Across much of the Western world, 25 years of expansion of the medical system has actually led to people feeling less healthy over time, a new study has found. A researcher at The Ohio State University used several large multinational datasets to examine changes in how people rated their health between 1981 and 2007 and compared that to medical expansion in 28 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

An examination of the reporting of noninferiority clinical trials raises questions about the adequacy of their registration and results reporting within publicly accessible trial registries, according to a study in the March 17 issue of JAMA. Noninferiority clinical trials are designed to determine whether an intervention is not inferior to a comparator by more than a prespecified difference (known as the noninferiority margin).

Increasingly high prices for cancer drugs are affecting patient care in the U.S. and the American health care system overall, say the authors of a special article published online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. "Americans with cancer pay 50 percent to 100 percent more for the same patented drug than patients in other countries," says S. Vincent Rajkumar, M.D., of Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, who is one of the authors.

A new molecule-making machine could do for chemistry what 3-D printing did for engineering: Make it fast, flexible and accessible to anyone. Chemists at the University of Illinois, led by chemistry professor and medical doctor Martin D. Burke, built the machine to assemble complex small molecules at the click of a mouse, like a 3-D printer at the molecular level.

Despite legal and ethical mandates for disclosure, results from most clinical trials of medical products are not reported promptly on a registry specifically created to make results of human studies publically available, according to Duke Medicine researchers. Among all clinical trials of medical products, those funded by industry were the most likely to be publicly disclosed in a timely fashion, but even then, compliance was poor.

New evidence published today in the Cochrane Library shows that hormone replacement therapy does not protect post-menopausal women against cardiovascular disease, and may even cause an increased risk of stroke. HRT, now more commonly known as hormone therapy, is widely used for controlling menopausal symptoms. It has also been used for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in post-menopausal women.

A new class of drugs identified and validated by Mayo Clinic researchers along with collaborators at Scripps Research Institute and others, clearly reduces health problems in mice by limiting the effect of senescent cells - cells that contribute to frailty and diseases associated with age. The researchers say this is a first step toward developing similar treatments for aging patients. Their findings appear today in the journal Aging Cell.