Health
Birthday buddies and next-door neighbors turn 101 on same day
Imagine living next door to a neighbor who is exactly your age and who shares the very same birthday.
Josie Church and Anne Wallace-Hadrill know all about this. They also know about longevity — and a lot of luck.
The two women have lived side-by-side since the 1980s.
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The great-grandmothers were also born on the same day in 1924 — April 1 — according to news agency SWNS.
Said Josie Church, “I think life has gone quite quickly.”
Anne Wallace-Hadrill (left) and Josie Church are pictured outside their homes in Oxford, Oxfordshire, on March 26, 2025. (SWNS)
She added of her neighbor in Oxford, in the U.K., “Anne was very busy when she was younger — so was I — and was very productive and creative. She did a lot of painting and tapestry, and she was always busy, and I was always busy doing something else, somewhere else, because that’s the sort of life we live.”
She also said, “I don’t think we’ve thought much about the time passing. It’s just passed.”
“I don’t think we’ve thought much about the time passing. It’s just passed.”
Both women were very involved in volunteering and creative activities after their husbands died, said the same news source.
Church’s husband, Peter, passed away in the 1990s and the women formed a friendship.
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Wallace-Hadrill, who grew up in Hampshire, first moved to the house following the death of her husband, John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, a historian.
She taught English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a radio mechanic during World War II.
While St. Hilda’s was an all-female college at the time, Wallace-Hadrill said, “We weren’t forbidden from seeing men. We were expected to live decent lives.”
Next-door neighbors Anne Wallace-Hadrill (left) and Josie Church will celebrate their shared 101st birthday on April 1. (SWNS)
She said she enjoyed being at the university, adding that it was both “a lot of fun and a lot of work,” said SWNS.
After graduating, Wallace-Hadrill worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. “I was always interested in words,” she said. “It was my trade.”
She was quite proud, she said, to receive a medal for her service from the Royal Navy last year; it was described as “long overdue” by the representative who gave it to her.
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Originally from Manchester, Church did her training at Preston Royal Infirmary and remembers the introduction of the National Health Service (NHS). She said the training was “three years of hard work.”
Said Church, “In those days, you had to live in, and you couldn’t get married, and it was very strict. People wouldn’t put up with that sort of life now.”
Her time in nursing during World War II included a “chilling” experience of caring for SS German soldiers. “They weren’t very nice,” Church said. “They didn’t wish to be taken care of by us. They were very difficult patients.”
Josie Church (left) and Anne Wallace-Hadrill have lived side-by-side in Oxford since the 1980s. “You just go on from one thing to another,” Church said. (SWNS)
She moved with her husband to Oxford so he could continue his degree at University College — which was interrupted by the war — and they “lived the life of an undergraduate.”
Half of the undergraduates had been to war, she said, while the other half were young students who were just matriculating.
“Oxford was very strange because each college had a large intake of older people who’d gone through the war and were taking up their university places,” said Church. “So you’d get the old men and then the young 18-year-olds coming in from school.”
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After marrying, Church worked for a while and looked after her family. Her husband was a housemaster at a boys’ boarding school and she was the house nurse — so she had an “interesting” few years looking after 120 boys.
She has three “wonderful” children, she shared: Chris, Pamela and Andrew.
Meanwhile, Wallace-Hadrill’s son James lives in Poole and her son Andrew in Cambridge.
“It was wonderful. We had a lovely day,” said one of the women about a birthday party thrown for them by their neighbors. (iStock)
The two women said they don’t remember the moment they discovered they share the same birthday — but they enjoyed the celebrations arranged for them last year, SWNS reported.
“We live on the most amazing road. It’s like one big, extended family,” said Church. “Everybody knows everybody else. If you have a problem, you just give a shout and somebody will come.”
“It was wonderful. We had a lovely day last year,” she said, referencing the women’s 100th birthday celebration. “It was quite unexpected because I didn’t know anything about it. It’s just an amazing street. I think we are lucky.”
“We live on the most amazing road. It’s like one big, extended family.”
As for tips about leading a long life: “Just live,” advised Church. “There’s not much you can do. You just go on from one thing to the next.”
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She added, “You do what seems to need doing, and then you do that, and then something else takes its place. You just go on from one thing to another.”
She also said, “We don’t engineer our lives. I think they’ve just engineered us.”
