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WEDNESDAY, April 22, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- As more women postpone childbirth, evolution may start to delay menopause or do away with it altogether, Canadian researchers predict. "Menopause is not a disease. It's a medical condition that arises simply because of human behavior," and can end with a change in behavior, said evolutionary biologist Rama Singh, co-author of a paper published April 19 in the journal BMC Women's Health. Singh is a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Previously, he's said women's fertility ends in midlife because men have long preferred younger mates. Over thousands of years, older women who were no longer having children accumulated infertility-related genetic mutations that led to menopause, he has contended. In the new paper,...

FRIDAY, April 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Like your sweets really sweet? Try enjoying them with a cup o' joe. Coffee makes sweet foods taste even sweeter, a new study shows. European researchers tested 156 volunteers' sense of taste and smell before and after they drank coffee. Their sensitivity to smell didn't change, but coffee did heighten their sense of taste. And this was true whether they drank caffeinated coffee or decaf, according to findings published recently in the journal Foods. "When people were tested after drinking coffee, they became more sensitive to sweetness, and less sensitive to bitterness," said lead author Dr. Alexander Fjældstad, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Aarhus University in Denmark. "It's probably some of the bitter substances in...

FRIDAY, April 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A new oral polio vaccine promises to help make polio a disease of the past, according to the results of a phase 1 clinical trial. Polio was almost eliminated worldwide -- except in vaccine-induced cases. In those cases, the weakened virus used in vaccines developed the ability to escape from immunized individuals and spread in places with low vaccination rates. The new designer vaccine is the first in 50 years. Its developers used genetics to redesign the vaccine to make certain that it won't infect recipients. Based on the early trial, the new vaccine appears not to cause humans to get the disease, according to the international team of researchers that is testing it. "To my knowledge, this is the first effort to rationally design a...

FRIDAY, April 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Contact lenses may someday do more than correct poor vision, with new, preliminary research in animals suggesting they could also monitor your diabetes and deliver medications. The new lenses were designed to check blood sugar levels and to deliver drugs to the eye, possibly for the eye disease related to diabetes called diabetic retinopathy. After trying them out on rabbits, scientists found the new lenses worked on both counts. It may sound like science fiction, but the researchers noted there is already a contact lens that's been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for measuring the pressure in the eye when worn overnight. Levels of eye pressure are important to know for people with the eye disease glaucoma. "Among...