DNA testing is transforming health care and medicine, but current technologies only give a snapshot of an individual’s genetic makeup. Any patient wanting a complete picture of their inherited DNA, or genome, would drop their jaw at the sight of the bill — to the current tune of $10 million or more charged for every human or mammalian-sized genome sequenced. [click link for full article]

Aromatase inhibitors, a type of hormone therapy used to treat advanced breast cancer in postmenopausal women, result in a small but significant increase in overall survival when compared to other hormone treatments, according to a new systematic review of studies. [click link for full article]

Alternative medicine has become increasingly popular in recent years. “Specialized” tests such as neutralization-provocation, applied kinesiology and body chemical analysis claim to diagnose and treat “toxic build-ups” in the body,…

Connecticut lawmakers, business representatives and universal health care advocates on Monday at a General Assembly Public Health Committee hearing agreed that changes are needed to reduce the number of uninsured state residents but disagreed on how to achieve such a goal, the [click link for full article]

A breast cancer treatment based on MIT research originally intended for detecting missiles is documented in a new book by Alan J. Fenn, an MIT researcher and inventor of the technique.The book, “Breast Cancer Treatment by Focused Microwave Thermotherapy” (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2007), includes a discussion of promising results from the latest clinical trials of the therapy. [click link for full article]

More than 39 million Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare prescription drug plans, CMS officials announced Tuesday, the Detroit Free Press reports. According to CMS, 1. [click link for full article]

NARAL Pro-Choice America earlier this month released its 16th annual “Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States” report, issuing failing grades to 19 states for enacting legislation to restrict access to abortion and other reproductive health services, CQ HealthBeat reports. [click link for full article]

US researchers conducting the first national survey of eating disorders have described binge eating disorder as a major public health burden. The study is published in the current edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry.The research was led by Dr James Hudson, Director of the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. [click link for full article]

Research groups from Texas, Chicago, Washington State and the Netherlands partnered to publish a landmark study validating the Infectious Disease Society of America’s guidelines for the clinical classification of diabetic foot infections.”We’re all very pleased to see this study in print,” noted co-author David G. Armstrong, DPM, PhD, Professor of Surgery at Scholl’s Center for Lower Extremity Ambulatory Research (CLEAR) at Rosalind Franklin University. [click link for full article]

Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB), the world’s leading voluntary health organization supporting eye research, awarded 90 grants totaling $9.12 million in 2006 for research into the causes, treatment, and prevention of all blinding diseases.Departments of ophthalmology at 55 medical schools throughout the United States currently receive RPB research grants; a total of 176 individual ophthalmic scientists received RPB grant support in 2006. [click link for full article]