Public Health

A new blood test developed by ImmusanT in Boston and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute can rapidly and accurately diagnose celiac disease without the need for prolonged gluten exposure, according to a preliminary result with 48 participants. The new diagnostic test gave a result within 24 hours and the preliminary findings indicated it could accurately detect celiac disease. Larger studies will be needed to verify the results. Celiac disease is caused by an abnormal immune (T cell) reaction to gluten in the diet, leading to damage to the small intestine. It can cause digestive symptoms such…

Though the War on Drugs has been a complete failure, and led to making poor people poorer and the rich in that market richer, scholars are touting the War on Cigarettes as a complete success - 8 million lives saved, they estimate. How do you estimate? You create a numerical model to show what might have happened if there had been no action, in this case who died younger than they might have if there had been no warning labels on cigarettes. Obviously that's not science - it's not possible to know who gave up smoking due to warning labels - but the scholars writing in the Journal of the…

In the last few years it became popular to sell health books blaming fructose for obesity and, more recently, to blame all sugars. Pancake syrup bottle today highlight that they have no high fructose corn syrup on giant labels, while the first ingredient is still corn syrup - which is still fructose, just in random rather than precise amounts. A new study found that fructose does not have any impact on an emerging marker for the risk of cardiovascular disease known as postprandial triglycerides - beyond the general impact of eating a lot of calories, anyway, but that applies to all foods.…

There is a national consensus among policy makers and educators that residents should factor the cost of care into decision making - but doctors and those who teach them are not buying in. In a culture of defensive medicine and unlimited malpractice lawsuits, over-testing is common. And there have been decades of stories and television programs stating that doctors should decide how to treat patients, not insurance companies or hospital management.  Of the nearly $3 trillion a year spent on health care costs,  30 percent - over $750 billion annually - is considered wasted care…

Endocrinologists are warning us in a paper for an upcoming issue of the journal Endocrinology that some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing - fracking - can disrupt the body's hormones.  Of course, that also applied to chemicals in everything you ate at Thanksgiving dinner. Lesson: Don't drink endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Also, don't touch numerous manufactured products, air, water and soil.  Endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been linked to infertility, cancer and birth defects. "More than 700 chemicals are used in the fracking process, and many of them…

It seems like common sense to want to avoid foodborne illnesses but the naturalistic fallacy regarding food has extended to milk - with claims that raw milk somehow wards off disease and is better for you. While no one should drink it if they aren't absolutely sure how it was produced, like cigarettes, raw milk should especially be avoided by pregnant woman and kids. A new policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics in Pediatrics written by Yvonne Maldonado, MD, takes the same position as the American Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the…

Short term over-eating is no problem - just don't make a habit of it and you will be fine, according to a paper in The Journal of Physiology and thousands of years of common sense. Some studies have said that even a few days of excess calorie intake, where you consume more calories than you burn, brings detrimental health impacts, but the new paper found that a daily bout of exercise generates vast physiological benefits even when you consume thousands of calories more than you are burning. Exercise clearly does a lot more than simply reduce the energy surplus.  James Betts from The…

This month, 23andMe, the most prominent genetic home testing company, stopped offering anything more than ancestry results due to a warning by the FDA that its marketing claims about the value of their health-related reports were not backed by evidence regarding their accuracy. The FDA was concerned that inaccurate results, including false positives or negatives, could lead some customers to seek treatment for diseases they don't actually have, or to begin to medicate improperly, which has potentially fatal results, A new analysis backs up that concern. It found that many relatives of…

Some papers say that meditation can have beneficial health effects, and that makes sense, but a new paper claiming evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of mindfulness meditation is likely the first of its kind. The scholars investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of…

In recent times, olive oil became one of the lowest health fads. Its popularity grew to such an extent that it became difficult to know if you were even buying olive oil, much less the extra virgin kind it might say on the label. You may have been better off with the vegetable oil that might have been in it, as it turns out.  Corn oil significantly reduces cholesterol with more favorable changes in total cholesterol (TC) and LDL-C than extra virgin olive oil, according to a new paper presented today at the American Society for Nutrition's Advances&Controversies in Clinical Nutrition…