Your Health: May 24, 1999

GOOD NEWS

MARGIN OF SAFETY For years, doctors have tried to spare women from having a mastectomy for ductal carcinoma in situ, a noninvasive form of breast cancer. Instead, they cut out only the cancerous cells and then irradiate the breast. Now a major report shows that women may be able to avoid radiation too--as long as doctors remove a 1/2-in. margin of tissue along with the problem cells. That sure beats getting zapped, which is expensive, time consuming and may make future mammograms difficult to read.

BRAIN FOOD It may sound implausible, but researchers think a type of fat in fish--known as omega-3 fatty acids--could help people with manic depression. A preliminary report shows that patients who for four months took daily pills containing 10,000 mg of omega-3s (that's about five salmon steaks' worth) were twice as likely to go into remission as those on a placebo.

BAD NEWS

PULLED PILL It's going to get harder to find the morning-after pill Preven at your local pharmacy now that Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, has decided to stop selling it. Not to be confused with RU-486, which is not yet approved in the U.S., Preven is taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sex to prevent ovulation or implantation of a fertilized egg.

DEATH BY LIPOSUCTION A new warning for anyone considering cosmetic surgery: liposuction--specifically, tumescent liposuction--may have been responsible for five deaths that occurred in New York City between 1993 and 1998. All surgery is risky, and the death toll is not huge, but doctors are concerned. The problem may be the massive doses of an anesthetic, lidocaine, that are pumped in before the fat is sucked out. Patients may have overdosed.

--By Janice M. Horowitz

Sources--Good News: New England Journal of Medicine (5/13/99); Archives of General Psychiatry (5/99); Bad News: Wal-Mart, New England Journal of Medicine (5/13/99)