Medicine
grrlscientist | August 7, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, coffee, memory, cognition, women, aging
Recent research has shown that women older than 65 years old who drink more than three cups of coffee per day were protected from some types of age-related memory declines.
"The more coffee one drank, the better the effects seemed to be on (women's) memory functioning in particular," reported Karen Ritchie, epidemiological and clinical researcher at La Colombiere Hospital and at the French National Institute of Medical Research (INSERM), in Montpellier, France.
To do this research, the researchers studied more than 4,197…
revere | August 7, 2007Dr. John Agwunobe is the federal official in charge of the US Public Health SErvie Commission Corps and of coordinating the nation's response to pandemic influenza. At least he will be until the end of this month.
Announcement from Department of Health and Human Services:
For Immediate Release Contact: HHS Press Office
August 7, 2007 202/690-6343
STATEMENT FROM HHS SECRETARY MIKE LEAVITT ON THE RESIGNATION OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HEALTH DR. JOHN…
neurophilosophy | August 4, 2007
Resident ScienceBlogs psychiatrist Joseph has found some interesting papers about various types of cognition-induced epilepsy, including this one from the Hong Kong Medical Journal:
Mah-jong induced seizures: case reports and review of twenty-three patients.
Chang, R. S. K., et al.
'Mah-jong epilepsy' is a rare reflex epilepsy syndrome, manifesting as recurrent epileptic seizures triggered by either playing or just watching mah-jong. We present three patients with this condition and review all the reported cases. Mah-jong-induced seizures can be considered a subtype of…
j7uy5 | August 4, 2007An
article in the Honk Kong Medical Journal reports on a seried of cases
of Mah-jong Epilepsy. This is something I had not heard of
before: it is considered a subtype of cognition-induced epilepsy.
rev="review" href="http://www.hkmj.org/abstracts/v13n4/314.htm">Mah-jong-induced
seizures: case reports and review of twenty-three patients
Richard SK Chang, Raymond TF Cheung, SL Ho, Windsor Mak
Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong
Hong Kong Med J 2007;13:314-8
'Mah-jong epilepsy' is a rare reflex epilepsy syndrome, manifesting as
recurrent epileptic seizures triggered…
revere | August 2, 2007Dangerous drugs that got approved and are widely and intensively marketed; dangerous imports from China and elsewhere that are never examined; conflict of interest allegations; contaminated consume products from toothpaste to lens solutions; vaccine supplies that go from shortage to glut. Just business as usual at the broken US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). So it's an important problem and fixing it is a priority. It's always a dilemma when a really excellent piece appears and you just want your readers to go read it instead of what we are writing about it. That's the case with an Op Ed…
tqa | August 1, 2007
There's a paper in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association that examines the impact of combat deployments on child abuse and neglect. The authors, lead by Deborah Gibbs of RTI International, found that the overall rate of abuse and neglect increased by more than 40% when a parent was deployed in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That result might not be very surprising, but it is alarming.
Once you get beyond the general finding, there are a lot of very interesting results in this paper. The increase in the rate of mistreatment is not even…
signout | July 31, 2007We're not supposed to pick favorites among our patients, but I have one. We'll call her Brenda.
Brenda heard about our clinic through a friend of hers, a guy she used to smoke crack with. She'd been off drugs and booze for almost a year when she came to see me. Now that she was sober, she said, she realized she had "normal-people problems"--joint pain, high blood pressure, obesity--and needed a normal-person doctor. She had anything but a normal-person mouth, however, and from the moment I met her, said anything she wanted to, any time she wanted. She never held back the many, many things…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007I am clearing out links, so here are two quotes on a libertarian persuasion.
From Jane Galt (about media coverage of the Hillary/Obama foreign policy debate:
It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007A healthy debate rages as to whether Restless Legs Syndrome is actually a disease, or whether it was something contrived by drug companies in order to sell drugs.
Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times that two separate studies have found a gene that is linked with the disease:
Kari Stefansson, chief executive of Decode Genetics, said his company had linked variations in the gene known as BTBD9 with periodic leg movements during sleep and with low iron levels in the blood, two clinical features already associated with the syndrome. He said Decode had missed, but subsequently confirmed, the…
terrasig | July 30, 2007This post appeared originally on 8 Feb 2006 at the old site for this blog. A frequent reader and commenter, Joe, suggested that I repost it here as it illustrates many common problems with clinical trials of botanical medicines.
You'd think the funding folks would learn at the NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). But, not as evidenced by the report in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine detailing the lack of efficacy of saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) extract in the treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy.
Yet another well-designed double-blind,…
denialism | July 30, 2007
A lot of people are talking about a new study showing a 40% increase risk of "psychosis", which I first heard news of in this story, from the Daily Mail:
A single joint of cannabis raises the risk of schizophrenia by more than 40 percent, a disturbing study warns.
