On Disabilities

Amy Purdy lost both legs below the knee to meningitis at age 19. She's now using her cred as a champion snowboarder to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated.

A neurologist's unorthodox thinking led to an experimental drug that allows trapped nerve fibers to grow again. And that growth helps amplify signals that restored movement in laboratory rats.

Michigan doctors used 3-D printing to custom-make a splint to prop open Garrett Peterson's defective windpipe last January. He's home with his parents this Christmas, as "normal life" begins.

The iBill, a new currency reader being offered by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, aims to change how the blind identify different kinds of bills.

The area of the brain that recognizes faces can use sound instead of sight. That recent discovery suggests facial recognition is so important to humans that it's part of our most basic wiring.

Twenty percent of people who fall and break a hip after age 50 die within a year, and women are at greatest risk. But you can reduce the odds of falling. Here's how.

The prosthetics industry is rapidly growing, allowing patients to better customize their devices, control them using their nervous system, and even regain a sense of touch.

Scientists in England are ready to do something that's never been done before — combine the DNA of two women and one man to create embryos that don't carry hereditary mitochondrial disorders.

A broken wrist may not seem like much, but it can be the first sign that you're headed for a broken hip or spinal fracture. Men often don't realize they are at risk of osteoporosis as they age.

Spontaneous gene mutations, not ones inherited from parents, increase a child's risk of autism, scientists say. By comparing genes within families they've identified more than 100 suspects.

A legally blind woman who has led a fight to make Medicare pay for care even when patients' medical conditions don't improve is in court to get Medicare payment for her own home care.

"When I first saw him he had a little bit of eye movement and that was really the only way he could communicate," says Eric Sellers, who helped a patient use a brain-computer interface to communicate.