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The use of crucial cancer-detecting PET machines is so restricted in Ontario that one university must send its medical residents to the United States and elsewhere for training. The low number of cancer patients eligible for PET screening means University of Western Ontario residents cannot obtain the experience they require. St. Joseph's Health Care in London scans as few as four patients a week, sometimes none. The rest of the time it experiments on laboratory-bred dogs and pigs.

When it comes to responding to pheromonelike chemical signals, lesbian women are much more like heterosexual men than their straight counterparts, according to a new study. The findings could lead to new insights into the neural basis of sexual preference and behavior, say the researchers. Pheromones are the ultimate aphrodisiacs. Many animals use the sex-specific scents to sniff out their partner of choice. The pheromones of female moths, for example, can attract a mate from several kilometers away. Whether the substances also play a role in human mating is less clear. Potential candidates include AND, a progesterone-derived molecule found in...

The first call Sheldon Goldberg got on his first day as president of the Alzheimer's Association was not from a patient or a doctor but from Michael D. Bromberg, chairman of the Capitol Health Group, a well-connected Washington lobbying firm. "He said he had a problem," Goldberg recalled, "and the problem was the position of the Alzheimer's Association." Bromberg represented an industry that stood to make millions if PET scans -- already used to help diagnose some cancers -- were to be reimbursed by Medicare as a test for Alzheimer's. Medicare officials had already said no, citing inadequate evidence that...

We have always suspected that man's best friend has a special ability to sense when something is wrong with us, but the first experiment to verify that scientifically has demonstrated that dogs are able to smell cancer. Experts say it is unlikely that pooches will become practical partners in cancer detection any time soon, but that the results of the study by English scientists are promising. They showed that when urine from bladder cancer patients was set out among samples from healthy people or those with other diseases, the dogs -- ordinary pets -- were able to identify the cancer...

Researchers at the University of Munich repeated the experiment 70 times: a healthy volunteer would receive a chemical injection, then be left alone to ride out an artificially induced panic attack. From the next room, doctors watched the volunteer's restlessness via video camera, measured the quickening pulse and rise in blood pressure, and used an intercom to question the person about his or her feelings of impending doom. The attacks typically lasted 5 to 10 minutes. Each volunteer was put through the same test a few days later, but this time most of them first received an experimental anti-anxiety drug....