Quick reminder

Medicare open enrollment ends this coming Saturday, December 7.

Hormone therapy risks: Not so simple

A lot of older women take various kinds of hormone therapy, especially post-menopause. Lurking in the background, though, is a fear of cardiovascular disease — that’s thanks to a 1990s study that found a risk. It focused on a single kind of hormone treatment, though, so Swedish researchers wanted to see if it still applied to today’s varied therapies.

They looked at seven different hormone treatments, and what they found was nuance. I.e., “Different menopausal hormone treatments pose different risks.”

For example, the synthetic hormone tibolone^* […] was linked to an increased risk of both heart attack and stroke, but not to an increased risk of blood clots.

Combined preparations containing both oestrogen and progesterone instead increase the risk of blood clots, including deep vein thrombosis.

They also found that patches were less risky than other delivery methods, so their next task is to break down the effects by age, medication, and delivery method to uncover that nuance.

^* Not available in the US.

Short takes

Could lung cancer be detected with a nasal swab?

A startup called OncoSwab thinks so, based on the fact that “Tumors shed compounds that can be picked up in screening tests,” and lung cancer obviously affects the airways. Thus the OncoSwab test, which is still in the early stages of development, looks for lung cancer biomarkers that make their way to the nasal passages.

Timing your Covid shot

The best time for a Covid booster, found Yale researchers, depends on geographic location and whether you’ve had a breakthrough infection. “[O]ptimal booster dates precede peak Covid-19 transmission by about 2.7 months,” so in the Northern Hemisphere that means “Administering boosters in September or October can provide up to three to four times more protection against infection compared to booster shots given later in the year.” (But, if you get a breakthrough infection in the fall, it’s best to wait several months for a booster.)

The next long Covid suspect

Health researcher have barely agreed on what long Covid is, and they’re still trying to figure out what causes it. The latest suspect comes from Australia, where immunologists at the Burnet Institute think there’s a “compelling case” that long Covid is actually caused by the virus lingering in the body.

They reached this conclusion after looking at details from several studies on the condition, such as more than one that …

… detected replicating viral RNA and proteins in blood fluid of patients years after their initial infection, a sign that the virus is likely replicating for long periods in some hidden reservoirs in the body, perhaps including blood cells.

In fact, evidence of viral activity seemed to be common in these studies. (The GI tract is “of considerable interest.”) And while they can’t say so conclusively, “we and other scientists argue the cumulative evidence is now sufficiently compelling to galvanise action.”

Pot for thought: kids, psychosis, and cannabis

Earlier this year there was a study that found that kids who used cannabis were a lot more likely to develop psychotic disorders — 11 times more likely, in fact.

Well then.

But now the twist: A new study that looked at 4 years of data on almost 12,000 kids aged 9–10 found that those psychosis-spectrum symptoms tended to appear before they started using cannabis. And “symptoms typically did not increase after initiation.”

In other words, the arrow of causation seems to point to psychosis leading to cannabis use, rather than the other way around.

The Long(ish) Read: Drug-war casualties

The drug crisis has been around for decades, to the point that there are survivors who are now in their 70s. The Wall Street Journal looks at one of them.