Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Back and Forth Again
January 24, 2006 2:17 PM
I didn’t plan this. There’s yet another medical reversal in the headlines today, this one about hormone-replacement therapy for women beginning menopause. Millions of women stopped after a 2002 study, called the Women’s Health Initiative, said hormone replacement raised the risk of heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer and a host of other ills. Well, now there’s a paper in the Journal of Women’s Health, saying hormone replacement is probably a good thing—reducing the risk of heart disease by 30 percent—as long as you’re young enough actually to be going through menopause. Turns out the women in the first study were, on average, 63 years old, a decade or more past menopause. The second study used a different—younger—group of women. "It may help to untangle some of the confusion," said Dr. JoAnn Manson of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who worked on both studies. But there we go again. I can’t blame people for asking, "Are you sure this time?" =========== Diet Pill While we’re at it, you may have seen the stories yesterday about Xenical, the prescription weight-loss pill. An FDA advisory panel recommended allowing it to be sold, in a weaker form, over the counter. The unfortunate truth about Xenical is that while it helped people lose weight, it didn’t help a lot. Users lost perhaps five percent of their body weight; that’s a 200-lb. person losing ten pounds. If that’s all you get from the full-strength version, what will the diluted one do?
January 24, 2006 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (4)
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After today's news about the different results, don't you feel a little like the mythological character Sisyphus, who was condemned for all eternity to roll a boulder to a summit, and, approaching the summit, having the boulder roll back down the mountainside?
I also saw the WNT report on Xenical yesterday evening and wondered what the big deal was about, other than the additional profits for Glaxo- SmithKline.
Posted by: chuck | Jan 24, 2006 3:33:40 PM
I am a breast cancer survivor who keeps a blog, Rutabaga Stew, posting my personal experiences as a cancer patient and cancer survivor, featuring other cancer blogs and reporting on the latest scientific research-based studies. I have come to the conclusion that, when announcing the findings of any study, a detailed account of who is behind the study and who stands to profit both politically and financially needs to be considered. Framed in the right way, any hypothesis can be proven, in the way in which the researcher wants it to be proven.
Posted by: Dalene | Jan 24, 2006 9:48:48 PM
concussion, glass jaw prevention
www.mahercorlabs.com
ESPN the magazine tommorow
Posted by: mark | Feb 3, 2006 11:51:12 PM
why cant i walk into a any corporate book store, look through all the astronomy books and not find a single image with the orbit of the moon relative to the earth's orbit of the sun?
see for yourself- www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/nav.005008001005007002
is it that difficult to keep visual integrity with such low standards of understanding?
and just who are those publishers that underestimate
common sense?
Posted by: paul duhoffmann | Feb 8, 2006 1:05:22 PM
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