Seeing green, cutting meds

How can city folks cut down on their prescription medication? Hit the green space.

This isn’t another “walking in the woods is good for you” study. In this case, Finnish researchers found that frequent visits — even short ones — to green and blue^* spaces led to “lower use of drugs for depression, anxiety, insomnia, high blood pressure, and asthma.”

How big the spaces were didn’t matter, and being able to see them from home doesn’t count. People had to visit — the frequency of visits was the important factor.

Compared with less than one weekly visit, visiting 3-4 times weekly was associated with 33% lower odds of using mental health meds, 36% lower odds of using blood pressure meds, and 26% lower odds of using asthma meds.

^* Forests, gardens, parks, castle parks, cemeteries, zoos, natural grassland and moors, and wetlands; blue areas were defined as sea, lakes, and rivers.

“Game-changer”: One (respiratory virus) test to rule  them all

PCR tests are great — if you know what you’re looking for. They only test for one virus at a time. British researchers, though, have a better idea: A different kind of test that looks for multiple viruses, and that does it more quickly.

The Brits’ fishing analogy is spot-on. Their test uses incomplete DNA strands as different kinds of “bait” for the RNA of different viruses. Once the virus particles are “caught,” it’s just a matter of seeing which bait worked — that identifies the virus.

The test can be tweaked for the circumstance, e.g,. respiratory viruses, viruses endemic to a region, etc. Oh, and it’s relatively cheap, too.

“One of the things we struggle with most is the rapid and accurate identification of the organisms causing the infection. This technology is a potential game-changer; a rapid, low-cost diagnostic platform that is simple and can be used anywhere on any sample.”

Captain Obvious stays home alone

“Taking Contraceptive Advice From Social Media Influencers Could Lead to Unplanned Pregnancies”

And while we’re talking about social media…

Tell your friends and relations not to buy medication through Snapchat. (Chances are @TimesHigh420 isn’t a pharmacist.)

Why you really went to college

People with more education have healthier guts. No, really. Aussie researchers found that “a better education has a strong genetic correlation and a protective causal association with several gut disorders.”

In other words, “[A] higher level of education protects against gut disorders.” And by gut disorders they mean everything from peptic ulcers and acid reflux to irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.

Their takeaway: Stay in school.

“The results support education as a possible avenue for reducing the risk of gut disorders by, for example, encouraging higher educational attainment or a possible increase in the length of schooling.”

“Cry wolf” … or “be prepared”? Your call

The CDC had warned about a potential jump in flu cases after all those holiday gatherings and under-the-mistletoe snogging. Good news: It didn’t happen.

That’s likely because of the huge surge at the end of the year that filled pediatric wards with flu and RSV patients. Between the large number of people in the hospital (or who had recovered and had immunity, there was little room for a post-holiday jump.

Easy hypertension cure (some conditions apply)

British docs say they can identify and cure 5 percent of people with high blood pressure. That’s because 1 in 20 people with hypertension have tiny nodules in an adrenal gland, and now the Brits know how to find ’em and destroy ’em. (The nodules, not the people.) And that effectively cures their hypertension.

The new technique uses a short-acting dose of metomidate, “a radioactive dye that sticks only to the aldosterone-producing nodule.” It replaces (and is more accurate than) the old catheter test while being “quick, painless, and technically successful in every patient.”

“These aldosterone-producing nodules are very small and easily overlooked on a regular CT scan. When they glow for a few minutes after our injection, they are revealed as the obvious cause of hypertension, which can often then be cured. Until now, 99% are never diagnosed because of the difficulty and unavailability of tests.

Pfizer’s heart grew three sizes that day

The pharma company has said it will provide not just a couple of dozen medications (as it announced previously), but its entire portfolio of drugs to poorer countries at cost.

The expansion covers off-patent products, such as chemotherapies and cancer therapies that have the potential to treat nearly 1 million new cancer cases in these countries each year […] It also covers antibiotics to combat infections — contracted in hospitals and clinics — that claim the lives of roughly 1.5 million each year in these countries.

The Long Read: Good Times With Scars edition

From surgery, injury, or yet another mishap with a bagel, everyone ends up with scars. But there are tricks to help your patients keep them from forming in the first place. (Hint: Betadine yes, peroxide no.)