A new law has taken effect prohibiting Chinese from being committed to mental hospitals without their consent in an attempt to prevent "forced detentions", state-run media said Thursday.

China's first mental health law comes after right groups accused authorities of locking up hundreds of thousands of people in psychiatric hospitals each year, often as a form of punishment for dissidents.

Scientists said Wednesday they had found a brain region that controls physical ageing, and could target it to manipulate the lifespan of lab mice.

The findings may be a step towards finding the holy grail of slowing human ageing, but have yet to be tested in human subjects.

Ireland's government has published a long-awaited bill explaining the law on when life-saving abortions can be performed in a country that officially bans the practice.

The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill is dividing the government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny. Some Catholic conservatives within Kenny's party have vowed to reject the bill because it authorizes hospitals to perform abortions on suicidal women, so long as three doctors certify the suicide threat as credible.

The U.S. government on Tuesday lowered to 15 the age at which girls can buy the morning-after pill without a prescription and said the emergency contraception no longer has to be kept behind pharmacy counters.

The decision by the Food and Drug Administration is an attempt to find middle ground just days before a court-imposed deadline to lift all age restrictions on the drug.

The antiretroviral drug efavirenz is more effective at treating children infected with HIV than the more commonly used and cheaper nevirapine, according to a study out Tuesday.

The study is being billed as the first large-scale comparison of first-line treatments for HIV-positive children, and could have an impact on care in poor parts of the world, where most of them live.

Breast implants may delay cancer diagnosis in women, said a study Wednesday that urged a thorough probe into the potential health risks of this type of cosmetic surgery.

In a review of 12 earlier studies of breast cancer patients, a team of epidemiologists from Canada found that women with implants had a 26 percent higher risk of being diagnosed at a later stage of the disease.

Cancer research tends to involve small studies focused on a single therapy, often falling short of scientific standards seen in other medical investigations, said a study released Monday.

The trend may be driven by a desire to speed treatments to market, but raises questions about how well experimental cancer-fighting therapies will work in practice, said the findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Men who are obese in their early 20s are twice as likely as peers of average weight to die before reaching the age of 55, a study said Tuesday.

Writing in the journal BMJ Open, a team of researchers reported on a 33-year study of 6,500 Danish men who were 22 years old in 1955.

Children born outside the United States have a lower risk of asthma, skin and food allergies, and living in the United States for a decade may raise a person's allergy risk, said a study on Monday.

The research in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that certain environmental exposures could trigger allergies later in life, overcoming the protective effects of microbial exposure in childhood.

The deadly H7N9 bird flu strain claimed a new victim on Monday when a hospital patient died in China, state media reported, bringing the death toll from the recently identified virus to 24.

A patient surnamed Chen died in the eastern city of Shanghai after 12 days of medical treatment failed, Xinhua news agency said. China has recorded more than 120 cases of H7N9 infection so far.