The Medical Thread

“As ever, all my recipes are sugar-and-wheat free”, Shaw announces, only to give a recipe for “gluten-free” brownies that contains 200g of coconut sugar, a substance that costs a lot more than your average white granulated sugar, but is metabolised by the body in the same way.

Mc Gregor’s main concern about clean eating, she added, was that as a professional treating young people with eating disorders, she had seen first-hand how the rules and restrictions of clean eating often segued into debilitating anorexia or orthorexia.

Amelia Freer, in Eat. Nourish. Glow, admits that “we can’t prove that dairy is the cause” of ailments ranging from IBS to joint pain, but concludes that it’s “surely worth” cutting dairy out anyway, just as a precaution. In another context, Freer writes that “I’m told it takes 17 years for scientific knowledge to filter down” to become general knowledge, while advising that gluten should be avoided.

["Food rules"] are not even good rules, based as they are on “unsubstantiated, unscientific claims”. Take almond milk, which is widely touted as a superior alternative to cow’s milk. Mc Gregor sees it as little better than “expensive water”, containing just 0.1g protein per 100ml, compared with 3.2g per 100ml in cow’s milk.

That's the key takeaway from a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature's Translational Psychiatry. Researchers from Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center studied 214 former football players, including 43 who only played at the high school level, 103 who played in college, and 68 who played professionally. The scientists found that playing tackle football before the age of 12 increased the odds of problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive functioning later in life by twofold, and the odds of suffering symptoms of depression threefold. (The mean age of study participants was 51). The results held steady for players with different levels of experience. Even for those who didn't stick with football after high school, playing tackle before the age of 12 increased their risk of behavior and mood problems as adults. "We found that to be pretty remarkable," says Michael Alosco, a post-doctoral fellow at the Boston University School of Medicine, and lead author of the study.

This dangerous form of the malaria parasite cannot be killed with the main anti-malaria drugs.

It emerged in Cambodia but has since spread through parts of Thailand, Laos and has arrived in southern Vietnam.

The team at the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok said there was a real danger of malaria becoming untreatable.

Prof Arjen Dondorp, the head of the unit, told the BBC News website: "We think it is a serious threat.

"It is alarming that this strain is spreading so quickly through the whole region and we fear it can spread further [and eventually] jump to Africa."

Resistance to the drugs would be catastrophic in Africa, where 92% of all malaria cases happen.

It is built to attack three critical parts of the virus - making it harder for HIV to resist its effects.

The work is a collaboration between the US National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.

The International Aids Society said it was an "exciting breakthrough". Human trials will start in 2018 to see if it can prevent or treat infection.

Our bodies struggle to fight HIV because of the virus' incredible ability to mutate and change its appearance.

These varieties of HIV - or strains - in a single patient are comparable to those of influenza during a worldwide flu season.

So the immune system finds itself in a fight against an insurmountable number of strains of HIV.

But after years of infection, a small number of patients develop powerful weapons called "broadly neutralising antibodies" that attack something fundamental to HIV and can kill large swathes of HIV strains.

Researchers have been trying to use broadly neutralising antibodies as a way to treat HIV, or prevent infection in the first place.

The study, published in the journal Science, combines three such antibodies into an even more powerful "tri-specific antibody".

Dr Gary Nabel, the chief scientific officer at Sanofi and one of the report authors, told the BBC News website: "They are more potent and have greater breadth than any single naturally occurring antibody that's been discovered."

The best naturally occurring antibodies will target 90% of HIV strains.

"We're getting 99% coverage, and getting coverage at very low concentrations of the antibody," said Dr Nabel.

Experiments on 24 monkeys showed none of those given the tri-specific antibody developed an infection when they were later injected with the virus.

Clinical trials to test the antibody in people will start next year.

A doctor examining the veteran — a 20-year Air Force mechanic named Walter Savage who had been living alone — decided he was in no shape to care for himself and should be admitted to the hospital. A second doctor running the inpatient ward agreed. But the hospital administration said no. Records show that a nurse in charge of enforcing administration restrictions said Savage was not sick enough to qualify for admission.

The denial appeared to be part of an attempt by members of the Roseburg Veterans Administration Medical Center to limit the number of patients it admitted to the hospital in an effort to lift its quality-of-care ratings.

Fewer patients meant fewer chances of bad outcomes and better scores for a ranking system that grades all veterans’ hospitals on a scale of one to five stars. In 2016, administrators began cherry-picking cases against the advice of doctors — turning away complicated patients and admitting only the lowest risk ones in order to improve metrics, according to multiple interviews with doctors and nurses at the hospital and a review of documents. Those metrics helped determine both the Roseburg hospital’s rating and the leadership’s bonus checks. By denying veterans care, the ratings climbed rapidly from one to two stars in 2016 and the director earned a bonus of $8,120.

Current and former staff members say the practice may reach well beyond Roseburg. Recent government reports also challenge the reliability of the department’s metrics, casting doubt on a key tool that it says it relies on for reforming its health care system.

The hospital’s director, Doug Paxton, acknowledged that being more selective had improved ratings, but denied the hospital was turning patients away to improve scores. Tightening admissions, he said, benefited patients, not metrics, because Roseburg’s hospital lacks the resources for acute patients. But five emergency room doctors strongly disagreed. In a letter in response to questions from The New York Times they said they had warned about the arrangement at Roseburg, where physicians are repeatedly overruled by administrators. “When we voice concern that a process is dangerous and not good for patient care,” they wrote, “We are met with the response that ‘this is what the director wants.’”