Only 1 in 5 women in developing world receive effective cervical cancer screening
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Few women in the developing world are screened effectively for cervical cancer and those at highest risk of developing the disease are among the least likely to be screened, accordingly an analysis published in PLoS Medicine. The study, by Emmanuela Gakidou (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) and colleagues, also finds striking inequalities in access to cervical cancer screening between and within countries.
Cervical cancer is the second-most common cancer in women and a leading cause of death worldwide. Since the 1970s, the developed world has seen a fall in the annual number of new cases of cervical cancer, and a fall in the death rate from the disease. This public health success is often credited to widespread screening programmes. But in the developing world, where most cervical cancer occurs, there is little information about rates of screening.
To address this lack of information and to estimate the magnitude of inequalities in access to screening services, Gakidou and colleagues analyzed World Health Organization surveys from 57 countries across all levels of economic development.
Ability to track stem cells in tumors could advance cancer treatments
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Using noninvasive molecular imaging technology, a method has been developed to track the location and activity of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in the tumors of living organisms, according to researchers at SNM’s 55th Annual Meeting. This ability could lead to major advances in the use of stem cell therapies to treat cancer.
“Stem cell cancer therapies are still in the early stages of development, but they offer great promise in delivering personalized medicine that will fight disease at the cellular level,” said Hui Wang, a postdoctoral fellow from Prof. Xiaoyuan (Shawn) Chen’s group of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), Department of Radiology at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and lead researcher of the study, Trafficking the Fate of Mesenchymal Stem Cells In Vivo. “Our results indicate that molecular imaging can play a critical role in understanding and improving the process of how stem cells migrate to cancer cells. Eventually, this technique could also be used to determine if gene-modified stem cells are effective in fighting cancer.”
MSCs are adult stem cells that have the ability to transform into many different types of cells, such as bone, fat or cartilage. Many scientists believe that stem cells show great promise in treating different types of diseases—and a few stem cell therapies are already used to fight some types of cancer.
Cosmetic surgery booming in Britain, study finds
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Britons might be feeling the pinch of the global credit crunch, but they’re still ready to pay thousands of pounds for cosmetic surgery, a report suggested on Monday.
Britain’s largest cosmetic surgery provider the Harley Medical Group said demand for procedures had grown by 35 percent over the past 10 months.
Abdomnoplasty or “tummy tuck” operations, a procedure costing nearly 5,000 pounds ($9,700), were up 59 percent, while breast augmentation surgery swelled 40 percent, it said.
Lung cancer no more common in women smokers: study
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Women who smoke are no more likely than men to get lung cancer but, among non-smokers, women appear to have a higher risk than men, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
Women who had never smoked were 1.3 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who had never smoked, Dr. Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues found.
“We noted slightly higher age-standardized incidence rates of lung cancer in women who had never smoked than in men who had never smoked,” Freedman and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Kids’ neck size may point to risk of sleep apnea
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Children with bigger neck sizes for their age seem to be more likely to develop obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome, researchers report.
OSA occurs when soft tissues in the throat collapse and block the airway during sleep, so that breathing is briefly but repeatedly interrupted. Chronic snoring is often a sign of the problem. Because it disturbs sleep, it can lead to tiredness during the day as well as other problems.
The new report comes from SLEEP 2008, the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. OSA has “many adverse neurocognitive consequences if left untreated in the child,” the study team notes in their meeting materials.
Rheumatoid arthritis doubles heart risk: experts
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People with rheumatoid arthritis have double the risk of suffering heart attacks or strokes and should be considered for treatment with statins and blood pressure drugs, rheumatology experts said on Friday.
A report by a medical task force to the annual congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Paris concluded the risk was comparable to that associated with type 2 diabetes, which is already an established cardiovascular risk factor.
Dr Michael Nurmohamed , leader of the task force, said the inflammatory processes underlying rheumatoid arthritis appeared to increase patients’ risk of serious heart problems.
Eating fish may curb risk of age-related eye disease
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Diets high in omega-3 fatty acids and oily fish appear to lower the risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to pooled data from nine “observational” studies that evaluated omega-3 or fish intake in the prevention of AMD.
AMD is the leading cause of severe vision loss among elderly people, the Australian research team notes in the latest issue of Archives of Ophthalmology. New treatments for AMD carry risks and treat only certain forms of the disease. Therefore, preventing AMD by modifying risk factors, like cigarette smoking, “remains an important public health strategy,” they write.
Red Wine’s Resveratrol May Help Battle Obesity
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Resveratrol, a compound present in grapes and red wine, reduces the number of fat cells and may one day be used to treat or prevent obesity, according to a new study. The results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Past research found that resveratrol protected laboratory mice that were fed a high-calorie diet from the health problems of obesity, by mimicking the effects of calorie restriction. Researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany wanted to know if resveratrol could mimic the effects of calorie restriction in human fat cells by changing their size or function. The German team used a strain of human fat cell precursors, called preadipocytes. In the body, these cells develop into mature fat cells, according to the study’s lead author, Pamela Fischer-Posovszky, PhD, a pediatric endocrinology research fellow in the university’s Diabetes and Obesity Unit.
