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Check in with us as we feature the latest trends, research and news in medicine, health and science. A team of Star Tribune staffers will aggregate updates from news wires, websites, magazines and medical journals.

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Why you need to let that cough run its course

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen Updated: January 14, 2013 - 6:28 PM

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How long-lasting is the typical cough — the kind you get with a cold? If you guessed about a week, you are average, but you are wrong.

In a new study, doctors who reviewed medical studies found that "acute cough," sometimes called "acute bronchitis," lasts an average of nearly 18 days. But when the doctors asked 493 adults in Georgia how long they expected such coughs to last, estimates averaged seven to nine days.

Many people wrongly believe that coughs lingering more than a few days need to be treated with antibiotics, says lead researcher Mark Ebell, a family physician and associate professor of public health at the University of Georgia. The report was published Monday in the Annals of Family Medicine.

"I frequently see patients who come in and have been sick for four or five days and say 'boy I really need an antibiotic — I'm just not getting better,'" Ebell says.

In fact, he and other experts say, most acute coughs are caused by viral illnesses, such as colds and flu, and won't be helped by antibiotics no matter how long they last. That's because antibiotics only treat bacterial illnesses, such as some forms of pneumonia. When they are used for viral illnesses, they can do more harm than good — frequently causing diarrhea, allergic reactions and other side effects and spurring the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can sicken not only the person who took the antibiotics but other people, as well.

Can berries cut heart attack risk for women?

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen Updated: January 14, 2013 - 3:53 PM

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Eating three or more servings of blueberries and strawberries each week may help reduce a woman's risk of heart attack, a large new study suggests.

The study included nearly 94,000 young and middle-aged women who took part in the Nurses' Health Study II. The women completed questionnaires about their diet every four years for 18 years.

During the study period, 405 participants had heart attacks. Women who ate the most blueberries and strawberries were 32 percent less likely to have a heart attack, compared to women who ate berries once a month or less. This held true even among women who ate a diet rich in other fruits and vegetables.

This benefit was independent of other heart risk factors such as advancing age, high blood pressure, family history of heart attack, body mass index, exercise, smoking, and caffeine and alcohol intake. The findings appear online today in the journal Circulation.

Drug overdoses top AIDS as top cause of death among homeless

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen Updated: January 14, 2013 - 3:11 PM

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Overdoses of drugs, particularly prescription painkillers and heroin, have overtaken AIDS to become the leading cause of death of homeless adults, according to a study of homeless residents of Boston.

The finding came from a five-year study of homeless adults who received treatment from the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, though its broad conclusions apply to homeless populations in many urban parts of the United States, the study's author and homeless advocates said.

The tripling in the rate of death by drug overdose reflects an overall rise in pain-killer abuse, said Dr. Travis Baggett of Massachusetts General Hospital, the lead author of the study, to be published next month in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

"This trend is happening across the country, in non-homeless populations too," Baggett said. "Homeless people tend to experience in a magnified way the health issues that are going on the general population."

The study, which tracked 28,033 homeless adults from 2003 through 2008, found that of the 17 percent who died during the study period died of drug overdoses while 6 percent died of causes related to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

That is a rough reversal of the trend found in a similar study 15 years earlier, when 6 percent of deaths were due to drug overdose and 18 percent due to AIDS.

After the drug overdoses, the second- and third-leading causes of death in the most recent study were cancer, which accounted each for about 16 percent of the deaths.

Hearing returns in mice deafened by noise

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen Updated: January 10, 2013 - 11:51 AM

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Although loud noise can cause irreversible hearing loss, researchers partially restored the hearing of mice with noise-induced deafness by regenerating damaged sound-sensing hair cells in the inner ear.

The study authors said their findings might one day help lead to the development of new treatments for people with acute hearing loss.

The team of researchers, led by Dr. Albert Edge of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, manipulated a cellular pathway that controls hair cells, known as the Notch pathway. They found that new hair cells formed after stem cells in the inner ear of the mice were treated with a drug that blocks this pathway.

The study was published in the Jan. 9 issue of the journal Neuron.

The study's authors concluded the treatment holds promise for people with noise-induced deafness. "The significance of this study is that hearing loss is a huge problem affecting 250 million people worldwide," Edge said.

Why wet fingers get wrinkled

Posted by: Colleen Stoxen under On the road Updated: January 9, 2013 - 6:02 PM

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For a long time, scientists thought that our fingers wrinkled underwater because of osmosis — meaning the skin's cells absorbed water, causing our fingertips to shrivel up. But new research suggests another explanation: The wrinkles help us to better grip objects underwater, in much the same way tire treads help cars stay on the road.

Scientists discovered that severed fingers didn't wrinkle underwater. This suggested the wrinkling mechanism was controlled by the nervous system, and was therefore some kind of evolutionary response.

A study in 2011 showed that the wrinkles indeed functioned like rain treads, in that the grooves helped divert water away from the fingertips. For this study, researcher Tom Smulder and his team at Newcastle University in the U.K. asked subjects to move wet and dry objects from one box to another with and without shriveled fingers. Unsurprisingly, people with wrinkled hands transferred objects 12 percent faster than those with smooth digits.

--THE WEEK