Midday naps are associated with reduced blood pressure levels and prescription of fewer antihypertensive medications, according to research presented at ESC Congress today by Dr Manolis Kallistratos, a cardiologist at Asklepieion Voula General Hospital in Athens, Greece.

Women living in poor areas in the UK are almost twice as likely to develop clinical anxiety as women in richer areas. However, whether men lived in poorer or richer areas made no difference to their levels of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). These are amongst the main findings of a major survey on how socio-economic factors affect mental health in the UK.

The study was part of the much larger EPIC program, which looked at the relationship between chronic diseases and the way people live their lives. The Cambridge group followed up the health of 11,422 women and 8,878 men resident in Norfolk, UK. Using detailed health and lifestyle questionnaires, they were able to unpick some of the factors which contributed to poor health over the 15-year period of the study.

In a way, cancer resembles a runaway car with a gas pedal stuck to the floor, hurling out of control. Most new targeted cancer therapies seek to fix the gas pedal itself, and thus thwart the aggressive behavior of the tumor. But for many types of cancers, the pedal simply cannot be repaired, so new alternatives are desperately needed. A team at Baylor College of Medicine has discovered a way to step on the brakes of some of the deadliest cancers.

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world's seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird's stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.

Europeans love to smoke but the good news is that the people who at least say they want to quit has risen in the last seven years, according to results from the latest EUROASPIRE surveys.

EUROASPIRE is a series of cross sectional surveys of the practice of preventive cardiology in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) and people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) across Europe. Four EUROASPIRE surveys have been conducted under the ESC's EORP initiative. EUROASPIRE III, conducted in 2006 to 2008, included for the first time people at high risk of developing CVD in general practice from 12 countries. The primary care arm of EUROASPIRE IV was carried out in 2014 to 2015 in 14 countries.

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said. They presented their findings Aug. 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.