A study of the effects on toddlers of home smoking bans shows that a policy of no smoking in the house is associated with a small but significant reduction in mean urinary cotinine:creatinine ratio in children aged 18-30 months. The reduction holds regardless of how much the parents smoke outside the home (Archives of Disease in Childhood 2005;90: 670-4).

A randomised, controlled, double blind study of the effects of candesartan (an angio-tensin receptor blocker) on 5436 patients with heart failure, who did not have diabetes at the start of the study, reports that 6% of those in the candesartan group subsequently developed diabetes, compared with 7.4% in the placebo group. It's not exactly news, because other large studies have shown similar effects with ramipril and enalapril, which are both ACE inhibitors. But the authors point out that this is the first study that compares the active drug with a placebo (Circulation 2005;112: 48-53).

A possible clue as to why melanoma cells are so resistant to chemotherapy has been reported by scientists in the latest issue of Nature …