Most heart attack survivors skip cardiac rehab
Approximately two thirds of patients in the United States who survive a heart attack do not undergo outpatient cardiac rehabilitation, a program proven to reduce the risk of illness and death, and to also improve psychological recovery, according to findings reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“Programs and policies directed at increasing the number of patients who are referred to and participate in cardiac rehabilitation need to be strengthened,” CDC researchers report in this week’s issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
“Future research should focus on identifying barriers to cardiac rehabilitation participation and interventions to improve referral and receipt of outpatient rehabilitation services,” they add.
Antioxidants more likely to raise cancer risk
Taking antioxidant supplements won’t reduce cancer risk, according to a new analysis of a dozen studies including more than 100,000 patients. In fact, the researchers found, smokers who take beta carotene supplements could be increasing their risk of smoking-related cancer and death.
While antioxidants have been touted for cancer prevention, different antioxidants have different effects, and their effects may also vary depending on the part of the body involved, Dr. Aditya Bardia of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and colleagues note in their report.
To investigate, the researchers looked at 12 trials that compared antioxidant supplements with placebo on cancer incidence and mortality.
Testosterone seen unrelated to prostate cancer risk
Natural levels of a man’s testosterone do not affect his prostate cancer risk as some had thought, a finding that should spur scientists to rethink their approach to the disease, researchers said on Tuesday.
Nearly two dozen studies have examined a potential link between testosterone and prostate cancer risk but so far results have been inconclusive, said Andrew Roddam, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford who led the study.
In the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Roddam and colleagues said they found no such relationship after collecting worldwide data on hormone levels of 3,886 men who eventually developed prostate cancer and 6,438 men who did not.
6 simple steps to protect against and stop the spread of noroviruses
Recent outbreaks of norovirus–also known as stomach flu–indicate the highly contagious, fast-moving virus is again a public health concern. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) has six simple steps to protect families against noroviruses.
Norovirus is the second most frequent cause of illness after the common cold. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain, and occur between 24 and 48 hours after exposure. Norovirus can be life-threatening for the elderly and immunocompromised.
Breast cancer diagnosis comes late for women in gentrifying neighborhoods
Women who live in Chicago’s gentrifying neighborhoods are more apt to receive a late diagnosis of breast cancer than women who live in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have found.
The surprising finding is in a study published in the January issue of the Annals of Epidemiology.
“There’s been a lot of social change in American cities since 1990, but we know very little about how gentrification impacts health outcomes,” said Richard Barrett, researcher at the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy and lead author of the study. “We know that minority women in Cook County are more likely to be diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and to die from it compared with white women, but we were interested in how neighborhood change impacts breast cancer diagnosis.”
The HLA-DRB1 gene and premature death in rheumatoid arthritis
People with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an inflammatory autoimmune disease, tend to die younger and, largely from cardiovascular disease (CVD). One explanation for this increasingly recognized fact is that inflammation promotes atherosclerosis. A marker of inflammation, elevation of the C-reactive protein (CRP) level has been shown to predict CVD in the general population. However, other highly inflammatory diseases—Crohn’s, for example—do not carry the same high risk of premature death from heart disease.
To identify other possible suspects, researchers in the United Kingdom investigated whether genetic variants linked to the likelihood of developing RA might also make patients more likely to die from CVD. Led by Dr. Tracey M. Farragher at the University of Manchester and funded by the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc), the study focused on two genes—HLA-DRB1and PTPN22—and their interactions with known RA risk factors. The evidence, presented in the February 2008 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, implicates HLA-DRB1 genotypes, already associated with RA susceptibility and severity, as a predictor of premature death from CVD for inflammatory arthritis patients. For RA patients in particular, having the shared epitope (SE)—a group of HLA-DRB1 alleles with kindred amino acid traits—plus anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibodies and current smoking is an especially deadly combination.
