This week's compendium

Here’s this week’s compendium – comprising eight health-connected items. This week…

1. research showed regular sunscreen use significantly cuts melanoma risk [1]. It cuts the risk of squamous and basal cell cancers too.

2. research showed sunlight exposure cuts the risk of mature-onset diabetes – mediated via vitamin D [2]. But even weak sunscreen – e.g. for melanoma prevention – markedly lowers vitamin D production.

3. research showed daily low-dose aspirin reduces the all-cancers death rate by 34% (and the stomach and bowel cancer death rate by 54%) [3]. It protects against stroke and heart attack too.

4. research showed overweight and obesity are associated with an increased all-cause mortality; and to a lesser degree so is underweight [4]. All-cause mortality is lowest when the Body Mass Index [BMI] is normal or just below normal, i.e. 20.0-24.9.

5. research showed lap band surgery’s effective in people with a lower BMI than that presently deemed acceptable by the US FDA [5]. Thus the FDA’s considering lowering the minimum BMI from 40 to 35 (and from 35 to 30 for people with other health problems).

6. the 16th UN Climate Change Conference [COP16] began in Cancun, Mexico [6a, 6b]. The health connection? It’s obvious. But COP16’s a giant ho hum.

7. I saw this fascinating video about what sits on Oliver Sacks’s office desk [7]. The health connection? He’s a neurologist.

8. darling Indi began a duck egg business unit within Daylesford Organics [8]. The health connection? Indi has the flu. Get well soon, Indi. xxxxx

Finally, I wish you, dear Farmdoc’s Blog readers, a wonderful week.

farmdoc's blog post number 222

Last week I saw an interesting article in a medical journal. It told me nothing I didn’t know. But I am comforted whenever science confirms an intuition. The article concerned bariatric surgery – which potentially has a high complication rate. It showed that the more bariatric surgery performed in any hospital, the lower that hospital’s complication rate – and vice versa. And the more bariatric surgery a surgeon performed, the lower that surgeon’s complication rate – and vice versa. Previously I’ve read similar articles about other surgery types, and the results are always the same – the more often you do something, the more likely you'll get a good outcome, or at least the less likely you'll get a suboptimal outcome. This is probably the raison d’etre of medical specialisation. A wag half-seriously said a specialist was someone who knew more and more about less and less – until he (or she) knew everything about nothing. Indeed some specialities, e.g. orthopaedic surgery, have splintered into subspecialties, e.g. knee surgery, shoulder surgery. It seems subspecialists’ convergent focus may be outweighed by the disadvantages, because in the last 10-15 years the trend’s been away from subspecialists back through specialists to generalists. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens in the next few years. Me? I’ll stick by the research results and opt for treatment by the specialist with the most experience in the field in question.