Ever since the drug warfarin was discovered to be a highly effective anti-clotting agent as well as a good rat poison in the early 1950s, it has been the frontline weapon in preventing stroke among those with atrial fibrillation. But its growing use has always raised the specter of dangerously hard-to-stanch bleeding if someone taking it is wounded or bleeds internally from a fall or a car accident.

Roughly six decades after its introduction, Kcentra has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It's a new product designed to quickly reverse the effects of warfarin. The prothrombin...

Fast food begets a fast-food culture that has seeped into pretty much everything going on in the world today, the chef Alice Waters told a crowd gathered at UCLA for a presentation about edible education.

Fast food, Waters said, affects our laws, rituals and “ways of doing things”; and it permeates business, journalism, architecture and how we treat one another.

Royce Hall was nearly full Thursday evening with, among others, school cafeteria workers, master gardeners, public health students and teachers and fans of Waters. But David Binkle, the Los Angeles schools food services...

In another major setback for efforts to develop a vaccine to boost immunity to the human immunodeficiency virus, known as HIV, a key clinical trial was ordered shut down this week after an independent panel of safety experts found that participants getting the vaccine appeared to be slightly more likely to contract the virus and no better at suppressing its replication than those who got a placebo.

Investigators involved in recruiting volunteers and running the trial at 21 sites across the country, including the AIDS Research Alliance of America in Los Angeles, were ordered to stop immunizing...

In the days when American physicians dispensed oracular commands and their judgments were rarely questioned, a doctor could take it upon himself with few ethical qualms to keep from a patient the bad news of a terminal diagnosis.

For better or worse, those days may be well behind us. But physicians have not ceased debating one of the stickiest and most universal ethical quandaries of medical practice: How, when and why does one inform a patient that he or she is dying? The latest evidence of that ongoing discussion was published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.

The latest question in...

Chinese health officials are warning that the death toll from the H7N9 bird flu is likely to rise in the weeks and months ahead.

In a report on the outbreak that began in China in February, doctors and researchers from from several public health agencies said they suspected that most of the 82 people with confirmed cases of bird flu contracted the H7N9 virus from healthy-looking animals.

“To date, the mortality rate is 21%, but since many of [sic] patients with confirmed H7N9 virus infection remain critically ill, we suspect that the mortality may increase,” they wrote in their...

A device that reveals counterfeit drugs in the hands of Food & Drug Administration agents is set to become the newest weapon in the worldwide effort to eradicate malaria, and may soon be used to detect useless look-alikes of drugs that combat cancer, heart disease and viral infections.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg on Wednesday unveiled an initiative aimed at putting simple handheld versions of the FDA device into the hands of public health field workers in Ghana to help root out counterfeit malaria drugs. In sub-Saharan Africa, 20% of the drugs used to fight malaria are outright...

That fresh, pine-scented mountain air that you happily breathe in the Sierra Nevada could be hazardous to your health.

Samples taken by federal scientists in Devils Postpile National Monument, southeast of Yosemite National Park, show that ozone levels occassionally exceed state air pollution standards.

“Even at remote eastern Sierra locations, ozone air pollution may be a problem for human and ecosystem health,” said Andrzej Bytnerowicz, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist and lead author of a study recently published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Researchers...

Spending adolescence in the “stroke belt” of the southeastern United States could make people more vulnerable to stroke later in life – even if they eventually move elsewhere, a study published Wednesday suggests.

What researchers call the “stroke belt” has been associated with higher rates of death from stroke than other parts of the country, but it hadn’t been known if living there during any particular stage of life had an effect.

Researchers led by Virginia Howard of the University of Alabama looked at 24,544 black and white people ages 45 and older who...

Pregnant women who took the anti-seizure drug valproate during pregnancy increased the odds that their baby would have autism, and were roughly twice as likely to give birth to a child who would go on to be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, according to a large study that captured 10 years of births in Denmark.

Valproate, often known by its commercial name Depakote, is widely prescribed in the treatment of epilepsy and a wide range of psychiatric conditions. It is one of a class of drugs that has been linked to a child's delayed cognitive development and to some congenital...

Diners confronted with the sweat equivalents of food offerings on a restaurant menu get a good, hard look at what they are in for -- and order a lower-calorie meal -- than do those who see actual calorie counts or no nutritional data at all, new research says.

At Texas Christian University, researchers recruited 300 young adults and offered them each a menu with much of the usual casual dining fare: hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, French fries, salads, desserts, sodas and water.

A third of the participants got a menu that had no calorie counts, and another third got a menu with the calorie...

Step away from the beer pong table! College binge drinking may leave you with more than just embarrassing memories and excruciating hangovers.

In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers found that four years of heavy drinking between the ages of 18 and 25 may be enough to permanently increase a person's risk of heart attack, stroke and atherosclerosis.

Researchers at the University of Illinois recruited 38 nonsmoking young adults and split them into two groups: alcohol abstainers and binge drinkers. To be considered a binge drinker,...