If you are in pain a doctor might ask you how bad it is on a scale of one to ten. It is subjective and up until now there has been no objective way of measuring how much pain a person experiences. A team at Indiana University School of Medicine has now developed a blood test which can not only assess pain, but will be able to predict whose pain ...…

To date there have been no cases of schizophrenia in people who are cortically blind from birth or in the first few years of life. Cortical blindness is the total or partial loss of vision caused by damage to the primary visual cortex. This idea that being blind is somehow protective against developing the mental illness schizophrenia has been ...…

Epidemiologists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have been investigating whether phones in the bedroom might affect people’s health by keeping them awake, waking them up or affecting the quality of their sleep. Inspired by the BBC Loneliness Experiment, they turned to Radio Denmark to help gather their data. They had a fantastic respo ...…

Sadaf Farooqi, Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, has been a pioneer in the genetics of obesity for more than twenty years, discovering more than a hundred common genetic variants as well as twenty single genes which can make people put on weight from early childhood. Twin studies have shown that about 40% of t ...…

Health Check has been following the progress of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Surgical Safety checklist since 2006 and it’s now the 10th anniversary of the first big evaluation of it. The Surgical Checklist is a list that surgical staff go through right at the start of an operation to make sure they are operating on the right person, in t ...…