When opioids do nothing

When OTC analgesics don’t work for acute back pain, low-dose, short-duration opioids are often the next step. But Aussie researchers found that they don’t work any better than placebos (and, of course, you kinda want to avoid opioids in general).

In a study of more than 340 patients suffering from low back or neck pain, a team of Australian researchers found there was no difference in pain severity after six weeks between those who received opioids versus a placebo sugar pill.

“It was quite a surprise to us. We thought there would be some pain relief, but overall there was no difference.”

Possible downside: The research could convince prescribers not to give opioids when they can actually do good.

Health journalists not doing their jobs

Bad CNN! No cookie!

It’s like this: A study by a group of those shifty Danes found that “Women in their 50s who took estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms had an increased risk of dementia within 20 years.”

The important bit: As experts point out, that probably means that women who were showing signs of dementia are the ones who sought out HRT. (One big reason is that the effect showed up within a year of beginning HRT — and that’s just “biologically implausible.”) There’s even an editorial with the paper titled, “A causal link remains unlikely.”

But that didn’t stop CNN, and presumably other news outlets (including HealthDay News), to phrase it as “HRT use by younger women linked to dementia.” Because that’s more exciting than, “Women with signs of dementia during menopause likely to seek out hormone treatment.”

Coming soon: “Aspirin use linked to headaches.”

Vitamin D non-story

Can vitamin D supplements help prevent heart attacks? One headline for the story on vitamin D reads, “Vitamin D supplements may reduce risk of heart attacks in older adults”. Another dials it back with, “Mixed Results on Vitamin D’s Benefit for Aging Hearts.”

But what did the authors of the actual paper have to say?

Vitamin D supplementation might reduce the incidence of major cardiovascular events, although the absolute risk difference was small and the confidence interval was consistent with a null finding. (Emphasis ours.)

Coffee (not caffeine) gives the get-up-and-go

There are often stories about the benefits of coffee, although the terms coffee and caffeine are sometimes (wrongly) used interchangeably; some of coffee’s benefits come from decaf as well.

The latest twist comes out of Portugal, where researchers found that even coffee’s wakefulness effect is about more than just the caffeine. First, they found that (no surprise) drinking coffee or taking caffeine directly “made people more prepared to move from resting to working on tasks.”

But here’s the cool bit:

[D]rinking coffee also increased the connectivity in the higher visual network and the right executive control network – parts of the brain which are involved in working memory, cognitive control, and goal-directed behavior. This didn’t happen when participants only took caffeine.

In other words, if you want to feel not just alert but ready to go, caffeine alone won’t do – you need to experience that cup of coffee.

Shout-out to AstraZeneca

The drug maker has said it will “plant and maintain more than 50 million trees by the end of 2025,” and is already more than 20% to the goal with projects in Australia, France, Ghana, Indonesia, the UK, and the US.

The maintain part is important. Lots of tree-planting efforts simply plant and abandon, but without maintenance especially during the first few years, the trees just die.

A cancer-seeking radioactive missile

To kill cancer cells, you have to find something that differentiates them from normal cells. One of those things is a compound called acrolein that’s unique to cancer. Japanese scientists found that an organic molecule called azide can attach to those cancer cells and, when paired with a fluorescent compound, can light up the cancer.

Well well well, they said — if we can attach a fluorescent compound, maybe we can attach a radioactive bomb.

That “bomb” is actually a radionuclide called astatine-211 that emits alpha particles as it decays. And the nifty thing about alpha particles is that A) they’re deadly, and 2) they only travel a fraction of a millimeter. In other words…

In theory, when astatine-211 is anchored to the inside a cancer cell, the emitted alpha particles should damage the cancer cell, but not much beyond.

They tested this on mice, and you betcha it worked — 100% of the mice survived when it was injected into the tumor (80% when injected into the blood).

Not only will this work with a lot of different kinds of cancer, thanks to the azide’s targeting ability, “[W]e can use this method to treat very early-stage cancer even if we don’t know where the tumor is.”