What will your brain be like when you’re 73? Quite good, in all likelihood, and all the better if you keep it ACTIVE. The study with this name randomised elderly adults to no training or cognitive training consisting of sessions on reasoning, memory, and speed of thinking. (more…)
Now children, who can remember from last week’s lesson what is the best biomarker for death or cardiovascular events? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already. Well, never mind, in the general population you can tell just as much by working out the (expanded) Framingham score, according to this paper from the Framingham Offspring Study. (more…)
The Revd. Thomas Malthus no doubt used to celebrate Christmas by taking food off his starving parishioners’ tables, the quicker to help them die, and there is a school of economics which argues similarly - for depriving poor countries of life-saving medicines. (more…)
2195 How safe is paracetamol? This editorial highlights the study which showed that at therapeutic (4G/day) doses it can cause ALT elevation in some normal subjects (JAMA 2006;296:87), but I think we need to be a bit more worried about the evidence linking it with asthma exacerbations too. (more…)
When we suddenly started back-tracking about hormone replacement therapy a few years ago, ours were not the only red faces. Women continue to complain about hot flushes and the temptation is to send them in search of “phyto-oestrogens
The covers of two of this week’s journals feature works by Florentine artists who were patronised by the Medici family: Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Actually there are more artists at work on the BMJ cover, since the Sistine Chapel finger of God fell off the ceiling in the sixteenth century and was replaced by an unknown plasterer, and Malcolm Willett has added a tattoo of the BMA caduceus to Adam’s forearm. (more…)
This observational study takes a careful look at 44 630 men diagnosed with localised prostate cancer between the ages of 65 and 80. Over 30,000 of them had radical prostatectomy or radiotherapy, and in this group, mortality was 30% less than in those who were simply observed. (more…)
2513 Apart from the threat posed by a new strain of pandemic influenza, there’s the irksome fact of antigenic drift in existing subtypes of influenza A, which means that most circulating viruses are now dissimilar to those included in the vaccines. (more…)
Time was when a new report about the future of medical research in the UK would have had me all agog. But here comes the Cooksey Report written by a “distinguished venture capitalist
This week’s Lancet is a bit thin on articles of general interest but here is a superb book review by Michael Marmot about Julian Tudor Hart’s The political economy of health care. Worth getting to celebrate the birth in a stable of the main proponent of the idea that all human beings are of equal value. (more…)
