Salon.com > Katherine Harmon

A cough doesn’t mean you need antibiotics

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:02:00 +0000

No one wants a hacking cough for days or weeks on end. But research shows that it generally takes about 18 days to get over a standard cough-based illness. Most of us grow impatient after a week or so and head to the doctor to get a prescription. The problem with that recourse, however, is that antibiotics are usually useless against typical respiratory infections that cause coughs.

A new analysis shows that even though antibiotics might be ineffective against a lingering cough, the timing of their prescription might be fooling people into thinking that the medication worked. This pattern might increase the frequency of these unnecessary prescriptions, a hazardous practice that can increase drug resistance across many bacteria strains. The findings were published online January 14 in Annals of Family Medicine.

Driving drowsy is more dangerous than you’d think

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 23:54:00 +0000

Driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs is known to increase the chances of causing an accident. For instance, marijuana can impair drivers’ reaction time. But what about drowsiness? As many as a third of all fatal car crashes might involve fatigued drivers, according to research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

And a new study finds that driving while under the influence—of drowsiness—is exceedingly common.

More than one in 25 people report actually having fallen asleep behind the wheel at least once within the past month, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Unsurprisingly, drivers who are at risk of dozing are more likely to cause crashes that result in injuries or death than are alert drivers. “Drowsiness slows reaction time, makes drivers less attentive and impairs decision-making skills,” the report authors noted.

Are new doctors driving up health care expenses?

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Health care spending increases have slowed over the past couple years. Still, we are spending some $2.6 trillion—that’s trillion with a “T”—a year on health costs, which is a higher percentage of our GDP than any other developed country. And we don’t seem to be getting that much healthier. So economists and policy researchers are looking for ways to staunch the bleeding while ensuring that care remains good.

One group who can have a great influence on the overall cost of health care are the doctors—your primary care physician and your specialists. They are often the ones deciding how many tests and procedures to order and whether to follow evidence-based recommendations on the most effective options. Until now, little research had been done examining how much doctors differ in the costliness of their practice styles—just how much their work was costing insurers.

Study: Sleep loss could cause weight gain

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Getting seven to eight solid hours of sleep each night might seem an almost impossible luxury to many people. But not getting enough sleep is known to impair mental function and increase the risk for heart disease, among other ill effects. Accumulating evidence also suggests that even short-term, partial sleep deprivation could pave the way for weight gain and other negative metabolic consequences.

Cockroaches: Smarter than you think

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:48:00 +0000

Your everyday cockroach might not seem terribly intelligent. But new fossil evidence from 520 million years ago suggests that this insidious insect might have had some surprisingly smart early ancestors.

Cockroaches and other insects belong to a group called the arthropods, which arose some 540 million years ago. A new Chinese fossil is yielding new insights into how the arthropod brain evolved and shows that within the first 20 million years of the group’s emergence, the arthropod brain had already become surprisingly advanced. The new findings are based on a three-inch-long fossil arthropod known as Fuxianhuia protensa, found in what is now China’s Yunnan Province and were described online October 10 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

Can technology save us from obesity?

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:29:00 +0000

SAN ANTONIO, Texas—So much of our information from—and interaction with—the world is now mediated by computers, cell phones and tablets that health experts have been practically running themselves ragged trying to find ways to use these conduits to help people make healthier choices.

Great success stories have come out of parts of the developing world, where cell phones have been used to improve maternal and infant care and help people adhere to medication guidelines. But in the U.S., attempts using mobile and online technology to tackle basic health problems, such as obesity, have largely been underwhelming, especially among the tech-savvy younger set.

“Junk” DNA holds clues to cancer, autism

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:53:00 +0000

When the draft of the human genome was published in 2000, researchers thought that they had obtained the secret decoder ring for the human body. Armed with the code of 3 billion basepairs of As, Ts, Cs and Gs and the 21,000 protein-coding genes, they hoped to be able to find the genetic scaffolds of life—both in sickness and in health.

But in the 12 years since then, very few diseases—almost all of them very rare—have been linked definitively to changes in the genes themselves. And large, genome-wide studies searching for genetic underpinnings for more common diseases, such as lung cancer or autism, have pointed to the nether regions of the genome between the protein-producing genes—areas that were often thought to contain“junk” DNA that was not part of the pantheon of known genes.

We’ll explain the side effects later

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Say you have high blood pressure. There's a new blockbuster drug on the market, and your doctor lets you know about a new clinical trial you can join that is testing the new treatment against an old tried-and-true one. What's not to like? You're going to be taking, under the care of experts, one of two U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved medications.

What you might not know—even after you sign up for the trial and have inked the informed-consent form—is that scattered reports are starting to suggest that the new medication might occasionally cause severe side effects. And the real reason the trial is being conducted with these previously released drugs is to test whether the new medication really is a lot riskier to everyone or just to a subset of patients.

If you found that out, would you still sign up for the trial? The problem is that many patients—and often even the institutional review boards that approve the trials—are never informed of these lingering questions.