By MAURA LERNER, Minneapolis Star Tribune

You won't find the word "nagging" in the study. But scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that smokers are more likely to kick the habit if a counselor calls them every month for a year with helpful tips and nicotine patches.

It's a question that some patients are afraid to ask: What are my chances of dying on the operating table?

Now, believe it or not, there's an app for that.

Is there any less effective form of communication than nagging?

At some point, we all want to change somebody else's behavior. And it's tempting to offer friendly advice, especially to spouses and children, about how they could improve.

But I think we would all agree that nagging is basically counterproductive.

Dr. Marcus Thygeson once wrote his patients countless prescriptions for heartburn drugs -- Prevacid, Prilosec and Nexium -- the "little purple pills" of TV ads.

But several months ago, when his own doctor advised him to start taking the pills, he refused. "It was all I could do to get out of the office without a prescription," he said.

Do you really need an MRI for that aching back or sore shoulder?

For the past three years, more than 2,000 Minnesota doctors have used a computer program to help answer those questions. They plug in information about a patient, and a program using national guidelines tells them if a CT scan or MRI is a good choice -- or if there's something better.

Dr. Paul Friedman insists he wasn't distracted by the woman in the second row wearing a pair of wings and a rainbow bodysuit. And he didn't even seem to notice when a visitor teleported into the audience, scanned the crowd and vanished into thin air.

At 17, Camia Carruthers is expecting her first child next week. But she's not going it alone. She has the support of her parents, her boyfriend and Jeanne Kumlin, a nurse who makes weekly house calls.

Four years ago, after being bitten by a deer tick, Michelle Backes got treated immediately for Lyme disease. She thought she was safe until three months later, when her body started going numb. Then the onetime teacher from Lindstrom, Minn., turned to a highly controversial therapy: more than a year's worth of antibiotics.

Would it surprise you to know that a crispy chicken salad at Burger King has as many calories (670) as a Whopper? Or that a 16-ounce mocha at Starbucks has twice the calories of a cappuccino?

Breast cancer researchers say they could cut years off the time required to test new drugs for treating certain kinds of tumors under a study about to begin at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic.

The study, being launched at 17 centers nationwide, is among the first of its kind, researchers from a national consortium said this week.