Steve Graff

Sharp and significant increases in suicides followed select financial crisis events and austerity announcements in Greece, from the start of the country’s 2008 recession to steep spending cuts in 2012, Penn Medicine researchers report in a new study published online this week in the British  Medical Journal Open, along with colleagues from Greece and the United Kingdom.

Here’s another potential reason to live up in the mountains. Lung cancer rates in both smokers and non-smokers are lower in higher-elevation counties in the western part of the United States, suggesting that oxygen may promote the incidence of lung cancer, according to a new study co-authored by a student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nearly 70 percent of smokers who try to quit relapse within one week – daunting odds for people trying to kick the habit. Researchers have long theorized that some individuals may be genetically programmed to have an easier time than others, but with few clues about why, experts have been unable to guide smokers looking to quit toward a strategy – the nicotine patch versus prescription pills, for instance – with the best chance of success.

Adding radiation treatment to hormone therapy saves more lives among older men with locally advanced prostate therapy than hormone therapy alone, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this week from Penn Medicine researchers.

Many patients with type 2 diabetes in the United States may be discouraged from taking metformin—a proven, oral diabetes medicine—because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inappropriately labels the drug unsafe for some patients also suffering from kidney problems, researchers from Penn Medicine and Weill Cornel Medical College report this week in a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Two-thirds of women treated for early-stage breast cancer in the U.S. receive longer radiation therapy than necessary, according to a new study published in JAMA this week from Penn Medicineresearchers Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, and Justin E. Bekelman, MD.

People with mental illness are more likely to have been tested for HIV than those without mental illness, according to a new study from a team of researchers at Penn Medicine&nb

Quitting smoking sets off a series of changes in the brain that Penn Medicine researchers say may better identify smokers who will start smoking again—a prediction that goes above and beyond today’s clinical or behavioral tools for assessing relapse risk.

The bed bug may be just as dangerous as its sinister cousin, the triatomine, or “kissing” bug.

The introduction of antiretroviral drugs in Botswana over the last two decades has increased the life expectancies of people living with HIV—many of whom are women co-infected with the  human papillomavirus virus (HPV)—considerably: from 39 years to the low 60s.  As a result, this co-infected group of women is at a much higher risk of developing HPV-associated cervical cancer.