Artificial intelligence is already part of the daily life of primary care in Catalonia. In fact, ChatGPT is the most used tool by family doctors, far ahead of other options, according to a study published in The Lancet Primary Care. The work, promoted by the Societat Catalana de Medicina Familiar i Comunitària (CAMFiC) and led by Antoni Sisó, shows that AI has become a regular support in tasks such as medical literature research, text drafting, or clinical session preparation.

Up to 692 new first-year medicine places in Catalan universities for the 2031-2032 academic year. This is the commitment announced this Friday by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, during the Conference on Medicine at the Palau de Pedralbes, and it aims to improve access to these studies, which currently have an insufficient offer of 1,333 places, as for every vacancy there are almost four students who apply for it. This is a historic demand from the health and university sectors, which have been calling for years to increase the number of doctors trained in Catalonia to meet the needs of the system, where there is a structural shortage of professionals. The increase in places will also serve to lower the cut-off grade for medicine studies, which will favor more students being able to enroll.

In Spain, universities operate under a "single district" system: regulations allow students to access any university in the country, regardless of the autonomous community to which the institution belongs or where the applicant completed their secondary education and university entrance exams. However, some sectors have long argued that this homogeneity creates inequalities among Catalan students. One example is medicine, where in recent years there has been an increase in the percentage of students from other regions enrolling in Catalan medical schools. Now, the Council of the College of Physicians of Catalonia (CCMC) and some deans of medical schools have submitted a proposal to the Catalan Government to modify the admissions process for this degree and thus "guarantee fair and equitable access."

For sixty-six years, Healthcare It champions a healthcare model that puts people at the center. Founded, managed, and directed by physicians, the organization has built its own healthcare system over decades, where medicine is at the heart of all its decisions, without any other interests taking a back seat. Medical expertise, quality care, and a human touch are the pillars upon which a project that understands health as a fundamental right has been built.

Some medical terms are more difficult to understand than others, especially when discussing complex pathologies or rare tests. Children, however, may initially encounter this difficulty with even the most basic vocabulary, encompassing everyday health terms and related concepts. For this reason, medical vocabulary specialists from Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona have collaborated with over 3,000 children and young people from schools and institutes throughout Catalonia to develop a platform to explain medical terms to children in their own words, using new digital and multimedia formats. This platform, called Diximed, is aimed at children and families, as well as pediatricians and educators. "You have to approach the child's needs, but keeping in mind a psycholinguistic theory that says nothing is learned in leaps and bounds, but always from what is already known. And if what a child knows is incorrect and no one explains it to them, they will always end up carrying that misconception," says Rosa Estopà, principal investigator of the Lex project, a research group at Iulaterm. To carry out this initiative, the participating children were asked to explain what they knew about certain words, such as flu, louse, vaccine, coronavirus, cancer either chickenpoxAmong many others, they were asked to draw them. "We told them they had to do it as if they were explaining it to a child their age who came from another planet," Estopà recalls.

By the time he was nine, Darío had already visited several clinics throughout Valencia to treat the involuntary muscle contractions that limited his movement and almost prevented him from walking. This condition was worsening, and the professionals couldn't determine the appropriate treatment. Furthermore, the medications they prescribed caused side effects such as severe pain and even blindness. But in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Darío's family received a call: "It changed our lives," admits Jaime López, the boy's father. The caller was Dr. Belén Pérez, head of pediatric neurology at Vall d'Hebron Hospital, who offered them the opportunity to come to Barcelona to begin treatment. The neurologist determined that Darío suffered from dystonia, a condition that, along with Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, is characterized by a movement disorder. It is common for patients with this condition to visit the Neurology and Pediatric Neurology departments of the Germans Trias i Pujol and Vall d'Hebron hospitals. In fact, the Ministry of Health has designated them as the reference centers (CSUR) in Catalonia for the surgical treatment of patients with movement disorders, whether adult or pediatric.

The arrival of immunotherapy in hospitals, the birth of gene editing and walking devices, the first drugs against Alzheimer's and injections for weight loss... It's difficult to look back and choose just a few milestones that demonstrate how, in the last fifteen years, medicine has funneled through countless advancements. Since 2010, tens of millions of medical articles have been published in high-impact journals, and as you read these lines, scientists and laboratories are not slowing down. Since its first issues, the ARA has reported on and delved into many of these achievements, and has not been oblivious to the ethical and economic challenges that health research has faced. Nor has it been unaware of the profound crisis of confidence that some disciplines have experienced in the last five years.

The most aggressive colorectal tumors have learned to evade the immune system and go undetected by its defenses. Although immunotherapies have revolutionized the fight against many types of cancer, colorectal cancer is still one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In most metastatic cases, patients do not respond to these drugs because their immune system does not recognize the malignant cells as a threat. But there is hopeful news. A study led by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) has discovered how these tumors manage to block the immune system and, therefore, limit the effectiveness of immunotherapy, the treatment that reactivates the body's defense cells to attack. The key: the hormone TGF-β. The researchers have found that, through a hormone known as TGF-β, colorectal tumors generate a double barrier that protects them from immune attack. "The issue is that the tumor microenvironment of more metastatic colon cancers is different from that of more benign ones and is characterized by the presence of TGF-β, an immunosuppressive hormone," Dr. Eduard Batlle, ICREA researcher and head of the colorectal cancer laboratory at IRB Barcelona, explained to ARA. "Malignant cells use this hormone to evade detection by T lymphocytes, the cells on which our immune system is based," he clarified.

