Shocking Failure of a New Promising Drug for Heart Disease
In a trial of more than 6,300 patients, ziltivekimab sharply lowered markers of inflammation but did no better than placebo at preventing cardiovascular complications or deaths. The result raises questions about treating inflammation in established heart disease, though it does not disprove inflammation’s role. Two further trials are underway. As you can see from the…
Read MoreTAVNS Devices Enter a Powerful New Era—but One Critical Question Remains
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a noninvasive neuromodulation technique that stimulates branches of the vagus nerve through the ear. Over its relatively short 20-year history, taVNS has shown promise across a remarkably broad range of conditions, including epilepsy, depression, insomnia, chronic pain, anxiety, stroke rehabilitation, cognitive impairment, metabolic and cardiovascular disorders, tinnitus, and…
Read MoreAcupuncture Affecting Skeletal interoception regulates joint homeostasis and PGE2-induced pain
What’s New in Acupuncture and Pain: Your Skeleton May Be a Sensory Relay Interoception is the body’s ability to sense what is happening inside itself. Signals continuously travel between the brain and peripheral organs, helping regulate heart rate, breathing, digestion, temperature, and other functions needed for physiological balance. What’s new in this article is the…
Read MoreBone Loss and Osteoporisis: What NASA Discovered to Decrease It? Not Supplements
The Best Exercise to Counter Bone Loss—Plus Easier Options That Still Help from Brad Stanfield Astronauts can get 1–2% bone loss for every month they spend in space—roughly what many postmenopausal women lose over an entire year. NASA tried treadmill workouts, cycling, calcium and vitamin D. But bone loss continued. What finally made a substantial…
Read MoreCT Scans. Rethinking the Risk
Recent studies throw into question the risk/benefit ratio of CT scans. Some are more risky than others in terms of cancer incidence. We’ve discussed this on the blog a few times, here, here and here. The last link is to my book where I tell the story of a patient who had an unnecessary CT…
Read MoreShingles Vaccine for Alzheimer Dementia Protection
This article on Alzheimer and Shingles vaccine from the Economist reiterates something I’ve been hearing more and more about. Shingles vaccine for Alzheimer protection. A piece of good news, is that dementia rates are falling, so the risk of contracting it is dropping fast. But still, it’s a frightening prospect and since medications are…
Read MoreLongevity: Sadly, Metformin Fails
This article from (disgraced) Peter Attia’s newletter rgues that enthusiasm for metformin as a longevity drug has substantially outpaced the evidence. It concludes that outside of Type 2 diabetes (and perhaps a few very specific high-risk conditions still under investigation), there is currently little justification for routinely taking metformin. We’ve discussed metformin here and here. …
Read MoreAre GLP-1’s Longevity Drugs
An article in the New York Times about Glp-1’s and longevity is the inevitable somehow. Longevity and GLP-1 hype collide. For my brief YouTube on the subject please click here. This kind of premature optimism for some sort of drug to universally prolong life drives me crazy. People are so enthusastic about injecting themselves with…
Read MoreTAVNS Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation for Long Covid
As much as I would love this literature review to have had positive assessment of TAVNS for Long Covid, alas, it does not. The noted positive changes in HRV were there in the verum TAVNS, but no difference in cognition. Sham did show improvement in cognition. Another oddity, was that the authors cite the number…
Read MoreHong Kong Acupuncture Conference: Cited in PubMed
I had posted on my comments for the Acupuncture Conference in Hong Kong in 2024. But I didn’t realize until today that my comments were published in PubMed. The citation below with the link under my name. Yeung JW, Bromley A, Chae Y, Cheung DST, Conboy L, Graca S, Levett K, Lumiere K, Schnyer R,…
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