Health

TWO POTS A DAY JUST TO BE SAFE:

2 to 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf. (Pam Belluck, Feb. 9, 2026, NY Times)

People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years.

decaf is a tool of Satan.

MIND? BODY? NO PROBLEM:

A study hints positive thinking could strengthen vaccine immunity (Simon Makin, 1/30/26, Science News)

Increasing activity in a brain region that controls motivation and expectation, specifically the brain’s reward system, is linked with making more antibodies after receiving a vaccine. The finding suggests these boosts were related to the placebo effect, researchers report January 19 in Nature Medicine.

“Placebo is a self-help mechanism, and here we actually harness it,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University. “This suggests we could use the brain to help the body fight illness.”

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

US projects to 3D bioprint livers, hearts and kidneys using immune-matched cells (Mrigakshi Dixit, Jan 13, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

The project targets patients suffering from acute liver failure. These are people caught in a race against the clock.

In the human body, the liver is the only organ capable of complete regeneration, but it needs time to heal. Usually, the time runs out before the healing begins.

“The goal is to create a piece of liver tissue that you can use as an alternative to transplant,” explained Adam Feinberg, professor of biomedical engineering at CMU and the project’s principal investigator. “The liver we are creating would last for about two to four weeks.”

That month-long window will allow the patient’s own liver to reboot.

If successful, the patient keeps their original organ, and a precious donor liver — currently a rare and finite resource — becomes available for someone else.

KNOWN KNOWNS:

Why sports stars who head the ball are much more likely to die of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease (Jasmin Fox-Skelly, 1/06/26, BBC)

The dangers of contact sports have actually been known about for almost 100 years. In 1928, US pathologist Harrison Martland published a scientific article arguing that, “for some time, fight fans and promoters have recognised a peculiar condition occurring among prize fighters which, in ring parlance, they speak of as ‘punch drunk’.”

Symptoms included a staggering gait and mental confusion, and were most common in “fighters of the slugging type, who are usually poor boxers and who take considerable head punishment”. In some cases, punch-drunkenness progressed to dementia, later classed as “dementia pugilistica” – a type of dementia occurring in boxers who have experienced repeated head injury.

At first, it was thought the problem was confined to boxing. But in recent decades that understanding has changed. In 2002, West Bromwich Albion and England soccer player Jeff Astle died at the age of 59 following a diagnosis of early onset dementia. In the US meanwhile, American football player Mike Webster died suddenly age 50 after experiencing cognitive decline and other Parkinson’s-like symptoms. In both cases, examination of the sports stars’ brains showed they had died from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a more modern term replacing the diagnosis of dementia pugilistica.

Always fun when tobacco advocates claim no one knew the cancer risks of smoking and then you read an old novel referring to cigarettes as coffin nails.

THE PHYSICAL IS MENTAL:

Illness is more than just biological – medical sociology shows how social factors get under the skin and cause disease (Jennifer Singh, January 8, 2026 , The Conversation)

Modern medical sociology ultimately considers all societal issues to be health issues. Improving people’s health and well-being requires improving education, employment, housing, transportation and other social, economic and political policies.

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO REFUSE VACCINES:

Absences at Texas School District Spiked 41 Percent After Measles Outbreak, Says Hoover Scholar (Hoover Education , December 16, 2025)

A West Texas school district that experienced a measles outbreak saw school absences climb by 41 percent and remain high for months afterward, demonstrating immense educational impact of preventable illnesses on communities with low rates of immunization, new research by a Hoover scholar shows.

The research was conducted by Thomas Dee, Robert and Marion Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), alongside Sofia Wilson, a doctoral student at the GSE.

Republican liberty restricts freedom.

NO BODY’S PERFECT:

Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated (Gina Kolata, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Times)

The idea that finding a cancer early is not always a good thing is not easy for many patients and their families to accept. And it is true that lives can be saved by treating cancer early.

Autopsy studies repeatedly find that many people die with small cancers they were unaware of. A review of these studies in prostate cancer reported that the cancer can appear in men as young as their 20s. The older the men were, the more likely they were to have undetected prostate cancer. By their 70s, about a third of white men and half of Black men had undetected prostate cancer.

A study of thyroid cancer in Finland found that at least a third of adults had undetected tumors. Less than one percent of people die from thyroid cancer

The problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not. And if the cancer is gone after treatment, there is no way to know if it needed to be treated.

But there’s a way to know on a population level if an increase in diagnoses is a false alarm or a danger signal, said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Look at the number of deaths from that cancer. If more lethal cancers are being found, there should be more deaths. But if the death rate remains steady as the incidence of that cancer spikes, many of those patients did not need to receive diagnoses.

That happened, for example, with thyroid cancer in South Korea. The incidence of thyroid cancer soared with the introduction of widespread ultrasound screening. But deaths did not increase. It was estimated that 90 percent of the cancers that were discovered and treated in women did not need to be found.

Well aware of such incidents, Dr. Vishal R. Patel of Harvard, Dr. Welch and Dr. Adewole S. Adamson of Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, asked whether the current spike in diagnoses in younger people of those eight cancers is tied to more deaths.

It is not, they reported in a recent paper examining trends over the past three decades.

For all but two of the eight cancers whose incidence has soared in younger people, death rates are flat or declining.

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

How to Print a Human: We desperately need new organs, and we’re running out of ways to get them (Mary Roach November 28, 2025, Nautilus)

I ask Feinberg when he thinks medical science will arrive at the point of implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients. If we use the analogy of airplane flight, he puts things somewhere around the Wright brothers stage. “Of course, we don’t want a plane that goes 30 feet down the field. We want a plane that can fly around all day.”

And how far off is that? A decade plus, Feinberg says.

For medical science, that’s actually a brisk turnaround. (In an earlier phone conversation, Feinberg equated “a decade or two” with “pretty quickly.”) He adds that he thought it could easily happen far sooner. “Because we keep coming up with new things.” Just 20 years ago, he points out, there was no gene editing, no CRISPR. “Plus AI is going to accelerate, and that’s going to change what’s possible.”

I pose the same question now to Jaci Bliley, a senior post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bliley has just joined us in the microscope room. Two to three decades is her estimate. Like Feinberg, she says she’s surprised at how fast things are moving. She offers the example of some stand-alone beating heart ventricles, little tubular constructs that she printed as part of her Ph.D. research. “That was 2019,” she says. “Now we’re putting them into mice and they’re surviving. After six months they’re still alive and beating.”

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Most ‘gluten sensitivity’ is not actually caused by gluten (Bronwyn Thompson, October 24, 2025, New Atlas)

“Across recent studies, people with IBS who believe they’re gluten-sensitive react similarly to gluten, wheat, and placebo,” said Biesiekierski. “This suggests that how people anticipate and interpret gut sensations can strongly influence their symptoms.”