Dr John Briffa's blog, A Good Look at Good Health — writing on food, cholesterol, weight, energy and the science behind everyday health, from the drbriffa.com archive. Filter by topic, browse by category, or search the library.
Brain and Behaviour
I recently read an interesting editorial in the Journal of American College of Cardiology about the relative benefits of walking and running [1]. The editorial is partly a comment on a paper published in the same edition of the journal which found that running for 5-10 minutes a day is associated with a 45 per […]
Cholesterol and Statins
The supposed ‘gold standard’ method of medical research is the ‘randomised controlled trial’. What this means in drug therapy research is that a group of individuals are randomly assigned to the treatment being studied or placebo, and the outcomes and effects compared. In the ‘best’ trials, neither the study participant not the investigators know who […]
Men's Health
When men middle-aged or elderly men have some difficulty with urination, their doctor’s attention will usually focus on their prostate – the gland that encircles the pipe that takes urine from the bladder to the outside known as the urethra. An enlarged prostate can impinge on the outflow of urine from the bladder and therefore […]
Cholesterol and Statins
I have written more than once about Professor Sir Rory Collins. He leads the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists collaboration in Oxford, UK. Periodically, this group takes (private) statin study data and churns out bold pronouncements on the (supposed) great effectiveness and safety of these drugs. Professor Collins recently tried to get the BMJ to retract two […]
Healthy Eating
I came across this story today, which talks about the device that counts the number of bites of food individuals take over the course of the day. The idea appears to be there being aware of this can help individuals to keep within some sort of recommended calorie limit for the day. However, as someone […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Cholesterol in the bloodstream is carried within protein-rich packages known as ‘lipoproteins’. These come in two main types, so-called ‘low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol’ (LDL-C) and ‘high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol’ (HDL-C). Conventional wisdom has it that LDL-C is responsible for dumping cholesterol on the inside of arteries, and is dubbed ‘bad cholesterol’ as a result. On the other hand, HDL-cholesterol […]
Brain and Behaviour
Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia, and its cause is likely to be ‘multifactorial’ and even vary considerably between individuals. However, on thing that appears to be true is that a key driving process in the condition is inflammation (which, by the way, seems to be true for ‘chronic’ conditions). One potential anti-inflammatory agent […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Professor Sir Rory Collins is one of the most strident advocates of statin therapy, and also leads a ‘research group’ known as the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists collaboration (CTT). Professor Collins and his colleagues hold a huge database of from statin studies, and quite-often ‘crunch the numbers’ and pronounce statins to be highly effective and very […]
Food and Medical Politics
On the face of it, health checks can seem like a bit of ‘no brainer’. If you accept an invite from your doctor to attend for a ‘health MOT’ (the MOT is the annual test of car road-worthiness in the UK), then the thought is this will help ‘catch something early’, and allow earlier and […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Higher levels of so-called ‘HDL-cholesterol’ is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular issues including heart disease and stroke. This finding has led to the widespread view that raising HDL levels has benefits for health, particularly with regard to cardiovascular risk. There are three main classes of agents that are known to boost HDL levels: the […]