(July 5, 2011 - Insidermedicine)

From Serbia - Vitamin D may improve survival in elderly women, according to a report published in The Cochrane Library. Results of a meta-anaylsis covering 50 trials and nearly 100,000 participants found that giving vitamin D3 to elderly women reduced mortality rates by about 6%.

From Ohio - Air pollution may raise risk of depression, as well as learning and memory problems, according to a report published in Molecular Psychiatry. Researchers exposed mice to either filtered air or polluted air for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for a 10 month period. Results showed that mice exposed to the polluted air had impaired memory on a variety of tests, and also showed increased inflammation in the hippocampus--an area of the brain responsible for mood, memory and learning.

And finally, from France - The drug erlotinib significantly improves survival in lung cancer patients, according to a report presented and the World Conference on Lung Cancer. Randomizing nearly 200 lung cancer patients to either erlotinib or chemotherapy, researchers found that progression free survival  with erlotinib was 9.4 months compared with only 5.2 months for chemotherapy.