This is the tale of two Toms. One Tom is famous, a singer, an international legend. The other Tom is local, a tech guy, an avid cyclist. Other than their first names, they don’t seem to have much in common, except one big thing – they both suffered a Sudden Cardiac Arrest.

About 850 people worldwide have been diagnosed with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressive (FOP) in the last five decades. Contrast that to the fewer than 100 individuals with progressive osseous heteroplasia (POH) who have been identified around the world since Penn Medicine's Fred Kaplan first described it in the early 1990s. “That makes FOP an ultra-rare genetic disease and POH ultra-ultra rare,” he said.

Debbie Cohen, MD, director of the Clinical Hypertension Program at Penn Medicine, doesn’t mince words when talking about the smartphone apps and kiosks in malls and pharmacies that take blood pressure. “People shouldn’t be using them,” said Cohen. “The readings can be completely inaccurate.”

When he was in fifth grade, Emile Mohler III built a wooden incubator with his father’s help, and picked up 25 fertilized chicken eggs at a Federal Poultry Research facility in Beltsville, Maryland. He wanted to see how the chick embryos progressed each day before hatching. Thus began a life of scientific experimentation and discovery.

Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is the most common type of diabetes diagnosed during pregnancy; it is also one of the most common pregnancy complications, affecting up to 18 percent of expecting women. Yet most women don’t learn much about the condition until after they are diagnosed. At 33 weeks into my pregnancy, I failed a glucose tolerance test and was diagnosed with GDM. Nothing really prepares you to hear a bad diagnosis.

The term “heart surgery” carries with it a certain amount of baggage: mostly some combination of grisly imagery and long, difficult recoveries. Thankfully, recent developments to both the technology and technique have resulted in a field rapidly evolving to improve the safety and comfort of one particular procedure that had, until recently, been hugely invasive.

Our lives, our careers, our homes are now dependent on technology, and all the time we spend using it can have a negative impact on our health. The overuse of digital technology can hurt your eyes, your posture and your ability to get a good night’s sleep.

The Legacy Program, launched earlier this year by Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center, seeks to help patients tell their own stories that they can share with loved ones. The monthly sessions are for patients who have received a cancer diagnosis, either recent or years past.

Depression is the leading cause of illness and disability worldwide. To help raise awareness about it, the World Health Organization launched a global campaign, called “Depression: Let’s Talk,” to encourage health care providers and people who are living with mental illness to seek the treatment they need.

“For a lot of these patients, it’s been a revolving door,” Barnett said. “It’s a tough population. We treat them, they leave, and they come back to be revived again. There’s more hope now that they’ll get treatment.”