Drinking rates down

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

Maybe the stylish television series "Mad Men" has it right. In the smoky, boozy world of Madison Avenue advertising during the Kennedy administration, there's a bottle of the hard stuff in every office and glasses clink for just about any occasion. A Boston University study of trends in alcohol consumption in The American Journal of Medicine says people really did drink more back then.

Researchers from the BU School of Medicine analyzed records from the long-running Framingham Heart Study and found that from 1948 through 2003, average intake dropped with each generation. The proportion of people who were heavy drinkers went down while the share of moderate drinkers went up. Beer fell out of favor compared to wine.

While drinking went down, the incidence of drinking problems - from job loss to drunken-driving arrests - did not. Framingham may be a long way from 1960s Manhattan, but things never change.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis comes in two forms: bad and worse. New research from Harvard shows progress against the worst kind.

People with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis can't be helped by two first-line drugs, cutting down their chances of being cured. Those whose disease does not respond to those two first-line drugs or to three classes of second-line drugs have what is called extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. Their chances of cure are even lower.Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Harvard, working with colleagues in Peru, report that an aggressive, comprehensive treatment program tailored to individual patients cured more than 60 percent of patients whose previous therapy had failed.

"It's essential that the world know that XDR-TB is not a death sentence," lead author Carole D. Mitnick of Harvard Medical School said in a statement.

To encourage parents to stop smoking, Massachusetts General Hospital wants pediatricians to deliver an antitobacco message to parents during a child's regular checkups.

Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff and his colleagues in the Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure, or CEASE, explain how they came up with the plan in the current Journal of Pediatrics. They tested the program among eight pediatric practices in the Boston area and presented it at national meetings.

"This program is now available for everyone to use, and the science behind it is compelling," Winickoff said in a statement. "I hope that every child healthcare office in the country adopts the program so that every family can become tobacco-free."

ELIZABETH COONEY