Wednesday, Dec 10th
Last update09:17:38 AM GMT
Health Glance
Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo. In fact, they may be worse.
Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill—a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.
Scientists say they have solved a crucial puzzle about the AIDS virus after 20 years of research and that their findings could lead to better treatments for HIV.
British and U.S. researchers said they had grown a crystal that enabled them to see the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV and is a target for some of the newest HIV medicines.
Americans love their shrimp. It's the most popular seafood in the country, but unfortunately much of the shrimp we eat are a cocktail of chemicals, harvested at the expense of one of the world's productive ecosystems. Worse, guidelines for finding some kind of "sustainable shrimp" are so far nonexistent.
Scientists have claimed people should remove old copper pipes from their homes or install special filters because the metal has been shown to build up in their bodies and cause serious health problems.
They have warned that tiny traces of copper from pipes, which are still installed in British homes, mix with tap water and are then consumed by people.
Oral drugs to treat multiple sclerosis could become available in 2011 after promising results in two trials.
Drug licences have been applied for and the MS Society said it was "great news" for people with MS - current treatments involve injections or infusions. The trials of the drugs each involved 1,000 people in over 18 countries, the New England Journal of Medicine says.
Thousands of women who attend routine breast screening checks are wrongly told that they have life-threatening cancer and undergo unnecessary treatment each year, researchers claim today.
An independent scientific review of the NHS breast screening programme accuses the Government of providing misleading propaganda to persuade women of the benefits of screening, without mentioning the drawbacks.
For heart disease patients, omega-3 fatty acids may protect against morbidity and mortality by slowing biological aging, researchers say.
Patients who had the highest omega-3 fatty acid blood levels also had telomeres that shortened at a significantly slower rate than patients with lower intake, Ramin Farzaneh-Far, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues reported in the Jan. 20 JAMA.
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