I suppose that I receive about half a dozen autoanalyser reports of serum phosphorus levels from my patients every day, but I can’t remember ever having made a clinical decision based on them. I don’t think this paper from Framingham will change that: it shows that higher serum phosphorus is associated with higher risk for vascular and renal disease in the community, but the hazard ratio in the highest quartile is 1.55.

In Shanghai, only 5% of women between the ages of 40 and 70 are obese by BMI criteria (>30). But this study of 73,000 non-smoking women there found that abdominal adiposity (the waist-hip ratio) was more closely related to overall mortality, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Another reminder to forget the scales and get out the tape measure.

Could calcium and vitamin D supplementation help to prevent obesity in postmenopausal women? Only if you count 0.13 kg as a significant weight difference.

More evidence that patients with acute myocardial infarction do better in hospitals with a capacity for immediate percutaneous coronary intervention. In this French study, these hospitals also tended to send MI patients home on the right drugs, and the overall mortality difference at one year was about 25%.

Believe it or not, “the natural history of type 2 diabetes in the elderly has not been previously described in a national longitudinal sample