Immigrant women in Ontario are not screened for cervical cancer as often as native-born Canadians, with the lowest rates being among older, poorer South Asians, new research shows.

Stem cells are ideal tools to understand disease and develop new treatments; however, they can be difficult to obtain in necessary quantities. In particular, generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be an arduous task because reprogramming differentiated adult skin cells into iPS cells requires many steps and the efficiency is very low - researchers might end up with only a few iPS cells even if they started with a million skin cells.

If you're a woman and your mother had a stroke, you may have a risk of heart attack in addition to a higher risk of stroke, according to new research on family history and heart disease published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.

PerkinElmer, Inc., a global leader focused on the health and safety of people and the environment, today announced that its family cord blood banking business, ViaCord, has released its 200th umbilical cord blood stem cell unit for treatment purposes. The 200th unit will be used in a clinical trial intended to treat cerebral palsy with a re-infusion of a child's own umbilical cord stem cells.

Tonsillectomy is the most common major surgical procedure performed in children. Children who undergo the surgical removal of their tonsils (tonsillectomy), with or without the removal of their adenoids (adenoidectomy), are at increased risk for becoming overweight after surgery, according to new research published in the February 2011 issue of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery.