82 clinical trial deaths reported over five-year period

The actual smoking rate among women is likely to be nearly triple the official count of 6.4 percent, due to women's underreporting, a health professor said in a report Monday. The smoking rate was measured at 40.7 percent for men and 6.4 percent for women in 2016. According to Jeong Geum-ji of Yonsei University's graduate school of public health, the difference between men and women in the inci...

While the link between smoking and a range of cancers is well known, the World Health Organization warned Thursday there was too little awareness of tobacco's impact on the human heart. On the occasion of World No Tobacco Day Thursday, the UN health agency hailed that smoking had declined significantly since year 2000, but warned that there were still far too many people indulging in the dangero...

Aging society not limited to humans, but pets as well

According to a report from the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, medical spending in South Korea jumped by an annual average of 6.8 percent from 2005 to 2015 The growth rate during the period outpaced the average of 2.1 percent expansion among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, marking the highest increase of the group. The spending gr...

Local coffee shops to enforce smoking ban with upcoming revision to smoking law in Korea

A group of South Korean scientists have developed a deep learning system based on artificial intelligence that can precisely predict interactions between drugs, the government said Tuesday. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the team led by Lee Sang-yup of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology developed the so-called deep drug-drug interactions technology, which can m...

In the age of social media, workout routines and diet plans are easily coupled with the desire to share these efforts with friends and followers online. At the last count, more than 1 million posts each under hashtags “dietgram” and “dietmeal” in Korean have been shared on Instagram, a social platform that is quickly expanding its user base here. The word “diet” in Korean implies a wide range o...

According to a survey from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of men who smoke came to 39.3 percent in 2017, down 1.3 percentage points from a year earlier. The survey was conducted with 228,381 adults here. The smoking rate has steadily fallen from 47.8 percent in 2008 to 40.3 percent in 2015, with exceptions in 2009 and 2016, the survey showed. The smoking...

Obese people are more susceptible to contracting diabetes than those who are not, a survey showed Friday. Obese people have a 156 percent greater chance of contracting diabetes than those who are not obese, according to the survey of 51,405 people carried out by a research team led by Professor Kwon Hyock-sang of Saint Mary's Hospital in Seoul. The review was carried out between 2002 and 2009. ...

Lookism hinders efforts to tackle obesity, focusing on appearances rather than health

A university research team has identified a protein produced by immune system that plays a key role in asthma attacks, opening up new possibilities for treatment research. The team led by professor Chung Doo-hyun at Department of Biomedical Sciences at Seoul National University found that XCL1 protein, produced by immune cells called natural killer T cells, engages with dendritic cells that cont...

Roughly seven out of 10 Koreans have received traditional Korean medical treatment, a study showed Tuesday. The Ministry of Health and Welfare put out the results of their study conducted on a total of 6,914 citizens. Results showed that 90.6 percent of those in their 60s or older have used Korean medicine, followed by those in their 50s (86.1 percent) and in their 40s (77.7 percent). Acupunct...

With the average temperature falling in January, the number of frostbite patients usually peaks drastically in that month, but the number has been declining in recent years. According to data from the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service, the number of patients suffering from frostbite reached 17,496 in 2014, 11,122 in 2015 and 9,806 in 2016. There were 1,297 patients in December 201...

The annual miscarriage rate for working women in Korea is 23 percent. Data also showed that the danger of failed pregnancy was 1.3 times higher for women with jobs as compared to those who do not work. According to a team of researchers led by Kim Eun-Ah from the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the miscarriage rate for working women was 3.9 percentage points higher than those wh...