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Simple Checklist May Spot Signs of Autism By Age 1

A simple checklist that parents fill out in the waiting room may help doctors someday screen for warning signs of autism as early as a baby's first birthday.

San Diego pediatricians tested the tool with more than 10,000 babies at their 1-year checkups, looking for such things as how the tots babble, gesture and interact with others.

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DNA Tests Link Southern Leprosy Cases to Armadillo

With some genetic sleuthing, scientists have fingered a likely culprit in the spread of leprosy in the southern United States: the nine-banded armadillo.

DNA tests show a match in the leprosy strain between some patients and these prehistoric-looking critters — a connection scientists had suspected but until now couldn't pin down.

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Study Shows Heart Attacks Are More Serious in The Morning

Heart attacks that occur in the morning are likely to be more serious than attacks at other times of the day, a specialist journal reported on Wednesday.

Spanish researchers looked at data from 811 patients who had been admitted to a Madrid clinic with a myocardial infarction between 2003 and 2009.

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Study Shows Aspirin Reduces Effect of Anti-Depressants

Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs taken for pain relief may reduce the effectiveness of anti-depressants such as Prozac, a U.S. study suggested on Monday.

As many as one in five people are affected by major depressive disorders but about one-third of them are resistant to anti-depressant drugs, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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France Hit by Measles Outbreak

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

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Studies Link Low IQ to Prenatal Pesticide Exposure

High levels of pesticide exposure in pregnant women have been linked to lower IQs in their children, according to three separate U.S studies released on Thursday.

Two studies were done in New York City and a third was in Salinas, a farming area of northern California. All spanned nearly a decade, tracking levels of pesticide in expectant mothers and testing nearly 1,000 children up to age nine.

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Study Shows High-Fat, Low-Carb Diet May Reverse Kidney Failure

Kidney failure is a main complication of diabetes, but a lab study on mice showed that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet could reverse that in eight weeks, U.S. researchers said Wednesday.

The extreme food plan is known as a ketogenic diet and is often used to treat children with drug-resistant epilepsy. It starves the body of carbs and sugars, thereby tricking the body into burning fat for fuel instead of glucose.

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Study Shows Too Much TV Puts Children's Hearts at Risk

Children who spend too much time watching television increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes in later life, an Australian study showed Wednesday.

In what was declared world-first research, the University of Sydney found that six- to seven-year-olds who spent the most time watching television had narrower arteries in the back of their eyes.

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Ovarian Cancer Starts Elsewhere

U.S. researchers have recreated the process by which ovarian cancer forms in the lab, providing solid evidence that the tumors start in the fallopian tubes, not the ovaries, a study said Monday.

The finding could provide clues on how to attack ovarian cancer, which often causes no early symptoms and by the time it is found has spread so much that the tumors are impossible to stop.

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Pregnant Mothers' Diet Linked to Child Obesity

An expectant mother's diet during pregnancy can alter her baby's DNA in the womb, increasing its risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in later life, an international study has found.

Researchers said the study provided the first scientific evidence linking pregnant women's diet to childhood obesity, with major implications for public health.

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