Health Report

With COVID there are more protective measures to take—and there's a historical parallel | The results of a trial of vitamin D supplementation find no evidence to support vitamin D supplements | Shingles can be a painful disease and those over 70 can have a free vaccination, but not the costly and most effective one.

The amount of money to spend on health care in the last year of someone's life is debatable. | The vital eligibility criterion for voluntary assisted dying in Australia is a problematic issue for doctors. | For a heart attack you want the best care possible—but where you live can affect limit that. Climate change is becoming more obvious—it now includes a noticeable mental health aspect.

Some immunologists are concerned that COVID-19 is not travelling as expected. An internationally respected immunologist had four doses of COVID vaccine but now recovering from heart failure after getting the virus.

There are still community questions about the value of getting a fourth vaccine dose—we asked a vaccine development expert to explain why you should.

Fitness and living longer are more than just how much you eat and how much you exercise?

In 2009 Australia launched a National Preventive Health Strategy with the aim of being the healthiest country in the world by 2020—where we're at with it now.

The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare has created a national clinical care standard for diagnosis and treatment.

Many people are told to take a vitamin D supplement, especially in winter when there's less sunshine, but you can have too much of it.

Australia has many stories from people who say they have long COVID but who are unable to access help | Updated versions of coronavirus vaccines targeting the Omicron variant have been announced, yet the virus still mutates | People with Type 1 diabetes need to monitor their blood glucose but automatic systems are being trialled to assist them | A study on the behaviour of teens undertaken during the pandemic identified some of the particular health risks for this group.

What an Australian Centre for Disease Control might aim to be; An Indigenous perspective and research to engage culture for protection against cardiovascular disease and stroke; Research on links between mental health and mortality concludes that both mental and physical health can be adversely impacted.

There may be a link between what you eat and your mental health—also, avoiding overtreatment for breast cancer; predicting your risk of osteoarthritis; and whether mammogram results should inform women about breast density.

The cancer risks that run through generations of families—and the growing frontier in medicine trying to change that.

The term 'time toxicity' expresses the idea that if treatment to extend a patient's life means lengthy periods in medical facilities, it may be time wasted; In Australia smoking has decreased generally, but tobacco use is higher than average in young people with mental health issues; The bad form of cholesterol is LDL — low-density lipoprotein, and high-density lipoprotein is the good form. An new study suggests there's a limit on how high HDL should be.