About 30 percent of cancer chemotherapies with no generic competition are being used off-label, to fight tumors that regulators at the FDA have never approved them to treat, a new study says.

Low-dose aspirin did not reduce overall incidence of stroke or improve outcomes following a stroke, an analysis of the Women s Health Study showed.
Researchers analyzed data from about 40,000 participants from the Women s Health Study, 460 of whom had been diagnosed with a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) in the preceding year. There was a mean follow-up of 10 years. Ultimately, researchers compared stroke patients against study participants who had not reported a stroke.

Following a year filled with baseless attacks on chemicals ranging from phthalates to BPA, a United Nations-sponsored research team released a report blaming these everyday chemicals for an increase in birth deformities, hormonal cancers and psychiatric diseases among many, many other conditions of vague or indeterminate etiology, including cancers of various types, obesity, you-name-it.

Drug overdose deaths rose in 2010 for the 11th straight year, killing over 39,000 Americans, according to new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nearly 60 percent of the overdose deaths 22,134 involved prescription medicines, rather than illegal narcotics. Three out of four medicine-related deaths involved opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin, and only 17 percent were suicides the larger fraction were accidental.

At the American Council on Science and Health, we promote the benefits of Tobacco Harm Reduction in helping smokers quit.

More than 400,000 Americans have full or partial hip replacements each year, and the majority of them are women. Now, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women were also 30 percent more likely than men to need a repeat procedure within the three years following the initial surgery. However, this news is not nearly as dire as it appears.

When screening patients for lung cancer with CT scanning, a more restrictive definition of a positive result could produce fewer false positive diagnoses, with their attendant unnecessary follow-up studies, including biopsies and surgery.
This conclusion, from a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is based on a higher nodule-size threshold for follow-ups from 5 mm to 6 to 8 mm lesion size before starting a more intensive work-up.

In other public health news, the CDC s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, has shown an incredible decline in motor vehicle fatalities among persons aged 15-24 years.

This doesn t sound good. The Centers for Disease Control last week warned doctors to prepare for the arrival of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea from Asia, and avoid prescribing too many antibiotics for fear they may create superbugs.
Gonorrhea has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics, known as cephalosporins, which are getting less effective at treating it especially among men who have sex with men on the West Coast, the CDC says.

Deaths from lung cancer are set to surpass deaths from breast cancer in European women, and will become the leading cause of cancer deaths among women there, according to a recent study published in the journal Annals of Oncology.
In some countries, such as the U.K. and Poland, lung cancer has already become the main cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Lung cancer killed more women than breast cancer in the U.S. for decades.