In 1898 Würzburg medical student Hermann Rottmann proposed tobacco dust, not smoke, might be causing the elevated incidence of lung tumors among German tobacco workers. In 1912 New York doctor Isaac Adler proposed smoking, not tobacco dust, was to blame for the growing incidence of pulmonary tumours. The intervening years reveal a rocky road on […]
Category: Research
Living longer increases our likelihood of experiencing more than one chronic health problem at a time. At least one in two older people have more than one chronic disorder with an average number of conditions ranging between 2.5 and 6.5. That is a heavy burden for one person. Co-morbidity or multimorbidity, as it is now […]
During the last century clinical curiosity in the human body focussed on what is inside. With the exception of dermatology, interest in exposed surfaces has been outside of the medical domain and frequently only skin deep. In short, attempts at linking the body’s exterior to its inner workings have occasionally surfaced but these have largely […]
The description of the human genome was a great advance for science. Identifying the 3.0 billion base pairs that make up the genome is no mean feat: compared with Japan’s Paris japonica flower (the largest genome identified so far), which boasts 152.23 billion base pairs, it is quite small. Size makes this discovery important, as […]
Medical research can take on average 17 years to translate into practice. The time from discovering the link between smoking and ill health to implementing a TV ban on smoking advertising was 54 years. Cognitive behavioural therapy for schizophrenia has taken 48 years to gain a foothold in clinical practice, whereas a major drug advance, […]
According to WHO the likelihood of death from a non-communicable disease is much greater than dying from cancer. In Italy, more than a quarter of people living with a cancer diagnosis have similar death rates to the general population. Moreover, nearly three quarters will not die as a result of their cancer. And, as with […]
As Daffodil Day approaches our airwaves fill with the usual topics: finding a consistent cause that can be eradicated; identifying a credible carcinogen that can be prevented, or just nailing a cure. But despite the best research into cancer, which is just a generic term describing out-of-control cells in multiple locations, control of the disease remains […]
Recent legislation that permits mitochondrial genetic transplanting to embryos finally acknowledges that all chromosomal material in our bodies doesn’t come from our mother and father. This is important because the human body is really one big family comprising parent organs, the offspring and visitors who come to stay and never leave. But not every member […]
When a plethora of information exists aggregation is important to find meaning. Systematic reviews provide a neat way of aggregating a backlog of information. The hierarchy of evidence-based medicine separates the medical ‘wood from the trees’ by allowing the sieving of essential information. Linear connections are important to our simple minds; cause and effect is […]
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