It is well known that exercise is beneficial for health, and this Olympic year has underscored the public health benefits of regular exercise. For instance, a recent study has demonstrated that Olympians live for around 2.8 years longer on average than the general population. However, we needn’t be Olympians to enjoy this longevity; those who… Read more »
Respiratory medicine is a main area of acute general medicine and for research funding agencies, which invest in large clinical trials and ground-breaking research into the pathogenesis and treatment of debilitating lung diseases. To keep up with the latest developments in the area, BMC Medicine recently attended the 3rd national conference on COPD (Nov 8th… Read more »
Guest blog post by Yongqun He, who is series editor for the newly launched “Vaccine and Drug Ontology in the Study of Mechanism and Effect” (VDOSME) thematic series. The VDOSME workshop provides a platform for discussing problems and solutions in the development and application of biomedical ontologies to representing and analyzing vaccines and drugs. In this… Read more »
From 2013, the World Allergy Organization’s official journal will be published by BioMed Central, transferring from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. World Allergy Organization Journal (WAO Journal) has been publishing since 2008 with a focus on articles with specific clinical relevance and practical measures that are critical for the practice of allergy anywhere in the world…. Read more »
In 2013 Genome Medicine will launch a new thematic series focusing on Microbes in health and disease. This series will highlight advances in genome-scale and other ‘omic approaches for studying infectious diseases, the role of the microbiome in health and disease, and how such information can be applied to medicine. The issue will be guest… Read more »
Although rare, pandemic flu is highly infectious and people have little or no immunity because they have not previously been exposed to the virus. Unlike seasonal flu, where only high-risk groups are at risk of serious complications, healthy people can be affected during a pandemic and the symptoms are often more severe. It is therefore… Read more »
Whether breast cancer screening saves lives or leads to harm has been the topic of intense debate in recent years, and this controversy has been highlighted in a collection of articles published recently in BMC Medicine. As outlined in our previous blog, in an opinion article, Donella Puliti and Marco Zappa advocate case-control and incidence-based… Read more »
BioMed Central has launched a new semantically-enriched search tool, Cases Database, which aims to enhance the discovery, filtering and aggregation of medical case reports from many journals. Open access to journal articles published under Creative Commons licenses which permit text mining enable the literature to be reused as a resource for scientific discovery. We are… Read more »
Cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins are the first line of treatment for hypercholesterolemia in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases but their side effects are associated with depression. Current research approaches aim to determine genetic variants, biomarkers and prediction models for improved management and individualized treatment of patients with cardiac conditions. These topics are highlighted in… Read more »
Anti-inflammatory drugs are taken for many conditions including asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and colitis. The most common class of these drugs, glucocorticoids, works very well, yet the side effects, such as muscle wasting and insulin resistance, can be so unpleasant that people stop taking them. For many years, it has been suggested that if a more… Read more »