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One woman’s uncomfortable reaction to alcohol led to a grave discovery.
Hollie Thursby, 28, a mother of two from the U.K., told Kennedy News and Media that after giving birth to her second son, Jack, she began experiencing unusual symptoms.
At a checkup for her son, who was a couple of months old, Thursby mentioned that she was experiencing “unbearably itchy skin,” which is known to be a post-partum symptom. The doctor suggested it was due to changing hormones.
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Thursby added that she occasionally drank a couple glasses of wine. Although she kept the drinking to a minimum, she described having “a lot of pain” down the side of her neck.
“Really quite painful and uncomfortable,” she said, according to the report.
A U.K. mom reported experiencing pain in her neck after drinking a glass or two of wine, which turned out to be one of the first signs that she had cancer. (Kennedy News and Media)
The mother also reported feeling extremely exhausted, which she assumed was due to caring for her children throughout the day.
“I also felt like when I got to bed that someone was sitting on my chest,” she shared.
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In July 2025, Thursby discovered a lump on the side of her neck that she described as “really quite big,” but wasn’t painful, Kennedy News and Media reported.
“It was hard, it didn’t move, but it was there,” she said. “When I turned my neck to the side, you could see it.”
Thursby reportedly began chemotherapy for Stage 2 Hodgkins lymphoma. (Kennedy News and Media)
Thursby’s symptoms turned out to be a form of blood cancer — Stage 2 Hodgkins lymphoma, which means it is in two or more lymph nodes, according to Cancer Research U.K.
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Common symptoms include swelling of the lymph nodes, heavy sweating, weight loss, itching, persistent cough or shortness of breath, high temperatures, and pain in the stomach or lymph nodes after drinking alcohol.
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“Pain when you drink alcohol is actually a known side effect of Hodgkin lymphoma,” she said, per the report. “It’s something about the acidity in the wine and not when you drink other alcohol.”
While alcohol-related pain in Hodgkins lymphoma patients has been “an accepted scientific consensus” since the 1950s, cases are rare, Healthline confirmed.
Hollie Thursby, 28, and her two sons are pictured above. The mother reported feeling extremely exhausted, which she assumed was due to caring for her children throughout the day. (Kennedy News and Media)
Thursby reportedly began chemotherapy in November, noting that the hardest part is not being able to care for her kids after losing her own mother to a blood disorder called myelodysplasia.
“I grew up without a mum, and it was horrendous. I can’t do that to the boys,” she told Kennedy News and Media. “We’re all devastated, but we all know now, and we’ve got a treatment plan, which is what we need.”
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“I’m just doing everything I can to get better for them. I keep telling myself this is only temporary, I just need to keep going.”
Anyone experiencing pain or other concerning symptoms after consuming alcohol should consult a doctor for guidance.
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Red light therapy has been shown to reduce brain inflammation, protecting people who experience head trauma from long-term health consequences, a University of Utah study has shown.
Brain damage from repeated impact over the years is known to cause cognitive symptoms, ranging from memory issues to full-blown dementia, particularly affecting soldiers and athletes.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive, degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts rather than a single injury, according to Mayo Clinic.
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More than 100 former NFL football players have been posthumously diagnosed with CTE, according to the new study, which was published in the Journal of Neurotrauma.
Other research has shown that military personnel in active combat suffer from similar issues, as do first responders and veterans.
The treatment was administered three times a week for 20 minutes using specialized headsets and intranasal devices designed to penetrate the skull. (iStock)
In the new study, the researchers recruited 26 current football players to understand more about the impact of red-light therapy on brain injuries.
The participants received either red light therapy delivered by a light-emitting headset and a device that clips into the nose, or a placebo treatment with an identical device that doesn’t produce light. Players self-administered the therapy three times a week, 20 minutes each time, for 16 weeks.
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“My first reaction was, ‘There’s no way this can be real,’” said first author Hannah Lindsey, Ph.D., in the university press release. “That’s how striking it was.”
Specific wavelengths of light are believed to enter the brain and reduce molecules that trigger inflammation, potentially halting the path toward dementia and other cognitive conditions. (iStock)
Players using the placebo treatment experienced increased brain inflammation over the course of the season. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans taken at the end of the season showed significantly more signs of inflammation than at the beginning of the season, the study found.
