Attending a weekly religious service, regardless of your faith, may lower your risk of death by 20 percent compared to people who don't attend services, researchers are reporting.

"Religion is always a hot topic, but particularly now, when people are perhaps in fear because of the recession and the threat of terrorism, people are looking for stability, and religion is something we find people reach out to for that stability.

Although head trauma is a common injury seen in young children, U.S. doctors report on two recent cases of skull fracture with a surprising cause -- hair beads.

What's worse, because the beads were translucent, they weren't readily apparent on diagnostic CT scans, the physicians say.

U.S. researchers say they've developed a genetic model for predicting the risk of recurrence in patients with early stage colon cancer.

According to a team at the Duke Institute for Genome Science & Policy, the model also predicts colon cancer's sensitivity to chemotherapy and targeted therapy regimens.

For the first time since such statistics were released in 1998, the number of men and women in the United States getting and dying from cancer has dropped.

The drop in cancer rates is mostly due to fewer cases of lung, prostate and colorectal cancer among men, and fewer cases of breast and colorectal cancer among women. Also, death rates from lung cancer have leveled off among women since 2003, a new report found.

A new review of existing data confirms that some common inhalers don't boost the life spans of people with the lung disease known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

In fact, these medicines may even raise the risk of pneumonia in patients with COPD, the fourth biggest killer in the United States.