Does your body position matter when taking pills? Plus, smartphones may detect narrow arteries, and more health news

If you need to take a pill, you might want to take it lying down — on your right side, that is.

Researchers studying how body positioning affects the absorption of pills found that one taken when a person was lying on the right side speeded pills to the deepest part of the stomach. That pill could then dissolve 2.3 times faster than if the person was upright.

“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said senior author Rajat Mittal, a professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and an expert in fluid dynamics. “I never thought about whether I was doing it right or wrong but now I’ll definitely think about it every time I take a pill.”

Methamphetamine is driving an epidemic of drug overdoses in rural America, a new study concludes.

Researchers attribute the surge to meth laced with fentanyl or combined with an opioid that contains fentanyl.

“Methamphetamine is increasingly contaminated or adulterated with fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin,” said lead researcher Dr. Todd Korthuis, director of the Addiction Medicine Section at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland.

“People may think that they’re smoking or injecting their usual methamphetamine supply and end up with an unintentional opioid overdose.”

“You can’t run from the fork.”

It’s an old weight-loss saying, reminding folks that diet is more important than exercise when it comes to shedding excess pounds.

But is that true for everyone?

New research suggests there’s a category of “diet-resistant” people who need to work out and watch what they eat if they want to shed pounds.

In fact, these folks should prioritize exercise, because it decreases their fat mass and boosts their muscles’ ability to burn calories, the Canadian study concluded.

A smartphone video could detect a blocked blood vessel in your neck that could cause a stroke, a new study suggests.

Nearly 87% of strokes are the ischemic type, which happens when fatty deposits build up in the carotid artery in the neck, blocking blood supply to the brain.

“Between 2% and 5% of strokes each year occur in people with no symptoms, so better and earlier detection of stroke risk is needed,” said lead author Dr. Hsien-Li Kao, an interventional cardiologist at National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei.

Kids who enter preschool with good vocabulary and attention skills have a head start on academic success.

That’s the takeaway from a new study of nearly 900 4-year-olds and their ability to engage with teachers and peers, as well as their involvement in classroom tasks.

“The levels of vocabulary skills and inhibitory control that children exhibit in the fall (autumn) of the preschool years matter for their classroom engagement in different ways,” said lead study author Qingqing Yang, a graduate student in the department of human sciences at Ohio State University in Columbus.