Health Sciences

What can Twitter reveal about people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD?

The first view of the physical mechanism of how a blood clot contracts at the level of individual platelets is giving researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania a new look at a natural process that is part of blood clotting. A team led by John W.

Penn Medicine will conduct the Northeast’s first clinical trial of uterine transplants, to provide women with Uterine Factor Infertility (UFI) - an irreversible form of female infertility that affects as many as 5 percent of women worldwide and 50,000 women in the United States - with a new path to parenthood.

The low efficacy of last year’s influenza vaccine can be attributed to a mutation in the H3N2 strain of the virus, a new study reports.

Each of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from your father and one from your mother. Theoretically, when you create a gamete — a sperm or an egg —  each copy has a 50-50 shot at being passed on. But the reality isn’t so clearcut.

The Restoring Active Memory project run by the University of Pennsylvania has just released human intracranial brain recording and stimulation data for 102 new patients and a new spatial-navigation task developed by researchers at Columbia University.

Homeless people are uniquely vulnerable, at risk of a variety of health problems, including chronic illness, hunger, pain, and infections. While resources exist to provide homeless populations with health insurance and care, those resources don’t always make their way to the people who need them.

Cancer of the pancreas is a deadly disease, with a median survival time of less than six months. Only one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer survives five years past the diagnosis. The reason is the cancer’s insidiousness; tumor cells hide deep inside the body, betraying no symptoms until late in the disease, when the cancer has almost invariably spread to other organs.

Congenital heart valve defects appear in 2 percent of all live births, making them the most common type of birth defect. While some of these defects have been linked to specific genetic mutations, the majority have no clearly definable genetic cause, suggesting that epigenetic factors – changes in gene expression versus an alteration in the genetic code -- play an important role.

James C.