EurekAlert! News by Subject: Medicine & Health - News by Subject: Medicine & Health

Medicine & Health

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 14-Jan-2026 17:11 ET (14-Jan-2026 22:11 GMT/UTC)

Despite relaxed prescribing rules, opioid addiction treatment still hard to find at pharmacies

University of Southern California
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Even as policymakers have made it much easier to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid addiction, most pharmacies still aren’t carrying the treatment.

Journal: Health Affairs
Funder: Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts

Rice research team on quest to engineer computing systems from living cells

Rice University
Grant and Award Announcement

Rice University biosciences professor Matthew Bennett has received a $1.99 million grant from the National Science Foundation to lead research on engineered bacterial consortia that could form the basis of biological computing systems. The four-year project will also involve co-principal investigators Kirstin Matthews, Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Anastasios Kyrillidis from Rice along with Krešimir Josić from the University of Houston. The research team aims to develop platforms that integrate microbial sensing and communication with electronic networks, paving the way for computing systems constructed from living cells instead of traditional silicon-based hardware.

Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation

New charts for artery stiffness could flag heart risk long before symptoms

Rutgers University

An analysis of healthy youth defines healthy results from pulse wave velocity tests so doctors can see what results indicate problems.

Journal: Hypertension

Advances in ultrasound drive gains in prenatal heart defect detection, but regional gaps remain

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, the journal from The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, suggests that prenatal detection of congenital heart disease has improved in recent years largely due to advances in ultrasound screening practices. However, the study also found that detection rates still vary by region and type of defect, pointing to a need for continued improvements in prenatal care.

Journal: Annals of Thoracic Surgery

Synthetic cells could be a new way to deliver drugs in the body

University College London
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A synthetic cell that can be activated by a magnetic field to release a medicine whilst deep in the body has been created by chemists at UCL (University College London) and the University of Oxford.

Journal: Nature Chemistry
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Royal Society

Higher education provides limited protection from Alzheimer’s disease

Boston University School of Medicine
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Cognitive reserve (CR) is the brain's ability to maintain cognitive function despite age-related brain changes, damage or disease. It reflects an individual's capacity to cope with these changes by utilizing pre-existing cognitive strategies or developing compensatory mechanisms. The CR hypothesis presumes higher tolerance of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-related pathology without functional decline for those with high education yet more rapid decline after AD onset. However, evidence supporting the second part of the hypothesis has been largely confined to U.S.-based studies.

A new study by researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

has found that people with more years of education lost their memory and thinking abilities faster after being diagnosed with AD, compared to those with less education. These findings now provide evidence for the CR theory using real-life data from older adults from England, Germany and France.

Journal: Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease

Turning off TV is ticket to better mental health in middle age

Cambridge University Press

- For middle-aged people, reducing TV time by 60 minutes a day decreases likelihood of depression by 11 percent, and reducing TV time by 90 or 120 minutes decreases likelihood of depression by over 25 percent.

- These benefits apply to middle-aged people not the young or the elderly.

- The benefits do not apply to switching TV time for household chores.

Journal: European Psychiatry