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Helen Pearson explains how longitudinal studies are building up data banks that help researchers better understand disease and ageing

More than a million carers are in poverty, a new report suggests.

Northern Ireland has been named as the most trusting region in the UK with the highest proportion of people feeling they belonged to their neighbourhood. Around 73 per cent of people in the region reported that most people in their area can be trusted, compared with 56 per cent of people in London. Scotland and Wales …

Doctors and politicians say new health figures reflect a "public health time bomb", with a quarter of adults in Wales now obese.

It’s the visit that we all hope we’ll never experience. The police arrive at your home to tell you that a family member has been murdered. For Marian Partington, 20 years of not knowing what happened to her sister Lucy ended with one such visit on a Saturday morning in March 1994.

This month's unemployment figure was up for Scotland, though not by much. It's the sharp fall in the number of jobs that should be causing more concern, combined with a fall in hours worked.

According to charity Asthma UK, in Scotland 368,000 people are currently receiving treatment for the disease.

Vaughan Gething, who was previously the Deputy Health Minister, gives his views on the health service

Surrey County Council to spend £864,000 to tackle childhood obesity as quarter of 10 and 11-year-olds revealed to be too fat

All packets will have to be the same olive green colour, with the same font, size, case and text appearance making packs containing 10 cigarettes or less too small to contain the warnings

Privatising the probation services is privatisation gone mad. That is the only conclusion you can draw from a progress report by the National Audit Office on the Government’s plans, though it received little attention when recently published.   Yes, you read that correctly: probation services – whose main task is to rehabilitate convicted criminals so that that they do not re-offend – are being made subject to the rigours of the market.

Would you trust a banker?

Teenagers of married couples were more confident than those in single-parent families or youngsters whose parents lived together in a stable long-term relationship, research found.

Fife is one of the most obese areas in the UK, according to new data research. Almost a third of adults, 31%, are deemed to be grossly overweight in the Kingdom, according to the Scottish Health Survey which was last updated two months ago. The figure is not much more inspiring in Tayside, with the level …