Top medicine articles for October 2014

A collection of some interesting medical articles published recently:

Hand-grip strength is an amazingly good predictor of future rates of mortality and morbidity, or sickness http://buff.ly/1BK759H -- Hand grip strength should be considered as a vital sign useful for screening middle-aged and older adults http://buff.ly/1DglFaI -- Measuring hand-grip strength is very simple and cheap. Every primary care doctor should have a dynamometer in their office. At every visit, the doctor could check grip strength for older patients. If someone was in the 45th percentile for their age and the measurements were stable, great. But if that person suddenly dropped to the 25th percentile, then that’s a sign that the doctor should look seriously at what might be going on.

Full fat milk (3%) cut the risk of getting diabetes type 2 by 20% http://buff.ly/1m9ghRL

Urine Test for Diagnosis of HPV Works Well (not yet available in practice) http://bit.ly/1pnswES

Weekly Injectable Drug for DM2 Approved -Trulicity (dulaglutide) a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist. http://bit.ly/1pnsyNh

FDA approved for treating fibromyalgia: pregabalin (Lyrica), duloxetine (Cymbalta), milnacipran (Savella) http://reut.rs/1pnsWet

Human Body, According to Venture Capitalists - which body systems stand to benefit most from their decisions - WSJ http://bit.ly/1pntgdp

Sodium conundrum: 9 in 10 U.S. children eat too much salt http://buff.ly/1wdlXx5

With 23andMe, this biologist gave his parents the gift of divorce http://bit.ly/1uvevub

People who spend more time preparing and cooking meals are more likely to have healthier diets http://buff.ly/1DTvZG4

Walking is the superfood of fitness, experts say -- “Walking is a superfood. It’s the defining movement of a human". “Actively sedentary is a new category of people who are fit for one hour but sitting around the rest of the day," Bowman said. “You can’t offset 10 hours of stillness with one hour of exercise.” http://buff.ly/1BxXEbA -- Exercise: “If you’re going to pick one thing, research says it should be walking”

Acupuncture May Not Help Chronic Knee Pain after all http://buff.ly/ZpQw5B

Epic holds the health records of nearly half of all Americans http://buff.ly/ZpRcIc

Gene affects your taste for bitter flavors. People who aren't as sensitive eat 200 more servings of vegetables/year http://buff.ly/YSQRMT

Ebola drug ZMapp is produced in the leaves of tobacco plants. 10 years from now, plants might be the dominant vaccine-production system http://buff.ly/1vzaN4f

The articles were selected from Twitter and my RSS subscriptions. Please feel free to send suggestions for articles to clinicalcases AT gmail.com and you will receive acknowledgement in the next edition of this publication.