Health briefs: Mind over matter may help some migraines

A quirky new study suggests patients' expectations can make a big difference in how they feel after treatment for a migraine. Boston researchers recruited 66 migraine patients in an attempt to quantify how much of their pain relief came from a medication and how much was because of what's called the placebo effect, the healing power of positive belief. More than 450 headaches later, they reported that it's important for doctors to carefully choose what they tell patients about a powerful medicine — because the message could help enhance its benefits, or blunt them.

"Every word you say counts, not only every gram of the medication," said Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk, who led the study at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

Here's how it worked: First, patients who suffer regular migraines agreed to forgo pain relievers for several hours during one attack, recording their symptoms.

Then for each of their next six migraines, the patients were given a different pill with a different message. Sometimes they were told it was an effective migraine drug named rizatriptan, a positive message. Other times they were told it was a placebo, a dummy pill, suggesting no benefit. Still other times they were told the pill could be either one. Remarkably, people who knew they were taking a placebo still reported less pain.

The surprise discovery: Patients' reports of pain relief more than doubled when they were told the migraine drug was real than when they were told, falsely, that it was a fake, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

In fact, people reported nearly as much pain relief when they took a placebo that they thought was the real drug as they did when they took the drug while believing it was a fake.

An inexperienced driver who reaches for a cellphone increases the risk of a crash by more than 700 percent, a study found.

Among the teenagers, eating almost tripled the risk for a crash, and texting quadrupled it. Dialing a phone was the most dangerous activity, resulting in eight times the risk of a crash or near-crash. For experienced drivers, only dialing a phone significantly increased the risk of an accident. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that overall, drivers spent about 10 percent of their time looking at something other than the road in front of them. "When young people engage in tasks that take their eyes away from the roadway, they're increasing their risk dramatically," said the lead author, Charlie Klauer, a research scientist at Virginia Tech University.

25% Only 1 in 4 U.S. kids aged 12 to 15 meet fitness recommendations — an hour or more of moderate to vigorous activity every day. The results are based on about 800 kids who self-reported their activity levels and had physical exams. "It's definitely very concerning to see that our kids are engaging in such a limited amount of physical activity each day when we are still battling" an obesity epidemic, said Dr. Stephen Pont, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' section on obesity.