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Almost 50% of psychiatric patients get a change in diagnosis over a 10-year period--meaning they may end up taking a slew of unhelpful drugs until doctors finally decide what mental illness they have. But what if a simple blood test could help discern whether patients have schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder? Rules-Based Medicine , a company that specializes in research and development for drugs and diagnostics, thinks it can.

It’s been more than a decade since the human genome was published.

The sex hormones that bathe a fetus in the womb are some of the earliest and most potent determinates of gender differences in brain structure and social behavior. But other chemicals produced by the human body more subtly tweak the neural pathways underlying these distinctions. Endocannabinoids, natural compounds in the brain that excite the same receptors as marijuana, influence gender-specific behaviors, according to a study published in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Wanna get out of the hospital alive? Well, the nursing staff has a lot to do with it. Now a study finds that a patient’s risk of dying goes up along with the number of work shifts that a hospital is understaffed in nurses

By Marian Turner Attaching chemotherapy drugs to small particles called nanodiamonds can make the drugs more effective, according to a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine . Anticancer drugs tend to become ineffective because cancer cells quickly pump them out before they have had time to do their work.