Health & Medicine Archives

Five books to celebrate British Science Week 2023

By OUP Science
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OUP celebrates their BMA 2022 Award winners

By Sandro Galea, Harold Thimbleby, and David Beaumont
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Infectious disease in the twentieth century

By Jonathan Sperber
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Science & Medicine /
Health & Medicine

What do we know about the effect of gut microbiome in diet and exercise on brain health?

By Noah Koblinsky, Krista Power, Laura Middleton, Guylaine Ferland, and Nicole Anderson

The gastrointestinal tract is one of the most densely populated microbial habitats on earth, containing more cells than those that make up the human body and 150 times the number of genes than exist within the human genome. An unhealthy gut environment is characterized by a reduction in the diversity of bacteria, leading to gut barrier permeability and the release of endotoxins into the blood stream that negatively impacts the brain.

A new OUP journal connecting health and infrastructure

By Evelyne de Leeuw and Patrick Harris

This week sees the launch of our new journal, Infrastructure and Health: Big Connections for Wellbeing, or OOIH for short. Humanity strives to and achieves progress through infrastructure. Infrastructure provides the hardware, tools, and services for a connected and functioning planet. Those connections are not just for humans but whole ecosystems. But the world faces challenges […]

Public Policy and Aging Report: Aging in Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities

Reframing an aging policy agenda for the AAPI community

By Oliver J. Kim

Over the past few years, we have had great discussions on societal inequalities in our nation’s infrastructure, and hopefully these in turn will result in policy changes. Aging, too, is having such a review as we think through how older people of color face disparities in key needs such as financial security, housing, and healthcare.

Four ways machine learning is set to revolutionize breast surgery

By Viraj Shah and Karen Soh

Machine learning has grown to become quite the buzzword in clinical research. Across recent years, we’ve seen an almost exponential increase in the number of successful machine learning trials conducted, with the technology now hailed as a torchbearer for healthcare’s artificial intelligence revolution.

Formerly incarcerated women of color face worse health in later life

By Kenzie Latham-Mintus, Monica Deck, and Elizabeth Nelson

Incarceration takes a heavy toll on one’s mental and physical health. A growing share of older adults are now aging with incarceration histories and poor health.

Becoming “properly empathic”: the importance of empathy in healthcare

By Richard P. McQuellon

There are three components to empathy and its expression: cognitive—the ability to grasp what the person thinks, to see things from their perspective; affective—the ability to discern another’s feelings; and importantly, the ability to act in such a way as to convey understanding to the other, sometimes referred to as compassionate empathy.

Equity in health care [podcast]

By Steven Filippi and Christine Scalora

There are many factors that affect our ability to be healthy, but we unfortunately do not all face the same barriers to accessing care. Such roadblocks can be related to cost, discrimination, location, sexual orientation, and gender identity, to name just a few.

Were you prepared for this pandemic?

By John Patcai

Did you have a stock of fitted, unexpired N95 masks in your closet and a six-month supply of non-perishable foods in the pantry? Pretty much nobody was fully prepared, including me. Were you relying on the healthcare system to keep supplies on hand? Should we expect better preparedness from ourselves and our society?

How can we build the resilience of our healthcare systems?

By Sonu Goel and A. K. Aggarwal

An effective and efficient health care system is a key to good health of citizens and plays a significant contribution to their country’s economy and overall development (WHO). Poor health systems hold back the progress on improving health in countries at all income levels, according to a joint report by the OECD, World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.

Aduhelm and the politics of drug approval in the United States

By Michael K. Gusmano

During the past several decades, the US Congress has authorized billions of dollars for Alzheimer’s disease research, but this has not yet led to a major breakthrough in the treatment. It is therefore understandable why there was a great deal of excitement about a new drug being developed by Biogen for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, aducanumab (Aduhelm).

We are what we breathe: environmental factors in biological ageing

By Yanfei Guo and Fan Wu

Volcanic eruptions, floods, and heatwaves have forced us to think seriously about whether the air we breathe will allow us to age healthily. To try to answer this question, we selected a unique sample of five middle-income countries on four continents and used NASA satellite remote sensing data to assess the associations between long-term exposure to ambient PM2.5 and frailty in older populations.

The role of DNA research in society [podcast]

By Steven Filippi and Stella Edison

For today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we’re commemorating National DNA Day in the United States with Amber Hartman Scholz and Dee Denver.

Celebrating women in STEM [timeline]

By Amelia Storck, Sarah Trostle, Emily Richardson, and Laura Godfrey

Throughout the month of March, Oxford University Press will be celebrating women in STM (science, technology, and medicine) with the objective of highlighting the outstanding contributions that women have made to these fields. Historically many of the contributions made by women have gone unsung or undervalued, and these fields have been male-dominated and inaccessible for women to enter.

Viruses: The Invisible Enemy, second edition

What are viruses for?

By Dorothy H. Crawford

What are viruses for? What use are they? These are questions that my frustrated grandson asked during the first lockdown in 2020, when he was deprived of friends, school and sports, all because of a virus.

Managing the power of music to foster safety and avoid harm

By Annie Heiderscheit and Kathleen M. Murphy

Pulitzer Prize recipient and American playwright Lynn Nottage shared in a recent interview, “What music can do is get to the emotion with incredible economy and efficiency.” This capacity that music holds to reach in and connect to the wide range of emotions we experience as human beings can be a wonderful asset as it accesses those feelings we want to revisit and are ready to express. This becomes challenging and potentially harmful when it relates to unexpressed or unresolved emotions and experiences.

Healing conversation in medical care

By Richard P. McQuellon

Every day thousands of people have conversations with healthcare providers (HCPs) about their medical condition. Such meetings can be profoundly comforting or extremely distressing to the patient and caregiver.