October 27th, 2011 by HarvardHealth in Research
Tags: Blood Pressure, Daytime, Drugs, Heart Attack, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Kidney, Kidney Disease, Medical Research, Medications, Morning, Night, Pills, Stroke, Study, Time Of Day, Timing
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“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”
That oft-quoted passage doesn’t apply just to rending and sewing, weeping and laughing, or gathering stones together. Your body has its own set of “seasons,” many of them following the turn of a complete day. Taking some medications at specific times of the day can help them work better. A new study suggests that blood pressure drugs taken at night might improve blood pressure and prevent more heart attacks and strokes than taking the same medications during the day.
Spanish researchers tested Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
October 26th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Research
Tags: Cancer, Cervical, Disappointment, Effectiveness, False Positives, JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, Predictive Value, Prostate, PSA, Research, Screening, Study, Tests, Treatment, Ultrasounds
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If you want to create an outcry of indignation, just inform people that certain screening tests are of no value and do not increase time on this earth. People love the idea that if they do all the right things and get all the medical tests at the right time, they can prevent disease ( ….uh…no, tests don’t prevent anything) or catch cancer early and cure it.
The furor over the lack of benefit for men of the screening Prostate Specific Antigen test (PSA) is still being heard. It seems everyone knows someone who was “saved” by getting a PSA and don’t try to tell me there is evidence to suggest otherwise, dammit!
There is a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
October 26th, 2011 by PeterWehrwein in Research
Tags: Americans, Anti-depressant, Celexa, Depression, Drugs, Effexor, Harvard, Health, Increase, Mental Health, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, NHANES, Overuse, Paxil, Prozac, Psychiatry, Psychology, Undertreated, Women, Zoloft
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Remember when the best-selling book Listening to Prozac came out almost 20 years ago?
Now Americans aren’t just reading about Prozac. They are taking it and other antidepressants (Celexa, Effexor, Paxil, Zoloft, to name just a few) in astounding numbers.
According to a report released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults (people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008.
The federal government’s health statisticians figure that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
October 24th, 2011 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Research
Tags: abstinence, BCP, Billings Ovulation Method, Birth Control Pills, Cancer, Cervical, Condoms, Effectiveness, Failure Rate, Family Planning, IARC, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Oral Contraceptives, Ovarian, Pharmaceuticals, Pregnancy Prevention, Prevention
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From a message posted on Facebook:
Is the pill safe? The International Agency for Research on Cancer in a 2007 study made by 21 scientists reported that the pill causes cancer, giving it the highest level of carcinogenicity, the same as cigarettes and asbestos. It also causes stroke, and significantly increases the risk of heart attacks. Several scientific journals have stated that the natural way of regulating births through the Billings Ovulation Method has no side-effects, and is 99.5 % effective.
The Billings Ovulation Method (BOM) is a method of natural family planning where women are taught to recognize when they have ovulated by examining their cervical mucus, allowing them to avoid intercourse during fertile periods or conversely, to have intercourse during fertile periods when pregnancy is desired. We used to call people who used the rhythm method “parents,” but BOM is more reliable than older abstinence methods.
I’m a big fan of oral contraceptives. They contributed to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
October 23rd, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
Tags: Disease Rates, Epidemiology, Flu, H1N1, Penn State University, PLoS Computational Biology, Public Health, Public Opinion, Social Media, Tweets, Twitter, Vaccines
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A researcher has used social media to track attitudes about vaccination and how they correlate with vaccination rates, in the process creating a novel model to track a variety of disease states.
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that social networking can be used to track diseases and other natural disasters that affect public health. Earlier this year, researchers used Twitter to track rapidly-evolving public sentiment about H1N1 influenza, and found that tweets correlated with actual disease activity. Before that, researchers analyzed how Twitter was used to disseminate information (and misinformation) about flu trends.
In the latest study, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
