Eating a healthy diet as a child is linked to girls having their first menstrual period at an older age than those who consumed a less healthy diet, according to a new study published in Human Reproduction. The findings remained unaltered by the girls’ body mass index or height, both of which have been associated with the earlier onset of periods. The study has implications for health in later life as it is well known that women who started their periods at an early age may be at higher risk for diabetes, obesity, breast cancer and diseases of the heart and blood vessels.

A new telemedicine service for personalised breast cancer prevention has launched at preventcancer.co.uk. It allows women aged 30 to 75 across the UK to understand their risk of developing breast cancer and take early action years before NHS screening begins.

This study introduces a deep-learning system for rapid, automated detection and classification of tiny calcium deposits (microcalcifications) in mammograms to aid early breast cancer diagnosis. Leveraging a multi-center dataset of 4,810 biopsy-confirmed mammograms, our pipeline uses a Faster RCNN model with a feature-pyramid backbone to detect and classify microcalcifications—the pipeline requires no hand-tuned rules and provides both the overall cancer risk and highlighted lesion regions in seconds per image. On unseen test data, it achieved overall classification accuracy of 72% for discriminating between benign and malignant breasts and 78% sensitivity of malignant breast cancer prediction, marking a significant step toward AI-assisted, cost-effective breast-cancer screening that can run on standard radiology workstations.

Cancer scientists engineer a new type of antibody which could be used to boost the immune systems of patients fighting disease.