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Adjuvanted vaccines used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic did not increase the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome substantially, if at all, finds a large Europe-wide study published on bmj.com today. An adjuvant is a substance added to a vaccine to stimulate the immune system to respond to the vaccine.

The recommendation to drink six to eight glasses of water a day to prevent dehydration "is not only nonsense, but is thoroughly debunked nonsense," argues GP, Margaret McCartney in this week's BMJ.

There is currently no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water, she says, yet the "we-don't-drink-enough-water" myth has endless advocates, including the NHS.

England's health secretary Andrew Lansley has said that if England keeps on spending on health at the current rate, the NHS will be unaffordable in 20 years' time. But in an article published on bmj.com today, John Appleby, Chief Economist at the King's Fund argues that spending on health will be a matter of choice, not affordability.

In an analysis to examine how often throughout adulthood clinically significant changes occur in a patient's family history of cancer, researchers found substantial changes in family history of colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer between the ages of 30 and 50 years, which would result in recommendations for earlier or more intense cancer screening, according to a study in the July 13 issue of JAMA. The authors suggest that a patient's family history of cancer be updated at least every 5 to 10 years.

Compared to a standard diagnostic procedure, infants with cystic fibrosis who received treatment based on a diagnostic procedure involving obtaining and culturing fluid samples from the lungs did not have a lower prevalence of lung-damaging infection or structural lung injury at 5 years of age, according to a study in the July 13 issue of JAMA.

Children and adolescents from states that had higher Medicaid payment levels to dentists between 2000 and 2008 were more likely to receive dental care, although children covered by Medicaid received dental care less often than children with private insurance, according to a study in the July 13 issue of JAMA.

Among nursing home residents at high risk for pressure ulcers, black residents had higher prevalence rates than white residents from 2003 through 2008, with the disparity largely related to the higher rates among nursing homes that disproportionately serve black residents, according to a study in the July 13 issue of JAMA.

Among the most important determinants of an individual's risk of cancer is family history, and the details of that history – whether and at what ages close relatives were diagnosed with particular tumors – can affect recommendations for screening examinations such as colonoscopies and mammograms. In the July 13 Journal of the American Medical Association a multi-institutional research team reports that changes in family history significant enough to alter screening recommendations are common in adults aged 30 to 50.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University biologists identified a new way in which bacteria hijack healthy cells during infection, which could provide a target for new antibiotics.

Zhao-Qing Luo, the associate professor of biological sciences who led the study, said the team discovered a new enzyme used by the bacterium Legionella pneumophila - which causes Legionnaires' disease - to control its host cell in order to take up residence.

Researchers at The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania have discovered that a low dose of the opioid antagonist naltrexone (LDN) has an extraordinarily potent antitumor effect on human ovarian cancer in tissue culture and xenografts established in nude mice. When LDN is combined with chemotherapy, there is an additive inhibitory action on tumorigenesis.

(Boston) – Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have brought attention to the potential health impacts for Korean and Korean-American women and their infants from consuming brown seaweed soup. Seaweed is a known source of dietary iodine, particularly in Korea; however, there is no scientific data on the iodine content in Korean seaweed soup.

PHILADELPHIA — Overall cancer mortality rates are higher for men than women in the United States, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Michael B. Cook, Ph.D., an investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute, and colleagues used U.S. vital rates and survival data from the SEER database for 36 cancers by gender and age. They assessed whether cancer mortality rates and cancer survival differed by gender.

Irvine, Calif., July 12, 2011 — UC Irvine researchers have found a new approach to the creation of customized therapies for virulent flu strains that resist current antiviral drugs.

Using powerful computer simulations, UCI's Rommie Amaro and Robin Bush created a method to predict how pocket structures on the surface of influenza proteins promoting viral replication can be identified as these proteins evolve, allowing for possible pharmaceutical exploitation.

An international consortium of scientists has produced a new map of the potato genome that may lead to the development of an ultra-nutritious potato that could help feed the world's hungry.

By sequencing and identifying genes in the genome of the potato, the consortium has, for the first time, tied specific potato genes to their functions. Resulting insights into the growth and development of potatoes may enable scientists and breeders to produce potatoes that are more nutritious, more disease resistant and less dependent on pesticides than conventional potatoes.

In a large and comprehensive investigation into the underlying causes of sudden cardiac death (SCD) – a surreptitious killer of hundreds of thousands annually in the United States – researchers have discovered a variation in the genome's DNA sequence that is linked to a significant increase in a person's risk of SCD.