A twist at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). After it was announced a year and a half ago that The UPC will launch a faculty and a degree in medicine next year., now the university has taken a step back and wants more time to launch these studies. As has been advanced The Country And the ARA has confirmed that the UPC has decided to postpone the launch of the degree in medicine until at least the 2027-2028 academic year.

American researchers Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japanese Shimon Sakaguchi have been distinguished with the Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded this Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to describe how the immune system regulates itself to prevent us from harming ourselves. Specifically, their work established the concept of peripheral immune tolerance, a mechanism that controls our defenses so that they don't attack us as an external threat. This has allowed us to better understand how the immune system works and has opened the door to the development of new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

The investment fund Ysios Capital has closed a purchase agreement with the Swiss multinational CSL for a maximum price of 2.2 billion dollars (about 1.862 billion euros) for its start-up VarmX, the fund reported in a statement on Tuesday.

Exactly seven days ago, the 23rd Medical Profession Conference was held at the Cerdà Museum in Puigcerdà as part of the Ramon Llull Summer University. The panelists were predominantly female physicians. In fact, in Catalonia, women are predominantly female in the medical profession, and among younger generations, the proportion is 70%. However, it wasn't until 2025 that a woman presided over one of the four Catalan medical associations for the first time. Specifically, this February 2025, Elvira Bisbe, an anesthesiologist at Hospital del Mar and until now vice president of the Barcelona Medical Association, marked a milestone by becoming the first female president of this association since its founding in 1894.

Mathematics and physics, aerospace and computer engineering, and medical degrees continue to lead the ranking of the highest university entrance exams in Catalonia for another year. The highest grade of all was once again that of the simultaneous degree in mathematics and physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), which rose to 13.370 points out of a total of 14. The same degree, from the University of Barcelona (UB), followed closely behind, with a entrance exam grade of 13.170 points. These degrees offer very few places (20 at two different universities, 40 in total), which is why access to them is so difficult.

Ana Hospital had always imagined dedicating herself to another specialty. In fact, while studying medicine, she worked as a primary care physician in a village, and also in a pediatrician's office. It was in the latter that she met Dr. Narcís Bardalet, who held dual positions as a pediatrician and forensic pathologist. Some days, after the consultation, she would accompany him to body removals. She enjoyed that job more than she imagined, and today she is a forensic doctor at the Institute of Forensic Medicine of Catalonia, a dentist, and a professor at the International University of Catalonia.

After the pandemic, medical series seemed to have become immune, because reality had surpassed any fiction set in a hospital. However, after a reasonable amount of time, it's a television genre that remains relevant and with new sensibilities. After all, these types of series speak to us about life and death, about human vulnerability. Medical centers are spaces that reflect the vast majority of their social concerns.

The scientific community has been warning for years about an increase in diseases such as cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimer's, and obesity in the coming decades. Society is increasingly aging, and many of these rising pathologies are associated with age. Everyone is calling for greater research efforts to better control these diseases, guarantee patient survival, and ensure their quality of life. However, pharmacologist Joan Ramon Laporte and health economist Guillem López Casasnovas emphasize the importance of overseeing this research, especially in the companies behind it.

Lluís Llach (Girona, 1948) has been practicing "the craft of contradicting" for decades. He has done so through songs like The stake and various challenges to the Franco regime. Since leaving music, Llach has shifted his iconoclasm towards literature, with novels such as The women of the Principal (Empúries, 2014) and The boy from Maravillas (Empúries, 2017), while He has been deeply involved in the civic and political struggle for the independence of Catalonia.. He has found a gap in his busy schedule as president of the Catalan National Assembly, which he has led since last June, to talk aboutThe Golden Book (Universe, 2025).

One of the main reasons why in recent years there has been an attempt to make university entrance exams the same – or as similar as possible – is that in the State the universities operate with the so-called "single district". The regulations allow a student to access any university in the country, regardless of the autonomous community to which the institution belongs and the place where the applicant completed high school and university entrance exams. The single district also opens the door to greater competition in certain territories that offer degrees that in other parts of the State have fewer places or that have better-rated universities. The clearest example of this dilemma in Catalonia can be seen in the degree of medicine.

Avatar It is a James Cameron film released in 2009 that surely everyone knows because it has the honor of being the highest grossing film in history. otakus You may know that this was the name of a cartoon series about a select few who can manipulate the four elements. Both franchises take their name from a Sanskrit word used in Hinduism to describe the earthly incarnation of a God or spirit, and which has become popular in the 21st century because it is commonly used to designate the representation of a user in the digital world. It is also this idea that has inspired the scientific meaning of the word. avatar to define any system that allows modeling what happens in an organism when it receives a treatment. Medical avatars come in many types, from digital to biological. The most recent, published in an article in Nature A few weeks ago, it is a mini-organ made from patient stem cells that can be used to predict whether or not a new treatment for rare genetic diseases will work.

Some 90-year-olds are more active than other 30-year-olds. But there are also others who, at 80, can hardly perform any activities without the support of someone else. Therefore, what are the keys to ageing in a healthy and enviable way? This is answered by the psychologist and researcher of the Envelliment, Cultura i Salut Research Group (Ageing, Culture and Health) (UdG) Pilar Monreal; the Catalan Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology geriatrician and vice-president, Jordi Amblàs; and the nurse and director of the Les Vetes nursing home in Salt, Àngels Teixidor.