"Health & Medical News"

The rats in the West Lafayette, Ind., laboratory of Susan Swithers, PhD, don’t lose weight when they eat artificially sweetened food. They eat more, and gain more. “Rather than these kind of products making it automatically easier to lose weight, they might make it automatically harder,” said Dr. Swithers, a Purdue University associate professor of psychological sciences.

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Barack Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a young man, but interviews with old friends and classmates find few who remember the presidential candidate as much of a drug user, the New York Times reported Feb. 9.

Former classmates from Obama’s high school and Occidental College, which he attended between 1979 and 1981, described Obama in mostly positive terms, with some saying he occasionally smoked marijuana but none recalling any cocaine use.

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An Ohio man whose house was robbed had more than $400,000 confiscated by the FBI as a result of an investigation of the crime, the Lima News reported Dec. 18.

Luther Ricks Sr. said the money, which had been stored in a safe and eluded the thieves’ grasp during a summer 2007 break-in, was his life savings. But officers from the Lima Police Department who were investigating the robbery seized the money and turned it over to the FBI. Now, the agency is telling Ricks he must prove he earned the money legally if he wants it back.

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With a Congressional funding ban finally lifted, the District of Columbia government announced that it will spend $650,000 of local taxpayers’ money to establish needle-exchange programs aimed at cutting HIV/AIDS transmission among drug users, the Washington Post reported Jan. 3.

In its FY2008 budget plan, Congress ended a ban on D.C. using public funds to fund needle exchanges, although a ban on federal funding for the harm-reduction programs remains in place. D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said the clean-needle programs are needed to help reduce the HIV/AIDS rate in the city, which is among the highest in the nation.

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Arthritis cure
The funny thing is how he stumbled into the cure for arthritis instead. … 6. Dr. Sands discovery cures arthritis by providing the fatty acid nutrients …

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The success rate among addiction-treatment patients in the U.K. has slipped in recent years despite increased spending by the National Treatment Agency, the Telegraph reported Oct. 31.

The National Treatment Agency budget rose from $526 million in 2004-05 to about $799 million last year, but the treatment success rate fell from 3.5 percent of patients to less than 3 percent.

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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most common mental-health problem among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but officials say it’s not clear if the therapies used to treat them are working.

Reuters reported Oct. 18 that the Institute of Medicine issued a report saying that only “exposure therapies” — a long, slow process of confronting patient fears — have been shown effective.

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Peer-led prevention efforts aimed at reducing adolescent alcohol and other drug use are about 15 percent more effective than other programs, researchers say.

Medical News Today reported Oct. 9 that researcher Thomas Valente, Ph.D., and colleagues tracked the outcomes of two cadres of youths enrolled in the Project Towards No Drug Abuse (TND) prevention program. One group was led by a health educator or teacher, while the other was led by peers.

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When it comes to low back pain, physicians generally advise exhausting nonsurgical options before resorting to surgery. But a new study shows that for degenerative spondylolisthesis with spinal stenosis, surgery provides significantly better results than nonsurgical alternatives.

The study, published in the May 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is the second in a series reporting findings of the Spine Patients Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT), a five-year, multicenter study supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), a part of the National Institutes of Health.

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