So it’s been shown in several studies that patients who enroll in a study generally do better than patients with similar conditions who don’t participate in studies. This is especially true of cancer studies with a general consensus that patients in cancer trials live longer (6 months to a year on average) than patients who […]
An interesting study published in the British Journal of General Practice claims to have come up with a good new sign to diagnose a potential case of lung cancer. By analyzing nearly 30,000 records of British adults diagnosed with lung cancer over a period of 17 years, these researchers concluded that shortness of breath and […]
An Australian study that reviewed the lifetime risk of 5 cancers came up with a conclusion that is pretty controversial. This study suggested that roughly 24 % of all cancer diagnoses in men are what you would call “over-diagnosed” while 18 % of caners in women fall into the same category, at least according to […]
Full disclosure: I have psoriasis, although luckily, it’s been a pretty mild case. And the most probable reason that I have psoriasis is that I also have an auto-immune condition called celiac disease (CD) (I’ve known about my CD for over 50 years), and studies tell us that when you have one auto-immune disorder, you […]
A recent study presented at the American Heart Association annual meeting in Philadelphia came to what I would call a totally unsurprising conclusion, namely that someone who is at high risk for heart disease is also at high risk for cancer. And the reason I say this is unsurprising is that if I’ve learned anything […]
The good news is that several studies have shown that the rate of colo-rectal cancer (CRC) is falling among baby boomers and older seniors (yes, baby boomers, you are seniors, too, whether you like it or not). The bad news is that according to several international studies, the rate of CRC rates are up sharply […]
New drug out – huge hype – everyone should try it – and before too long, lots of reports about people for whom it didn’t work, or worse, people it actually harmed. That’s because absolutely nothing ever works in the real world as well as it did in studies (or in ads, right?). And the […]
Headline in the Daily Mail: Could receipts cause cancer? Scientists warn 90% of the papers doled out by shops ‘contain hormone-disrupting chemicals thought to be carcinogenic’. May I suggest that given what the average person has to deal with IRL that may raise their risk of cancer, this is not something that should keep anyone […]
In a recent study published in the journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers did something way more researchers should do. They set out to compare what happens in the real world (IRL) from a medical recommendation versus what happened in the study that gave birth to that recommendation. In this case they decided to look at […]
The main problem with so many medical studies – nearly all of them, in fact – is that no matter how hard the investigators try to even out differences among study participants- that’s the part where they always say, “We controlled for differences in income, smoking, diet, type of vehicle, favourite sports team, middle initial, […]