Five young men in sneakers and jeans troop into a waiting room at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., and drape themselves all over the chairs in classic collapsed-teenager mode, trailing backpacks, a CD player and a laptop loaded with computer games. It's midafternoon, and they are, of course, tired, but even so their presence adds a jangly, hormonal buzz to the bland, institutional setting. Fair-haired twins Corey and Skyler Mann, 16, and their burlier big ...

For much of the past decade, the Iranian government has tolerated what it considers a particularly depraved and un-Islamic vice: the keeping of pet dogs. During periodic crackdowns, police have confiscated dogs from their owners right off the street; and state media has lectured Iranians on the diseases spread by canines. The cleric Gholamreza Hassani, from the city of Urmia, has been satirized for his sermons railing against "short-legged" and "holdable" dogs. But as with the policing of ...

At Chapelizod, outside Dublin, complications of jaundice, dropsy and heart disease brought Death last week to a bearded, brilliant gentleman with a testy tongue, Timothy Michael Healy, first Governor General of the Irish Free State, in his 76th year. Three years ago failing health made him resign the Governor-Generalship. Fortnight ago his condition became critical, relatives were summoned. Tim Healy died in the night. Even 15 years ago if anyone had seriously suggested in the House of Commons that ...

How much longer will you be able to see advertisements in which a person blissfully runs through a field after taking some kind of antiallergy medication? Or those in which a down-and-out man is suddenly sunny after being prescribed an antidepressant? How much longer will you giggle at that commercial with the warning that you should call a doctor if a certain condition lasts more than four hours? These are questions that keep drug companies, as well ...

After more than a year of bitter political debate and seemingly inescapable congressional deadlock, President Obama sat down in the White House East Room on March 23 and signed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law with a stroke of his pen. And then another pen. And another. Obama used 22 pens to sign the landmark $938 billion health care bill. It would seem that either the President has an undiagnosed case of OCD ...

For seven months the blond, chubby-cheeked twins ate, slept, cried, had their diapers changed, just like babies everywhere. But they gazed at the world around them from an awkward and virtually immobilizing position. The two were joined at the back of the head, with their faces turned Janus-like in opposite directions. Sitting up or crawling was impossible. By the time they were brought to Johns Hopkins Children's Center in August, they weighed a total of 30 lbs. -- too heavy ...

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine. Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that ...

For the longest time, Sarah Palin was leery of Facebook. Some of the comments left on her page during the 2008 vice-presidential campaign were so withering and unpleasant that it took months of coaxing by her staff and her daughters Bristol and Willow to convince Palin that she should give it another try. So she waded back into the digital fray just after she resigned the Alaska governorship and as her aides were compiling a new press list. Her first Facebook post, in ...

Pregnancy rates among U.S. teenagers, which had been dropping since 1990, took an upturn in 2006, according to newly released data. The figures, obtained from government sources and abortion providers by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank, echo previous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that births among teens had risen. But the new Guttmacher report rounds out the picture: in 2006, there were 71.5 pregnancies for every 1,000 women under the age of 20. ...

That's what the latest analysis of national health data on adolescents shows. Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%. And the reason may not be the ubiquitous earphones that snake from nearly every teen's ears during most hours of the day. A team headed by Dr. Josef Shargorodsky, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women's ...