Hospitals Offering Clinical Trials Could Be Better

American and Canadian researchers have found that hospitals that practice drug and device studies could be better at dealing with life-threatening situations and they have lower patient death rates than hospitals that don’t do clinical trials. There was another study done that found that ovarian cancer patients at these types of hospitals have a 28 percent lower mortality rate.

Get a List of Hospitals that Offer Clinical Trials at: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov

New Study Says Antidepressants Don’t Work

A new study says that antidepressants are as effective as placebos when it comes to relieving a person’s depression. This was found by British researchers that went through data from 47 published and unpublished clinical trials of drugs, such as Prozac and Paxil. They found that drug companies were being selective in reporting the results of their studies and the drugs only showed significant mood improvements in the most severely depressed people. For most people, antidepressants are no more effective than taking a sugar pill.

It is suggested that antidepressants work because people expect them to and not because they change the chemistry of the brain. Studies have found that talk therapy and regular exercise are just as effective as the drugs in relieving mild depression.

Study Shows that Alcohol Increases Risk of Cancer

A recent study has show that alcohol can increase the chances of getting breast cancer in women. Studies have shown a link between drinking alcohol and breast cancer but they have yet to determine if certain types of alcohol is more dangerous than others.

The study analyzed the drinking habits of 70,033 women and asked them various questions during health exams between the years 1978 and 1985. By the year 2004, 2,829 of those women had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The study found that women who had one or two drinks a day increased their risk by 10 percent and women who had more than three drinks a day increased their risk by 30 percent.

Experts think that alcohol raises hormone levels in the blood to levels that could cause cancer. Doctors say that other factors, such as genetics, obesity, and age are more important factors that can raise the risk of breast cancer.