Give your medicine a jolt. By using electrochemistry, future pharmaceuticals - including many of the top prescribed medications in the United States - soon may be easily scaled up to be manufactured in a more sustainable way. Currently, making pharmaceuticals involves creating complex organic molecules that require several chemical steps and intense energy.

In light of a huge increase in recent years in the number of meta-analyses published annually about prevention and treatment of heart disease as well as in other fields, the American Heart Association (AHA) published a scientific statement to provide recommendations for physicians and researchers who wish to do meta-analyses, journal editors who publish them, and health care professionals who wish to use them to make decisions about patient care.

Medical researchers at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, are advising caution when treating blood pressure in some older people - after results from a study contrasted with recent advice from the US to attempt to aggressively lower blood pressure in all adults to targets of 120mmHg. Researchers from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, have recently published the findings in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Internal Medicine).

A new study by University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center researchers shows that when therapy-sensitive cancer cells die, they release a "killer peptide" that can eliminate therapy-resistant cells. Tumor relapse is a common problem following cancer treatment, because primary tumor cells often contain therapy-resistance cancer cells that continue to proliferate after the therapy-sensitive cells have been eliminated.

Researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have been searching locally for plants that have potential for use to combat cancer. Now, three plants used for traditional medicine in Saudi Arabia are shown to be worthy of further investigation for anticancer properties. Cancer is a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded 8.8 million cancer-related deaths, but almost twice as many cases are diagnosed each year.

Most cancer-related deaths are the result of post-surgical metastatic recurrence. In metastasis, cells of primary tumors travel to other parts of the body, where they often proliferate into inoperable, ultimately fatal growths. A new Tel Aviv University study finds that a specific drug regimen administered prior to and after surgery significantly reduces the risk of post-surgical cancer recurrence.

A drug commonly used to treat diabetes may have disease-modifying potential to treat Parkinson's disease, a new UCL-led study suggests, paving the way for further research to define its efficacy and safety. The study, published in The Lancet and funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF), found that people with Parkinson's who injected themselves each week with exenatide for one year performed better in movement (motor) tests than those who injected a placebo.