Dr David Cox

Zombie cells are a hot topic in the scientific community, with groundbreaking research being conducted worldwide to find ways to halt their damaging and inflammatory effects

Until recently, few outside the specialised world of ageing science had ever heard of senescent cells, the so-called “zombie cells”. These cells are located in organs and tissues throughout our bodies and stop dividing as normal but instead linger, refusing to die and perpetuating chronic inflammation.
In the past d...

If you took an average UK family, and lined up children, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, you’d likely notice a distinct shift in height from one generation to the next, especially in the male line.
During the course of the 20th century, the average height in the UK rose by nearly 4in (10cm) on average, as living standards shifted, childhood starvation disappeared as a public health threat and common infectious diseases were eradicated.
Earlier this year, a new study found that m...

In the spring of 2022, Tim Story’s doctor told him that he likely had just months to live.
Story, a high school football coach in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been diagnosed with Stage 3 small bowel cancer two years earlier, at the age of 49, after mysterious pains in his side turned out to be a tumor in his small intestine. Surgery and several grueling rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy had failed to stop the cancer, which had spread to other organs.
“I’m not a crying man, but my wife...

Last year, Jessica Kent, a doctor working in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Toronto, found herself with an unusual patient. Confused, nauseous, and slumped on the floor of the emergency department, readings showed that his blood pressure had soared to levels far higher than would be expected for an otherwise healthy 21-year-old university student. When medical staff attempted to ask some simple questions, his responses were nonsensical.
But this patient wasn’t drunk...

The idea of simply being able to pop a daily tablet and watch the pounds magically melt away has been a long-held fantasy for anyone keen to shed some excess weight.
For decades, this has been exploited by the supplement industry who have generated billions in profits from selling products branded as aiding weight loss, even though the evidence for their benefit and safety is often distinctly dubious.
“There’s always been a lot of interest in anything that’ll help lose weight,” says Dr Pieter...

When the legendary cyclist Sir Chris Hoy revealed he had stage 4 prostate cancer last autumn, Keven Williams had an eerie sense of déjà vu.
Six years earlier, Williams, then aged 55, had received an almost copycat diagnosis – prostate cancer which had already spread out of the organ to his lymph nodes, spine, ribs, and other bones. “I was pretty devastated,” he recalls. “The first consultant I saw just told me to go put my affairs in order.”
Like Hoy, a six-time Olym...

The Global Story

While GLP-1 drugs can be game-changing for those who want to shed weight, there are always a certain number of ‘non-responders'. Some people lose 40% of their body weight on the drug, but then one in 10 people don’t lose any weight at all.

As a consultant endocrinologist at Galway University Hospital who runs a publicly funded obesity clinic, Francis Finucane has long been frustrated by the limited and sometimes intermittent access to semaglutide — the blockbuster drug better known by t...

In today’s age of smartwatches and Fitbits, it’s hard to go for more than a few hours without taking a sneaky peak at your daily step count. Whether it’s the endorphin rush from the celebratory ping to inform you that you’ve hit 10,000 steps, or the nagging sense of shame that comes with the realisation you’ve done less than 2,000 – as happens on some of my busier days glued to my desk – step counts have become part of our lives.
But they’re not just a gimmick. Research is increasingly showin...

After a lifetime on the frontiers of the fight against HIV, Linda-Gail Bekker could finally see the end of the epidemic in sight. For decades, HIV experts had dreamed of an elusive vaccine to block the ongoing chain of infections, which still sees more than 1 million people worldwide contract the virus annually. Bekker, a 62-year-old medical professor from the University of Cape Town, had helped identify a drug that could do just that.

Senescent cells power the body’s ageing process, and scientists are developing treatments to annihilate them
At St Jude children’s research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, an unusual clinical trial is under way that, if successful, could have wider ramifications for the vast field of age-related chronic diseases. At first glance, childhood cancer survivors may seem like an unusual population in which to study ageing, but as Greg Armstrong, principal investigator of St Jude’s Childhood Cancer ...

As an NHS oncologist who treats breast cancer patients, Dr Saif Ahmad and his colleagues have noticed a rather alarming trend in recent years. While breast cancer is still a disease which predominantly affects older women, with the highest incidence of cases in 65 to 69-year-olds according to Cancer Research UK (CRUK), Ahmad and his team have found themselves seeing increasing numbers of patients in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
“We’ve certainly felt like there are more younger women presenting wit...

A pioneering new treatment promises to tackle a wider range of cancers, with fewer side-effects than conventional radiotherapy. It also takes less than a second.
In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumours, eliminate cancers that have metastasised to distant organs, and generally...

In the summer of 2020, 15 recognized leaders in US public health gathered to author an article in The Lancet—one of the world’s most eminent medical journals—decrying Donald Trump’s intention to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization, a decision that was later reversed by President Biden before it took effect.
Nearly five years later, one of the opening salvoes of Trump’s second term has been to again initiate the process of withdrawing...

With vape shops popping up on high streets in even the most rural communities, an entire generation is steadily becoming hooked on e-cigarettes, with recent data from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) highlighting a worrying trend.
Vapes or e-cigarettes were originally devised as a safer alternative for chronic smokers, helping them to transition away from more harmful, conventional cigarettes. But it’s becoming apparent that their proliferation is also actively drawing in non-smokers, who are becomi...