Health Report

THE GOOD NEWS

-- Breast cancer may not be so strongly hereditary as people think. A new study shows that having a mother or sister with the disease seems only to double a woman's risk of getting it herself, rather than tripling it, as earlier studies had suggested.

-- High levels of uric acid are usually evidence of gout but have now also been found in some cases of otherwise symptomless high blood pressure. The discovery may give doctors a new diagnostic tool.

-- Paralyzed dogs have walked again after having minute electric currents passed over their damaged spines. The current helps heal nerves that normally can't. No one knows why it works, but it may soon be tried on humans.

THE BAD NEWS

-- Folk wisdom, as well as some medical research, has suggested that megadoses of vitamins may prevent breast cancer. Not true, says a new, large-scale study. An investigation of nearly 90,000 women over the course of a decade has found no evidence that vitamin C or E offers any protection at all. Vitamin A supplements don't help either, unless a woman gets too little in her diet.

-- A potentially important AIDS treatment announced last winter may be a dud. A "cocktail" of three drugs seemed to prevent the HIV virus from reproducing in test tubes. But both the original scientists and others have discovered a subtle flaw in the research that made the effect seem more significant than it really was.

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Sources: New England Journal of Medicine; Journal of the American Medical Association; New York Times; Journal of Restorative Neurology}]