“There’s excitement, there’s caution and a lot of unanswered questions,” warned Erwin Gelfand, a pediatrics and immunology professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine. But all this means that anyone who has gone through Aimmune’s regimen would still want to carry epinephrine, and try to avoid peanuts. “Not everybody responds well,” Gelfand said.
“There was once a time where we could say schools are the safest place for a child to be, and they would agree,” said Steven Berkowitz, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who has worked with kids for 25 years. “They wouldn’t now, even though it’s still true. The perception of safety is no longer there.”
Without more data, it’s difficult to pin that HDL improvement on a single factor, said Robert Eckel, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a former president of the American Heart Association. “It can’t be because we’re losing weight, because that’s still going up, but it could be statin use. It could be a result of the decline in smoking. Or a combination of factors,” Eckel said. “Regardless, the message here is a good one. And it reflects other things we’re seeing, like the number of heart attacks which have gone down, too.
Nursing has been linked to a reduced risk of breast cancer risk in both pre- and post-menopausal women. But, says Virginia Borges, director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center’s young women’s breast cancer program, “it gets complicated from here.” Nursing a baby changes the structure of the breast. Even after breast-feeding ends, microscopic changes in the milk-delivery system protect the breast against precancerous cells, Borges says. This effect is more common among women who have nursed more children or for longer periods than others.
