Thousands of people have been wrongly told they are in danger of developing life-threatening heart diseases because of flaws in the way doctors routinely calculate the risk, according to a study of more than a million people published today. Current estimates of the number at risk of cardiovascular diseases are 1.5 million too high, the report says, suggesting the anti-cholesterol drugs statins are massively and needlessly over-prescribed, inflating the £2bn annual bill to the NHS. Join discussion...

You probably learned your basic human anatomy sometime around grade school. Textbooks said your blood was red and a scraped knee on the playground confirmed it. We bleed red because of hemoglobin, an iron-containing protein that carries oxygen throughout the body. Hemoglobin is comprised of iron, which oxidizes as red like rust, causing our blood to be bright red when oxygen rich. So… Why Are My Blood Veins Blue? Join discussion...

Drinking more than one soda a day -- even if it's the sugar-free diet kind -- is associated with an increased incidence of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors linked to the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, a study finds. The link to diet soda found in the study was "striking" but not entirely a surprise, said Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, study senior author and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. There had been some hints of it in Join discussion...

A new machine that makes any blood type universal could lessen the risk of fatal transfusion mix-ups Join discussion...

People who seem to always be looking for a fight may find themselves at greater risk of heart disease, a new study suggests. Researchers found that adults whose spouses rated them high on the "antagonism" scale were more likely to have calcium build-up in their heart arteries, an indicator of artery-clogging plaque. The relationship was mainly apparent in older, rather than middle-aged, adults. A number of studies have found a link between hostile temperament and heart disease. These latest fi Join discussion...