Lung
Linkage 8/27: Chronic Fatigue & Oil Spill Messiness
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is known as a “diagnosis of exclusion,” a disease with non-specific symptoms that can only be considered when all other reasonable diseases have been ruled out. Because there are no known proven causes of CFS, it’s impossible to design a test for the disease, and there is no defined treatment strategy. […]
Linkage 8/20: A New Face for Athlete Concussions
The link between sports-related concussions and severe brain injury has been percolating in the press for several years now, due mostly to the tireless reporting of Alan Schwarz at the New York Times. But until this week, the research was lacking a prominent face, with most of those found to have suffered from early dementia […]
Fighting Air Pollution…Indoors
Since the middle of the 20th century, fighting air pollution has been a primary goal of the growing environmental movement in the United States and around the world. Encounters with smog and toxic gases inspired waves of public anger and protest that led to Clean Air Acts being passed in several countries and a steady […]
Teaching Chicago How to Breathe Easier
In 2008, a twenty-year-old environmental treaty had a dramatic impact upon the care of asthma in the United States. Due to the 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the ozone-depleting propellents once found in hair spray and other aerosol-can products, the inhalers used by millions of asthmatics underwent a mandatory switch to a CFC-free version. Unfortunately, […]
ASCO 2010: Two Productive Singles
In the New Yorker last month, Malcolm Gladwell wrote elegantly about the euphoria and frustration of cancer drug discovery. Tracing in parallel the path of a modern biotechnology company and a team of doctors in the 1950′s, Gladwell illustrated the unexpected twists and turns that mark every new drug’s journey from laboratory to clinic, in […]
Should Kidneys Be for Sale?
Please welcome Ankur Thakkar, who works in our Publications Department, with this fine post on the controversy over paid compensation for organ donation. The economic crisis over the last three years caused many Americans to change their lifestyles to make ends meet. They turned to second jobs, second mortgages and tighter budgets. They sold the […]
The Promise of a Near-Miss
A critical step in the design of any clinical trial is picking the right primary endpoint, the result that will usually make or break the study. That’s more difficult than it sounds – one’s hope is to cure a disease or relieve a patient’s symptoms, but choosing the best specific measure for those goals is […]
