Health Check

Many new mothers grapple with whether or not they should work while their children are still young. But if a new study is to be believed, it can actually benefit a woman’s health to collect a paycheck between changing diapers.

While brain activity during sleep is still largely a mystery, scientists have discovered that dreaming not only consolidates our memories and helps us learn, it may also soothe stressful reactions to bad experiences.

While you should eat, drink and be merry on Thanksgiving, doctors are warning not to overdo it. Excessive alcohol consumption can lead to what’s known as “holiday heart syndrome.” The term was coined back in the 1970s when researchers detected heart rhythm abnormalities in 24 study participants, none of whom had a history of heart disease — but all of whom had too much to drink over the holidays.

If you’re one of those women people tease because you’re never seen without a Starbucks cup in your hand, you may actually be bettering your health. All that coffee might be warding off cancer. Researchers at Harvard University who followed the medical records of more than 67,000 women over a 26-year period found that those who drank at least four cups of java per day had a 25 percent lower risk o

Data examined over a seven-year period revealed 48 million Americans — about one in five — aged 12 and older suffer from some form of hearing loss, far exceeding previous estimates of 21 to 29 million people.

It’s cold and flu season again. While that means many people will be getting flu shots, there’s one member of the family you may not realize needs one too: your dog. The H3N8 virus, identified in 2004 and commonly known as “dog flu,” has sickened thousands of dogs in 38 states. Currently there are outbreaks in the New York metropolitan area and near San Antonio, Texas, with other states like Penns

Is your kid hooked on video games? New research says simple brain-wiring may be to blame. Brain scans conducted on 154 teenagers who played video games at least nine hours per week found the structure and activity in the part of the brain associated with reward processing was larger than in those who played less often.

Members of Congress love pizza as much as any of us. So, when the United States Department of Agriculture threatened to take it off public school lunch menus, they did what many of us would have done in their position — they officially declared it a vegetable. Earlier this year, the USDA proposed new standards that would’ve limited both sodium and potatoes for school lunch lines — moves some conse

Researchers discovered that countries with the highest numbers of women using oral contraceptives also have the highest rates of death from prostate cancer. What does this mean? They think estrogen from the urine of women who take birth control pills could be to blame.

A new study of 8,000 kids published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health finds those who had high IQs were more likely to use certain illicit drugs as they aged. Smarter girls in particular may tend to experiment with marijuana, cocaine, and other illicit drugs later on.