The Government-commissioned report has also found that taking the drug regularly more than doubles the risk of serious mental illness.
Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness, the Lancet reports.
Something sounds a little off. Let's see what this Lancet…
oracknows | July 27, 2007
This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of Death should in fact be a cat, although, oddly enough, not a black cat:
Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, though morbid talent - predicting when patients will die.
When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours.
Such is Oscar's apparent accuracy - 25 consecutive cases so far…
revere | July 26, 2007You can't count on defenders of US health care for much, but you can always count on them to allege that in Canada and other "socialized health care" systems there are long waits for elective surgery. Wait times for a hip replacement in Canada have been alleged as long as 6 months, although I don't know if that is generally true or not. Whatever the wait times, most Canadians seem satisfied. From Statistics Canada:
The results for 2005 indicate that waiting for care remains the number one barrier for those having difficulties accessing care. Median waiting times for all specialized services…
oracknows | July 26, 2007Until the other day, it had been a long time since I had indulged my interest in World War II history. Not surprisingly, a certain anti-Semitic troll appeared out of the woodwork, thus amazing me with persistence, given that it's been at least two months since I've even mentioned the topic. That's a long time to have to wait for an opportunity to leap into the comments here and rail against "Jews" and Zionists while I've been dishing out the usual commentary on alternative medicine, science, clinical trials,
Since he/she/it's here again, I thought I'd mention a story that's cropped up over…
neurophilosophy | July 24, 2007
LOBOTOMY (from the Greek lobos, meaning lobes of the brain, and tomos, meaning cut) is a psychosurgical procedure in which the connections the prefrontal cortex and underlying structures are severed, or the frontal cortical tissue is destroyed, the theory being that this leads to the uncoupling of the brain's emotional centres and the seat of intellect (in the subcortical structures and the frontal cortex, respectively).
The lobotomy was first performed on humans in the 1890s. About half a century later, it was being touted by some as a miracle cure for mental illness, and its use became…
mikethemadbiologist | July 24, 2007A colleague has told me about some interesting data that people are far less likely to request an antibiotic for a chest cold than for bronchitis even though they're the same thing. With that in mind, here's something from the archives.
One cause of the evolution of antibiotic resistance is the inappropriate use of antibiotics in clinical practice. A recent study concluded that antibiotic therapy did not result in eliminate bronchitis any faster than not using the antibiotic:
A study found that bronchitis sufferers who are otherwise healthy do not get better any faster by taking antibiotics…
sciencetolife | July 23, 2007
Caution for bungee jumping enthusiasts!
The July "Images in Clinical Medicine" section of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) presents a 25-year-old patient who went bungee jumping and developed a hemorrhage in the left eye. The image was contributed by Atul K. Jain, M.D. and Michael Gaynon, M.D. of Stanford University.
Here is an explanation taken directly from NEJM:
A 25-year-old woman with no clinically significant medical history and with normal coagulation and hematologic studies went bungee jumping from a vertical height of 150 ft (45.7 m). Immediately afterward, she…
scientificactivist | July 22, 2007Today's New York Times includes a profile of drug safety advocate Dr. Steven E. Nissen by medical business writer Stephanie Saul:
His questioning of the safety of the Avandia diabetes medication in late May, for example, prompted a federal safety alert and led to a sales decline of about 30 percent for the drug, which brought in $3.2 billion for GlaxoSmithKline last year. Now, with a federal panel soon to decide whether it can remain on the market, Avandia's future is uncertain.
The drug is the latest example of why Dr. Nissen, 58, whose day job is chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the…
j7uy5 | July 21, 2007The
href="http://www.sanofi-aventis.us/live/us/en/index.jsp">Sanofi-Aventis
obesity pill,
rel="tag">rimonabant, will be labeled with
stronger warnings as a result of
href="http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=11864">a review
by The European
Medicines Agency (EMEA).
According to the
href="http://www.emea.europa.eu/humandocs/PDFs/EPAR/acomplia/32982607en.pdf">EMEA
press release on Acomplia (31 KB PDF file):
The
European Medicines Agency (EMEA) today recommended contraindicating
Acomplia (rimonabant) from sanofi-aventis, in patients with ongoing
major…
oracknows | July 20, 2007It sure took the FDA long enough, nearly five months, but it finally acted. It finally shut Jim Tassano down, as this notice on TheDCASite.com states:
Two agents from the FDA visited us on Tuesday,July 17, 2007 and ordered that we stop making and selling DCA. Unfortunately, the site www.buydca.com will be shut down immediately.
It is against US government law to sell substances with the suggestion that they are cancer treatments unless they are approved by the FDA.
DCA can still be obtained from pharmacies with a prescription and from chemical companies.
To keep you informed and abreast of…