Dementia costs more each year in the United States than cancer or heart disease, with annual costs ranging from $157 billion to $215 billion, according to a study released Wednesday.

Much of the costs come from long-term care giving, and the price tag is expected to more than double by 2040, said the study by the non-profit RAND Corporation in the April 4 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a double blow, bald men may be at higher risk of coronary heart disease, said a study Wednesday, but only if the hair is lost at the crown.

Men who bald from the front appear to carry no significant added risk for the clogged artery disease that can cause heart attacks, said a report in the online journal BMJ Open.

In a worrisome sign, a bird flu in China appears to have mutated so that it can spread to other animals, raising the potential for a bigger threat to people, scientists said Wednesday.

So far the flu has sickened nine people in China and killed three. It's not clear how they became infected, but there's no evidence that the virus is spreading easily among people.

Its raw materials are plants and it bases its products on texts dating back millennia, but don't dare call India's biggest herbal healthcare group a maker of "alternative medicine".

"It's high time people took us very seriously and did not view us as an alternative form of medicine," says Philipe Haydon, the India chief executive of the Himalaya group from his office in tech and healthcare hub Bangalore.

Studies in rats have shown that stimulating a sleepy brain region in cocaine addicts can diminish craving for the drug, a technique that should also work in humans, scientists said Wednesday.

A team in the United States trained rats to "self-administer"cocaine by pressing two levers.

A man in the Chinese province of Zhejiang has died of the H7N9 strain of bird flu, state media said Wednesday, bringing the total deaths attributed to the virus to three since the first human cases.

He was one of two H7N9 avian influenza infections reported in Zhejiang in eastern China, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing local authorities, bringing the country's total number of cases to nine.

Individuals and governments need to step up their efforts to battle high blood pressure, which is estimated to affect more than one in three adults aged over 25, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

Around a billion people around the globe suffer from the condition, also known as hypertension, the United Nations health agency said.

Italy on Tuesday announced plans to raise the legal limit for buying electronic cigarettes to 18 years from a previous 16, citing the high dose of nicotine inhaled when using the smokeless product.

The new rules will go into effect on April 23 and follow a study ordered by the health ministry which found that the level of nicotine consumed -- even through moderate use -- of so-called e-cigarettes exceeds the recommended level established by the European Food Safety Authority.

Suspicion quickly fell on a research assistant who had been working in a scientist's lab when three vials of a possible cancer-fighting compound disappeared recently from the professor's desk at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Security video showed Hua Jun Zhao, who studied in China and whose wife lives there, was the only person who entered the professor's office that day. Investigators later found research results from another professor on Zhao's computer.

A decrease in levels of the sleep hormone melatonin has been linked to an increased risk of adult onset diabetes, according to a study published Tuesday.

Research in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 370 women with diabetes were compared with 370 women of the same race and age without the disease.