Medicine
gregladen | November 19, 2007The "statins" make up a class of cholesterol lowering drugs. Fish oil (oil derived from fish) is rich in certain fatty acids.
Both types of compounds can have powerful positive and protective effects in the brain.
A study just now coming out (to be published in Brain Research Reviews) looks at the biochemical effects of statins and fish oil in the brain in detail. The study makes specific recommendations for further research, and concludes with a proposal that the way we classify certain neural pathologies be reconsidered to take into account the complex biochemical pathways that produce…
oracknows | November 16, 2007It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong:
A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday.
Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died.
Kerry, 69, is charged with…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2007The Department of Defense appears to be making a real effort
to
determine the scope of the problem. They now have published
the results of a second screening of 88,235 returning soldiers.
In their most recent study, they acknowledge that the prior
study missed a lot. Moreover, they now worry that even the
second study is missing some. In a nice gesture, the
style="font-style: italic;">Journal of the American Medical
Association has made the results openly accessible. (The
results of the first study also are openly accessible,
href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/9/…
sb admin | November 12, 2007Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., and the Department of Veterans Affairs reminds us of the purpose:
Veterans Day is the day set aside to thank and honor ALL those who served honorably in the military - in wartime or peacetime. In fact, Veterans Day is largely intended to thank LIVING veterans for their service, to acknowledge that their contributions to our national security are appreciated, and to underscore the fact that all those who served - not only those who died - have sacrificed and done their duty.
There are plenty of speeches, parades, and other events marking this holiday. The…
oracknows | November 12, 2007I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of an idea first to stop me from discussing it, and this particular idea is definitely worth expanding upon because (1) it's interesting and (2) it combines two of my interests, alternative medicine and evolution. I agree with parts of the idea, but it's not without its shortcomings. Indeed, I'd very much welcome any of the evolutionary biologists who read this blog to chime in with their own ideas.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist over at Aardvarchaeology has proposed a rather…
sb admin | November 9, 2007The news is out that Merck has agreed to settle 27,000 Vioxx lawsuits for $4.85 billion. Plaintiffs who claim they or their family members suffered injury or died after taking the anti-inflammatory drug will, on average, receive just over $100,000 before legal fees and expenses, reports the New York Timesâ Alex Berenson.
The Vioxx debacle is an example of how not to interpret clinical trials data. Even before the FDA approved the drug, there was extensive evidence that taking Vioxx increased the risk of a cardiovascular event. Yet the FDA approved it and an estimated 20 million Americans…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Orac gets e-mail from time to time. This time around, a person working at The Ohio State University writes about a disturbing incident there demonstrating yet more evidence that academic medical centers are having increasing difficulty distinguishing between evidence-based medicine (which they should champion) and non-evidence-based medicine, which they should not. This e-mail comes from someone who wishes to remain anonymous:
Time after time I've read Orac's accounts of woo infiltrating the medical community. Last month I witnessed its encroachment into the Ohio State University. Each year…
terrasig | November 8, 2007About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted:
What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as:
Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools.
When I read that, I…
tsmith | November 8, 2007 Both Mike and Revere have new posts up documenting swine as a new threat to human health (beyond the pork chops and bacon), via carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in these animals. Several papers have been published recently documenting high rates of MRSA carriage in swine in the Netherlands, and also have documented transmission of this bacterium from swine to humans. However, even more worrisome to me than the Dutch publications is a new one out in Veterinary Microbiology, showing high rates of MRSA in Canadian swine--and guess where we import about 9 million hogs…
sb admin | November 7, 2007At the APHA meeting yesterday, the APHAâs Occupational Health & Safety Section held its annual awards luncheon â and the list of honorees included names that are familiar to many Pump Handle readers.
Our own Celeste Monforton won the Lorin Kerr Award, which ârecognizes a younger activist for their sustained and outstanding efforts and dedication to improving the lives of workers.â (Lorin Kerr was a physician and lifelong activist dedicated to improving access to healthcare for coal miners and other workers and to obtaining compensation for and preventing black lung disease.) Celesteâs…
purepedantry | November 6, 2007I don't know if people heard about this, but a participant in the Olympic trials prior to the NY marathon died suddenly:
A triumphant United States Olympic trials marathon turned somber yesterday morning when Ryan Shay, a 28-year-old veteran marathoner, collapsed during the race in Central Park and was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital.
