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Some obese children as young as 3 years old have elevated levels of a marker that is linked to heart disease in later life, a new study says.

Doctors are narrowing their recommendation on who should take daily aspirin for heart health, based largely on concerns about the drug’s side effects, which can include bleeding ulcers. See here for more about that.

But there’s another type of person who might someday be advised to steer clear of a daily aspirin: those for whom the pain reliever doesn’t work well as a blood clotter.

Pfizer has won FDA approval of a product developed by Wyeth, which Pfizer bought last year for $68 billion. And it’s a biggie — a updated version of the world’s best-selling vaccine Prevnar. See the Pfizer announcement.

Some time ago, 20 obese men traveled by cogwheel train and cable car to the awesomely named Umwelt Forschungsstation Schneefernerhaus, a research station (pictured) in the shadow of Germany’s highest mountain.

The men were the subjects of a study on altitude and weight loss. They were allowed to eat whatever they wanted during their week on the mountain, and their activity was restricted to slow walks through the research station.

An injury treatment popular with professional athletes failed in a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The treatment is called platelet-rich plasma injection. The doctor takes some of the patient’s blood and uses a relatively simple technique to separate out the platelets, some of which are then re-injected at the injury site. The idea is that the platelets stimulate the repair of injured tissue.

A few quick drug-industry items:

Novartis is buying closely held Corthera for $120 million. That gives the company the rights to a drug called Relaxin, which is in late-stage trials for acute heart failure. Current Corthera shareholders could get hundreds of millions more in milestone payments if the drug pans out (always an iffy proposition).

Is there a ceiling on the price of cancer drugs?

A medicine called Folotyn, approved earlier this year for patients with a rare form of lymphoma, costs $30,000 per month, the New York Times reports.

The drug hasn’t been proven to extend patients’ lives; in a study cited by the FDA, tumors shrank in 27% of patients who took the drug.

Here’s an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question to kick off the week: If the public option offers private insurance, is it still the public option?

Yes, health IT systems done right can help improve patient safety. But health IT systems done wrong can actually create new safety risks, a doctor and patient-safety expert says in a new article published by the journal Health Affairs.

We heard something similar a few weeks back, when we chatted with a senior Kaiser doc who warned of “magical thinking” on health IT. Today’s commentary comes from Bob Wachter, a UC San Francisco hospitalist, who writes:

Doctors and nurses don’t wash their hands as often as they’re supposed to. So we were interested to read about a program at UCLA Medical Center that managed to boost compliance with hand-washing guidelines from 50% to 93%, according to a paper published today in the journal Academic Medicine.

The trick was getting undergrads to volunteer to come lurk in the hospital.