Asserting "we are at an exceptional moment" in the hunt for an Alzheimer'sdiseasetreatment, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins on Tuesday promised a raft of new research aimed at stopping and reversing the memory-robbing disorder by the year 2025. In unveiling a first-ever "national strategy" on Alzheimer's disease, Collins launched several new projects and clinical trials--including a whole-genome sequencing effort to identify genes that confer vulnerability to--or protection against-- Alzheimer's, and a trial to explore whether an inhaled form of insulin will slow...

Parkinson's disease is a disorder of the brain, but it may be possible to diagnose it at an early stage by examining the bowel, researchers said Tuesday. As new drugs to treatParkinson's are developed, they noted, earlier diagnosis should make it possible to intervene at an earlier stage when the disorder is more susceptible to drugs, thereby prolonging quality of life and lifespan.

Parkinson'sis a common neurological disorder that is associated with aging. It is characterized by tremors or shaking, and difficulties with walking, movement and coordination. There is no cure, and it ultimately...

The proportion of Americans with asthma increased from 7.3% in 2001 to 8.4% in 2010, marking the highest level ever, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. In 2010, an estimated 18.7 million adults and 7 million children had the disease -- one in every 12 Americans. Overall, about 29.1 million adults have been diagnosed with asthma at some point in their lives, but many of those were misdiagnosed or have apparently recovered, leading to the current figure of 18.7 million.

Asthma is a chronic airway disorder characterized by periods of irreversible airflow obstruction...

Smoking marijuana to relieve the symptoms of multiple sclerosis is a practice with a fair number of adherents, though it has not been subject to rigorous testing. A new study finds that puffing weed does have a rapid and measurable effect on MS patients' muscle spasticity and on their perception of pain. But subjects who smoked pot were not able to walk any faster and -- surprise! -- they felt higher than members of the control group who smoked marijuana stripped of THC.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, recruited 30 MS patients who suffered from...

A new study offers some promising evidence that acupuncture may improve quality of life for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Researchers in Japan recruited 62 patients with COPD, a progressive disease that makes it hard for patients to breathe. Symptoms include coughing, shortness of breath, wheezing and tightness in the chest, according to this primer from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

A 2005 study had found that acupuncture improved breathing for cancer patients, so the Japanese researchers wondered whether it would help patients with stable COPD too. They...

This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details.

A colonoscopy is a life-saving procedure, identifying polyps and early-stage tumors so they can be removed before they grow and spread. But many people refuse to undergo the procedure because they don't relish having an endoscope inserted into their body, and they don't like the preparation for the procedure, which requires drinking laxatives and spending large amounts of time in the lavatory the night before.

The first problem has been overcome in part by the advent of the virtual colonoscopy, in which a CT scan is used to...

Ever sleep-walked? I have. At the age of 12, I woke up to find myself in a bedroom where a visiting kid was staying over, my head gently resting on the foot of the bed. I got up, snuck back to my bedroom and kept it to myself. It was weird and a little embarrassing.

On other occasions as a child, I woke -- well, half-woke -- in the wee hours and stumbled about the house talking to myself, waking everybody up and just generally causing a ruckus, not fully conscious. It was all to do with a recurrent nightmare involving frighteningly huge numbers, and I am not sure whether to blame the “...

Emergency room visits resulting from children swallowing batteries or sticking them into other orifices doubled between 1990 and 2009, researchers said Monday. There were an estimated 5,525 ER visits caused by batteries in 2009, with the bulk of them occurring in children under the age of 5, according to a team from Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Most of them were caused by button batteries, the small, disc-like batteries found in many games and other electronic devices.

Swallowing a battery is often harmless, but the devices can cause serious problems if they become lodged...

Some of the longest-lasting relics of my kids’ infancies and toddlerhoods have been their pacifiers and their sippy cups.  Even now, with the boys 3 and 5 years old, we devote two drawers in our kitchen to a collection of jumbled lids, valves and cups (many featuring slowly fading portraits of Lightning McQueen.)  The binkies, which my younger son uses at bedtime and on long airplane trips, live in a banged-up plastic container perched on a high cabinet shelf. 

Someday we’ll be completely done with the stuff, but I’ve learned the hard way that imposing strict, newspaper-ish...

News flash: Eggs are really good for you. This message was brought to you by the American Egg Board.

That’s right – the folks who sell eggs paid for a study that comes to the shocking conclusion that eggs are an ideal breakfast food. They could have just asked people if they liked eating eggs for breakfast.

Instead, they recruited 20 volunteers who were overweight or obese and assigned them to a week of either egg breakfasts or ready-to-eat cereal breakfasts. After a two-week gap, the groups were switched. Both types of breakfasts had the same number of calories, but the egg...

Chances are, if you’re out and about, you’ll pass by an automated external defibrillator, or AED. 

The machines, which check the heart's rhythm and can deliver a shock to restore the heartbeat to normal, are scattered about public places so that bystanders can deliver a jump-start to people experiencing sudden cardiac arrest, keeping the heart going until the patient can make it to a medical facility for treatment. 

But two studies presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Chicago demonstrate a key limitation of the machines: For...