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In short, it doesn't look that way, so you can relax.

The question arose, The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog notes, last year and prompted a review of several dozen studies that compared health outcomes of people taking statins with people taking a placebo. In short, reseachers found no significant difference in the rate of development of ALS between the two groups.

A finding to the contrary would have been significant, given that statins, which lower cholesterol, are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.

The New York Times' Gina Kolata had an excellent article yesterday on how good medical research is supposed to work, how much weight it should be given and why its results are sometimes surprising. It's good background info for a general audience.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has a site at the social-networking site MySpace. It's using the site primarily to try to spread the word about the need for tens of millions more Americans to get a flu shot this fall than have done so in previous years. (For the first time, the agency is recommending that all school-age children between 5 and 18, except for those with severe egg allergies, get the shot. Eggs are used to cultivate the vaccine.)

The site includes not only information but also buttons you can put on your own Web site or blog, touting the flu shot. The CDC hopes bloggers will help get the word out.

The CDC site is here.

October is both National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Lead Poisoning Prevention Month in North Carolina. The Guilford County Department of Public Health has information on both issues here and here, respectively. Go check it out.

Via the Wall Street Journal's comes this news: In case of an anthrax-related terrorist attack, doses of antibiotics might be coming your way via your neighborhood letter carrier. It sounds weird until you realize that postal workers cover the entire community six days a week.

Letter carriers "are constantly helping out as just part of their job, and this is taking it one step further,” a union representative is quoted as saying. That's not just blowing smoke. Carriers frequently check on older residents on their routes, for example. And I can point to one example in my own life. The morning after my daughter was born, my mother-in-law accidentally left the oven on in our house when she left for the hospital. Our letter carrier heard the smoke alarm going off and, finding no one home, roused our next-door neighbor, who tracked me down at the hospital so I could come home and make sure the house wasn't on fire.

... here's another analysis of presidential candidate Barack Obama's health-care plan, this one by Maggie Mahar of The Health Care Blog, based on a review by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social-policy think tank.

This week's New England Journal of Medicine has pieces by the two major presidential candidates on their plans for health-care reform. Barack Obama's is here. John McCain is here.

The journal also has a roundtable discussion on health care in the next administration. Video is here and a transcript (*.pdf file) is here.

About 1 in 6 people shopping online for health insurance likely would be deemed uninsurable by most providers, a new study shows (via The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog).

The report (*.pdf)analyzed almost 450,000 people who requested a price or asked to be contacted by a sales representative. Those deemed uninsurable (or who might have to pay a prohibitively high price for insurance) typically had pre-existing conditions or were obese, according to the information they provided.

Two-thirds of those deemed uninsurable were women, with pregnancy or a prior c-section being major factors. But the significance of that figure is difficult to gauge because two-thirds of the online shoppers were women.

It is not clear how proposals to allow more people to shop for their own health insurance might be affected by this finding. It suggests, however, that any such plan, if it aims for universal coverage, will have to take into account the large number of people currently deemed uninsurable.

I recently suggested in passing that with the government on the hook for hundreds of billions, at least in the near term, to prop up the economy, we might not see anything approaching significant health-care reform even with a new president and new Congress.

I don't pretend to be an expert. But the Wall Street Journal's blog, of all places, links to some folks who explain why the economic crisis might make major health-care reform more, not less, likely. For one thing, the cry "Socialized medicine!" starts to look pretty silly, or at least a lot less dangerous, when the government is socializing financial markets to a degree that used to lead us to foment coups d'etat when other countries did it.

Are these writers right?/Am I wrong? I don't know. But it almost certainly may be the case that the economic events of the past few weeks will change the plans of the powers that be regarding health care, for good or ill. And that's as far out on that particular limb as I and my limited powers of foresight are prepared to go.

At-home genetic testing for a lot of diseases and disorders (and for genealogy hobbyists) is a growing industry. Via Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies comes this essay by noted medical ethicist Art Caplan that says breast-cancer gene testing simply isn't ready for prime time.

For one thing, only about 10 percent of the 200,000 new cases of breast cancer that are detected annually appear to have any sort of connection to the specific gene the test looks for. And among women with no family history of the disease, Caplan says, only about 1 in 100 would benefit from an accurate test. And speaking of accuracy, there's simply not enough information to determine whether these tests are accurate, let alone any sort of gauge on how the combination of genetics and lifestyle might combine to make a woman more or less likely to develop breast cancer.

On top of that, the tests cost from $1,600 up to about $3,000 -- and some of that money is going toward a heavy marketing push. Caplan thinks most women ought to resist the hype. Better is for women with a close family history of the disease -- two or more parents, grandparents or sibling with the disease -- to consult closely with their doctors about the need for any genetic testing, plus lifestyle changes you can make to reduce your risk.

There may someday be a reliable test to gauge a woman's chances of developing breast cancer. But Caplan says that day is not here yet.

UPDATE: Illinois Medicaid thinks that day is here and has begun paying for the testing.

The adversarial relationship between humans and tuberculosis has gone on much longer than previously thought, according to archaeological findings reported by the British Broadcasting Co.

Scientists found DNA evidence of the tuberculosis bacterium of the 9,000-year-old skeletons of a mother and her baby, found in Mediterranean waters off the coast of Israel.

The oldest previous such discoveries, in Italy, date from 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.

