Karen Weintraub

If only Cindy Russo had a spare $200 two years ago, she might have avoided her current nightmare. Doctors might have caught her cancer sooner if she hadn't put off a mammogram, knowing it would lead to an ultrasound not fully covered by insurance. And they might have found it sooner if, when she did get around to scheduling an ultrasound, an overdue bill from the last one hadn't caused further delay. So as it was, Russo, 47, of Long Island, New York, went a few years between

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ‒ Sonia Vallabh watched helplessly as her 51-year-old mother rapidly descended into dementia and died. It didn't take long for Vallabh to realize she was destined for the same rare genetic fate. Vallabh and her husband did what anyone would want to do in their situation: They decided to fight. Armed with little more than incredible intellect and determination they set out to conquer her destiny. A dozen years later, they've taken a major step in that directio

Sandy Haas wants to pick the candidate she hopes will be the best president for her children and grandchildren. But when she thinks about casting a ballot this fall, what's also on her mind is how much smaller she is than her husband Roy. She barely tops 5 feet and weighs 100 pounds less than her 6-foot-2-inch-tall former-police officer husband, who has been severely disabled for more than a year. When she tries to help him transfer from the bed to his wheelchair, or into the

Nine years ago, Jimmy Carter held a news conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta to talk about his cancer diagnosis and treatment. Then age 91, Carter explained that a bad cold the previous May had led to a thorough physical, which by early August 2015 resulted in a diagnosis of melanoma, an extremely dangerous form of skin cancer. He had liver surgery earlier that month, and doctors identified four spots where the cancer had spread to his brain. If his diagnosis had come

Towana Looney (right) and her daughter visit New York City between medical appointments. Towana Looney lived for more than four months with a kidney from a pig instead of her own damaged ones. But in early April, her body ‒ which had tolerated the kidney longer than any human had ever survived with an animal organ ‒ suddenly rejected it. Doctors aren't yet sure why, but it happened after they reduced the medication Looney, from Gadsden, Alabama, was taking to tamp down her im

For three decades, professor Ken Kosik has been collaborating with researchers in the United States and Colombia to better understand the causes of Alzheimer's. An extended family in that South American country has a devastating genetic variant that triggers early-onset dementia. "They get Alzheimer's at age 45 like clockwork," said Kosik, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The scientists have now studied more than 5,000 relatives and

Within minutes of KJ Muldoon’s birth, doctors knew there was something very wrong. Five weeks premature, his little arms went rigid when lifted and shook oddly on the way back down. An attentive doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, checking for a host of possible causes, noticed that KJ’s ammonia level was off the charts. He was rushed across the street to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where doctors quickly offered a dire diagnosis. His body couldn’t clear ammonia

At least 1 in 5 Americans suffers from chronic pain and nearly 1 in 10 are disabled by it. Medications are either not enough, cause dangerous side effects or even making the pain worse.  To better understand pain in America, USA TODAY spoke with more than 50 experts – in pain control, psychology, complementary medicine, addiction and neuroscience – and people who live with pain every day.  That reporting resulted in America in Pain, a five part series exploring the problem, i