Website on hospital care, cost

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

Massachusetts residents can now search a new website to compare the cost and quality of care at different hospitals, part of an ambitious state plan to help control healthcare costs by giving consumers more information.

The My HealthCare Options site (http://hcqcc.hcf.state.ma.us/) gives consumers access to previously confidential information about how much insurers pay individual hospitals for surgical procedures such as knee and hip replacements, and for treating illnesses such as pneumonia. It also allows comparisons of patient satisfaction ratings and patient safety measures at different hospitals.

LIZ KOWALCZYK

Hopes that taking vitamins and other supplements might cut the risk of cancer took another blow in two new studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One large, randomized clinical trial led by Dr. J. Michael Graziano of Brigham and Women's Hospital found that middle-age men who took vitamin E or vitamin C for about eight years did not lower their risk of prostate cancer or other kinds of cancer.

Another large trial from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center studying the effect of selenium and vitamin E on cancer risk was halted early when neither supplement showed any benefits to the men taking it.

"It may be time to give up the idea that the protective influence of diet on prostate cancer risk . . . can be emulated by isolated dietary molecules given alone or in combination to middle-aged and older men," wrote Dr. Peter H. Gann of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

ELIZABETH COONEY