The Washington Post reports that the colonoscopy is much better at detecting colorectal cancer on the left side of the colon than the right.

The procedure does a good job of detecting early signs of disease on the left side of the colon, or large intestine, but is not as effective at spotting potential problems of the right side of the organ. This means a colonoscopy’s success at preventing colorectal cancer deaths seems to lie with its ability to uncover so-called “left-sided” problems.



“We did find that colonoscopies are effective — that’s the good news. It’s still one of the best screening tests for any cancer that we have,” said study author Dr. Nancy Baxter, a colorectal surgeon with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.



“But it’s not perfect,” she added. “And it does not appear to be as effective in picking up growths on the right side of the colon as it is in detecting them on the left side.”



The findings are published online Dec. 16 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That’s disturbing because colon cancer can often be a killer if it isn’t diagnosed early. A doctor gave one reason for the discrepancy, explaining that polyps tend to grow flatter on the right side of the colon. Doctors say it is still a great test that saves lives but patients really need a colon cancer test that is both more thorough and less invasive. The ultimate solution might be miniature robots that examine your colon but that’s still a solution for the future and not available today.



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The Star Tribune did a fine job digging, finding and disclosing that Dean Deborah Powell of the University of Minnesota medical school “appointed as cochair of the task force (on med school conflict of interest policy) a man who’d just come off three years of sanctions for his own serious conflict-of-interest violations involving a private company he owned.” As a Strib editorial correctly stated: “Had it not been for the newspaper story, made possible by documents obtained through the state’s open records laws, neither the public nor some members of the panel would have known of Leo Furcht’s past.”

Blogger Bill Gleason posted the Strib article and has commented on the events.

Blogger Margaret Soltan “proposes we call this the Hannibal Lecter Executive Strategy. Not only was Lecter, as an object of FBI interest, experienced in the Bureau’s flaws. As someone who killed and ate people, Lecter had an insider’s understanding of other people who kill and eat people.”

I was asked by the dean to serve on that task force.

I never thought I would have to poll fellow task force members about their own past or present conflicts of interest, so I didn’t.

No one ever told task force members – at least not me – about the history of Furcht and Powell. Maybe everyone else knew. But I was the outsider on this task force – the journalism guy from across the street.

I am disappointed and feel misled. I’m not sure that knowing these details up front would have changed anything about the task force report. But I do know I’d feel a lot better about the process had there been full transparency and disclosure up front – which is at the core of conflict of interest policies.

The Washington Post reports that a new five-year study has found that more sleep can reduce calcium deposits in people’s arteries. Specifically, the study found that people getting one extra hour of sleep each night were less likely to have “artery-stiffening calcium deposits.” The researchers do not know why there is a link between more sleep reduced calcium deposits but they do have theories involving cortisol and reduced blood pressure.

After adjusting for lots of potential risk factors, such as sex, race, and smoking habits, the researchers found that one more hour of sleep a night decreased the risk of calcification by a third. That’s about as much as a 16.5-point reduction in blood pressure, the researchers said.



“Nothing came out of the study as appearing to explain the association,” Lauderdale said. But she believes that there are three possible explanations.



One is that another factor, such as socioeconomic status, was the connection here. A second is that a stress-related hormone, cortisol, which has been tied to decreased sleep and increased calcification, is the link.



“Finally, sleep is related to blood pressure, and that is a coronary artery disease risk factor,” Lauderdale said. “It’s possible that for people who were sleeping more, their 24-hour blood pressure was lower than their daytime blood pressure.”

It’s already been proven that being sleep deprived can be unhealthy so it is best to try to get a full night’s sleep. It’s disturbing news for those who are unable to get a full night’s sleep because of work or health issues. It’s also confusing because no one knows exactly what a full night’s sleep is and the hours of sleep people need varies in individuals. For more on how much sleep you really need read this article from Time that talks about a study that tried to answer this question.



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Levels of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in China are nearly twice the global average. Nationwide research reported in the open access journal BMC Infectious Diseases has shown that almost 10% of Chinese TB cases are resistant to the most effective first-line drugs. Susan van den Hof, from the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation in The Netherlands is one of the authors on a Chinese study into the prevalence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). She said, “In order to obtain insight into the prevalence and distribution of resistance, China has joined the global project on anti-tuberculosis drug resistance surveillance, and investigated drug resistance in ten provinces between 1996 and 2004.”…….

Children who are overweight or obese are over two and a half times more likely to suffer injuries to their upper and lower extremities following a motor vehicle crash compared with normal weight children, as per a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. Overweight and obese children were overall more likely to experience injury to any body part following a crash; however this difference was not statistically significant. The results are available online at the website of the journal Injury Prevention and reported in the December print edition of the journal……..

Presidential scholars have written volumes trying to understand the presidential mind. How can anyone juggle so many complicated decisions? Do those seeking office have a unique approach to decision making? Studies have suggested that power changes not only a person’s responsibilities, but also the way they think. Now, a new study in the recent issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that having power may lead people to automatically think in a way that makes complex decision-making easier……..

When faced with a difficult decision, we try to come up with the best choice by carefully considering all of the options, maybe even resorting to lists and lots of sleepless nights. So it may be surprising that recent studies have suggested that the best way to deal with complex decisions is to not think about them at all-that unconscious thought will help us make the best choices. Eventhough this may seem like an appealing strategy, new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, cautions that there are limitations in the efficacy of unconscious thought making the best decisions……..

Childhood sexual abuse victims with a strong religious upbringing often report feeling terrible guilt about their assault, which doesn’t surprise Jean-Guy Nadon. A professor of theology and religious sciences at the Universit de Montral, Nadon has conducted dozens of interviews with women who were sexually abused as children and found the impact of religious beliefs can produce varying reactions……..

Typically, tobacco companies market harm-reduction cigarettes as being safer than traditional “full-flavored” brands, leading a number of smokers to conclude that the use of harm-reduction brands lowers their exposure to toxicants. But a UC Riverside study now shows that smoke from these “light” or “low-yield” harm-reduction cigarettes retains toxicity and that this toxicity can affect prenatal development……..

A commentary by Adriane Fugh-Berman and Susanna J Dodgson in Open Medicine today is about ghostwriting of drug-related journal articles and publication planning – “the finely calibrated process by which clinical trials, commentaries and other articles supporting the efficacy of particular products are written and released into the biomedical literature. This article describes how industry uses publication planning to sway medical and public opinion through the medium of medical journals.”

From the conclusion:

Publication planning, as it is currently practised by pharmaceutical companies, can undermine the medical literature. Industry control over the timing, content and authorship of studies and opinion pieces including reviews and commentaries distorts medical discourse. That academic health professionals (physicians, nurses, pharmacists) lend their names to articles to which they may have contributed nothing is ironic, considering that such behaviour by students in the same academic institutions would be considered plagiarism.