It put a terrible twist on the victory by Ryan Hall, who exulted in the emotion of winning the race and capturing an Olympic berth. But he had no idea that the ambulance that had passed him on the course was carrying Shay, his good friend and occasional…
clock | November 6, 2007Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry.
But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put some order in the question of authorship.
Different scientific areas have different traditions. In one discipline…
neurophilosophy | November 2, 2007
On November 4th, 1906, during a lecture at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tubingen, the German neuropathologist and psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915, right) described "eine eigenartige Erkrankung der Hirnrinde" (a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex). In the lecture, he dicussed "the case of a patient who was kept under close observation during institutionalisation at the Frankfurt Hospital and whose central nervous system had been given to me by director Sioli for further examination". This was the first documented case of the form of dementia that…
clock | October 31, 2007These last couple of days were very exciting here at PLoS. After months of preparation and hard work, PLoS presents the latest addition to its collection of top-notch scientific journals. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases went live yesterday at 6:42pm EDT. This journal will be
...the first open-access journal devoted to the world's most neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), such as elephantiasis, river blindness, leprosy, hookworm, schistosomiasis, and African sleeping sickness. The journal publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research on all scientific, medical, and public-health aspects…
oracknows | October 30, 2007...at least, that was my first reaction when I first read this reaction by the Karen Malec of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer to posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and myself pointing out the numerous flaws in the latest "study" being circulated to "support" a link between abortion and breast cancer.
Then I thought about it. That post was one of my more ambitious posts, and it reached a length even greater than the usual Orac-ian standard of logorrhea to match its ambition. Indeed, the post took me two or three times longer to put together than the typical heapin' helpin' of Respectful…
signout | October 29, 2007"Is anyone running this code?"
There were two residents in the room, one administering chest compressions, and one getting an arterial blood sample. Neither of them answered me; in response to my question, there was only the binging and bonging of various monitors ably detecting a dead man.
"OK, so, I guess I'm running this code."
Although I'd been looking forward to this moment for a long time, it was acutely uncomfortable in the way that being onstage in one's underpants might be. As fifteen people watched and waited for my decisions, I bumbled through the algorithms, alternately talking to…
mementomori | October 29, 2007[Editor's Note: at the request of our readers this will become a recurring feature. The C.O. in his infinite wisdom created a new character, Dr. Noce Saggio, to serve as the protagonist in this series of medical mysteries. And now, if you would please, raise the curtain... ]
"Another espresso, Doctor?" The waiter stood crisply by the table as his customer drained the last of his cup. The cafe swelled with the sounds of early morning conversation.
"I don't think so, Raoul. I've got to be off to my clinic. My secretary will not stand another late start this week." The waiter bowed and…
denialism | October 26, 2007Are placebo's really effective? So asks Darshak Sanghavi in Slate, citing this study from 2001 that shows the placebo effect, compared to passive observation, to be relatively minor for improvements in pain or objective measures of health.
This is an interesting topic, but unfortunately, a really bad article. Given how many alties love to stress the role of placebo and its apparent proof of the benefit of positive thinking, we should critically re-evaluate the evidence that placebos on their own can do anything more than improve subjective symptoms. Although there is a fair amount of proof…
tsmith | October 25, 2007For those of you who might not brave the comments threads on any HIV post, you may have missed this tidbit of information. I've written about "investigative journalist" Liam Scheff previously; he's an HIV "dissident" and author of a story from a few years back titled "The House that AIDS Built". In this, he claimed that HIV+ children had been removed from their parents' homes and force-fed "toxic" drugs to treat their condition (which of course, he claims is based on "inaccurate" HIV testing in the first place):
The drugs being given to the children are toxic - they're known to cause…
mikethemadbiologist | October 25, 2007
Yes, it's LOLStaphylococcus. They don't call me the Mad Biologist for nuthin'
A colleague of mind sent along this paper, "Nose Picking and Nasal Carriage of Staphylococcus aureus":
OBJECTIVE. Nasal carriage of Staphylococcus aureus is an important risk factor for S. aureus infection and a reservoir for methicillin-resistant S. aureus [MRSA]. We investigated whether nose picking was among the determinants of S. aureus nasal carriage.
SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS. The study cohort comprised 238 patients who visited the ear, nose, and throat (ENT) disease outpatient clinic of a tertiary…