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Recently I met with Nancy, a 72-year-old woman with coronary artery disease, to review her latest cholesterol results. Despite taking a statin, following a healthy diet, and exercising regularly, her low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol remained above our target. “What else can I do?” she asked. “When I increase my statin dose I get terrible leg pains. But I don’t want to have another heart attack!”

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), is a condition that involves inflammation of the digestive tract. In recent years, treatment options for IBD have rapidly expanded. The goal of these newer treatments is to improve control of inflammation in the gut, which can greatly improve patients’ quality of life.

The transition from fall to winter means grayer skies, shorter days, and for some people, the return of seasonal affective disorder. With the apropos acronym of SAD, this disorder has symptoms similar to depression (such as feeling sad, listless, and sluggish) but occurs only during the late fall and early winter.

Hot flashes and sleep or mood changes are well-known, troublesome symptoms that may occur during perimenopause and menopause. Now, one survey suggests nearly 80% of midlife women use cannabis to ease certain symptoms, such as mood issues and trouble sleeping.

It seems like a long time since the pandemic began. And now, as so much of life looks like it did before the pandemic, it’s reasonable to wonder: is it over? It sure seems like it — even the president said so in September, and COVID precautions are barely seen in some locales.

One of the many forms mental illness may take is psychosis. People experiencing it may have hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing visions, or feeling sensations that are not real) or delusions (firmly fixed beliefs that are not based on reality). And often, a first experience of psychosis occurs in the teenage or young adult years.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common virus that has become even more common in recent years — and is causing lots of problems.

In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* server, researchers at Georgia State University, USA, generated short-term forecasts of new monkeypox cases using an ensemble and subepidemic model.

My wife likes to say it’d be helpful if everyone knew their "expiration date" — as in the date you die. You know, for planning purposes.

The basic tools we have for treating depression haven’t changed greatly in recent years. Medications and talk therapies are a mainstay. Lifestyle approaches, such as encouraging physical activity, sufficient sleep, and social connection, are often part of the package. If depression fails to lift, the next line of treatment for some may be a noninvasive form of brain stimulation called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that is helpful in certain cases and has very few side effects.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most common cause of cancer death among Americans. The gold-standard screening test, colonoscopy, is performed on roughly 15 million people in the US every year. In 2021, because of rising rates of CRC in younger people, the US Preventive Services Task Force lowered the recommended screening age from 50 to 45. For certain patients, including those with a family history of early-onset CRC or diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, screening may be started even earlier than age 45.

An older adult patient once told me, “There are good decades and bad decades.” I remember the shock at hearing this — the patient was referring to the relationship with his wife. For many of us, 10 years seems like a very long time to struggle. How do we find joy when experiencing difficulties — or how do we at least make our struggles bearable?

Ideally, the fix for dry eyes would be an easy one: if you added a little moisture to them, the problem would be solved. In reality, it’s not that simple.

In a recent study published in Viruses, researchers used whole genome sequencing to evaluate monkeypox virus samples from Washington and Ohio in the United States and identified 25 samples with open reading frame (ORF)-disrupting mutations.

You’ve just seen your doctor, and you’ve been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Does that mean you shouldn’t be driving?

In a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, researchers explored the genetic variability among the monkeypox virus genomes of Clade IIb lineage B.1 using a phylodynamic and genetic survey to confirm the epidemic cluster in the clade and understand the evolution of the virus.