Health, Study | featured news

Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births, a large study concluded Thursday, offering strong evidence for how a bitterly contested Obama administration policy could benefit women’s health.

Men in a Danish study who worked out for 30 minutes a day lost more weight than those who worked out vigorously for a full hour each day.

There's no link between chronic fatigue syndrome and a mouse virus known as XMRV, says a study out today that researchers say eliminates a possibility raised by a study in 2009. Researchers tested the blood of 293 people with and without the debilitating condition and found no trace of the virus.

Kids with higher levels of the widely used substance BPA in their bodies are more likely to be obese, according to the first large-scale, nationally representative study to link an environmental chemical with obesity in children and teens.

Finally, there’s good news on the child obesity front. A new study published online today suggests that inexpensive, community-based obesity intervention programs can work very well for kids who struggle with weight issues.

Thanks to new research released this week by Stanford University, consumers now know that all of those sweet, red pieces of fruit – no matter how naturally or conventionally they were grown, and no matter how they are labeled – carry the exact same nutritional value. Forget: "Paper or plastic?" The question now: Will this revelation take a bite out of the $31 billion organic food industry?

The theory that people might dramatically increase their life spans by severely restricting their food intake has been around for decades. But that theory takes a big blow from a new study that finds monkeys put on such a strict diet -- getting 30% fewer calories than usual -- live no longer than monkeys allowed a normal diet, says USA Today's Science Fair.

The researchers didn't find the same IQ dip for people who became frequent users of pot after 18. Although experts said the new findings are not definitive, they do fit in with earlier signs that the drug is especially harmful to the developing brain.

Declining rates of circumcision among infants will translate into billions of dollars of unnecessary medical costs in the U.S. as these boys grow up and become sexually active men, researchers at Johns Hopkins University warned.

The CDC says there is only one good treatment left to ward off the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea. Lab studies are showing an increasing resistance to the type of drugs that doctors use to treat gonorrhea, called cephalosporins. That leaves only a few options, which are not as effective. “Cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea could potentially mean untreatable gonorrhea,” says Dr. Gail Bolan, director of the Division of STD Prevention at the CDC. “Untreatable gonorrhea is a real possibility.”