Health & Beauty

One of the world’s first Omicron-specific variant vaccines is to be trialled in Devon and Cornwall, as the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc works with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The innovative study will see participants receive a first or second booster. In the South West, it is opening first at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, with plans to open at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, and the NIHR Patient Recruitment Centre: Exeter at Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust later in March.

Half of the volunteers will receive a...

CHARITY MENINGITIS NOW are urging young people to take up a potentially lifesaving vaccination to protect against the disease.

The latest Government figures on the uptake of the routine school-based MenACWY teenage vaccination show an increase from 58.3% of those eligible to receive it in 2019-20 to 76.5% last year.

Whilst the charity has welcomed the increase in take up the figure is still not back up to the pre-COVID levels of around 88% and it is concerned that many young people are leaving themselves at risk.

Meningitis Now chief executive, Dr Tom Nutt, said...

Two new research programmes are helping find new ways to support people with dementia who experience problems with sleep.

Across the world, around 55 million people have dementia. Up to 90 per cent of them experience problems sleeping.

Both too much and too little sleep are common, and can have significant impacts on health, leading to falls, or worsening existing symptoms and increasing death rates. Commonly used sleeping tablets can also be particularly harmful to people with dementia .

Two research programmes led by the University of Exeter are now seeking to...

An innovative clinical trial will investigate how drinking beetroot juice impacts brain function in older adults, via the bacteria that live in our mouths.

A donation from University of Exeter alumnus Tom Morgan (Business Economics 1999) is supporting the new research. It seeks to investigate how the hundreds of species of bacteria and other organisms that colonise our mouths – known as the oral microbiome - impact on processes key to the development of major diseases, including brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Beetroot juice is high in...