MADRID, Spain - Actor Tom Cruise said Scientology teachings helped him overcome childhood dyslexia, a Spanish magazine reported.

"Cruise was quoted by Spanish magazine XL Semanal as saying he was diagnosed with the learning disability when he was 7 years old.

Cruise said he was often anxious, frustrated and bored as a youth and couldn't concentrate in class, the magazine reported on its Web site Sunday.

The magazine quoted Cruise as saying he was functionally illiterate when he graduated from school in 1980, but learned to read perfectly as an adult through Scientology technology.

XL Semanal said the interview was conducted in Los Angeles, but did not say when. A transcript of Cruise's original comments in English was not available.

The Church of Scientology was established in 1945 by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and claims 10 million members around the world. Cruise and fellow actor John Travolta among its more famed followers."

A functional illiterate joins "religion" that believes aliens inhabit our bodies that can cure most brain diseases....

Meanwhile, diet tips from Gwyneth Paltrow.  Do NOT try this at home or on Yom Kippur:
 

Gwyneth Paltrow: How I'm Losing Those Holiday Pounds

• • celebs:
  • Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow arrives for the grand opening of Fontainebleau Miami Beach on November 14, 2008 in Miami Beach, Florida.Us Magazine

No, really.

Susan Dentzer (editor-in-chief of Health Affairs and an on-air analyst on health policy for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) has an excellent and timely Perspective piece in the January 1 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, “Communicating Medical News — Pitfalls of Health Care Journalism.”

Some of her comments include:

“Whether they realize it or not, journalists reporting on health care developments deliver public health messages that can influence the behavior of clinicians and patients. Often these messages are delivered effectively by seasoned reporters who perform thoughtfully even in the face of breaking news and tight deadlines. But all too frequently, what is conveyed about health by many other journalists is wrong or misleading.”

“Consider news reports on the findings of the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) study, reported in March 2006. The STAR*D study was a complicated trial designed to test treatment approaches for seriously depressed patients who weren't helped by taking one antidepressant. The results showed that 50% of patients had improvement after pursuing additional treatment steps, such as switching or adding medications, taking a higher dose, undergoing cognitive therapy, or some combination of these. Arguably, for people with serious long-term depression, this was hopeful news. Yet on March 23, 2006, the Washington Post ran a story whose lead paragraph framed the study as a failure because half the patients had no improvement: ‘Antidepressants fail to cure the symptoms of major depression in half of all patients with the disease even if they receive the best possible care, according to a definitive government study released yesterday.’ Apparently, simply noting that half got better and half did not was not deemed sufficiently new or interesting.”

“But so uncertain and episodic has been past coverage of drug safety and efficacy that much of the news media now feel duty-bound to report on many drug-related findings whether reporters understand them or not. A recent high-profile example was coverage of the Ezetimibe and Simvastatin in Hypercholesterolemia Enhances Atherosclerosis Regression (ENHANCE) trial. Although the study in fact raised questions about whether ezetimibe yielded any benefit when added to statin therapy, its findings were almost consistently misreported. Some journalists asserted that it showed the drug had no benefits in preventing heart attacks and strokes — something it certainly did not show, since heart attacks and strokes were not end points in the trial. We will never know the cost of this misinformation in terms of panicked patients or physicians who, perhaps unnecessarily, discontinued use of the drug.”

“In my view, we in the news media have a responsibility to hold ourselves to higher standards if there is any chance that doctors and patients will act on the basis of our reporting. We are not clinicians, but we must be more than carnival barkers; we must be credible health communicators more interested in conveying clear, actionable health information to the public than carrying out our other agendas.”

The full article can be found here. 

Well done and well said Susan.
 

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - Many genes linked to various cancers do not appear to raise the risk of getting cancer after all, according to an analysis of hundreds of studies published on Tuesday.

The findings highlight the need to exercise caution over the increasing number of studies associating common genetic variations with a range of diseases, said John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece.

"The whole thing about genetic variations and links to diseases like cancer are very exciting, but the general public should be quite cautious about jumping to the conclusion that if they have a change in one gene or another they are doomed," Ioannidis, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

"Genetic effects are very complex and very subtle and we need to know a lot more before we can make strong recommendations based on genetic profiles."

Ioannidis said his team had looked only at common genetic changes or polymorphisms, not at rare mutations, which in genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 significantly raise breast cancer risk. The rare form of these variants, for example, accounts for an estimated 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers.

Since early 2007, variations at more than 100 places on the genome have been linked to diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

The problem, researchers say, is that many of these genes typically interact in a complicated manner and their ultimate effects are influenced by the environment -- diet, exercise, smoking and other behavior -- in often poorly understood ways.

Ioannidis and his colleague Paolo Vineis of Imperial College London analyzed hundreds of published studies linking genetic changes to different cancers. They found that, out of 240 associations between a specific mutation and a cancer, only two genes involved in DNA repair and tied to lung cancer -- XRCC1 and ERCC2 -- turned out to be strong candidates for such a link.

"Most of the associations had weak or modest credibility," he said. That included PARP1 for breast cancer and CCND1 for head and neck tumors.

The problem is that on their own, the earlier studies fail to provide a complete picture and run the risk of drawing conclusions from too limited an amount of data, Ioannidis said.

This does not mean studies linking genes to cancer and the risk of other diseases have completely missed the mark, but rather that it takes a mountain of evidence to reach strong conclusions when it comes to the human genome, he added.

"Our study shows that it really takes a lot of research effort and many, many studies to be able to pinpoint a couple of associations," Ioannidis said.

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; editing by Maggie Fox and Tim Pearce)

Blue Cross, Zagat to rank doctors
But the ratings will be based on nonmedical factors, and some question insurance link