Food regulation threat if obesity plan fails
The government will consider regulating the food industry if a three-year health lifestyle campaign fails to reduce obesity levels in England, Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said on Friday.
The government kicks off the Change4Life campaign on Saturday with television, magazine and billboard adverts urging people to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
The action is being taken after forecasters said obesity was rising so fast that by 2050 four out of 10 children and nine out of ten adults will be overweight or obese.
Fast food near schools means fatter kids
Adolescents who go to school within a half-mile of a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be overweight or obese than kids whose schools are further away, new research suggests.
The young people in the study also ate fewer servings of fruits and vegetables and drank more soda if there was at least one fast food restaurant within a half-mile radius of their school, Drs. Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California and Christopher Carpenter of the University of California at Irvine found.
“Overall, our patterns are consistent with the idea that fast food near schools affects students’ eating habits, overweight, and obesity,” they conclude in a report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Chromosome disorder raises risk of death
Turner syndrome, the most commonly diagnosed sex chromosome abnormality in women, not only leads to substantial illness but is also raises the risk of death, according to UK researchers.
“This study,” lead investigator Dr. Minouk J. Schoemaker told Reuters Health, “shows that mortality in women with Turner syndrome is three-fold higher than in the general population, and that mortality is raised for almost all major causes of death, and throughout adulthood.”
Turner syndrome is a genetic condition caused when one of the two X chromosomes that girls normally have is missing. It results in various physical characteristics and incomplete ovaries.
Study finds favorable trends in stroke
Fewer people are suffering stroke and fewer people are dying from stroke, new research from Sweden hints.
To varying degrees, there have been improvements in the incidence of stroke and in stroke deaths among both diabetic and non-diabetic adults, Dr. Aslak Rautio and colleagues from Umea University report in the journal Stroke.
The researchers used data from a Swedish stroke registry to compare time trends in incidence, case-fatality, and death in stroke patients with or without diabetes. All strokes in patients 35 to 74 years old were registered from January 1, 1985, and December 31, 2003.
Family History of Prostate Cancer Does Not Affect Some Treatment Outcomes
In a first of its kind study, a first-degree family history of prostate cancer has no impact on the treatment outcomes of prostate cancer patients treated with brachytherapy (also called seed implants), and patients with this type of family history have clinical and pathologic characteristics similar to men with no family history at all, according to a January 1 study in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, the official journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology.
“This information is relevant for both physicians and patients with new diagnoses as they embark on complex treatment decisions,” Christopher A. Peters, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at Northeast Radiation Oncology Center in Dunmore, Pa. (chief resident at Mount Sinai School of Medicine at the time of the study), said. “Now patients with a family history of prostate cancer can be confident that they have the same outcomes as patients with sporadic disease, regardless of the treatment modality they chose.”
According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men behind skin cancer. Many patients diagnosed with prostate cancer have some type of family history of the disease and men with a family history do have an increased risk of developing the disease, but there is conflicting data on how family history impacts treatment outcomes.
Minimizing Obesity’s Impact on Ovarian Cancer Survival
Obesity affects health in several ways, but new research shows obesity can have minimal impact on ovarian cancer survival. A study by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center found ovarian cancer survival rates are the same for obese and non-obese women if their chemotherapy doses are closely matched to individual weight.
The findings contradict earlier research that shows obese women have lower ovarian cancer survival rates compared to non-obese patients. In the UAB study, such survival disparity disappeared when chemo doses were calculated by actual body weight rather than a different dosing standard, said Kellie Matthews, M.D., a UAB gynecologic oncologist and lead author on the new study.
“Often chemotherapy dosing is calculated using ‘ideal’ body weight as a guide. We found using actual body weight works best, and it wipes away much of the difference in survival rates between obese and non-obese patients,” Matthews said.
Cystic fibrosis patients’ self-assessment of health can predict prognosis
Adult Cystic Fibrosis patients can provide important information that helps to predict their prognosis, according to research that asked 223 adult CF patients to assess their own health and well-being.
“We wished to see whether patients themselves had clinically relevant insight to their disease, and we found that they did,” said lead author of the study, Janice Abbott, Ph.D., of the University of Central Lancashire in England.
The study was published in the first issue for January of the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Pollution at home often lurks unrecognized
Many people may be surprised by the number of chemicals they are exposed to through everyday household products, a small study finds, suggesting, researchers say, that consumers need to learn more about sources of indoor pollution.
In interviews with 25 women who’d had their homes and bodies tested for various environmental pollutants, researchers found that most were surprised and perplexed by the number of chemicals to which they’d been exposed.
The women had been part of a larger study conducted by the Silent Spring Institute in which their homes and urine samples were tested for 89 environmental contaminants—including pesticides and chemicals found in plastics, cleaning products and cosmetics.
Diabetic youth may try unhealthy dieting tactics
Young people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes are often overweight and many turn to unhealthy weight loss practices, such as using over-the-counter diet aids without a doctor’s advice, fasting and taking laxatives, new research shows.