For players who used red-light therapy during the season, their brain inflammation didn’t increase at all.
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Previous studies have shown that red light, if powerful enough, can penetrate the skull and reach the brain, where it may reduce inflammation-related molecules.
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“When we first started this project, I was extremely skeptical,” said Elisabeth Wilde, Ph.D., the senior author on the study. “But we’ve seen consistent results across multiple of our studies, so it’s starting to be quite compelling.”
Study limitations
The study was conducted using a small sample size, which led to different levels of inflammation in the treatment and control groups, the researchers acknowledged.
While the placebo group showed increased brain inflammation during the football season, those receiving red light therapy showed no increase in inflammatory markers. (iStock)
Future large randomized clinical trials will be “crucial to back up the results” in larger populations, they noted.
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“We’ve been trying to figure out how to make sports safer, so that our kids, friends and family can participate in sports safely for the long term while they’re involved in activities that give them happiness and joy,” Carrie Esopenko, Ph.D., second author of the study, said in the release.
“And this really feels like part of the hope for protecting the brain that we’ve been searching for.”
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The team plans to recruit 300 people with persistent symptoms from TBI or concussion for a randomized controlled trial in 2026, with a focus on first responders, veterans and active-duty service members.
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Drinking heavily and consistently over an adult’s lifetime could lead to a higher risk of colorectal cancer, according to a study published in the journal Cancer by the American Cancer Society (ACS).
The study analyzed 20 years of data from more than 88,000 U.S. adults to determine how long-term drinking impacted the risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC) or precancerous colorectal adenomas (polyps).
The participants reported their average weekly intake of beer, wine and liquor intake during four age periods — 18 to 24, 25 to 39, 40 to 54, and 55 and older.
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“Heavy drinkers” were identified as having more than 14 drinks per week and “moderate drinkers” had between seven and 14 drinks per week.
The observational research revealed that consistent heavy drinking over adulthood was linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer, especially rectal cancer.
Researchers found a major association between colorectal cancer diagnosis and heavy lifetime drinking. (iStock)
Heavy lifetime drinking was associated with a 25% higher overall CRC risk and nearly double the risk of rectal cancer. Moderate lifetime drinking had a lower overall CRC risk.
Compared to light drinkers, the consistently heavy drinkers had about a 91% higher risk of CRC.
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For colorectal adenomas (precancerous polyps), higher current lifetime drinking did not show a strong pattern, although former drinkers showed a significantly lower risk of non-advanced adenoma compared to current light drinkers.
Out of the 88,092 participants, 1,679 were diagnosed with colorectal cancer.
Out of the 88,092 participants in the study, 1,679 were diagnosed with colorectal cancer. (iStock)
The authors noted that the research was limited, as it was observational and not based on a clinical trial. It also hinged on self-reported alcohol use.
The findings suggest that consistently heavy alcohol intake and higher average lifetime consumption “may increase CRC risk, whereas cessation may lower adenoma risk,” the researchers stated. Associations “may differ by tumor site,” they added.
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The link between drinking alcohol and cancer is not a new discovery, according to health experts.
In a recent episode of the podcast “The Dr. Mark Hyman Show,” Dr. Mark Hyman, chief medical officer of Function Health in California, detailed how even moderate drinking can impact “nearly every organ system in the body,” due to metabolic stress, inflammation, impaired detoxification and its effect on hormones.
The link between drinking alcohol and cancer is not a new discovery, according to health experts. (iStock)
Drinking has been found to increase the risk of many cancers, metabolic dysfunction, gut microbiome disturbances and mitochondrial toxins, Hyman said.
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“Bottom line, alcohol taxes every major system in your body, especially your liver, your brain, your gut, your hormones,” he warned.
Reducing or eliminating alcohol can lower the risk of several cancers, according to medical experts. (Getty Images)
In a previous interview with Fox News Digital, Dr. Pinchieh Chiang, a clinician at Circle Medical in San Francisco, shared that taking a break from drinking alcohol for longer periods of time can “reshape health more profoundly.”
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“Over months to a year, we see sustained improvements in blood pressure, liver function and inflammation,” she said. “Those changes directly affect long-term heart disease and stroke risk.”
Chiang added, “Reducing or eliminating alcohol lowers the risk of several cancers, including breast and colorectal, over time.”
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Fox News Digital reached out to the study researchers for comment.
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