PLoS medicine
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Most regulatory agencies, says Mintzes, fail to treat regulation of drug promotion as a public health concern. Unless this changes, she says, the public can expect more unfettered disease mongering.
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Berhane discusses a new study in PLoS Medicine that evaluated the effect of improved water access in rural Ethiopia upon birth rate and child malnutrition.
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Historical Article
Female sexual dysfunction: a case study of disease mongering and activist resistance.
Tiefer highlights key steps in the "creation" of a new diagnosis, female sexual dysfunction, and of the campaign to challenge its reductionist approach to women's sexual problems.
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Multicenter Study
Large-scale evidence for the effect of the COLIA1 Sp1 polymorphism on osteoporosis outcomes: the GENOMOS study.
Osteoporosis and fracture risk are considered to be under genetic control. Extensive work is being performed to identify the exact genetic variants that determine this risk. Previous work has suggested that a G/T polymorphism affecting an Sp1 binding site in the COLIA1 gene is a genetic marker for low bone mineral density (BMD) and osteoporotic fracture, but there have been no very-large-scale studies of COLIA1 alleles in relation to these phenotypes. ⋯ Allowing for the inevitable heterogeneity between participating teams, this study-which to our knowledge is the largest ever performed in the field of osteoporosis genetics for a single gene-demonstrates that the COLIA1 Sp1 polymorphism is associated with reduced BMD and could predispose to incident vertebral fractures in women, independent of BMD. The associations we observed were modest however, demonstrating the importance of conducting studies that are adequately powered to detect and quantify the effects of common genetic variants on complex diseases.