Tag Archive | epidemiology
Harold Pollack on the stalled HIV prevention fight
Harold Pollack wrote an editorial in the Washington Post last week on the stalled HIV prevention fight in the US.
LabBook October 19, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. LAST […]
Mercy, Mercy, MRSA
In her 2010 book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, author and self-proclaimed “disease geek” Maryn McKenna charted the steady advance of a treatment-resistant organism which she referred to as a “crisis in many dimensions.” MRSA illustrates “failures of science, failures of the marketplace, and failures of support for research and innovation,” McKenna wrote. Since […]
GW-As: The Toxicity Risk in the Genes
By Rob Mitchum Arsenic is a deadly toxin, but it’s not one dose fits all. Two people exposed to the same level of the chemical can have entirely different responses, with Patient A developing the skin lesions, cancers, and respiratory conditions that are a hallmark of arsenic toxicity, while Patient B is entirely unaffected. Currently, […]
Thinking Outside the Black Box on Antidepressants
By Rob Mitchum In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration placed their equivalent of a scarlet letter on the antidepressant fluoxetine. Acting on the compiled results of several clinical trials, the FDA affixed its foreboding “black box warning” on to the drug best known as Prozac, preaching caution about increased suicide risk in children and […]
Can a KISS Predict Breast Cancer?
The most common cause of death from breast cancer is not the primary tumor, but metastatic disease, when the cancer travels and takes root in the brain. About 1 in 5 women with metastatic breast cancer will contract a brain lesion, and median survival for those patients is less than a year after diagnosis. Yet […]
Lonely Hearts, Disrupted Sleep
Loneliness has had a tough run of late, with a growing body of research blaming it for everything from high blood pressure to heart disease to depression and cognitive decline. The research group of John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, has been among the leaders […]
A $5 Billion Study Takes Its Baby Steps
Being a parent these days is anxious business, with an onslaught of news reports telling you what might be good or bad for your child’s health and development. In many cases, these claims are based on scientific evidence that is preliminary at best, studied only in small subject pools or retrospectively. To comprehensively confirm a […]
The Real Danger of Cell Phones and Cancer
When the media fixates on a medical topic, doctors know that a flurry of patient questions will inevitably follow. So it helps to be prepared with responses to hot-button questions, such as those surrounding the recent resurgence of the potential link between cell phones and brain cancer. Inspired by the World Health Organization moving the […]
Using Google to Hunt for MRSA and “mersa”
Most people turn to Google to search for news on Justin Bieber, baseball scores, and who got kicked off Top Chef last night. But users of the search engine also turn to Google for medical advice, typing in symptoms and conditions as a sort of pre-screening tool before making the call to the doctor’s office. […]
