Every person covered by Medicare would shell out an additional $3 a month if the government agreed to pay to screen certain current and former smokers for lung cancer, a new study estimates. It would cost Medicare $2 billion a year to follow recent advice to offer these lung scans — and fuel angst about rising health costs that are borne by everyone, not just smokers, the study found.

A smartphone app that uses voice analysis to detect mood changes in people with bipolar disorder is being tested by researchers. Bipolar disorder is a mental illness that causes extreme emotional highs and lows. It affects millions of people worldwide and can have serious consequences, including suicide. The app showed promise in early tests with a small group of patients.

Doing yoga may help reduce blood pressure among people with hypertension. There is now a growing number of randomized controlled trials on yoga for a variety of medical conditions. But the quality and expressiveness of these trials varies, thus, it is often difficult to evaluate the real evidence for the usefulness of yoga in a specific condition based on single trials.

As the weather warms and summer begins, dozens of camps across the nation will be catering to children and teens with special needs. “Kids, whether they have special needs or not, are kids, and they are helped by summer camp programs,” said W. George Scarlett, deputy chair of the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

The idea that yoga is beneficial is not new. But new studies continue to advance our understanding of the health benefits attained through yoga practice. Three studies reported in the April 2014 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine show that yoga can improve balance and reduce fear of falling, helps to reduce and regulate blood pressure and can improve important aspects of cardiovascular health.