Health

About 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to the first nationally representative survey on these groups, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday. Transgender and gender-questioning teenagers reported alarmingly higher rates of bullying …

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for the discovery of microRNA, a tiny class of RNA molecules that play a crucial role in determining how organisms mature and function — and how they sometimes malfunction. Working with curious, millimeter-size roundworms …

Two more people were diagnosed with bird flu this week, even as scientists in Missouri continued to investigate a possible cluster of infections in that state, federal health officials said at a news briefing on Friday. In California, two farmworkers who were exposed to infected dairy cattle at different farms …

As marijuana legalization spreads across the country, people are consuming more of the drug, more often and at ever-higher potencies. Most of the tens of millions of people using marijuana, for health benefits or for fun, don’t experience problems. But a growing number, mainly heavy users, have experienced addiction, psychosis …

Rwanda is in the midst of an outbreak of Marburg virus disease, a hemorrhagic fever with a high fatality rate that has killed 11 people there this year. The disease has been found in multiple African countries over the last several decades but never before in Rwanda, in east-central Africa. …

In 2016, Tracy Jennings received shocking news: A lifelong friend, a woman who had a farm with animals great and small, had died suddenly in an accident. A circle of grieving friends hastily arranged new homes for the woman’s beloved animals, including three older horses. But just two weeks after …

An older patient with dementia is in the hospital and has trouble swallowing. A speech pathologist recommends thickening the liquids the patient drinks with starch or gum and specifies how viscous her tea, water or juice should be. Should it resemble honey? Or apricot nectar? A doctor writes the order, …

Even before Georgia Outlaw met her new nephrologist, she had made her decision: Although her kidneys were failing, she didn’t want to begin dialysis. Ms. Outlaw, 77, a retired social worker and pastor in Williamston, N.C., knew many relatives and friends with advanced kidney disease. She watched them travel to …

Mary Peart, 67, a retired nurse in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., began taking gabapentin a year and a half ago to reduce the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia. The drug helps her climb stairs, walk her dog and take art lessons, she said. With it, “I have a life,” she said. “If …

The encounter happened years ago, but Beverly K. Brandt remembers it vividly. She was leaving her office at Arizona State University, where she taught design history, to run an errand for her ailing stepfather. He had moved into a retirement community nearby after his wife, Dr. Brandt’s mother, died of …