This old disease is becoming more common, but it's highly treatable and even curable — with the right care.

Unless you've experienced it firsthand or know someone who has, gout may seem like a museum piece of a disease — a condition that once afflicted corpulent men of means but doesn't get mentioned much these days. Even the name seems archaic and unscientific. Gout comes from gutta, Latin for drop, a reference to the belief that it was caused by a drop-by-drop accumulation of humors in the joints.

But gout is still very much with us, and the number of ...

The warmer months are the prime time for getting tick-borne Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is by far the most common tick-borne disease in the United States. Between 20,000 and 30,000 cases have been reported in most of the past several years, and health officials suspect many more go unreported. The incidence is highest in New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and Wisconsin. We've posted the latest state-by-state counts on our Web site, www.health.harvard.edu/healthextra. Deer ticks are responsible for the vast majority of Lyme disease cases, although a related tick, Ixodes pacificus, found in the western United States, also can transmit the ...

Some studies suggest that extra weight helps older people live longer, but they may be misleading. Weight still matters, but so does the waist.

Americans have been getting heavier since the Civil War, and it's safe to say some of the added weight reflects improvements in health. Better nutrition, improved housing, control of infectious diseases — they all helped fill out the American physique, and add some inches to it as well. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the long-term trend of adding pounds took off, and we found ourselves in the midst of an obesity epidemic.

There was some ...

Botox for migraines? Our article on migraines in the March 2010 issue mentioned several steps that sufferers of the headaches can take to possibly prevent or at least reduce the number of attacks. We touched on avoiding triggers, regular sleep, stress reduction, and the commonly prescribed medications, which include beta blockers, tricyclic antidepressants, and anticonvulsants. But Botox? Not mentioned, and why would it be? But Dr. Kenneth Arndt, a dermatologist and a member of our editorial board, sent along findings from a study he helped conduct that show the injections maybe (but it's no more than a maybe) could help ...

Q. I am 63 and have tears running down my face at odd times. Most of the information I've found on the Internet is about infants with blocked tear ducts. Can you provide some information about tearing in adults?

A. Watery eyes are a common problem for adults, and there's often an effective way of treating them.

First, a little background. Your lacrimal glands, which are located above the eye at the edge of the eye socket, are continually making small amounts of tears at a steady rate (see the illustration). Blinking helps spread the moisture over the front of ...