michaela felt a sharp pain shoot from her hip while she bent over to water some plants in early May 2025. Then she fell over and couldn't get back up. Her husband called an ambulance and she spent the night in a hospital, where, at 57, she found out she had a mass on her spine. It was metastatic breast cancer.

U.S. health officials have expanded approval of a much-debated drug aimed at boosting female libido, saying the once-a-day pill can now be taken by postmenopausal women up to 65 years old. The announcement Monday from the Food and Drug Administration broadens the drug's use to older women who have gone through menopause. The pill, Addyi, was first approved 10 years ago for premenopausal women who report emotional stress due to low sex drive.

"I was sent to hospital straight away with a referral letter and was waiting for 16 hours," she says. "I had X-rays, bloods and all the usual checks done, and afterwards I was told that I was fine, that there was nothing to worry about, and that it was just viral. I went home happy, thinking that it would pass soon and that I was just being dramatic."

When Jennifer Goldsack woke up after emergency surgery last Christmas, she was waiting to hear she had a stress ulcer. Maybe appendicitis. But not this. The surgeon had news that made no sense to her, as a 42-year-old CEO and former athlete: late-stage cancer. Goldsack had always prided herself on being able to get anything done - Olympic training schedules, corporate roadmaps, back-to-back meetings. Cancer forced her into a new, uncertain kind of leadership: one built on vulnerability, delegation, and uncertainty.

A research project supported by FAPESP and carried out at Harvard University in the United States has identified a set of metabolites that move from the intestine to the liver and then on to the heart, which distributes them throughout the body. These circulating compounds appear to influence how metabolic pathways function within the liver and how sensitive the body is to insulin. The findings point to potential new strategies for treating obesity and type 2 diabetes.

"In this paper, instead of trying to pursue hypoxia to slow or postpone the disease as a therapy, we simply used it as a trick. We used it as a laboratory tool with which to discover genetic suppressors,"

"I'm still in Kaiser hospital. Day 2. Haven't pooped in 4-5 days and lost all ability to control my lower body since yesterday. I don't know if this is permanent or if it is growing. Legs have feeling and reflex but I have no control over them except the slightest toe wiggle. This is mostly from worsened since yesterday, but the leg numbing condition started over a month ago, Adams wrote in an X post."

My husband, Francisco - known as Pako - has always been professional, kind, and considerate to everyone. However, in the fall of 2020, I began to notice changes in his behavior, including skipping meals, struggling to find the right words in conversation, and difficulties managing his finances. I called him the human calculator because he had been in charge of our income and outgoings from before we got married in 2010, but all of a sudden, he would buy strange things.

The jury in Los Angeles superior court awarded $18m to Monica Kent and $22m to Deborah Schultz and her husband after finding that Johnson & Johnson knew for years its talc-based products were dangerous but failed to warn consumers. Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson's worldwide vice-president of litigation, said in a statement the company plans to immediately appeal this verdict and expect to prevail as we typically do with aberrant adverse verdicts.

A Food and Drug Administration panel of health experts convened Wednesday to discuss and promote the health benefits of testosterone treatments for men. FDA Commissioner Martin Makary told Morning Edition that low testosterone is believed to be associated with symptoms in roughly one-third of men who have it, though he said the evidence and data are not fully defined. Symptoms can include "reduction in mood and vitality," Makary said.