Chronic Disease

This article was produced as a project for the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Fellowship.

Brain researchers have found a surprising commonality in how genes are expressed in the brain: There are just 32 different patterns. The finding opens up new horizons for treatments.

In the largely rural Central San Joaquin Valley, a reporter tracking efforts to expand access to health care in the wake of Obamacare finds that "many of the most effective outreach tools at play involve very little technology."

Will a diagnosis of “prediabetes” motivate meaningful lifestyle changes among patients, or simply lead patients and providers to use medications rather than refocus on aggressive lifestyle changes?

The Los Angeles Department of Health Services will start approving hepatitis C drugs for active IV drug users. Until now, the department had withheld approval for anyone who had not been drug-free for at least six months.

In California’s Central Valley and rural north, more than a dozen hospitals have closed since the early 2000s. The closures often limit care options and inflict economic misery — some communities never recover.

Physicians are often terrible at heeding their own advice. "Among a trio of lung specialists I once knew, only one was not a chain smoker himself," writes Dr. Monya De. How does this happen?

In a recent Reuters series, a team of reporters exposed what we still don't know about superbugs and highlighted a huge hole in that knowledge: the inaccuracy of death certificates.

A program that creates market incentives to encourage drug makers to target rare pediatric diseases seemed like good policy at first. But evidence of the program's effectiveness is missing.

"There exists a class of hyper-polluters — the worst-of-the-worst — that disproportionately expose communities of color and low income populations to chemical releases," researchers write in a 2016 paper.