Childhood cancer treatment may raise diabetes risk
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Cancer survivors who got radiation treatments as children have nearly twice the risk of developing diabetes as adults, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said children who were treated with total body radiation or abdominal radiation to fight off cancer appear to have higher diabetes risks later in life, regardless of whether they exercise regularly or maintain a normal weight.
The odds of surviving childhood cancer have improved with better therapies but several research teams have found that some treatments pose health risks later in life.
Breastfeeding protects against breast cancer
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A woman with a mother or sister with breast cancer should “strongly” consider breastfeeding her baby, doctors advise in a report released today.
In a long-term study of more than 60,000 women, researchers found that women with a close family history of breast cancer had significantly lower risk of developing breast cancer before menopause themselves if they breastfed their babies, compared to women who did not breastfeed.
“Breastfeeding is good for mothers and for babies,” study chief Dr. Alison M. Stuebe, of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Reuters Health by email.
50 million women in Asia at risk of HIV infection
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Fifty million women in Asia are at risk of being infected with HIV because of the risky sexual behavior of their husbands or boyfriends, leading health experts said in a report on Tuesday.
More than 90 percent of the 1.7 million women now living with HIV in Asia became infected while being in monogamous, long-term relationships with men who engaged in risky sex behavior, the report launched by UNAIDS said.
These include men who had other sexual partners or who were drug users.
Computer system improves pain therapy for cancer patients
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Successful test of electronic decision support on applying international therapy guidelines / Clinical pharmacologists from Heidelberg publish results in “Pain”
Pain therapy for cancer patients – whether inpatient or outpatient – is often inadequate. At Heidelberg University Hospital, the use of an innovative electronic system – combined with guidance by an experienced clinical pharmacist – has been successfully tested. The treatment of the patients showed little variance from international guidelines on pain therapy. In addition, patients reported having less pain. The results of the study have been published in the journal Pain.
The electronic pain relief guide AiDPainCare is an additional instrument of the electronic pharmaceutical guide AiDKlinik, which guides physicians safely through the current pharmaceutical market in Germany with over 64,000 products and successfully helps avoid false dosages, side effects, dangerous drug interaction, and duplications in prescriptions. The medication prescribed by the physician can be transferred from AiDKlinik directly to a prescription or medical report. The system is currently in use in 10 hospitals in Germany and can also be subscribed to by physicians in private practice (http://www.doctors-aid.de).
“Brat Pack” director John Hughes dies of heart attack
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Filmmaker John Hughes, who made some of the most memorable teen comedies of the 1980s and turned Macaulay Culkin into a major star, died suddenly of a heart attack in New York on Thursday. He was 59.
Hughes, who had largely turned his back on Hollywood in the past decade to become a farmer in the Midwestern state of Illinois, collapsed while strolling in Manhattan, where he was visiting family.
His films, such as “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” are considered standard-bearers of the teen genre, exploring American adolescent behavior with warmth and affection. He supplied his awkward characters with natural dialogue, allowing audiences to empathize with their travails.
Worried about baby bust? Study says births may rise
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- Wealthy countries worried about their shrinking birth rates may have had their prayers answered. If they get just a little richer, birth rates should head up again, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
They studied 24 countries over 30 years, looking at fertility rates and a measure of education, income and lifespan called the human development index.
“Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium human development index levels, our analyses show that at advanced human development index levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility,” Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.
WHO keeps 2 billion estimate of likely H1N1 cases
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The World Health Organisation stuck on Tuesday to its statement that about two billion people could catch H1N1 influenza by the time the flu pandemic ends.
But the estimate comes with a big health warning: no one knows how many people so far have caught the new strain, known as swine flu, and the final number will never be known as many cases are so mild they may go unnoticed.
“By the end of a pandemic, anywhere between 15-45 percent of a population will have been infected by the new pandemic virus,” WHO spokeswoman Aphaluck Bhatiasevi said in a statement.
