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Antibiotic fails sinus infection test
By Nathan Seppa
Anyone who has felt the pressure of
a weeklong sinus infection won’t be
happy to hear it, but a study finds that a
commonly prescribed medicine doesn’t
clear up such attacks any better than
a placebo.
The findings, in the Feb. 15 Journal of
the American Medical Association, don’t
apply to people who have chronic sinus
infections lasting 28 days or more. But
people with trademark signs of an acute
sinus infection — yucky drainage, facial
pressure, congestion and headache for
a full week — overall fared no better with
antibiotics than did people getting inert
pills, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis report.
“This struck me as a very well-
designed, -conducted and -analyzed
study,” says James Hughes, an infectious
disease physician at Emory University
in Atlanta. “It adds to evidence that in
most patients with acute sinus infec-
tions, antibiotics don’t add value.”
The researchers randomly assigned
166 adults with sinus infections to get
either amoxicillin or a placebo three
times a day for 10 days. All patients
received other drugs for symptom relief
as needed. Three days after treatment
started, the two groups had improved
at the same pace. Seven days out,
slightly more patients getting antibiot-
ics reported improvement, but this edge
disappeared by day 10 when about four-
fifths of each group reported “significant
improvement” in sinus infections, says
study coauthor Jane Garbutt, a physician
and researcher at Washington University.
James Gill, a practicing physician
who also heads Delaware Valley Out-
comes Research in Newark, Del., says
the medical community has tried to slow
the prescribing of antibiotics for sinus
infections for years. “But I don’t think
practice patterns have changed much,”
he says. Doctors are under pressure from
patients to do something, and offering
assurance that the symptoms are likely
to resolve in a week or so rarely satisfies
them, Gill says.
Two cells make fly memories last Of the 100,000 nerve cells in the fruit fly brain, two have a special role in memory. Positioned on the front of the brain, one on each side, this duo of nerve cells (shown in pink) churns out proteins that are essential for fruit flies to form, store and retrieve long-term memories, Chun-Chao Chen of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and colleagues report in the Feb. 10 Science. When the researchers prevented these two nerve cells from making proteins after a training session, the flies’ ability to remember an odor diminished. surprisingly, these two large nerve cells, called the dorsal-anterior-lateral neurons, reside outside brain regions that are typically thought of as the fruit fly’s memory centers — L-shaped structures called the mushroom bodies (shown in green). —Laura Sanders
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