In the cell-based study, they found that resveratrol inhibited the pre-fat cells from increasing and prevented them from converting into mature fat cells.
Moderate Fitness Lowers Risk of Death for Normal Weight or Obese Men with Type 2 Diabetes
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Being even moderately physically fit lowers a diabetic man’s risk of death, regardless of his weight, according to a new study. Results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
The study found that for men with type 2 diabetes, moderate fitness levels reduced the risk of dying of any cause during an average follow-up period of seven years by 40 to 50 percent, even if they were overweight or obese.
“Death rates were the highest for those who were low fit in all weight categories,” said Roshney Jacob-Issac, MD, an endocrinology fellow at George Washington University Hospital and the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Washington, D.C. She presented the study results.
Severe Insulin Resistance may Increase Rate of Pregnancy and Birth Complications
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Testing pregnant women for insulin resistance with a simple blood test may be a new tool for predicting problems during pregnancy, according to a new study. The results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Insulin resistance is a condition in which the body blocks the effects of the hormone insulin. As a result, glucose, or sugar, builds up in the blood, and diabetes can develop. Insulin resistance lies behind the development of gestational diabetes - diabetes that develops during pregnancy - which increases the risk of pregnancy and birth complications. Therefore, the authors aimed to find out whether insulin resistance is linked to poor outcomes in pregnant women and newborns, said the lead author, Weerapan Khovidhunkit, MD, PhD, of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
It is standard for pregnant women to get a blood test for gestational diabetes between the 24th and 28th weeks of pregnancy, according to The Hormone Foundation, the public education affiliate of The Endocrine Society. This test is called the glucose challenge test or glucose challenge screening. If this test result is positive, the woman then has an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), in which her blood sugar levels are tested 3 hours after she drinks a glucose drink.
Low Testosterone May Cause Health Problems that Lead to Erectile Dysfunction
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Men with erectile dysfunction should be examined for testosterone deficiency and the metabolic syndrome, because these conditions commonly occur together, a new study shows. The results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
“Erectile dysfunction is a portal into men’s health,” said the study’s senior author, Aksam Yassin, MD, PhD, of the Clinic for Urology and Andrology of the Segeberger Clinics in Norderstedt, Germany. “It is becoming clear that obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and erectile difficulties are intertwined, and a common denominator is testosterone deficiency.”
Yassin’s research, performed with scientists from The Netherlands, Germany and the United Arab Emirates, aimed to determine in men with erectile dysfunction (ED) the prevalence of hypogonadism, the scientific term for testosterone deficiency.
Overweight Does Not Decrease Sperm Production
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Overweight men are not more likely to be infertile, as past research has shown to be true in obese women, according to a new study. The results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Findings of the study, performed in New York in nearly 300 very overweight men, were unexpected, said coauthor Nanette Santoro, MD, an Albert Einstein College of Medicine obstetrician-gynecologist who is trained in reproductive endocrinology.
“We see pretty significant deficits in fertility in women due to obesity, so we thought we’d see an effect in men,” Santoro said. “But that wasn’t the case.”
Aspirin may help prevent asthma in women
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In a large study of healthy women, taking low doses of aspirin reduced the occurrence of asthma, investigators at Harvard Medical School report.
Two recently reported studies among adult men and women have indicated a significant reduction in the risk of newly diagnosed asthma associated with regular aspirin use, lead investigator Dr. T. Kurth and colleagues note.
To further investigate, the Boston-based researchers analyzed data from the Women’s Health Study, in which more than 37,000 female health professionals age 45 and older with no previous history of asthma were randomly assigned aspirin 100 milligrams every other day or placebo.
New finding links pollution to childhood allergies
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German researchers say they have found some of the strongest evidence yet linking traffic pollution to childhood allergies.
The risk of developing asthma, hay fever, eczema or other allergies is about 50 percent higher for children living 50 metres (yards) from a busy road than for those living 1,000 metres away, they said in a study released on Friday.
Previous research has linked pollution to allergies, but to date observational studies in the field have been inconsistent, said Joachim Heinrich, an epidemiologist at the Helmholtz Research Centre for Environment and Health in Munich.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease
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Paris, France, Friday 13 June 2008: The risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) for people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been found to be comparable to the risk of CVD in people with type 2 diabetes, according to the conclusions of two studies presented today at EULAR 2008, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Paris, France.
At least one CV-event was reported in 8.6% of the RA population studied, a figure that was double that reported in the general population (4.3%), corresponding with an incidence of 3.14 per 100 patient/years (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.98-4.30) for RA patients, and 1.51 per 100 person/years (95%-CI: 1.18-1.84) for the general population.
In a second study, the age- and gender- adjusted prevalence odds ratios for CVD were found to be 2.3 (95%-CI: 1.3-4.0) for those with type 2 diabetes and 2.0 (95%-CI: 1.1-3.4) for those with RA, indicating a similar CVD risk for the two diseases.
