New theories on world’s obesity pandemic
Fatty hamburgers, sugar-laden sodas and a couch-potato lifestyle: these are the familiar villains in the crisis of obesity sweeping developed countries.
But what if they had been convicted without fair trial?
What if the global fat explosion had other causes?
Surgeon general warns of secondhand smoke
Breathing any amount of someone else’s tobacco smoke harms nonsmokers, the surgeon general declared Tuesday — a strong condemnation of secondhand smoke that is sure to fuel nationwide efforts to ban smoking in public.
“The debate is over. The science is clear: Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance, but a serious health hazard,” said U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona.
Merck says Vioxx risk unchanged by data correction
Merck & Co said on Monday that it stands by the original findings of the study that led to the withdrawal of its pain drug Vioxx from the market, despite a correction to the description of how some of the data were analyzed.
Merck said it still believes the data from the study confirm that the increased risk of heart attack and stroke from Vioxx begins only after the medicine has been taken for 18 months. However, The New England Journal of Medicine cast doubts on that conclusion earlier on Monday by issuing an early release of a paper by a Harvard biostatistician. He concluded that the data were misinterpreted and the 18-month risk cut-off point for increased cardiovascular risk was not valid.
Diet Pattern More Important than Specific Food Choices
Making changes to what you eat is difficult. Often the barrier to change is a preoccupation with specific choices: Can I have eggs for breakfast? Is oatmeal better than raisin bran? Individual choices are meaningful, but if they fit into a sound overall dietary pattern, there will be plenty of wiggle room, says the July issue of Harvard Men’s Health Watch.
A report from Harvard’s Health Professionals Follow-up Study examined the effect of dietary patterns, rather than individual foods, on men’s health. The results: Men who ate a lot of red meat, processed meat, refined grains, and sweets were 64% more likely to develop heart disease than men with the most prudent diets.
X-rays raise breast cancer risk in women with BRCA
X-rays may double or triple the risk of breast cancer in women who carry a mutation in the BRCA1 or BCRA2 gene, which makes them more susceptible to the breast as well as ovarian cancer, researchers reported on Monday.
The findings are not clear-cut and it is not known which type of chest X-ray poses the greater risk, said Dr. David Goldgar of the University of Utah School of Medicine, who helped lead the research.
“The results from this study raise potentially significant clinical considerations,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. “The absolute risk of breast cancer by age 50 years is in the order of 40 percent in BRCA1 carriers and 15 percent in BRCA2 carriers.”
Reported child abuse up nearly 26 percent in Japan
The number of child abuse cases reported in Japan shot up nearly 26 percent in the year to March 2005, topping 30,000 for the first time, with almost half the cases involving preschool children.
Japan had long boasted that its stable family structure made the idea of child abuse inconceivable, but reports of parents starving or beating their children to death have appeared in the news more often in recent years.
According to a white paper released by the government on Tuesday, the number of child abuse cases reported in that year jumped to 33,408 from 26,569 the year before, a rise of 25.7 percent.
Combo therapy may help celiac disease patients
Early tests suggest that therapy with a combination of two enzymes inactivates gluten in the gut and may someday benefit patients with celiac disease.
In two papers appearing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Dr. Chaitan Khosla and colleagues, from Stanford University in California, describe the creation of this oral enzyme therapy, which they believe could alleviate many of the symptoms and complications of celiac sprue.
First, the researchers explain that they genetically engineered EP-B2, an enzyme found in barley seeds. They then created a compound in which EP-B2 was attached to Escherichia coli, a bacterium normally present in the gut that is frequently used to transport the active agent in gene therapies. Further testing of the EP-B2/E. coli compound showed that it efficiently inactivated a wheat gluten protein at regions toxic to celiac disease patients.