Dr. Jean M. Lawrence, of Kaiser Permanente Southern California, Pasadena, and colleagues studied 1742 female and 1615 males, of whom 520 had type 2 diabetes and 2837 had type 1 diabetes. The subjects’ average age was 15 years.
Roughly half of the subjects reported ever trying to lose weight, they report in the journal Diabetes Care.
Post-cancer reproduction still low for women, men
Strategies introduced in the late 1980s for protecting fertility in patients undergoing cancer treatment may have indeed helped boost reproduction rates modestly among survivors of certain types of cancer, new research from Norway suggests.
However, overall, female cancer survivors remain about half as likely as women who had never been diagnosed with the disease to have a child within the 10 years following their diagnosis, the researchers found. For male cancer survivors, reproduction rates were about 30 percent lower than among their healthy peers.
“There is much left to be done to improve post-diagnosis reproduction, in particular in women,” Dr. Sophie Dorothea Fossa of The Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo and her colleagues conclude in a report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Metabolic syndrome predicts kidney disease
Having the so-called metabolic syndrome may raise the risk of chronic kidney disease in people with type 2 diabetes, researchers from China report.
Metabolic syndrome refers to a cluster of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease—including abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and high triglycerides (another type of blood fat). The syndrome is typically diagnosed when a person has three or more of these conditions.
The current study suggests that conventional cardiovascular risk factors are also predictors of kidney trouble, Dr. Peter C. Y. Tong from The Chinese University of Hong Kong noted in comments to Reuters Health. “Hence, physicians should actively assess patients with diabetes for these risk factors and treat them aggressively,” Tong said.
Rare sleep disorder may be a harbinger of dementia
More than half of people with a rare sleep disorder develop a neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease, within 12 years of being diagnosed, results of a Canadian study published Wednesday indicate.
So-called “REM sleep behaviour disorder” affects a small percentage of the population, Dr. Ronald B. Postuma, at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and colleagues explain in the journal Neurology. It is characterized by a loss of the normal muscle relaxation while dreaming and is seen most often in men aged 50 and older. REM sleep behaviour disorder should not be confused with insomnia, night terrors, or confusional arousals.
Small studies have identified REM sleep behavior disorder as a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease and dementia. To investigate further, Postuma’s team conducted a follow-up study of 93 patients diagnosed with unexplained REM sleep behavior disorder between 1989 and 2006. The average time from diagnosis to last evaluation was 5.2 years.
Newly Found Enzymes May Play Early Role in Cancer
Researchers have discovered two enzymes that, when combined, could be involved in the earliest stages of cancer. Manipulating these enzymes genetically might lead to targeted therapies aimed at slowing or preventing the onset of tumors.
“We could conceivably reactivate a completely normal gene in a tumor cell – a gene that could prevent the growth of a tumor if reactivated,” says David Jones, Ph.D., professor of oncological sciences at the University of Utah and senior director of early translational research at the university’s Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI).
“We believe this could be one of the earliest processes to go wrong in cancer,” he adds. “By manipulating these enzymes, we could possibly prevent or slow the onset of tumors.”
Child’s ADHD Diagnosis Is Tied to Mother’s Health Status
The probability of having one’s child receive an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis involves a mother’s own medical conditions and her use of health services prior to having the child, a new study finds.
What is not clear, however, is whether the effects are due to biological, environmental or psychosocial factors — or some combination of these.
The new study implies “that the diagnoses and health care utilization that a mother receives prior to having her child is predictive of having a child who is diagnosed with ADHD,” said G. Thomas Ray, lead author. “Our study raises the possibility that certain types of mothers — those who get or seek diagnoses and who use more health services — may be more likely to seek ADHD diagnoses for their children.”
Longer Sleep Linked With Lower Incidence of Calcification in Coronary Arteries
Participants in a study who slept on average an hour longer per night than other participants had an associated lower incidence of coronary artery calcification, which is thought to be a predictor of future heart disease, according to a study in the December 24/31 issue of JAMA.
Risk factors for coronary artery calcification (the accumulation of calcified plaques visible by computed tomography [a method of imaging body organs]) include established heart disease risk factors such as male sex, older age, glucose intolerance, tobacco use, dyslipidemia (disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, which includes high cholesterol levels), high blood pressure, obesity, raised inflammatory markers and attaining a low educational level. Recent data suggest that sleep quantity and quality are connected to several of these risk factors. “However, some of these correlations have only been documented in studies in which sleep is measured by self-report, which may be biased or insufficiently accurate,” the authors write.
Christopher Ryan King, B.S., of the University of Chicago, and colleagues tested whether objectively measured sleep duration predicted the development of calcification over 5 years of follow-up. The study included 495 participants from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults [CARDIA] study, who were black and white men and women age 35-47 years. At the start of the study in 2000-2001, the participants had no evidence of detectable coronary calcification on computed tomography scans.
