Answering Your Questions About Immunity
Your immune system is crucial in maintaining your health—so it's important to keep it in good order. But how do you do that? People talk about boosting immunity as if it were a task similar to building muscles or reducing blood cholesterol. Hundreds of ads for supplements and other products promise to boost immunity. But keeping your immune system in good shape is a complicated task. "How do I boost immunity?" is really the same question as "What can I do to stay well?"

New Advice on Pain Relief
Pain relievers can work wonders, allowing many people to carry on with their lives despite disabling arthritis, for instance, or recurrent headaches. But all pain relievers, prescription or over-the counter (OTC), have potential risks, especially when used long term for chronic pain. Recent studies have raised concerns—some new, some old—about these widely used drugs. In December the FDA proposed tougher warnings on labels, but it may take a year for these to appear on packages. Here are the concerns—and what to do about them.

Maintaining Mental Health in Time of Crisis
The attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in September, among many other results, have played havoc with our mental and emotional life. No one knows how many people sought crisis counseling in the aftermath—or needed it and did not seek it. The list of traumatized people was very long: rescue workers, those who had lost friends, colleagues, spouses, parents and other family members, and eyewitnesses to the disasters, in reality or on TV.

New Advice for a Healthy Heart
We reported in February on the growing popularity of cholesterol-lowering "statin" drugs, which many healthy people take to prevent heart disease. Among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, statins will surely be even more popular now that an important government-sponsored panel of heart disease experts has announced aggressive new recommendations for treating high blood cholesterol.

What You Should Know About Your Drinking Water
The U.S. and Canada, as well as most other industrialized nations, have a right to be proud of their drinking water. Safe public water is one of the triumphs of the last century.

The Wellness Guide to Preventive Care
A recent government study showed that more than half of all Americans do not receive many of the important preventive services they need—that is, immunizations, screening tests for early detection of disease, and education about healthy habits and injury prevention. Why not?

Managing Arthritis: Q & A's
The term "arthritis" covers several joint diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic inflammation of tissue surrounding the joints, which often begins early in life. Osteoarthritis (OA)—the subject of this article—is more common, and is a chronic degenerative joint disease that usually affects older people. Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, it's not characterized by inflammation, but is a breakdown of cartilage, the tissue that cushions the joints.

Diabetes Prevention: The Test
Diabetes is about to become a concern for millions of middle-aged Americans who never gave it much thought before. The American Diabetes Association, backed by federal health authorities, recently called for routine screening of all Americans starting at age 45, using a simple, inexpensive test, in order to detect more cases of Type 2 diabetes earlier.

Demystifying Stress
Stress is a word on everybody's lips. But how any two people define it can differ dramatically. Scientists increasingly look at stress as an important factor in the origin of illness.

Alcohol: Weighing the Benefits and Risks for You
It's hard to say exactly how many Americans die as a result of alcohol consumption. And it's even harder to figure out how many deaths from heart disease are prevented by "moderate" drinking. Moreover, such a weighing of the beneficial and adverse effects of alcohol doesn't take into consideration the big differences between the two groups involved. While most alcohol-related deaths occur in relatively young people, the deaths prevented by alcohol are generally in older age groups—those with high rates of cardiovascular disease.

Answering Nine of Your Cholesterol Questions
"Cholesterol" is a household word, but still an elusive concept for many people. And no wonder. Biochemistry is hardly simple, even for biochemists. Here are a few cholesterol review notes.

Hormone Therapy and Women's Hearts
Does hormone therapy:
      (a) protect women from heart attack?
      (b) increase their risk of heart attack?
      (c) make no difference, one way or the other?
For years the answer was thought to be (a). But recent research has left researchers—and the public—with a nagging feeling of uncertainty.

New Advice About Bone-Density Tests
Do all women in their fifties need a bone-density test? No, but a great many could benefit from knowing how their bones measure up. And at age 65 all women should be tested. This is a change in our recommendation from a few years ago, when we did not advise even women over 65 to be routinely tested.

The Ups and Downs of Hypertension
What's the most important number to know? Not your net worth, your age, or even the PIN number for your ATM card. It's your blood pressure. You should know this number and what it means. Nearly one-third of people with high blood pressure don't know they have it.

How to Lower Your Cancer Risk
The newspapers and other media are rife with reports that this or that food or chemical or environmental factor—everything from canaries to toasters—causes cancer. But most reports are given out of context, and it's easy to lose sight of the big picture and of the scientific progress that's been made in understanding and preventing cancer.

Preventing Heart Disease
Scientists now know far more about the major controllable risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD) than for most other diseases. A risk factor merely increases the probability that you will develop CAD; it doesn't guarantee that you will develop it, nor does its absence (or even the absence of all risk factors) guarantee that you won't have a heart attack.