Nancy Shute

Video games can be a haven from the world, and it's easy to imagine that they would appeal to children who struggle with social interaction.

Boys with autism spectrum disorders or with ADHD are both prone to problematic use of video games, according to a study.

The researchers asked the ...

The world has changed a lot since a divorced mother of two teamed up with a St. Louis gynecologist to study the physiology of sex.

Masters and Johnson's first book, Human Sexual Response, made Virginia Johnson and William Masters household names in the 1960s. More than any other scientists before ...

Menthol gives cough drops, lip balm and other drugstore remedies that cool minty taste and slight numbing quality. Now the Food and Drug Administration has taken a long-awaited step toward saying that in cigarettes, those same qualities do more harm than good.

Yesterday the FDA announced an advanced notice ...

Parents would like to think their teenage sons are spending the summer reviewing calculus. Unfortunately, at least a few of them may be manufacturing homemade blowguns, with unexpectedly painful results.

Doctors at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, were puzzled when a 15-year-old boy showed up in the emergency room ...

If you want people to slim down, why not reward them with gold? That's the tack being taken in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Alarmed at ballooning waistlines in a region where fast food is common and comfortable outdoor exercise is not, the local government is offering to give citizens a ...

West Nile virus looked like it was waning as a health threat, with the number of cases dropping each year. Then last summer, it roared back.

The number of people infected with the mosquito-borne illness suddenly spiked in 2012. And Dallas was hit hardest of all.

People showed up in ...

Retweeted by Mom? Teenagers might say they'd die of embarrassment. But teenagers who are connected with their parents via Twitter and other social media have better relationships with them, and fewer behavioral problems.

A study that asked teens if they used social media to communicate with their parents found that ...

Parents who think their children don't pay attention can take heart. They're doing their best to emulate your bad TV-watching habits.

Parents have been told repeatedly that setting rules and banning TVs in children's bedrooms will help limit TV time. But those much-researched and oft-touted methods don't seem to matter ...

The PSA test has been dissed a lot lately. The nation's preventive medicine task force, for one, says the test is so unreliable in figuring out who's at risk for deadly prostate cancer that most men shouldn't bother getting one.

But the test for prostate-specific antigen, imperfect though it ...

Homicide rates among teenagers and young adults have dropped to the lowest level in 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That's good news, but it still means about 4,800 young people under age 25 were murdered in 2010.

Teenagers and young adults remain more likely ...

Guys can really get hammered, can't they? I mean, totally trashed. Not me. I may have gotten a little buzzed at that birthday party, but that's it.

The words people use to describe their drinking behavior can say a lot about how they perceive drinking, a perception that may not ...

Public health efforts to reduce the number of children and teenagers killed by guns got a big boost in visibility after the tragic killing of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School last fall.

Each week about 50 children and teens are shot and killed in the United States, with ...

Disease detectives have traced the continuing outbreak of hepatitis A that has so far sickened 136 people in the U.S. to a shipment of pomegranate seeds from the Anatolian region of Turkey.

As a result, the Food and Drug Administration has ordered any new shipments from the company that ...

It's much better to prevent illness than to treat it: less time, less money, less suffering. But prevention is a surprisingly hard sell with doctors and the public. That's true even though preventable chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease are the most common causes of disability and premature death ...

Doctors have been putting in a lot of ear tubes. It's the most common outpatient surgery in children.

Despite how common the tubes are, it's been hard for parents to know if and when a child should get them. "Pediatricians are confused about it too," says Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, ...

Now we know what you're doing when you're staying up late. You're eating 553 calories.

That's the equivalent of a Big Mac, and also about one-quarter of the recommended daily caloric intake for an adult.

Our guess is that the people eating that big chunk of chow in the ...

Twenty percent of strokes hit people under age 65, and the cause of many of those strokes remains a mystery. Having had a concussion or other traumatic brain injury might make the risk of a stroke more likely, a study says.

Back in 2011, researchers in Taiwan had unearthed ...

Pretty much every medical organization has told men to back off on screening for prostate cancer, because it can lead to unneeded treatment, including surgery that can leave a man incontinent and impotent.

But it's hard to resist a robot.

Men who have been diagnosed with low-grade prostate cancer increasingly ...

Hundreds of overweight or obese people with diabetes have been able to do something very few Americans have done: lose a big chunk of weight and keep it off for 10 years.

So should it matter if that epic weight loss didn't reduce the risk of heart disease? Maybe not.

Children often get sinus infections after they've had a cold.

It can be hard for parents and doctors to tell when those infections need treatment with antibiotics, and when they should be left to get better on their own.

The nation's pediatricians are trying to make that call a bit ...