surgery

Nearly half of older adults who've considered elective surgery say they’re worried about COVID-19 exposure, according to the findings of a new AARP-sponsored poll.

Nearly two years after announcing she had gotten a preventive double mastectomy and encouraging women to get tested for the BRCA1 breast cancer gene, actress and director Angelina Jolie says she has had her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed to reduce her risk of ovarian cancer, the disease that…

My smile has stayed largely the same over the years — think dimples and skinny lips — but age and a bajillion cups of tea have undeniably stained and diminished the effect. Fortunately, my husband is a cosmetic dentist, and his care has improved my smile and brightened my teeth. (At breaking my…

By Jordan Rau, Senior Correspondent, Kaiser Health News

Here's a scary statistic: A surgeon in the U.S. leaves a foreign object, such as a sponge or towel, inside a patient's body after an operation 39 times a week.

By Becky Squires, a writer-editor for AARP Foundation ||

For men in their 60s who are diagnosed with early-state prostate cancer, surgery doesn't help them live significantly longer than those who wait and monitor the slow-growing disease, a landmark new study finds.

More Americans than ever are getting their knees replaced.

Underweight individuals have a 40 percent higher risk of dying in the first month after surgery than patients who are overweight, U.S. researchers reported in the Archives of Surgery. And the congressional panel charged with devising a plan to reduce the nation's deficit has failed and folded.

Doctors had high hopes for an operation designed to prevent strokes, but a $20 million federal study on the procedure was cut short when it became apparent that it didn't work. And a conservative-leaning federal appeals court yesterday ruled Barack Obama's health care law"”including the individual mandate"”is constitutional.