Because I've been bombarded with thousands of e-mails* seeking more analysis of John McCain and Barack Obama's health-insurance proposals, I'm happy to share critiques (well, if, by "critiques," I mean "eviscerations") of both published online this week by The New England Journal of Medicine.

The critique of McCain's plan, offered by an unpaid advisor to the Obama campaign, says in part, "The McCain proposal violates the bedrock principle that major health policy reforms should first do no harm. It would risk the viability of employer-sponsored insurance and the welfare of chronically ill Americans in pell-mell pursuit of a radical vision of consumer-driven health care."

The critique of the Obama plan, offered by someone who disclosed to the journal no connection to the McCain campaign, says in part that Obama proposes to do, and the claimed benefits therefrom, are "are too audacious to be believed."

Read and enjoy.

*Maybe hundreds. Well, OK, actually zero. Still.

Via alert co-worker Lanita Withers comes this LA Times item about how to do CPR, and it involves a Bee Gees song:

In performing Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation -- CPR -- the perfect rhythm is 100 compressions per minute, and done properly, it can triple a heart arrest victim's chances of survival. But how, when you're saving a life, do you achieve that ideal rhythm of life-saving compressions? Think "Stayin' Alive."

Medical students and physicians trained to perform CPR to the bouncing beat of "Stayin' Alive" maintained close to the ideal rhythm recommended by the American Heart Assn. for chest compressions during CPR, according to a study to be presented Oct. 27 at a Scientific Assembly of the American College of Emergency Physician's annual meeting.

Turns out the song's tempo is 103 beats per minute, almost exactly the 100 beats per minute recommended for chest compressions. Sure, there are lots of other songs with the same tempo, but they figure the title "Stayin' Alive" is most likely to stick with people in an emergency.

Please, in an emergency, do not try to perform chest compressions to the beat of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated." You'll only hurt yourself.

Via The Wall Street Journal's health blog, here's an analysis in the Journal's personal-finance section on who would benefit from each of the major candidates' health plans.

And if it's Thursday, it must be time for some free full-text articles from The New England Journal of Medicine: Three Inconvenient Truths About Health Care and an article about what we can learn from other countries about slowing the increase of U.S. health-care costs.

I commend these to your attention, particularly as the election approaches (and, no, I'm not advocating any particular approach -- I don't know enough about the analysis to do so).

Via the Health Affairs blog, here are links to two articles relating to major issues of health-insurance reform.

The first addresses five "myths" about health insurance. For example, Myth No. 2: Covering The Uninsured Pays For Itself By Reducing Expensive And Inefficient Emergency Room Care. Not so much, it turns out, except in some cases in which management of chronic conditions is cheaper than treating acute problems in the ER. Diabetes is one example.

The second, by Jonathan Oberlander of UNC-Chapel Hill, discusses the politics of health-care reform. Oberlander spoke March 10 in Greensboro on a similar topic at a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters.

There's some good stuff to chew on in each article. But they present formidable obstacles to some of the most-discussed possible solutions to America's health care/health insurance crisis and, by implication, call upon experts to look beyond the conventional wisdom for real solutions.

Relatedly, at The Health Care Blog, Jacob Hacker touts a book which he edited and to which he contributed that examines various problems with health care. Among other things, he says that to suggest the government has no money to reform health care

... has it exactly backward. To the extent that we’re worried about the budget and the future of our economy, health care reform is more vital, not less so.

For starters, our long-term deficit problem is really a health care spending problem. If you take health care programs out of the equation, there is literally no other long-term federal budget problem. None. No Social Security crisis. No out-of-control-earmarks catastrophe. No deficits as far the eye can see.

I haven't read the book, so I'm reserving judgment. But his description raises some provocative points, and if he's accurate, then he and his co-authors are pointing to a welcome way out of the current long-term financial stress the government faces.

Niko Karvounos and Maggie Mahar have an excellent, and somewhat scary, post up at the Health Beat blog about how health-insurance companies are using health savings accounts to, in effect, turn themselves into very profitable -- and practically unregulated -- banks.

The accounts provide the companies with cash. The administrative fees provide them with profits (and you thought $3 for using some other bank's ATM was bad). And the whole system of health savings accounts is geared toward the healthier, higher-income end of the spectrum because, although the premiums for high-deductible insurance plans linked to HSAs are in fact lower, they're still high enough to put a squeeze on middle- and lower-income households ... and paying the deductibles, for some, will turn out to be flat impossible.

"This shift isn’t about empowerment," the authors write. "It’s the end of health insurance as we know it -- and the beginning of more dangerous, under-regulated financial management." And when even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is admitting under oath before Congress that the fruits of under-regulation have left him in a "state of shocked disbelief," this probably isn't the time to encourage people to put whatever savings they might be able to muster into risky investments that have little oversight.

Don't let this happen to you.

In this week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Henry Aaron -- not the baseball legend, the senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, takes a look at waste in the medical system. He says, among other things, that it will take a long time to root out, which is why it's important to start now.

The Journal also has posted an article examining reproductive-freedom issues as outlined by the two major presidential candidates. Once confined primarily to abortion-related issues, this area now covers greater, and grayer, issues such as embryonic stem-cell research.

And this article examines our country's problems -- and problems they are -- with reproductive health.