Almost 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke every year. Strokes are the third most common cause of death in the US, and are frequently disabling to those who survive. These sobering numbers are despite the substantial improvement in recent decades in stroke prevention through the use of medications that lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
This week’s hubbub relates to carotid arteries, the large arteries in the neck that carry blood to the brain. But before we dig into the details we have to ...
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Alarms about Asthma Agents
(or, LABAs Relabeled)
Long acting beta agonists (LABAs) are a family of inhaled medicines used to control asthma symptoms. LABAs include the medicines in Serevent and Foradil. LABAs are also available in combination inhalers, Advair and Symbicort, which combine a LABA with an inhaled steroid.
Though LABAs dilate airways and improve airflow, they have long been associated with an increased risk of worsening asthma symptoms. It has previously been thought that using an inhaled steroid with a ...
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Gastric Banding is an Effective Option for Obese Teens
What’s my advice to my overweight patients? Eat less and exercise more. I give this advice every day, but following this advice is much harder than giving it. Overweight people frequently struggle with diet and exercise for years, sometimes successfully, sometimes regaining their previously lost weight.
And as we become more overweight as a nation, obesity is no longer just a problem for adults. Over 5 million adolescents are estimated to be obese in the US, which predicts bad things for th...
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Twelve Years Later, the Truth about Vaccines and Autism
Ideas have consequences. False ideas, especially popular false ideas, can cause harm. For example, the very popular false idea “corduroy pants and wide lapels are far out, man” made an entire nation ugly for about a decade. And some false ideas do even more harm than that.
In 1998 the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper authored by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that claimed to link autism to the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). The study looked at 12 children (that’...
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