From the machine learning algorithm this morning, culled from over 3,000 new abstracts posted overnight.

1: Refractory rickets in the tropics.

2: "Functional food" for acceleration of growth in short children born small for gestational age.

3: Changes in opioid use and healthcare costs among U.S. patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain treated with duloxetine compared with other therapies.

1: Discontinuation of Cholinesterase Inhibitor Treatment and Determinants thereof in the Netherlands: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

2: Low-dose doxepin: in the treatment of insomnia.

3: Borderline personality traits and disorder: Predicting prospective patient functioning.

It's called diascorea alata, and researchers this week showed some improvement in menopausal symptoms in an Asian population.

Seems to be derived from some sort of purple yam.

This week, researchers published a comparison of radiation treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma.  This is the kind of study I wish we saw more of.  This is a head-to-head comparison of IMRT and conventional radiotherapy in a (thankfully) uncommon form of throat cancer.

The results were not as strongly in favor of the newer IMRT (intensity-modulated radiotherapy) as I would have expected.  Disease free survival, the simplest outcome to wrap my head around, was a little better, but not enough to show statistical significance.  There is no mention of overall survival, which would have been a nice outcome to track, considering this was a retrospective review.

We docs seem to be putting people on steroids all the time.  An article out this week warns us that we might want to consider some of the risks in people with a history of Hepatitis B.

Systemic steroids, in asthmatics at least, were 5 times more likely to reactivate Hepatitis B than inhaled corticosteroids.

Scientists at Harvard and B.U. were able to transplant lab-generated lung tissue into a rat.  The tissue was able to perform regular gas exchange for six hours (at which point it presumably failed).  Report is in this month's Nature Medicine.

WSJ highlights research findings published in Science this week on HIV-neutralizing antibodies.

The news is that an antibody has been discovered that neutralizes almost all known strains of HIV.

I wish the news was that scientists have created a vaccine to neutralize almost all strains of HIV--that would have been better.

This story resonated with me on several levels--you might have seen this on FOXNews TV earlier today, and now it's on their website.

Evidently there's a guy from the US that is on a one-man commando mission to kill Osama Bin Laden.

Wait, it gets better.  He is on dialysis three times a week, and fits in trips to the Pakistan hinterlands in between dialysis appointments.

Now, I've heard of guys skipping out on dialysis, but this is a whole other level!

Sham treatment or the next new thing in multiple sclerosis and cancer treatment?

The New York Times published some letters today criticizing the NIH's cancer research program.  Most of these arguments have been heard before: the private sector is not conducting the right types of studies, (or conversely, we should thank pharma for developing so many good drugs), not enough adult patients are enrolling on clinical trials, etc.

This was from the excellent NHS "Behind the Headlines" website: a thoughtful analysis of the recent claims that tanning beds may be habit-forming.  So what did NHS conclude?  They may very well be addictive.