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dr art 2 days ago
The US Task Force on Protective Services has just come out with new recommendations (published in The Annals of Internal Medicine) about breast cancer screening, and those guidelines have raised a huge storm of protest down south. According to these new proposed guidelines (which many, much more politicized organizations have disavowed, by the way): average and low-risk women between the ages of 40 and 50, who up to now had been advised to get annual mammogram screening, are now advised that they don’t need mammogram screening at all; women between 50 and 74 are advised to get mammogram screening only every 2 years as opposed to every year previously; women over 74 have been told that there is just not enough evidence to tell them what to do, and all women are ...
dr art 12 days ago
With the constant media focus on H1N1, an unintended consequence is that lots of other important heath news has been over-looked, information that will actually impact way more people in a much more significant fashion than H1N1 will. Tae for example, a recent study about ASA in the journal, Drugs and Therapeutics Bulletin. Despite all the contradictory evidence out there about whether for an average-risk person it’s worth taking ASA or not, millions of people are doing exactly because some experts still tout it loudly (for example, apparently Dr Oz says it’s a good thing to do and hey, if an expert on Oprah promotes it, it must be the right way to go), and besides, ASA is so prevalent, most people figure, then it must be safe, especially in the small amounts that people usually use for heart and stroke prevention. But according to this study, for anyone who isn’t at high-risk for a heart attack or stroke, ASA’s heart-prevention effect is 1) not that ...
dr art 18 days ago
Interesting H1N1 study from California, where they’ve had a pretty severe time of it – both now and when the H1N1 pandemic first hit last spring and summer. And in this analysis of just under 1100 patients admitted to hospital with H1N1 infections – that is, the most severely ill flu patients – they came up with two very interesting findings. First, in this analysis, obesity emerged – as it has in several previous studies – as a major risk factor for death with H1N1. Interestingly, in the past, obesity does not seem to have been a major risk factor for people infected with seasonal flu viruses. Also, these researchers found that although the elderly are less likely to develop an H1N1 infection in the first place, if the elderly get sick enough to be admitted with H1N1, they do much worse than younger people; that is, the death rate for severely ill elderly people infected with H1N1 is much higher than the death rate for severely ill middle-aged people. ...
dr art 23 days ago
If you’re pregnant, and you’re unsure, as nearly all pregnant women about what to do about the H1N1 vaccine, if you can even get the vaccine, of course, you might be interested to k now that an article published online in the journal, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, concluded that the risks from an H1N1 infection are much greater – both to the pregnant woman and to the baby she is carrying – than any potential – and largely unproven – risks from an H1N1 vaccine. In fact, the bottom line for these authors - who reviewed the experiences from 3 past flu pandemics - is that pregnant women are the HIGHEST risk group for H1N1 infections, and thus have the most to benefit from the vaccine.
dr art 23 days ago
Amidst all the gloom about not having enough H1N1 vaccine to satisfy all those who want to get it, here is a bit of heartening news: a small study from the US has shown that people who take statin drugs (those drugs to lower LDL levels, such as – sorry, trade names here because those are the most familiar to most people - Lipotor, Zocor, Crestor, and others ) have a significantly lower risk (about half) of dying from a severe case of H1N1 compared to people not on statins. No one knows the reason, of course, but statins are known to have a pretty potent anti-inflammatory effect (in fact, that’s probably an important part of the reason – along with their LDL-lowering effect – that they statins lower the heart attack risk in people who take them), and perhaps it’s that trait, namely, dampening down the severe and occasionally lethal inflammation that happens in rare cases of H1N1 infection – the so-called cytokine storm, that is responsible for their beneficial role in H1N1 ...
