Heart attacks tumble after Irish smoking ban
Ireland’s rate of heart attacks fell by around a tenth in the year following the introduction of the world’s first nationwide ban on workplace smoking, boosting the case for more similar bans, doctors said on Tuesday.
Edmond Cronin and colleagues at Cork University Hospital said an analysis of people admitted with heart attacks to public hospitals in southwest Ireland showed an 11 percent fall in the year after the ban came into effect in March 2004.
Dementia risk increased among older smokers
Over 55 years old and smoke? You’re significantly more likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s disease than people who never smoked or have quit, findings from a Dutch study suggest.
“Over seven years of follow up, those who currently smoked were 50 percent more likely to develop dementia than never smokers (while) past-smokers had a slightly increased risk to develop dementia,” Dr. Monique Breteler told Reuters Health.
Diabetes drug promising as aid to weight loss
Treatment with pramlintide, which is approved in the US for lowering blood sugar in people with diabetes, leads to progressive weight loss in obese subjects, according to researchers.
Pramlintide, sold in the United States under the trade name Symlin, is a synthetic version of a natural hormone called amylin that slows down gastric emptying, thereby increasing the sensation of satiety and reducing food intake. Dr. Christian Weyer, the senior investigator on the current study, told Reuters Health that the results “are the most robust clinical proof-of-concept reported to date for the anti-obesity potential of a satiogenic peptide hormone.”
Sleep position for preemies questioned
The lung volumes of premature infants is higher when they are place on their stomachs (i.e., prone) rather than their backs, a UK study indicates, but this doesn’t seem to improve the concentration of oxygen in their circulation much, at least when they are not in respiratory distress.
“Prematurely born infants are often nursed prone in the initial stage of illness, because such positioning is associated with superior oxygenation and lung function,” Dr. Anne Greenough and colleagues from King’s College Hospital, London, write in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. “However, there has been little research on the effect of sleeping position on convalescent infants.”
Asian men more likely to survive prostate cancer
In a study of prostate cancer patients living in California, most Asian men with the disease survived longer than their white counterparts. The exception was men from South Asia; their survival was worse than that of white men.
In an interview with Reuters Health, Dr. Anthony S. Robbins, from the California Cancer Registry in Sacramento, said that few studies have compared prostate cancer risk factors and survival between Asians and whites. He added that “there are zero that looked at Koreans, Vietnamese, and South Asians.”
