Archive for August 27th, 2010

Is it doctors practicing defensive medicine? Or are patients so accustomed to a culture of medical technology that they insist on extensive tests and treatments? Too much cancer screening, too many heart tests, too many cesarean sections. A spate of recent reports suggest that too many Americans — maybe even President Barack Obama — are [...]

What if you could be fat but avoid heart disease or diabetes? Scientists trying to break the fat-and-disease link increasingly say inflammation is the key. In the quest to prove it, a major study is under way testing whether an anti-inflammatory drug — an old, cheap cousin of aspirin — can fight the Type 2 [...]

The way they weep and vomit without warning, it’s tempting to think that preschoolers are incapable of rational thought. As biologist and emeritus Harvard professor Edward Wilson has written, a prevailing view – one promoted by the famed developmental theorist Jean Piaget – has long been that very young children are “reflex-dominated” and “egocentric”: in [...]

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have created an experimental vaccine against beta-amyloid, the small protein that forms plaques in the brain and is believed to contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the Center said Friday in a press release. Compared with similar so-called DNA vaccines that the UT Southwestern researchers [...]

Children exposed to pesticides known as organophosphates could have a higher risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a U.S. study that urges parents to always wash produce thoroughly. Researchers tracked the pesticides’ breakdown products in children’ urine and found those with high levels were almost twice as likely to develop ADHD as those with [...]

Neuroendocrine tumors found in the pancreas are slow-growing and rare. It is estimated that there are fewer than 1,000 new cases in the United States each year. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday approved Sutent to treat patients with progressive neuroendocrine cancerous tumors located in the pancreas that cannot be removed by [...]

The majority of the world’s annual new cancer cases and deaths (7.1 million and 4.8 million, respectively) are now occurring in economically developing countries. Cancer rates are increasing in developing countries due to changing lifestyles linked with economic growth, the American Cancer Society (ACS) said. This reflects the growing adoption of unhealthy behaviors — such [...]

    US health authorities said … they will import a drug to treat ovarian, bone marrow and AIDS-related skin cancer from India in order to ward off a worrying shortage. “Lipodox will be imported as an alternative to Doxil,” the US Food and Drug Administration said in a statement, noting that a temporary deal [...]

Consumers who opt for organic foods often believe they are improving their health, but there is currently no strong evidence that organics bring nutrition-related health benefits, a new research review finds. A “disappointingly small” number of well-designed studies have looked at whether organic foods may have health benefits beyond their conventional counterparts’, according to the [...]

Lower levels of Vitamin D may worsen asthma and hinder response to steroid treatment, a new study finds. For the study, researchers at the National Jewish Health (NJH) in Denver took the vitamin D levels of 54 asthmatics and assessed lung function, airway hyper-responsiveness, which is the prevalence of airway constriction, and response to steroid [...]

Drinking alcohol may help reduce the severity of rheumatoid arthritis and cut the risk of developing the painful and crippling disease, a study published Wednesday has shown for the first time. Researchers led by Gerry Wilson, a professor at the University of Sheffield in Britain, asked 873 arthritis patients and a control group of 1,004 [...]