Mediterranean Diet in Pregnancy Helps Ward Off Childhood Asthma and Allergy
Mums to be who eat a Mediterranean diet while pregnant could help stave off the risks of asthma and allergy in their children, suggests research published ahead of print in Thorax.
The findings are based on 468 mother and child pairs, who were tracked from pregnancy up to 6.5 years after the birth.
What the mothers ate during pregnancy and what their children were eating by the time they were 6 years old were assessed using food frequency questionnaires.
Combined HRT Increases Risk of Lobular Breast Cancer Fourfold After Just Three Years of Use
Postmenopausal women who take combined estrogen/progestin hormone-replacement therapy for three years or more face a fourfold increased risk of developing various forms of lobular breast cancer, according to new findings by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
“Previous research indicated that five or more years of combined hormone-therapy use was necessary to increase overall breast-cancer risk,” said Christopher I. Li, M.D., Ph.D., the lead author of the report, published in the January issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. “Our study, the first specifically designed to evaluate the relationship between combined HRT and lobular breast cancers, suggests that a significantly shorter length of exposure to such hormones may confer an increased risk.”
The study, which confirms previous reports of the association between combined hormone-therapy use and increased risk of lobular breast cancers, is the largest study of combined HRT and lobular cancer risk in the United States. It is also the first such study to take into account the recency and duration of hormone use and the first to include a centralized pathological review of tumor specimens to confirm their histological type: ductal, lobular or mixed ductal-lobular.
Smoking Belies Milder Disease but Worse Prognosis for IPF Patients
Smokers and ex-smokers with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), an untreatable progressive lung disease that usually leads to death within a few years of diagnosis, have a worse prognosis than non-smokers, according to research from London.
Previous research had counter-intuitively suggested that current smokers with IPF might live longer than ex-smokers, but the new study establishes that the data likely reflected a healthy smoker effect.
The study appears in the second issue for January of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.
Expert commentary on origins of syphilis study
Next week the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases will publish a new phylogenetic analysis by Kristin Harper and colleagues on the origins of venereal syphilis.
Along with the analysis, the journal will also publish an expert commentary by Sheila Lukehart (University of Washington, Seattle) and colleagues that discusses the strengths, limitations, and implications of the new study. The commentary is attached and will be online at http://www.plosntds.org on January 14 at 5pm PDT.
