American and international doctors will discuss the safest ages to play tackle football at the Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport this week.

More than 100 medical experts from around the world, including leading U.S. doctors Stanley Herring and Robert Cantu, will take part Thursday and Friday.

The benefits of preemptive breast cancer screening outweigh the risks, a study said Tuesday, insisting the practice saves thousands of lives.

The new research adds to the debate about the dangers of over-diagnosis, which sees some women undergo invasive treatment for cancers that would never have made them ill or even been diagnosed were it not for the scans.

Scientists in Britain say they have developed a super-sensitive test using nano-particles to spot markers for cancer or the AIDS virus in human blood serum using the naked eye.

As it does not need sophisticated equipment, the test-tube technique should be cheap and simple, making it a a boon for disease detection in poor countries, the team wrote in Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday.

As the world struggles with a growing obesity epidemic, Slow Food gurus from the U.S. and Australia are urging international campaigners gathered in Italy to join a revolution in the way children eat.

"Australia has exactly the same problem as almost any other developed country: a very large obesity rate. Something must be done, globally," Melbourne chef Stephanie Alexander said at the world's largest food fair in Turin.

The jailed founder of a French breast implant company at the heart of a global health scare could be freed Monday after eight months in prison ahead of a much-awaited trial next April.

Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) founder Jean-Claude Mas, 73, was jailed at Marseille's Baumette prison for four months in March, after refusing to pay bail. He was charged in January with causing grievous bodily harm after the scandal erupted.

Learning how to play tennis is hard enough. Now try it when you can't see.

That's what students are doing at the California School for the Blind. They're learning a form of tennis adapted for the visually impaired — and expanding the boundaries of what the blind can do.

Two-thirds of Australia's adult population are overweight or obese, a key study found Monday, with rates continuing to climb despite a drop in smoking and drinking.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said people were continuing to pile on the kilos despite other findings indicating a switch to healthier habits.

As relations between Tokyo and Beijing appear increasingly in need of major surgery, officials in the far north of Japan are hoping the nascent industry of medical tourism can thrive unscathed.

They are quietly confident that a spat over disputed islands will not seriously impact the growing number of relatively wealthy Chinese visiting Japan for its high quality treatment, therefore keeping the lifeblood pumping in an industry that analysts say could one day be worth $7.0 billion a year.

Women can add nine years to their lives by quitting smoking before the age of 40 but still face a 20-percent higher death rate than those who never smoked, a study said Saturday.

Published in The Lancet, a survey of nearly 1.2 million women in Britain showed that smoking throughout adulthood chopped on average 11 years off lifespan.

The black mold creeping into the spines of hundreds of people who got tainted shots for back pain marks uncharted medical territory.

Never before has this particular fungus been found to cause meningitis. It's incredibly hard to diagnose, and to kill — requiring at least three months of a treatment that can cause hallucinations. There's no good way to predict survival, or when it's safe to stop treating, or exactly how to monitor those who fear the fungus may be festering silently in their bodies.