Statins can be effective at lowering cholesterol, but they have a perplexing tendency to work for some people and not others. Gut bacteria may be the reason. A research team led by a Duke University scientist has identified three bile acids produced by gut bacteria that were evident in people who responded well to a common cholesterol-lowering drug called simvastatin.

A peanut solution given under the tongue can desensitize a child’s deadly peanut allergies, but further testing will be needed to determine if it may permanently eliminate their reactions to the foods, according to researchers from Duke University Medical Center. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, Duke researchers built up tolerance to the allergen in 11 children with a year of small but escalating daily doses of peanut

Women who have survived childhood cancer should be advised to breastfeed if they can, in order to offset some of the negative health effects of their earlier cancer treatment.

(Garrison, NY) Extra large private hospital rooms with plenty of natural light and artwork may seem like unaffordable luxuries, but new research shows that these and other architecture and design features can improve patient care and in the long run reduce health care expenses. They are among the elements of the “Fable hospital,” an ideal health care facility as conceived and analyzed by leaders in health care and design. Elements of the Fable hospital are being adopted on the ground today, with the imperative to improve quality and value.

WHAT: Adding new evidence to the debate on the best treatment for middle-ear infections, or acute otitis media, in young children, clinical researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have found antibiotics to be more effective than a placebo in relieving symptoms. These findings appear in the January 13th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine . The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed new methods for analysing medical databases that can be used to identify diagnostic markers more quickly and to personalise medication for allergic disorders. They could also reduce the need for animal trials in clinical studies. Published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology , the study builds on data analyses of freely available medical databases representing studies of countless numbers of patients in the PubMed database, and microarray data in another major database