The Year In Medicine From A To Z

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Parents routinely administer a spoonful of cough syrup to a child who can't get to sleep because of a bad cough. The expectation is that the medicine will give the child--and the parents--a silent night. But does it work? When researchers gave a group of children with upper respiratory infections one of two active ingredients in over-the-counter cough syrup or a placebo, they found that the kids taking either of the cough-syrup ingredients had no better improvement in their symptoms than those taking the dummy liquid. In fact, all three groups had fewer symptoms on the second day. That should be a useful lesson for anxious parents: when it comes to coughing, sometimes the best medicine is to wait it out.

D

DIET

In a study published to great fanfare last March, the CDC announced that poor eating habits and inactivity were on track to become the No. 1 causes of preventable death in the U.S. by next year, surpassing even tobacco smoking. Well, someone at the agency miscalculated. The number of obesity-related deaths in 2000 was not 400,000, as the CDC reported, and may have been significantly lower. (Tobacco killed 435,000 people in 2000.) But even though the numbers may be off, the message stands: obesity is a major public-health threat in the U.S., and if it hasn't yet surpassed tobacco, it may do so one day.

DENTAL X RAYS

A startling report in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that expectant moms who get dental X rays may be at risk for having underweight babies. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that among the women they studied, those who had babies weighing less than 51/2 lbs. were twice as likely to have had dental X rays. Researchers were quick to say they didn't know how radiation might affect pregnancy or whether the babies' low birth weight was due to X-ray exposure alone. Whatever the risk, say the study's authors, it's small. They recommend that pregnant women not forgo necessary dental care.

E

ESTROGEN

A part of the big government-funded study known as the Women's Health Initiative was abruptly halted in 2002 after researchers found that women who took estrogen and progestin to replace the hormones lost during menopause raised their risk of heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. This year the National Institutes of Health shut down another arm of the study, one involving women who had had a hysterectomy and were taking estrogen therapy without progestin. It turns out that taking estrogen alone also raises a woman's risk of stroke and blood clots. There are benefits from taking estrogen--among them, better bone health and relief from hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms--but after two years, doctors say, the benefits no longer outweigh the risks.

EXERCISE