Dr David Cox

It may sound dramatic, but the rate at which your heart is beating plays a key role in how long you’re likely to live.
According to expert cardiologists and academic researchers, resting heart rate (also known as pulse rate) has become a simple, yet vitally important, biomarker in determining your state of heart and risk of disease.
So what exactly is resting heart rate, what’s normal, and what does it mean for your health?
What is a resting heart rate?
Put simply, doctors define a resting he...

After more than 10,000 years of use, the ancient cultures and indigenous communities who use plant medicines may hold lessons for today's psychedelic Renaissance.
In a cave nestled into the rocky vastness of the Andes in south-west Bolivia, amid rubble and llama dung, in 2008 anthropologists discovered a small leather bag which had once belonged to a shaman from the Tiwanaku civilization – a pre-Columbian empire in the Southern Andes – more than 1,000 years ago. Inside, they found a collectio...

The vegan diet is often described in the context of its benefits for weight loss and heart health. Cult documentaries such as Netflix’s The Game Changers have helped push a narrative that going plant-based is not only best for the planet, but better for our own wellbeing.
There are currently an estimated 2.5 million vegans in the UK, a figure which has nearly doubled in the past 12 months alone. This has helped to greatly enrich vegan food companies, with the UK market for meat substitutes wo...

Are you embarrassed or concerned about your breath? Most people who are accused of halitosis, the medical term for smelly breath, assume that their mouth hygiene is to blame.

But while oral conditions such as chronic gum disease, dehydration, poor saliva flow and dental problems are thought to drive an estimated 60-70 per cent of cases of bad breath, the remaining 30 per cent are actually thought to be linked in some way to the gut and wider digestive system.

Prof Martin Warren of the Quadram...

As a treatment is approved in the UK but deemed too expensive for NHS use, a married couple say it has bought them valuable time
Eight years ago, David Essam was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 72 – news which his wife, Cheryl, describes as ‘heartbreaking.’ At the time, in 2016, scientists and drug developers had been striving for decades to develop a medication which could slow down or reverse the degenerative brain condition, with little success.
“A doctor said to me at the...

Lecanemab, the disease-modifying drug which can slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, is set to be one of the most sought-after medications in the country after UK regulators greenlighted it earlier this week.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have approved the drug for people in the early stages of the disease. This decision follows the results of clinical trials which demonstrated that lecanemab could slow the rate of cognitive deterioration by 27 pe...

The news of a virus spreading rapidly, jumping between countries and continents seemingly at will, and the declaration of an international public health emergency, is likely to bring back uncomfortable memories of early 2020.
Some of the figures emerging from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the 13 other African countries now battling a spiralling outbreak of the so-called clade 1 strain of monkeypox, or mpox as the World Health Organisation is calling it, are alarming.
More than 17...

When Jeff Brown signed up for the Human Longevity programme at the age of 51, he was more intrigued by the prospect of learning about his own physiology, than concerned about his well being and risk of disease.
“I felt fantastic, more like a 30-year-old than a 51-year-old,” he remembers. “I was always an [amateur] athlete when I was younger, I still trained in the gym three or four times a week and I had a very active life. Never any issues with fatigue. I felt I was in very good shape, and I...

In May 2023, the World Health Organization released a statement declaring the end of mpox—formerly known as monkeypox—as a public health emergency. Just over a year later, the agency has been forced to backtrack, with a far more serious epidemic brewing across much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Statistics show that more than 15,000 mpox cases and 461 deaths have been reported on the African continent since January, spreading out of countries such as the Democratic R...

Take a brief scan on Amazon and you’ll find hundreds of products promising to stimulate the vagus nerve. From vibrating pendants to headphones, these rather spurious products promise to relieve stress and reduce anxiety. Social media influencers are also obsessed, talking endlessly about the benefits of stimulating the longest nerve in our body any which way you can. But while this might sound like the latest wellness industry sham, there is some science behind this apparent madness.
What is ...

There’s a new incentive for tackling your cholesterol levels – it could reduce your risk of dementia, based on new research that has been presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Philadelphia.
Growing evidence has shown excessive cholesterol, clogging up your arteries with fatty deposits, now officially recognised as one of 14 modifiable dementia risk factors.
It is also, of course, a risk factor for heart attack and stroke.
Julie Ward, senior cardiac nurse at the ...

As a doctor at a children’s hospital in Michigan, Dr Megan Pesch has found herself becoming all too familiar with the damage the infection cytomegalovirus (CMV) can wreak on newborn babies.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a little known but surprisingly common herpes virus. According to the NHS, around one in 200 children in England are born with a so-called congenital CMV infection which they contracted in their mother’s womb. Capable of invading the brain, around one in 1,000 children develop some...

Could autism traits really be reversed through a targeted dietary and supplementation regime, combined with behavioural and speech therapy?
That’s the claim being made in a provocative paper published by Dr Heather Tallman Ruhm, a doctor and physician, and a group of scientists from the University of Maryland.
Dr Tallman Ruhm, who runs a non-profit initiative called the Documenting Hope Project which investigates new strategies for helping autistic children, is a proponent of the idea that wh...