Health

Ever feel that the arrival of summer sun makes you feel a bit dopey? You wouldn’t be the only one. Soaring temperatures are known for their ability to slow our thought processes, making even everyday tasks seem like a baffling ordeal.

Before breakfast, you may already have checked your sleep score, resting heart rate or blood oxygen level. By bedtime, you might look at your step count, stress score or even an estimate of your biological age. For millions of people, keeping tabs on health and well-being has become almost as routine as checking the weather.

Measuring waist size may be one of the simplest and most effective ways to detect obesity-related health risks, according to a study by Rutgers Health researchers.

Most people in the UK already monitor their own health and well-being, and an overwhelming majority would be happy to do more if advised by the NHS, according to a new University of Manchester–led study.

Obesity is a global health concern that can contribute to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other metabolic disorders. While many health conditions can lead to obesity, an increasingly worrying cause is found on grocery shelves: high-fat foods. These foods are known to be hard to resist and can promote overeating.

Only 13 low- and middle-income countries offer smokers the full support needed to help them quit, leaving around 1.3 billion people without access to effective care, according to a new study.

Most individuals encounter their health primarily through an annual health screening, which provides a limited snapshot of their health status. A new study by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), challenges the way we think about health and longevity by seeking to understand what occurs between those assessments, focusing on function rather than static markers and tracking how physiology changes moment to moment.

Three minutes of sprinting can do something that 90 minutes of moderate exercise apparently cannot: dramatically reshape the molecular contents of the bloodstream. Rockefeller researchers comparing different intensities of exercise found that six sets of 30-second, all-out sprints altered nearly a quarter of the proteins measured immediately afterward. Moderate, continuous cycling for 90 minutes altered fewer than one-quarter of 1%. And while moderate treadmill running changed more proteins than cycling, it still altered far fewer than a quick sprint.

An international study has found that despite two decades of global tobacco control efforts, the message still is not getting through to enough smokers that smoking and secondhand smoke cause heart attacks and strokes.

Coffee is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages, and previous research has linked its consumption to a lower risk of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, the biological mechanisms behind these benefits remain unclear.

Taking the stairs could help you live longer—according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. The study, published today, suggests that climbing stairs significantly reduces the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.