Dr David Cox

Living in South Australia, the hottest and driest of Australia’s six states, and feeling the brunt of the region’s increasingly intense seasonal heat waves, local researchers wanted to know more about the impact of our warming world on human sleeping patterns.
In late January, the South Australian city of Adelaide endured its hottest night on record, with thermometers still measuring temperatures of 34.1 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit) just before 7 am. Such sweltering nighttime...

Larry Bordeaux, 65, has been on blood thinners since 2010, after he started developing deadly clots following an operation.

He credits the drugs with saving his life. If he stops taking them for several days — which he must sometimes do before certain medical procedures — clots develop quickly.
Still, Bordeaux, of Havelock, North Carolina, knows that being on blood thinners is a double-edged s...

A person’s genes play a far greater role in likely lifespan than previously thought, according to a major new study published Thursday in the journal Science.
Using data from human twin studies, an international team of researchers arrived at the conclusion that the genetic contribution to how long we’re likely to live is as high as 55%.
This new finding is strikingly higher than previous estimates, which have calculated the role of genetics in lifespan could range from 6% to 33%. It’s likely...

A growing body of research suggests that everything from the shape of your lungs to how you enunciate your Ts and Ks could make you a flu superspreader.
In January 2020, British businessman Steve Walsh began an international trip which would take him to Singapore and France before returning home to Brighton in the UK. Walsh's travels – which saw him contract Covid-19 and unwittingly infect about a dozen others he met on his journey – would go on to make headlines around the globe.
Stories lik...

The face of the new US dietary guidelines is an inverted pyramid filled with red meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and wholegrains. Unveiled earlier this month by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, many of the guidelines feature recommendations that nutrition experts have pushed for years – namely more whole foods and less sugar, refined carbohydrates or ultra-processed foods.
Yet one segment of the pyramid is deliberately provocative. For more than half a century, Americans have been advise...

Early detection can often save lives — but the disease doesn’t always cause obvious symptoms at first, which is why noticing small changes matters
For many of the 44,000 people in Ireland who are diagnosed with cancer every year, the outlook is more optimistic than ever. Survival rates for breast, bowel, prostate, testicular cancers and melanoma have improved significantly in recent years, thanks to national screening programmes such as BreastCheck, CervicalCheck, and BowelScreen, and the con...

A consultant urologist at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), Pippa Sangster has been an NHS doctor for more than 25 years, and is a specialist in all aspects of male sexual health, otherwise known as andrology.
ULCH has the largest andrological department in the UK, with seven consultants who run more than 18 clinics every week. Many of the cases are men with erectile dysfunction, and it’s particularly common for them to be very surprised that they have developed issues with their er...

In November 2025, a group of the world’s leading experts on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) came together to review the latest evidence for the overall impact of these foods on our health for leading medical journal The Lancet.

The findings were damning, concluding that UPFs have adverse effects across nearly every single organ system in the body. For the UK, a country where the average person consumes 56 per cent of their daily calories through UPFs, it was particularly bad news.

“Overall, poor...

Middle-aged males often dismiss health red flags until it’s too late, even though a trip to the GP can prevent risky symptoms from developing into serious problems

For the typical middle-aged man, a visit to the doctor is one of life’s great inconveniences, something that has long been a source of vexation to the country’s medical specialists.

“Sadly, a lot of patients come to see me because a friend drops dead,” says Robert Kelly, a consultant cardiologist and lifestyle medicine physician at...

Balancing on a single limb can be surprisingly challenging as we get older, but training yourself to do it for longer can make you stronger, boost your memory and keep your brain healthier.
Unless you're a flamingo, spending time delicately poised on one leg isn't something you probably invest a lot of time in. And depending on your age, you might find it surprisingly difficult.
Balancing on one leg generally doesn't take a lot of thought when we are young. Typically our ability to hold this ...

Know your numbers. That’s the simple piece of advice for anyone over 60, say researchers, who believe it’s crucial for staying healthier for longer; important guidance considering that, by 2035, 67 per cent of all over 65s in the UK are expected to be living with two or more chronic health conditions.
As Eric Verdin, President of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging puts it: “Health is a lifelong process, and when you reach 60 you’ve accumulated 40 years of either bad ageing or good agein...

Who doesn’t love cream cheese? It makes a celery stick more appealing, while a smoked salmon bagel just isn’t complete without a schmear.
But might it also be good for our health? A glut of recent studies has suggested that consuming cheeses of any kind might be a good idea in the context of healthy ageing. A recent study, for example, which tracked nearly 8,000 over 65s in Japan for more than three years, reported that those who ate cheese at least once a week, had a lower dementia risk, whi...

After many years of campaigning from patient groups, UK regulators have taken the step to place strengthened warning labels surrounding the risk of addiction, physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms on a range of common prescription drugs.
Benzodiazepines, a collective of drugs commonly prescribed for anxiety and sleeping problems, gabapentinoids such as pregabalin and gabapentin which are used to treat epilepsy and nerve pain, and Z-drugs which are prescribed for insomnia, are the medica...

Take a glance at the website or shelves of most major supermarkets and pharmacies and it’s clear that the self-testing market is booming