A lot of people who believe they have food allergies don’t. What’s worse, a lot of people who were told by their doctor they have food allergies don’t.
An article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association tried to review the existing literature on food allergies to standardize how food allergies are diagnosed. What the study found was an inconsistent jumble of unreliable test results and methods.
First, to clear up some of the confusion, we have to understand th...
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Zostavax is Safe, Effective, and Not Free
Varicella zoster virus (VZV) is the virus that causes chicken pox, usually a relatively minor childhood illness. Unlike other viruses that are cleared from our bodies after infection, VZV stays in our sensory nerve cells forever. Over the subsequent decades our immunity to VZV wanes. When our immunity falls too low, VZV can reactivate and cause shingles. Shingles is a painful blistering rash along the distribution of one sensory nerve. The rash resolves in a few weeks, but in some older pat...
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Vitamin E is Effective for Fatty Liver
My regular readers know my skepticism about vitamin supplements. I leap at the chance to bring you news that some vitamin has been tested for some disease and found useless. So for balance, I have to also report when a well-designed study finds that a vitamin actually helps something.
This week’s New England Journal of medicine published a study about the treatment of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). NASH, also known informally as fatty liver, is a condition in which fat is deposited in ...
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Your Food Is Pretty Safe, But it’s Not Getting Safer
In a world where journalism was free of hype the above headline would have been atop the many stories this week relating to a press release by the CDC about food-borne illness. The numbers are far less sensational than the headlines.
The CDC report reviewed statistics about food-borne illnesses in 2009. Overall there were 17,468 laboratory-confirmed food-borne infections in 2009. What the CDC press release doesn’t mention is that this number has stayed about the same for several years. (It ...
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Vitamin C and Vitamin E Do Not Prevent Eclampsia
A friend of mine recently asked me “Is regular soda or diet soda better for you?”
I tried to probe for details. “Are you talking about calories? Obviously, if you’re watching your weight or restricting carbohydrates, you should have the diet soda.”
“No, I don’t mean the calories.”
“Oh, you mean the concern that the citric acid might leach calcium out of your body?”
“No. I just mean overall, are they good or bad for you?”
This precipitated an important revelation that had been percolating...
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Pitfalls in Prostate Cancer Prevention
My regular readers know the controversies and challenges posed by prostate cancer. It is very common. Over half the men who die at advanced age of other causes will have prostate cancer on autopsy. It is very slow. From the time that prostate cancer is detectable on biopsy to the time that it causes symptoms or shortens life can be as long as a decade. It is not very lethal. Because it tends to affect older men, most men diagnosed with it tend to die of other causes. Though it does kill t...
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Erroneous Evidence about Enough Exercise
This week, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association received a lot of undeserved media attention. The study wanted to examine the relationship between exercise and long-term weight changes among women who were eating a normal diet (i.e. not dieting). It followed for over a decade 34,000 women who were 45 years old or older and correlated their self-reported physical activity and body weight.
The study found that on average, the women gained about 6 lb during...
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Are Bisphosphonates to Blame for Baffling Bone Breaks?
This week ABC World News aired a story about a possible side effect of osteoporosis medications. The family of medications involved in this story is called bisphosphonates and includes Fosamax, Actonel and Boniva. These medications have been proven to prevent fractures in patients with osteoporosis (very low bone density). Apparently, some doctors had noticed the occurrence of an unusual kind of fracture, a break in the thigh bone between the hip and the knee, in some women who had been takin...
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Carotid Stenting Still Controversial
Almost 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke every year. Strokes are the third most common cause of death in the US, and are frequently disabling to those who survive. These sobering numbers are despite the substantial improvement in recent decades in stroke prevention through the use of medications that lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
This week’s hubbub relates to carotid arteries, the large arteries in the neck that carry blood to the brain. But before we dig into the details we have to ...
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Alarms about Asthma Agents
(or, LABAs Relabeled)
Long acting beta agonists (LABAs) are a family of inhaled medicines used to control asthma symptoms. LABAs include the medicines in Serevent and Foradil. LABAs are also available in combination inhalers, Advair and Symbicort, which combine a LABA with an inhaled steroid.
Though LABAs dilate airways and improve airflow, they have long been associated with an increased risk of worsening asthma symptoms. It has previously been thought that using an inhaled steroid with a ...
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