Richard Harris

People who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking have milder cravings. The act of vaping provides pleasure, which may contribute to its success as a tobacco-quitting aid, researchers say.

A study found parachutes were no more effective than backpacks in preventing harm to people jumping from aircraft. The researchers' tongue-in-cheek experiment makes a deeper point about science.

Researchers have devised a large clinical study to quickly assess whether one doctor's apparently effective treatment for deadly sepsis is a fluke or worthy of widespread use.

Patients and doctors should have nuanced conversations about the benefits and risks of statins before deciding to start them. The drugs can reduce heart attack odds but also carry some side effects.

Life expectancy in the United States continues to decline, driven by increases in accidental deaths and drug overdoses. Suicide is on the rise as well.

Harvard University researchers probed the way ADHD is assessed by taking advantage of a quirk found in many U.S. school systems that means some kids are a year younger their classmates.

A full genome sequence costs about $1,000. But Nebula Genomics expects that companies and researchers would defray the cost in exchange for key medical information about the person involved.

Installment plans and refunds for treatments that don't work are two options getting more attention as ultra-expensive therapies become more common. The financial strains will only grow.

Two new studies suggest that minimally invasive surgery for early stage cervical cancer patients leads to death and recurring disease more often than standard surgery through a large incision.

Though widely prescribed in hospital intensive care units to treat hallucinations and other signs of delirium, Haldol and similar drugs are no better than a placebo for such patients, a study finds.

Sometimes discoveries derived from patients' medical data become the foundation of new profit-making companies. A fledgling industry wants to help patients get a cut of the cash.

People who suffer from prolonged delirium in the hospital are likely to develop long-term mental problems like dementia. Doctors have come up with techniques they say can reduce delirium in the ICU.

Up to half of all patients who survive emergency medical treatment in the intensive care unit have mental problems when they return home. Doctors studying the problem say it starts with delirium.

James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were cited for their work in harnessing the immune system to arrest the development of cancer.

James P. Allison, 70, and Tasuku Honjo, 76, won the prize for their discovery of cancer therapy that works by harnessing the body's own immune system.

Scientists affiliated with Harvard and MIT have been battling with colleagues at University of California, Berkeley over who deserves patents for a revolutionary technology used in medical research. On Monday, the east coast scientists won their case in a federal appeals court.

Microbe-eating-microbes are found in "almost every ecosystem on Earth," says a defense department scientist who hopes bacteria of this type might one day be deployed to fight human infections.

The U.S. has the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease cases in the industrialized world, say health trackers, with chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis reaching 2.3 million cases in 2017.

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen also says the multicenter study of life-threatening sepsis will at best produce confusing results. A Harvard doctor and designer of the research disagrees.

Many social sciences experiments couldn't be reproduced in a new study, thus calling into question their findings. The field of social science is pushing hard to improve its scientific rigor.