The first medical topic today: The American cholesterol guideline, the joint guideline of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, has been updated in 2019. The new version of the guideline still says that patients at high-risk for heart attack must take a statin. However, a new category has been created, intermediate-risk. If a patient is at intermediate-risk for heart attack, he or she can take a statin but must not do so. The decision should be made after a joint conversation between the doctor and the patient, taking the pros and cons into account.
The second medical news today: It has been long known by doctors that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. This knowledge has been confirmed once again in 2019. A large study was published in the medical journal “Annals of Internal Medicine” in 2019. This large study adds to the evidence showing no association between MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism diagnosis. However, what non-doctors do not know is that there is a specific problem. The original medical study that had shown that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism was faked. Dr. Andrew Wakefield had published this medical study in 1998. Yet, the journalist Brian Deer later discovered that Dr. Wakefield secretly had taken many hundreds of thousands of British pounds from anti-vaccine activists to publish a fake medical study. This fake research had catalysed the anti-vaccination movement, and unfortunately, continues to do so today. This fake study continues to be the main argument of the anti-vaccination movement. Please be not an anti-vaccine activist before finding out all the facts.