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The modern social calendar is often at odds with our biological requirements. Whether it is a holiday season, a string of late-night weddings, or the occasional weekend party, our internal systems pay a heavy price for social jetlag. We often view the resulting exhaustion as a simple debt of hours, but as Dr Sneha S consultant internal medicine at Manipal Hospital, Kanakpura Road, Bengaluru, explains, the reality is far more disruptive. “When our schedules shift abruptly, our internal clocks become desynchronised, leading to sleep that is light, fragmented, and fundamentally unable to perform its restorative functions,” she shares. Repairing a shattered sleep schedule is not a matter of sheer willpower or ‘catching up’ on a Sunday morning. Instead, it requires a strategic realignment of th...

Mumbai doctors have performed a rare and clinically significant bilateral hand transplant. It was done using hands received through cadaveric donation, after the family of a 50-year-old woman consented to donate her organs following her death.  The transplant restored functional hand use to an 18-year-old male recipient. Along with her hands, the donor’s lungs, liver, and corneas were also donated, enabling multiple transplants across hospitals in Mumbai and Surat.  The recipient, 18-year-old Priyank Aghera, the son of a farmer from Rajkot in Gujarat, had lost both hands in a tragic farm accident in January 2024 while assisting his father during cotton harvesting. A branch became lodged in a tractor blade and, when the blades restarted, he sustained severe crush injuries that were beyond...

In a world-first discovery, scientists in Australia have found that the human heart can regrow muscle cells after a heart attack, raising hopes for future regenerative treatments for heart failure, and subsequently overall health. The study, published in Circulation Research, revealed that while parts of the heart remain scarred after a heart attack, new muscle cells are also produced, a phenomenon previously seen only in mice and now demonstrated in humans for the first time, Xinhua news agency reported. "Until now we`ve thought that, because heart cells die after a heart attack, those areas of the heart were irreparably damaged, leaving the heart less able to pump blood to the body`s organs," said Robert Hume, research fellow at the University of Sydney and first author of the study. "...