Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Daily Dose: Uncle Sam’s deadly cigarette pack

In today’s daily dose Wikipedia earns high marks, but safety concerns are raised about antidepressants and American tobacco products.


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— American-made cigarettes may contain higher levels of major cancer-causing compounds, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers examined 126 smokers in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, and found that over the course of a day those who preferred American brands absorbed three times the amount of carcinogenic nitrosamines as those who smoked foreign cigarettes. You shouldn’t rush to trade your Marlboros for Benson & Hedges, though; the CDC’s study examined only one of the over two dozen known carcinogens in cigarette smoke. (ABC)

–An Italian PhD student has admitted to faking results in three papers on drug resistance in leukemia patients. Francesca Messa, who worked in the laboratory of hematologist Giuseppe Saglio at the University of Turin, reportedly substituted photographs of fluorescing cells from an unrelated set of experiments. The papers, published in the journals Leukemia and Blood, have been retracted, and Messa has been fired. (The Scientist)

–A new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal provides further evidence linking the use of antidepressants by pregnant women with a higher risk of miscarriage. The study found that 5.5% of women who suffered miscarriages took at least one antidepressant during pregnancy, whereas among women who carried their babies to term, only 2.7% used an antidepressant. (Pharmalot)

–It turns out Wikipedia can be a relatively reliable source, at least where cancer’s concerned. Researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia compared the information on ten types of cancer in the National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query to corresponding entries on Wikipedia. They gave the open-source encyclopedia high marks for accuracy, but faulted the entries for being “significantly less readable”. (LATimes)

Posted on behalf of Roxanne Palmer

Image by user Kr. B. via Flickr Creative Commons

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