Nancy Shute

Count Los Angeles as the latest big city to say no to electronic cigarettes.

The City Council there voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban use of the devices, which release vaporized nicotine, in almost all public places, including bars, workplaces and beaches.

If the mayor signs the ordinance, L.A. ...

Cancer patients who get chemotherapy in the last months of their lives are more likely to die in the intensive care unit, rather than where they wish, a study finds.

And with more than half of all people with incurable cancer getting palliative chemotherapy in the months before they ...

College athletes astound us with their power and speed, but they can pay a price years later. Division I players are more likely to be disabled, depressed and in pain in middle age, a study finds. And they may end up worse off because they fail to make the switch ...

Strokes sounds like an old folks' problem, but they hit young people, too. And they don't all shake it off. One-third of people who had a stroke before age 50 are struggling with disability and loss of function nine years later.

Many of those people aren't able to live independently ...

Everybody's supposed to get screened for colon cancer starting at age 50, but many of us haven't gotten around to it. That's especially true in the Latino community, where about half of people are up to date on screening, compared to 66 percent of non-Latino whites.

The numbers get even ...

If Dr. Majella Doyle is your surgeon, it means that something very bad or very good has just happened to you.

Doyle is a liver transplant specialist. For years that meant she had her bag packed, ready to fly or drive to wherever an organ donor lay on life support. ...

The yearly pediatrician's visit can seem like the same old thing: height, weight, shots. But the rules for well child visits are changing, and the nation's pediatricians want to make sure that parents and doctors are up to speed on the changes.

Children should get a cholesterol test between the ...

You go in for a checkup. The doctor feels your throat. Hmm, she says, there's a lump in your thyroid gland. We better check that out.

And that might be the start of a painful, costly and unnecessary treatment for thyroid cancer, a study says.

The number of people diagnosed ...

Women with low-risk pregnancies should be allowed to spend more time in labor, to reduce the risk of having an unnecessary C-section, the nation's obstetricians say.

The new guidelines on reducing cesarean deliveries are aimed at first-time mothers, according to the American College of Obstetricians and the Society for Maternal-Fetal ...

Parents love it when their babies are good eaters, whether it's polishing off a bottle or happily grabbing bits of pasta. But researchers think babies who chow down with gusto might be setting themselves up for obesity later on.

By looking at pairs of twins, researchers were able to separate ...

We've got more snow here in Washington, D.C., than they have in Sochi, and it's colder. But still it's hard not to dream about being at the Winter Olympics, especially since reports from athletes and spectators say that the food in Sochi is beyond delicious.

There's khatchapuri, a pizza-like Georgian ...

About 1 in 10 Americans has chronic insomnia, and many aren't finding relief from pills.

A form of treatment called cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn't use drugs, works. But it can be hard to find. So proponents of the treatment are trying new ways to get the treatment to troubled ...

Mammograms don't reduce the number of women dying from breast cancer, according to a large and long-term Canadian study. It's the latest chunk of data to raise questions in an increasingly partisan debate about the use of mammograms to screen for cancer.

Improvements in breast cancer treatment since the study ...

The HPV vaccine was created to protect women against the virus that causes cervical cancer. But it also helps prevent genital warts, a common sexually transmitted disease caused by the same virus, a study finds.

Girls and women who got two doses of the HPV vaccine got almost as much ...

It's been a big week for distressing and important news about women and stroke.

Thursday saw the first-ever guidelines for prevention of stroke in women. They pointed out that women are more likely than men to have strokes. Young women are vulnerable because of pregnancy and birth control pills.

Women are at greater risk for strokes than men, and for the first time women and their doctors have evidence-based guidelines on how to reduce that risk.

"The take-home here is really about starting prevention earlier," says Dr. Cheryl Bushnell, an associate professor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center ...

Think about your fifth-birthday party. Maybe your mom carried the cake. What did her face look like? If you have a hard time imagining the way she looked then rather than how she looks now, you're not alone.

The brain edits memories relentlessly, updating the past with new information. Scientists ...

The question of how often women should get mammograms remains contested, with advisory panels and medical societies disagreeing on how early and how often they should be used to find breast cancer.

But those discussions rarely mention cost. And the financial implications are huge.

If women got screening mammograms every ...

More than a few parents have worried that the HPV vaccine might encourage girls to be more sexually active.

But girls say that's not so, even if they think, wrongly, that the HPV vaccine protects them against other sexually transmitted diseases.

Earlier studies have found that the vaccine for

Vodka is our enemy, the Russian proverb goes, so we'll utterly consume it. This embrace of the enemy has a lot to do with the country's abysmal life expectancy rates, with one quarter of Russian men dying before age 55. But when the drinkers start cutting back, death rates drop ...