If you have high blood pressure, watch out. You may be putting your brain at risk even if you re under 40.

Sixty years after health reports started tallying the deadly toll of cigarettes, millions of people are still addicted to tobacco. Writing in Examiner.com, ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross uses the release of a Million Women Study in Britain to examine the damage women have sustained, and continue to sustain to their bodies, thanks to the scourge of addiction to cigarettes:

Using brain scans, researchers from Banner Alzheimer s Institute in Arizona have detected some of the earliest signs of Alzheimer s disease, more than two decades before symptoms would normally occur.

The votes are in, and Californians have soundly rejected a measure that would have required labeling of genetically modified foods. With 98 percent of ballots tallied, Proposition 37 was trailing 47 to 53 percent, the Mercury News reports. ACSH was joined by a number of other groups, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and newspaper editorial boards around the state, in condemning the measure as anti-scientific scaremongering.

Although chelation has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat heavy metal poisoning such as from lead or mercury a growing number of alternative medicine practitioners have been promoting its off-label use as a means of treating diseases such as autism and heart disease.

In more promising news from the American Heart Association s Scientific Sessions in California, researchers have reported a key advance in using stem cells to repair damaged hearts.

Recent safety concerns among Pradaxa users, their families and some doctors, has caused the Food and Drug Administration to issue a safety review on Friday stating that the risk of serious bleeding in Pradaxa patients is no higher than that among patients taking the older

In a quick note to all our readers and friends, today as you all know is Election Day, and ACSH will be monitoring the vote and hoping when Californians vote on Proposition 37, they ll vote in favor of sound science.
We ll look forward to reporting on this issue tomorrow.

It s been 60 years since the first solid reports of the causal effects of cigarettes and premature death and disease made the news, and almost 50 since the Surgeon General s report made believers out of almost everyone: Cigarettes are killers.

It s enough to make us sick to our stomachs all the shoddy food-related public health articles and pseudo-science we see sometimes. And we re not the only ones in Reason.com, Baylen Linnekin, president of a Washington-based issue organization called Keep Food Legal, has a very thorough expose citing articles and naming names. In one example, California was praised by USA Today for perhaps bringing us to the turning point in combating childhood obesity.