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Risk of new lesions reduced by 54% in veterans who started drug after first skin cancerKey Takeaways Nicotinamide reduced skin cancer risk by 14% overall in patients with a history of nonmelanoma skin cancer. The risk reduction increased to 54% when nicotinamide was started after a first skin cancer diagnosis. More prospective studies are needed to confirm findings and identify patients most likely to benefit. Patients with a history of using nicotinamide had a significantly lower risk of developing nonmelanoma skin cancer, particularly when starting treatment after a first skin cancer, a large retrospective cohort study showed. Overall, nicotinamide use...

Revised guidelines for heart health are set to move away from target-based approach. Soon after Joseph Francis learned that his levels of ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol sat at twice the norm, he discovered the short­comings of cholesterol-lowering drugs — and of the clinical advice guiding their use. Francis, the director of clinical analysis and reporting at the Veterans Health Administration (VA) in Washington DC, started taking Lipitor (atorvastatin), a cholesterol-lowering statin and the best-selling drug in pharmaceutical history. His LDL plummeted, but still hovered just above a target mandated by clinical guidelines. Adding other medications had no effect, and upping the...

Nicotinamide, commonly known as vitamin B3, may help the innate immune system kill antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, the so-called "superbugs". In lab work done with mice and human blood, researchers found high doses of the vitamin increased the ability of immune cells to kill the bacteria by 1,000 times.The discovery opens the door to a new arsenal of tools for dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, such as those caused by methicillin-resistant S. aureus or MRSA, that have killed thousands of people around the world. They are increasing in hospitals and nursing homes, and also rising in prisons, among athletes, people in...

The claims have been sensational. Martin Mittelstaedt checks up on the research behind the hype ### In the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave. The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the colour-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced. Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost...