Early-stage breast cancer could be most likely to kill women who had severe stress - a family death, divorce, financial crisis - in the year before diagnosis, a study says.

The research tracked 80 patients over seven years, starting within a year of their diagnosis. There were 20 recurrences and 15 deaths.

"It's a very small study to be making any sweeping conclusion. But it does pose questions that need to be followed up on," says Frances Visco, President of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. The women were diagnosed with stage 2 cancer that had not been detected beyond the lymph nodes.

Severe stress after their cancer diagnosis had no relation to recurrence or death, says psychiatrist Karen Weihs. But major troubles in the year before diagnosis nearly tripled the women's odds of having a recurrence or dying from the disease, Weihs says.

Breast cancer is so stressfull that it can swamp any other troubles, blurring the differences in life stress among the women after diagnosis. Terrible jolts in the year before diagnosis could affect the body's ability to fight off disease, Weihs says.

Millions of asthma sufferers could have their lives transformed by a new vaccine.

Research on a vaccine tested on asthma brought on by cat allergies showed a 50% reduction in reactions, with some sufferers left with only minor symptoms. Work is now under way to make the vaccine - known as a peptide vaccine - effective for people whose asthma is caused by allergies to dust mites and pollen. It is hoped the vaccine will be available within five years, and benefit up to three million people. Dr Douglas Robinson of Imperial College, London, told The Daily Mail : "In terms of controlling symptoms and preventing extreme allergic reactions it seems to be extremely effective. It may well be useful for a substantial number of allergic asthmatics." The treatment works by desensitising the immune system so that its reaction to a particular substance is reduced over time. Patients are given injections of minute doses of substances to which they are allergic, to stimulate a minor immune reaction from the body's natural defences.

Why does just glimpsing a stranger's yawn trigger yawning in others? One group of researchers lays the blame on a very human trait— empathy.

Dr Steven M Platek at Drexel University in Philadelphia and his colleagues found that people who are prone to so-called contagious yawning also tend to score highly on tests that measure levels of empathy, or fellow-feeling with others. "This finding suggests that some people are so intune with what others may be feeling that, in certain situations, they mimic that behaviour", Platek said.

These may also be the same people who say "ouch" when someone else stubs her toe or steps on a sharp object, he noted. Platek and his colleagues determined whether 65 undergraduate students were prone to contagious yawning by observing them while they watched a video.

The video contained images of people who were laughing, yawning, or lacked expression. More than 40 per cent of those who watched the videos yawned in response to an image of a person yawning, the authors note. Of those who exhibited contagious yawning, 60 per cent did so more than once.

A Japanese team has restored the sight of patients by cultivating artificial corneas from membranes taken from their mouths. Conventional grafts using corneas taken from donors can be rejected by the patients' immune system, but the new operation could remove such worries, Jiji Press News Agency said.

The team led by Dr Takahiro Nakamura at the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine performed operations on nine patients who lost their eyesight due to illness or injuries to the surface of the cornea.

Surgeons removed 2 mm square membranes from the patients’ mouths and cultivated them for three weeks on tissue from the amniotic sac, the membrane which surrounds embryos in the uterus, the agency said.

The patients received the graft of the membranes once they grew to 3 cm square. Eight of the nine patients recovered their vision after the operation.

People with serious gum disease are at higher risk of developing oral pre-cancerous lesions and tumours, according to dental researchers at the University of Buffalo.

The researchers found that people with serious periodontal disease were at double the risk of having a pre-cancerous lesion and at four times the risk of having an oral tumour of any kind than persons without serious gum disease.