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A New Heart Disease Test That Could Save Your Life
A new test called high sensitivity CRP, catapulted into the headlines last week by a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, appears to be better than cholesterol at predicting the risk of heart attack and stroke. The test measures levels of an inflammatory substance, C-reactive protein that plays a role in cardiovascular disease….
No Drug Cure in Sight for Obesity
Three very fat Turkish people, all cousins, got very lucky this year, when they spent a few months in Los Angeles getting injections of leptin, the “satiety” hormone discovered in 1994 and immediately hailed as the long-awaited magic bullet to cure obesity. The three, a 27-year old man who weighed 312 pounds, a 35-year old…
Oral Cancer Poses Growing Threat
Patrice Di Carlo’s ordeal with oral cancer just might be enough to scare anyone who still chews tobacco or smokes and drinks heavily out of denial forever.Di Carlo, 49, a former smoker who lives in Malden and works as a legal secretary at the Boston lawfirm, Ropes and Gray, discovered what she thought was a…
Women and Stress
Do men and women handle stress differently? Or, to put it more provocatively, do women have a built-in hormonal advantage when it comes to dealing with chronic stress? That’s the (highly loaded) question at the heart of a fascinating body of research that’s got the Net humming, with enthusiastic emails flying from woman to woman….
When Drinking Too Much Water Means Disaster
Kelly Hall, 34, was in fantastic shape, routinely biking 100 to 200 miles a week in preparation for last year’s AIDS Ride from Boston to New York. Usually, she trained with other riders, who made it a point to take food and hydration breaks. But one day last June, Hall, a strategic planner at Partners Community…
SOME Sun is Good For You
Remember how good it used to feel, hanging out in the sun, letting your face acquire that nice, ruddy glow? Then came all those depressing public health messages telling us that the sun was dangerous, that we should feel guilty about even the slightest tan. Well, fellow sun worshipers, the sad truth is that as…
Coated Stents Show Huge Promise
Vice President Dick Cheney made the problem famous, but thousands of Americans each year need a new round of treatment to fix a heart problem they thought was already solved. The setback generally goes something like this: Having experienced a chest pain or heart attack, the patient undergoes a procedure to open up the clogged…
New Drug for Narcolepsy
Mary Rourke, a 55-year old teacher from Salem, N.H., used to nod off all the time as a child, but people just shrugged and said, “Oh, she must be very tired,” she recalls. Then, as an adult, she began having attacks in which her muscles would lose tone and she’d fall- every time she laughed…
Sentinel Node Biopsy – Ready for Prime Time?
Anna Coppinger, 61, a school cafeteria worker from Hingham, lies waiting outside the operating room at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, chatting with her husband and daughters – and wincing whenever she jostled the needle that had been placed in her left breast several hours earlier to guide surgeons to the exact spot where her tumor…
Better Ways to Scan the Colon
“We Cater to Cowards,” proclaims the cheery little sign at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where countless cowards (including this one) go for what may well be everyone’s least favorite test: colon cancer screening.It’s no secret why people stay away in droves from such things. To detect cancer, or the small growths called polyps that…
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