The charity Cancer Research UK said it was a “huge burden”. The figures, published in the Lancet Oncology, included the cost of drugs and health care as well as earnings lost…

Healthy adults do not need to take vitamin D supplements, suggests a study in The Lancet which found they had no beneficial effect on bone density, a sign of osteoporosis….

Children whose mothers are depressed during pregnancy have a small increased risk of depression in adulthood, according to a UK study. Medical treatment during pregnancy could lower the risk of…

The brain has a critical window for language development between the ages of two and four, brain scans suggest. Environmental influences have their biggest impact before the age of four,…

British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline is seeking regulatory approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine after trial data showed that it had cut the number of cases in African children. Experts…

Two people, one a police officer, have been killed by a bomb which went off near anti-polio campaigners in Pakistan, say police. The blast struck a van near a hospital…

Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology after discovering how cells precisely transport material. James Rothman and Randy Schekman, both from the US, and Thomas Sudhof,…

A service that digitally weaves together the DNA of prospective parents to check for potential disease in thousands of “virtual babies” is set to launch in the US by December….

The Irish health minister has published a plan to make the state “tobacco-free” by 2025. Dr James Reilly has defined a “tobacco-free Ireland” as a state where less than 5%…

Exercise can be as good a medicine as pills for people with conditions such as heart disease, a large study has found. The work in the BMJ looked at hundreds…