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The Paralympic Rowing Cox will compete a year after getting the all clear from cancer.

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British Medical Association (BMA) leaders have met to discuss the approach being taken to children and young people struggling with their gender identity.

A new study adds to evidence that the shots can reduce the chances of developing one of the most dreaded consequences of Covid.A summer wave of Covid is surging in many parts of the nation. Infections, emergency room visits and hospitalizations are all on the upswing.Recognizing that Covid is now a permanent respiratory threat, as are influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, federal officials have recommended that everyone 6 months and older receive the newest vaccine this fall.If last year is any indication, many Americans may pay no heed, opting instead to take their chances with another bout. Nearly everyone has layers of immunity acquired from prior illnesses and immunizations. For many, another go-round with Covid just means a few days of misery.But for some people with certain risk factors — age, pregnancy, chronic conditions or a compromised immune system — an infection may bring serious illness. “It’s very, very important that they get vaccinated,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System.In every age group, even a mild illness may trigger a lasting set of problems. Nearly 14 million Americans, or about 5.3 percent of adults, may now be living with long Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study published on Wednesday offers strong evidence that vaccination reduces the odds of getting long Covid.“It’s very clear that no demographic group is spared,” Dr. Al-Aly said. Does Covid still matter?Yes. This summer’s wave is a sign that Covid remains a problem. By nearly every measure, infections are on the rise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

In the first two years of the pandemic, the rate of long Covid was starkly lower among people who were vaccinated, researchers reported.A large new study provides some of the strongest evidence yet that vaccines reduce the risk of developing long Covid.Scientists looked at people in the United States infected during the first two years of the pandemic and found that the percentage of vaccinated people who developed long Covid was much lower than the percentage of unvaccinated people who did. Medical experts have previously said that vaccines can lower the risk of long Covid, largely because they help prevent severe illness during the infection period and people with severe infections are more likely to have long-term symptoms.But many individuals with mild infections also develop long Covid, and the study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that vaccination did not eliminate all risk of developing the condition, which continues to affect millions in the United States.“There was a residual risk of long Covid among vaccinated persons,” Dr. Clifford Rosen, a senior scientist at the MaineHealth Institute for Research, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying editorial. Because of that, Dr. Rosen added, new cases of long Covid “may continue unabated.”The study evaluated medical records of millions of patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system. It involved nearly 450,000 people who had Covid between March 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2022, and about 4.7 million people who were not infected during that time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

16 hours agoGetty ImagesA drug commonly prescribed to thin blood can be repurposed as a cheap antidote to cobra venom, a team of scientists based in Australia, Canada, Costa Rica and the UK has discovered.

A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.But what if other things are just as damaging?Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

17 minutes agoMRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences/Duke UniversityA drug has increased the lifespans of laboratory animals by nearly 25%, in a discovery scientists hope can slow human ageing too.

A small new study shows reactions in the brain in people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting.If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.Sara Moser/Washington University School of MedicineThe image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.