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.
Four in 10 Emergency Department Visits Billed to Public Insurance
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More than 40 percent of the 120 million visits that Americans made to hospital emergency departments in 2006 were billed to public insurance, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
According to the analysis by the federal agency, about 50 million emergency department visits were billed to Medicaid and Medicare. The uninsured accounted for another 18 percent of visits for emergency care, while 34 percent of the visits were billed to private insurance companies and the rest were billed to workers compensation, military health plan administrator Tricare and other payers.
The agency’s study of hospital emergency department use in 2006 also found that:
Healthcare reform looms large in Texas
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At Ben Taub General Hospital in the rich U.S. oil hub of Houston, 52 people wait in a holding room designed for 26, in beds crammed so close together that patients can touch one another.
“They can’t even go to a doctor, most of these people,” because they lack health insurance, said Angela Siler Fisher, an associate medical director there. “We are their doctor.”
The Texas Medical Center—which is the size of Chicago’s downtown Loop and has its own distinct skyline—draws patients from around the world to its private rooms and specialized, cutting-edge treatments.
Houston, the fourth-largest American city, is a case study in the extremes of the U.S. healthcare system.
Breastfeeding could save 1.3 million child lives: WHO
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Teaching new mothers how to breastfeed could save 1.3 million children’s lives every year, but many women get no help and give up trying, the World Health Organization said on Friday.
Less than 40 percent of mothers worldwide breastfeed their infants exclusively in the first six months, as recommended by the WHO. Many abandon it because they don’t know how to get their baby to latch on properly or suffer pain and discomfort.
“When it comes to doing it practically, they don’t have the practical support,” WHO expert Constanza Vallenas told a news briefing in Geneva, where the United Nations agency is based.
Summer camp flu outbreaks presage fall surge: CDC
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Outbreaks of the H1N1 flu among children attending U.S. summer camps presage a surge in cases this fall as students return to school, an official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Wednesday.
“This is just a harbinger of what we will see in the fall,” Dr. Richard Besser, who led the U.S. response to the virus outbreak last spring, told a meeting of public health officials.
Besser, who was the CDC’s acting director for the first half of this year, later told Reuters that the number of outbreaks in summer camps was in the hundreds.
Democrats aim for new vote on U.S. food safety law
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House Democratic leaders may try for the second time in two days on Thursday to pass a sweeping reform of the U.S. food safety system that would step up federal inspection of food makers.
The bill, drafted in response to recent outbreaks of illnesses linked to peanut butter, spinach and peppers, would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to order food recalls, require facilities to have a food safety plan in place and give FDA more access to company records.
Representatives defeated the bill on Wednesday, when it was debated under special rules that limited debate to 40 minutes but required a two-thirds majority for passage. The vote of 280-150 fell short of the 288 needed to pass.
Diabetes Gene Raises Odds of Lower Birth Weight
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Pediatric researchers have found that a gene previously shown to be involved in the development of type 2 diabetes also predisposes children to having a lower birth weight. The finding sheds light on a possible genetic influence on how prenatal events may set the stage for developing diabetes in later childhood or adulthood.
Researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine published the study July 10 in the online version of the journal Diabetes.
“It’s a bit unusual to find a gene linked to both prenatal events and to a disease that occurs later in life,” said study leader Struan F.A. Grant, Ph.D., a researcher at the Center for Applied Genomics of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This gene variant carries a double whammy, in raising the risk of both lower birth weight and the development of type 2 diabetes in later life.”
Many heart disease patients not referred for rehab
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Despite evidence that cardiac rehabilitation helps patients following discharge from the hospital, almost half of heart disease patients eligible for such rehabilitation are not referred for it, according to a new study.
Cardiac rehabilitation involves exercise and counseling on diet and other risk factors. It has been shown to decrease the likelihood of future heart problems.
Dr. Todd M. Brown, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, analyzed data from the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines program. Included were 72,817 patients who were discharged from 156 hospitals in the US after a heart attack or procedure such as placement of a stent or bypass surgery to clear blocked arteries feeding the heart, between January 2000 and September 2007.
Tiny ovarian tumors lurk for years, study finds
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Tiny ovarian tumors lurk in the Fallopian tubes for an average of four years before they grow large enough to be detected, researchers reported on Monday in a study that explains why diagnosis usually comes too late to save a woman’s life.
They said they were trying to find ways to improve testing for the cancer, one of the deadliest because it is so hard to detect before it has spread.
“Reliable early detection would save so many more lives than many new blockbuster anticancer drugs,” Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Dr. Patrick Brown of Stanford University in California, who led the study, said in a statement.
