NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Wider dissemination of portable defibrillators in Japan's schools, workplaces and other public venues has increased the number of people who survive cardiac arrest, researchers reported Wednesday. Experts say the findings, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, support efforts to make the devices, known as automated external defibrillators (AEDs), more widely available for laypeople ...

A small but significant portion of medical studies exclude gays from participating, sometimes without an apparent scientific reason, several cancer researchers say. In a letter in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, three scientists from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia cite several dozen studies requiring a participant to be "in a reciprocal relationship with a person of ...

Children inherit about 30 mutated genes from each parent, fewer than had been thought, but enough in at least one case to pass on inherited illnesses, according to a first detailed look at the blueprint for human life in a family. And a separate study of an individual genome located ...

Ivermectin, a pill prescribed for the skin disease known as scabies, also gets rid of hair lice that are resistant to conventional lotions, a study published on Thursday says. Lice affects over 100 million people worldwide each year, especially children of primary school age, according to the paper, appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine. The main treatments are ...