Traffic pollutants may fuel adult asthma: study
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A new study provides more evidence that breathing in traffic-related pollutants is unhealthy—for kids and adults.
The study, report in the journal Thorax, suggests a link between asthma that develops in adulthood and increased exposure to traffic-related pollutants. Previous research linked childhood-onset asthma with traffic pollutants.
In the current study, researchers looked at associations between traffic-related air pollution and “new-onset” asthma among 2725 Swiss adults. None of them had ever smoked.
Growing evidence of marijuana smoke’s potential dangers
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In a finding that challenges the increasingly popular belief that smoking marijuana is less harmful to health than smoking tobacco, researchers in Canada are reporting that smoking marijuana, like smoking tobacco, has toxic effects on cells. Their study is scheduled for the Aug. 17 issue of ACS’ Chemical Research in Toxicology, a monthly journal.
Rebecca Maertens and colleagues note that people often view marijuana as a “natural” product and less harmful than tobacco. As public attitudes toward marijuana change and legal restrictions ease in some countries, use of marijuana is increasing. Scientists know that marijuana smoke has adverse effects on the lungs. However, there is little knowledge about marijuana’s potential to cause lung cancer due to the difficulty in identifying and studying people who have smoked only marijuana.
The new study begins to address that question by comparing marijuana smoke vs. tobacco smoke in terms of toxicity to cells and to DNA. Scientists exposed cultured animal cells and bacteria to condensed smoke samples from both marijuana and tobacco.
“Don’t eat me” sign helps bladder tumors escape
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Researchers said on Monday they had found primitive bladder cancer cells that cloak themselves with a “don’t eat me” signal that scares off immune system cells, allowing them to mature into tumors later on.
But they found a way to unmask this disguise and said their findings may lead to new approaches for treating cancers of several different types.
The immediate hope is to find a way of telling apart patients who have dangerous bladder cancer from those who have more benign forms. Bladder cancer is mostly slow-growing and easily treated, but 15 percent of cases become invasive and deadly.
Kefir won’t stop diarrhea in many kids
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If you give your kids kefir to prevent the diarrhea they often get when they take antibiotics, here’s some news for you: if your kids are otherwise healthy, it probably won’t help, according to a new study.
Up to 35 percent of children who take antibiotics develop diarrhea, according to Dr. Daniel J. Merenstein at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, DC and colleagues, who performed the study. Sometimes the diarrhea is so severe that the children can’t finish taking the medication.
Many sources report that kefir helps prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea. Kefir, a cultured dairy beverage that’s a bit like drinkable yogurt, is rich with probiotics—bacteria present naturally in the body and sometimes added to food or dietary supplements to boost immune function.
Drug cuts diabetics’ pancreatic cancer risk: study
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Diabetics who took the drug metformin, which makes the body process insulin better, had a 62 percent lower risk of pancreatic cancer compared to those who had never received it, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.
But the risk of getting the cancer, one of the deadliest, was significantly higher among diabetics who took insulin or drugs that make the body produce more insulin, according to their study published in the journal Gastroenterology.
“We find that diabetics that had ever used metformin alone or in combination with other drugs had like a 60 percent reduced risk for pancreatic cancer, compared to diabetic patients who never used metformin,” lead researcher Donghui Li from The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center said.
Antidepressant use doubles in U.S., study finds
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Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday.
About 6 percent of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996 - 13 million people. This rose to more than 10 percent or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found.
“Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans,” Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Accidental Childhood Poisonings Mostly Due to Medicines
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More than two-thirds of all emergency department visits for childhood poisoning involve prescription and over-the-counter medications, more than twice the rate of poisonings from consumer products, reports a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We feel these data suggest that new poisoning prevention efforts should focus on the problems of medication poisoning,” said Daniel Budnitz, M.D., the senior study author.
Budnitz, director of the Medication Safety Program in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the CDC, and colleagues analyzed two years’ worth of data on pediatric emergency department (ED) visits for unintentional medication overdoses.
