A few years back, HealthNewsReview.org publisher Gary Schwitzer drew up a widely circulated list of seven words you shouldn’t use in medical news. Now it’s time to add one more: “controversial.”. Too often, the word is used as a crutch that allows media outlets to evade the responsibility of providing context.

This week a New York Times story introduced readers to a young woman with a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), which is characterized by high cholesterol levels and early heart disease. titled “These Cholesterol-Reducers May Save Lives. So Why Aren’t Heart Patients Getting Them?

Mary Chris Jaklevic is a reporter-editor at HealthNewsReview.org. She tweets as @mcjaklevic. “Helped slow an aggressive type of breast cancer,” reported Reuters. “Expected to change the standard of care,” crowed The New York Times. Judging by news reports last weekend, women with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer had reason to cheer results of a clinical trial of an immunotherapy drug called atezolizumab, which is marketed as Tecentriq.

Results of a much-anticipated trial on fish oil and vitamin D generated conflicting headlines last weekend. Some stories declared good news about the popular supplements: Reuters wrote that fish oil “can dramatically reduce the odds of a heart attack while vitamin D’s benefits seem to come from lowering the risk of death from cancer.”.

With sexually transmitted diseases on the rise, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago think they might have a powerful new weapon to fight their spread: Google searches. The nation’s leading search engine has quietly begun giving researchers access to its data troves to develop analytical models for tracking infectious diseases in real time or close to it.

Dozens of not-for-profit organizations have formed in the past decade to promote free or low-cost heart screenings for teens. These groups often claim such tests save lives by finding abnormalities that might pose a risk of sudden cardiac death. But the efforts are raising concerns. There’s no evidence that screening adolescents with electrocardiograms (ECG) prevents deaths.

When John Gaddo and Nancy North set out to build a small, energy-efficient house in southeast Minnesota, they found themselves gravitating to passive house, a rigorous design standard that aggressively slashes energy use. But computer modeling showed their plan would fall just short of the standard, which was devised in Germany, unless they made some onerous changes.