Toy beads that were internationally recalled last year, after concerns that they may be coated with a dangerous chemical, are still being advertised on toy shop websites for purchase in the UK, warn doctors in this weeks BMJ.
They want to bring this serious public health concern to the attention of all doctors involved in the care of children.
They report the case of a 7 year old girl who presented to their emergency department with an acute life threatening event after swallowing Bindeez toy beads given to her as a Christmas present.
The NICE guidelines on follow-up for breast cancer patients need urgent revision, warn experts in this weeks BMJ.
More than 1.2 million women and men worldwide are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and it is now recognised as a chronic disease that can recur even after 20 -30 years.
Survival continues to improve, so new cancers are now more common in many patients than recurrence because the treatments of the first cancer are so effective. However, follow-up protocols still vary widely both within and between countries and are not always evidence based.
A series of recent scientific publications have exaggerated the benefits and underplayed the harms of drugs to treat pre-osteoporosis or osteopenia potentially encouraging treatment in millions of low risk women, warn experts in this weeks BMJ.
The authors believe that this represents a classic case of disease-mongering: a risk factor being transformed into a medical disease in order to sell tests and drugs to relatively healthy people.
An elderly person's risk of falling is too often overlooked when trying to prevent them from getting serious fractures, for instance of the hip or wrist, according to an article published in this weeks BMJ.
Being resistant to aspirin makes patients four times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke or even die from a pre-existing heart condition, according to a study published on bmj.com today.
The study relates to patients who are prescribed aspirin long term as a way of preventing clots from forming in the blood.
Patients who are labelled aspirin resistant have blood cells (platelets) that are not affected in the same way as those of patients who are responsive to the drug, ie people who are aspirin sensitive.
A study carried out by researchers at the Peninsula Medical School and the Institute of Child Health (UCL) has revealed that families from an ethnic, non-English speaking background with a child with Downs syndrome do worse from the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) system than families facing the same issues who come from a white, English-speaking background.
The research team surveyed the parents of 138 children with Downs syndrome, aged two years or less, from across the UK who were taking part in a trial of vitamin supplements.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia have discovered for the first time a pathway that makes cancerous leukaemia cells resistant to treatment.
The scientists found that death-resistant Acute Myeloid Leukaemia cells are given their resistance by a genetic anti-oxidant pathway called hemeoxygenase-1 or HO-1. This resistance pathway leads to relapse of the disease and non-responsiveness to treatments. When this pathway is inhibited, the cells lose their resistance and become responsive to death-inducing agents.
St. Louis, Jan. 16, 2008 — Increasing levels of a protein that helps the brain use cholesterol may slow the development of Alzheimer's disease changes in the brain, according to researchers studying a mouse model of the disease at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
EDITOR'S PICK: Engineered mice provide insight into Alzheimer disease
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