Stage IV cancer patients and their caregivers don't agree on the value of another year of life versus other end-of-life improvements.

Cancer is an expensive proposition emotionally and also financially. High-cost treatments may result in only moderate improvements in length or quality of life. Because such decisions are very difficult for patients to make, in some cases the decision is entirely deferred to a family caregiver.  

Alcoholism can not just ruin your life, it can shorten it - an average of 7.6 years shoter for those hospitalized compared to hospital patients without it, according to patient data from various general hospitals in Manchester, England.

The long-term observational study included a 12.5-year period. The researchers analyzed co-morbid physical illnesses of 23,371 hospital patients with alcohol dependence and compared them with those of a control group of 233,710 randomly selected patients without alcoholism. 

Type 2 diabetes is becoming increasingly widespread throughout the world and lifestyle habits, such as exercise and nutrition, are the biggest culprits.

In the 1942 short story "Runaround", author Isaac Asimov came up with Three Laws of Robotics and those fictional ethics have captivated engineers ever since.

Maintaining the spirit of Asimov, Dr. Eduardo Morales Manzanares of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) in Mexico has developed robots with artificial intelligence that don’t require specialized personnel to be controlled.

Instead, software allows the robot named Sabina to be able to learn with the guide of the user, either through a remote control or through voice commands or simply by showing the automaton tasks, as one would teach a toddler. That means anyone can program it without being an expert in robotics

Modern technology for healing distal femur fractures is as safe and effective as its more established alternative, but without the potential shortfall of the older approach.

A new study found that when done correctly, there are no significant differences between "locked plating" and "non-locked plating" in terms of healing rates, need for corrective surgery, or hardware failure.

The number of total hip replacements (THRs) nearly doubled among middle-aged patients between 2002-2011, primarily due to the expansion of the middle-aged population in the U.S., according to a new study presented today at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). Continued growth in utilization of hip replacement surgery in patients age 45 to 64, an increase in revision surgeries for this population as they age, and a nearly 30 percent decline in the number of surgeons who perform THR, could have significant implications for future health care costs, THR demand and access.