Hearing loss among older adults appears to be associated with faster cognitive decline than people without hearing loss, researchers found.

The study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday suggests that, on average, individuals with hearing loss would require 7.7 years to decline by the five points on a commonly accepted cognitive impairment scale, compared with 10.9 years for people with normal hearing.

The prevalence of dementia worldwide is expected to double in 20 years, so the efforts to understand what leads to cognitive decline are important, said the authors led by...

It may seem a little obvious, but one way to eat less is to take smaller bites.

Researchers from the Netherlands published a study Wednesday in the journal Plos One that looked at what happened when 53 people ate soup, taking various size sips – when they were focused and when they were distracted.

People who took small sips consumed about 30% less than those who took big sips and those who decided the size of their sips. And, those who took larger sips underestimated how much they ate.

“Consuming small bites rather than large bites involves more bites for consumption of the same...

Nearly 20% of patients who are discharged from hospitals return for acute care within 30 days, researchers reported Tuesday.

The team, led by Yale emergency medicine researcher Dr. Anita A. Vashi, scoured records collected between July 2008 and September 2009 that reported on 4,028,555 patients in California, Florida and Nebraska. They found that 17.9% of hospitalizations resulted in at least one hospital-based “acute care encounter” within 30 days, including readmissions for inpatient care and emergency department visits. Just over 35% of the trips back to the hospital took place...

Doctors have discovered a way for professional football players to see how much damage their brains have suffered through a bruising career before it’s too late, according to a new study.

UCLA researchers led a team of scientists that used a chemical marker called FDDNP to measure the degree of brain damage in five retired football players. That marker latches onto the tau proteins that build up in the brain when someone suffers from Alzheimer’s or other cognitive impairments like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Doctors can then perform a routine positron emission tomography...

Just in case you were wondering, even while you're lifting weights at the gym, your brain is still in charge. It's the three-pound organ between your ears -- not the depletion of ATP in your muscles or a servomechanism in your heart -- that tells you to take a break before doing one more rep. A new study reveals how the brain decides to issue a "stop work" order, and what factors it takes into account in giving the go-ahead for hard physical labor to resume.

The brain's bilateral posterior insula -- buried inside the organ a little above the ears -- registers and tracks the sensation of pain...

It's no secret that poor sleep gets in the way of all kinds of good things in life. 

People who drive on too little sleep -- and there are a lot of us -- are more likely to be in accidents that result in injuries than people who've had enough rest.  When we haven't slept well, we make lousy food choices and have trouble metabolizing our food. 

Staying up too late studying actually hurts high-schoolers' academic performance.  Among the younger set, slight decreases in sleep make kids more likely to act out.  A team of faux astronauts suffered a variety of sleep disturbances over the course of a...

Serving hot food on melamine tableware could increase your exposure to melamine, a study released Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine suggests.

 Melamine, an industrial chemical used in everyday items such as cooking utensils, plates, paperboard and industrial coatings can apparently seep into food when it's heated, the study said.

In two separate tests, researchers from Kaohsiung Medical University and Kaohsiung Municipal Hsiao-Kang Hospital in Taiwan served a dozen participants about two cups of hot noodle soup in melamine bowls and ceramic bowls. After participants ate out of the...

Worried that your genetic information could be revealed?  You should be, says Harvard geneticist George Church. 

But it doesn't have to keep you from participating in genetic studies.

DNA privacy has been a subject of concern this week, as a team of geneticists reported Thursday in the journal Science that it was able to figure out the names of people who had donated their DNA to research -- even though test subjects' identities were stripped from their genomic data.

Using information posted to genealogy websites and other publicly available Internet resources, the Whitehead Institute...

As waiting rooms in other parts of the U.S. have been clogged with sniffling, feverish hordes, California has seemed to avoid the worst of this year’s flu — so far.

But that may change, as officials in California said this week that flu activity in the state had reached “a widespread level,” and that the number of visits to doctors and hospitals for the treatment of flu-like illness was higher than usual for mid-January. 

(For more on the flu’s spread West, read this report from Los Angeles Times writer Anna Gorman.) 

There is still plenty people can do to prevent...

With the presidential inauguration days away, the Food and Drug Administration wants to assure us that the food to be eaten amidst all the pomp and circumstance won’t give anyone a nasty case of food poisoning.

“This week, at the request of the U.S. Secret Service and D.C. Department of Health, we’ve assembled a team of 35 FDA staff from across the U.S. including 18 experts in retail foods and field inspection,” FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said on the FDA blog.  

“Their mission? To work closely with the D.C. Department of Health, local county health...