Closer Look
Kim Kardashian enters the fray on full-body scans
Ashley Landis/AP
This first sentence in Lizzy Lawrence and Mohana Ravindranath's takedown could be a mic drop, but keep reading: "The last time Kim Kardashian (above) posted about medical imaging, it was to prove her butt was real. Now, she's praising its ability to find aneurysms and cancers before they turn deadly." Kardashian's post on Instagram about the company Prenuvo raises serious questions about full-body MRI scans that can cost thousands of dollars and lead to false positives and unnecessary follow-ups for wealthy and largely healthy patients.
Prenuvo is just the latest in a long list of celebrity-endorsed scans, along with Ezra, Neko Health, and SimonMed. There are exceptions to false positives, but radiologists have been sounding the alarm on the dangers of over-testing for decades. MRIs can pick up legitimately threatening conditions, but they also pick up abnormalities that prove to be completely benign. Read what the companies say.
In the lab
Even amateur tackle football tied to later Parkinson's
Boxing and Parkinson's disease have been connected at least since the 1920s, long before Muhammad Ali died from the neurodegenerative disease linked to head trauma. But while American football at the professional level has been tied to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, how tackle football might be related to Parkinson's or other symptoms called parkinsonism hasn't been established. A new cross-sectional study in JAMA Network Open found that playing tackle football, even in high school and college, raises the odds of developing Parkinson's, with the risk rising along with years of play.
Among 1,875 trial participants — 729 men who played football, mostly as amateurs, and 1,146 men who played non-football sports — those who played tackle football carried a 61% higher risk of having a Parkinson's or parkinsonism diagnosis than those who played other sports. The risk for college or professional players was 2.93 times higher than for those who played only at the youth or high school level.
health
Opinion: Don't give up on aspartame, dentist pleads
Two weeks ago, when an agency within the WHO linked artificial sweeteners to cancer, some people clutched their Diet Cokes in fear. Aspartame, a sugar substitute in about 6,000 products worldwide, was deemed "possibly carcinogenic to humans." Other sugar substitutes (saccharin, sucralose, stevia) have come under fire, too. But the FDA strongly disagreed with the aspartame assessment, and so does dentist Melissa Weintraub.
"If non-nutritive sweeteners were to fall out of use altogether, would our health be in a better or worse position?" she asks in a STAT First Opinion. "The answer is obvious: We'd be in a worse place because of our relationship with sugar, which humans crave." That's not only down to the damage sugar can cause, but sugar-free gum's value as an oral health tool. "Helping reduce harmful mouth bacteria, prevent gum disease, and protect tooth enamel is precisely what chewing sugar-free gum can do." Read more.
The latest episode of Color Code explores how Long Island became the "eugenics capital of the world" and how the dangerous pseudoscience's shadow still affects aspects of racist policies today. Listen here.
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