WebMd.com has an interesting article on why the flu occurs primarily in winter.  Bonus points for using M&M’s as an analogy.

My new favorite site diethack.com, has yet another great post. This one describes 12 common sense things to do to reduce the chance of getting cancer.

Cold season is officially upon us, or at least for me, now that the kids are back in school and I’ve started my constant cycle of cold after cold after cold. As such, WebMD has a good article on the symptoms of the common cold and useful tips on when it might be time to see a doctor.

I found this study, reported by WemMD, very encouraging for people who have heart problems. Basically, it states that:

“People with heart failure can regain 70% of their exercise capacity if they stick to an exercise program,” says Axel Linke, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Linke worked on both studies.

70% is a big number and that heart disease doesn’t have to be the end of activities you enjoy.

I’ve been battling a cold over the last few days, and if with all those deadlines looming at work, I had a tough time deciding whether I should go to work or sleep it off at home. You don’t want to pass the cold on to your co-workers, but on the other hand, you don’t want to appear to be a slacker.

This is a pretty common question, and this article from MedicineNet seems to be the best I have found on the subject.

This is a little old, but still exciting news. A New Scientist article reveals a possible new cancel therapy that has been showing promising results in the labs. Even more surprising, the drug used in the study, dichloroacetate, is cheap, easy to produce, and patent-free. Based on a study done by University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, the article states:

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

While it’s a long way from being proven useful on humans and even longer before we see it active use, it’s still something to be excited about.

Links to followup:

• Official DCA Research Information
• The DCA Site