Whoever stumbled across this discovery is a genius! First let me say there is nothing that will knock the breath right out of you than being told a test for cancer has come back positive. False-positive results are determined when the second follow-up test reveals the first test is an error in diagnosis. I am certain the first reaction is relief -- and then a sort of aggravation that you had to be put through the harrowing emotions of a cancer diagnosis in the first place.

False-positives can happen for a number of reasons, but one of them involves body heat generated by brown adipose tissue, or brown fat, which can mimic cancer during a PET/CT scan. The current solution is the use of valium and beta blockers during the scan, and studies have shown it reduces reading error by 30 percent. However -- and here is where the whoever thought to do this is a genius comes into play -- the simple use of a warm blanket is more than twice as effective as the administration of drugs in preventing the uptake of tracer by brown fat in the body. According to the researchers, everyone has brown fat, but it is more common in slender women.