About 6 percent of people who hadn’t been taking opioids before an operation but were prescribed the drugs to ease post surgery pain still got the drugs three to six months later, a study finds.

Do certain people want more medical care than others do? And, does that matter? Research suggests medical maximizing or minimizing could explain the different ways people use health care.

Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Doctors go after the tumors that they can see. But the seeds that cause cancer to spread? Those are thought to be single cells or clusters of cells, traveling through the bloodstream. It’s hard to eradicate them with such blunt instruments.

More than 80 tiny DNA differences seem to raise the risk of type 2 diabetes in some people. Now scientists havereported a discovery that might explain how multiple genetic flaws can lead to the same disease. They’ve identified something that some of those diabetes-linked genetic defects have in common: they seem to change the way certain cells in the pancreas “read” their genes.

A national Precision Medicine Initiative dedicates $55 million to create four program areas, including a Data and Research Support Center. The U-M School of Public Health was named one of four sub-awardees that will work with the Data and Research Support Center at Vanderbilt University to mine and organize data and create the tools to analyze it, while protecting those who share it. The nationwide goal is to obtain the DNA and relevant health information from 1 million people.