Nancy Shute

If you've got a life-threatening medical condition, your first call might not be to an economist. But Alvin Roth used a theory about matching markets to help connect kidney patients and donors.

Lots of people say they're having trouble with alcohol. Native Americans and young, college-educated white men are most apt to be at risk. And most people don't get any help cutting back.

In some counties in the South, almost 20 percent of adults have severe vision loss. And those communities are also likely to be among the nation's poorest. Lack of regular eye care is just one issue.

Black women are more likely to have heart disease with just a few metabolic risk factors, a study finds. That's not the case for white women. Being obese seems to affect black women more, too.

Women with dense breasts are more likely to get cancer and less likely to catch it early on a mammogram. But degree of density matters too, a study finds, as do other factors like family history.

It can be hard to decipher what a non-native speaker is saying. But that might not always be a bad thing when it comes to understanding or remembering, scientists say.

The infectious disease world is not short on surprises. Take the people in Montana and Idaho who looked like they had pneumonia. It turned out they had a fungal disease never before seen there.

Long hours in practice might account for the higher concussion risk in high school and college football, a study finds. Some schools are retooling practice to reduce the number of hits.

Weeks after being diagnosed with Ebola, a doctor came down with a dangerous eye infection. Ebola was lurking there. Other Ebola victims face the risk of blindness through these delayed infections.

Infections with C. difficile are a big problem for people in hospitals and nursing homes. An experimental treatment with spores from a harmless version of the bacterium prevented new infections.