Innovative techniques and the latest researcher in smoking cessation will be on the agenda at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in August. Researchers will examine how smokers respond to dramatically reducing nicotine levels in cigarettes, text messages that can help smokers curb cravings and how medication may be a key to helping women avoid lighting up when stressed.

Here’s more evidence why breakfast may be the most important meal of the day: Men who reported that they regularly skipped breakfast had a higher risk of a heart attack or fatal coronary heart disease in a study reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Residents of the South regardless of race, and blacks throughout the United States, have lower healthy life expectancy at age 65, according to a report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The risk of elevated blood pressure among children and adolescents rose 27 percent during a thirteen-year period, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension. Higher body mass, larger waistlines and eating excess sodium may be the reasons for the elevated blood pressure readings, researchers said.

A new study has found that working the night shift long-term may double a woman’s risk of breast cancer. The association was found in women who did night shift work for 30 or more years. The researcher team led by Kristan Aronson, a professor of public health sciences at the Queen's Cancer Research Institute at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, found no increased risk among women who worked that shift fewer than 30 years.

The number of prescription painkiller overdose deaths increased fivefold among women between 1999 and 2010, according to a Vital Signs report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While men are more likely to die of a prescription painkiller overdose, since 1999 the percentage increase in deaths was greater among women (400 percent in women compared to 265 percent in men).

Controlling your high blood pressure and high cholesterol may cut your risk for heart disease by half or more, yet fewer than one in three people are doing it, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

The American Heart Association (AHA) is backing a bill introduced in Congress this week by Representative Lois Capps (D-Calif.) that would fund CPR training in schools.