Health & fitness - latest

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration directed Hope Food Supply Inc., a Pasadena, Texas, food processing company, to shut down and immediately recall all products manufactured from its Texas facility since 2007.

Two occasional HCR bloggers are co-authors of an article published this week:

Why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) Should Be Abandoned
Kimball C.

Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; Wallace I. Sampson, MD
Medscape J Med. 2008;10(5):115.

©2008 Medscape
Posted 05/13/2008

The HISTalk site, a vendor-supported health IT "gossip" site, has a lower standard for its reader comments than more responsible healthcare blogs and websites such as HCRenewal, allowing anonymous ad hominem and other forms of hysterical or irrational argumentation to be posted without refutation.

In a way, this is good, because such posts may reveal sentiments held by a number of people but rarely expressed, except in an anonymous forum.

A combination of two new-generation cancer drugs modestly delayed the time it took for cancer to worsen in a study of 300 women with very advanced disease who had stopped responding to other treatments....

Vitamin D deficiency is common among women diagnosed with breast cancer, and it may raise the risk of cancer spread and death, researchers report.

The physician in charge of the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

A federal judge rejected yesterday a proposed agreement between the District and the Justice Department that would have established programs and deadlines intended to improve health care for the developmentally disabled in the city's group homes.

(The Wistar Institute) Wistar Institute scientists have developed a new type of enzyme inhibitor capable of blocking a biochemical pathway that plays a key role in cancer development.

Based on studies in human melanoma cells, the research paves the way for developing new ways to treat cancer by dampening overactive enzyme activity that leads to uncontrolled tumor growth.

The study shows how small-molecule inhibitors can be designed to target a family of signaling proteins, called phosphatidyl-inositol-3-kinases, or PI3Ks.

(University of Rochester Medical Center) In the wake of divorce, illness, violence and other problems that can unsettle homes, countless young children are liable to experience temporary separations from one or both parents before packing their knapsacks for kindergarten.

Published in the May/June issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics, a new, community-wide study from Rochester, New York, warns that such kids are at increased risk for learning difficulties.

(University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center) Gefitinib, the once-promising drug formerly approved as a second line treatment for lung cancer, also known as Iressa, enhanced the effectiveness of hormonal therapy for the treatment of specific types of metastatic breast cancer, according to a Phase II clinical trial led by researchers at The University of Texas M.

D. Anderson Cancer Center.