Your Health

By Janice M. Horowitz

GOOD NEWS

NICOTINE FIT No one wants to say anything good about nicotine, but the highly addictive chemical may in fact have some benefits. A preliminary study of 100 children with Tourette's syndrome--a bizarre affliction in which patients involuntarily grimace, shout obscenities, even bark--finds that those given nicotine patches along with standard medication (the tranquilizer Haldol) had fewer symptoms than kids on placebo patches. And though some young users complained of side effects like nausea, none got hooked.

ATTENTION! Using a special MRI technique, researchers have mapped out regions of the brain involved in paying attention. The frontal cortex and parietal cortex--in the front and back of the brain, respectively--appear to light up when subjects focus on certain signals. Then, as the new stimuli are processed, the visual cortex in the lower rear of the brain moves into action. The finding may help researchers better understand attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and even schizophrenia.

BAD NEWS

FORGET ESTROGEN? It looks like estrogen may not be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's, after all. Doctors had every reason to believe it might be; studies show it may prevent the brain-deteriorating disease, and several preliminary reports suggested it could actually be used to treat it. But now the largest and longest study on the subject--100 women with mild to moderate Alzheimer's who took estrogen for a year--finds that the drug did nothing to improve patients' memory, attention span or language skills.

HEARTBREAK HOTELS Warning: more than 80% of cribs in U.S. hotels may be unsafe. Spot checks revealed a variety of hazards, including cribs with soft bedding or adult-size sheets (both known suffocation risks) and cribs with gaps between the mattress and frame that could entrap a baby. Also, about half of mesh-sided cribs checked had holes big enough for infants to get stuck in. What to do? Call ahead and insist that cribs are in good repair.

--By Janice M. Horowitz

Sources: Good News--Amer. Association for the Advancement of Science; Nature Neuroscience (3/00). Bad--J.A.M.A. (2/23/00); U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and National Safe Kids Campaign