Lack of sleep unlikely to impact weight over time
Regularly getting 5 hours or less of shut eye a night does not appear to have a considerable influence body weight or waist size over time, according to findings from a long-term study of British workers.
While some past research has identified a relationship between obesity and a lack of sleep, this research could not affirm which came first—the lack of sleep or the weight problem.
To clarify whether lack of sleep over time might be related to obesity, Francesco P. Cappuccio and colleagues analyzed information from more than 10,000 white-collar British civil servants participating in a long term forward-looking study called the Whitehall II study.
Older men with prostate cancer can wait and see
Men in their 70s and older who are diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer can safely “watch and wait” because they are not likely to die of it, researchers confirmed on Wednesday.
Their findings, presented at a meeting of specialists, backs up the widely held belief that prostate cancer rarely kills men if it strikes late in life. Something else will kill them first, said Grace Lu-Yao of the The Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
Her study of more than 9,000 older men with prostate cancer that had not spread beyond the prostate showed that just 3 to 7 percent of the men with low or moderate-grade tumors died of it after 10 years.
U.S. back pain costs rise but pain still there
The total cost of treating back pain in the United States has risen 65 percent in the past decade, but after all the pricey treatments, many people are still left with an aching back and an increasingly empty wallet, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said treating spine problems in the United States costs $85.9 billion a year, rivaling the economic burden of treating cancer, which costs $89 billion.
Higher spending on prescription drugs, more advanced diagnostic tests and more frequent outpatient visits helped drive the increases, as well as greater patient demand for treatment and more use of spinal fusion surgery and instruments, they said.
Breast cancer risk linked with fertility timing
A longer interval between the age a woman first begins to menstruate and her age when she first gives birth is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, the results of a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggests.
Age at menstruation and first birth are “established risk factors for breast cancer,” Dr. Christopher I. Li, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, and colleagues write. The interval between these ages may also influence breast cancer risk because the breast becomes more susceptible to carcinogenic exposure during this period period, they note. “However, few investigators have studied this relation.”
To investigate further, Li’s group used data from the Women’s Contraceptive and Reproductive Experiences Study (1994 to 1998), including 4,013 women with breast cancer and 4,069 women without breast cancer (the controls).
Diabetes, Cholesterol, Anti-obesity Drugs Top Spending
U.S. adult consumers spent nearly $36 billion for prescription drugs to lower blood sugar, reduce cholesterol, or help with other metabolic problems in 2005, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Role identified for glaucoma gene and related signaling pathway
Researchers have found that a gene and a related signaling pathway play a role in the development of glaucoma, which is a common cause of visual impairment and blindness worldwide. The team was led by Alcon Research and included investigators from the University of Iowa and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
The study, which revealed that over-expression of the gene, sFRP1, elevates pressure in the eye, could help improve glaucoma diagnosis and lead to the development of sight-saving treatments. The study results appeared online Feb. 14 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
“The cause of glaucoma and the resulting elevation of intraocular pressure has been poorly understood,” said Abe Clark, Ph.D., Alcon’s vice president of discovery research and head of glaucoma research. “This new discovery may allow researchers to develop therapies to treat the underlying cause of the disease.”
U of I study: exercise to avoid gallstones!
A new University of Illinois study shows that exercise-trained mice get far fewer gallstones than sedentary mice and identifies potential mechanisms to explain why this occurs.
The study, recently published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, can be viewed online at: http:// jap.physiology.org/cgi/reprint/01292.2007v1.
“For the first time, we have direct evidence that physical activity reduces gallstone formation, adding to the ever-increasing number of reasons that people should get more exercise,?said Kenneth Wilund, a faculty member in the U of I Division of Nutritional Sciences and an Assistant Professor in Kinesiology and Community Health.
