Urban Planning a Factor in Rising Obesity Rates
You may want to buy healthy food for your family, but if the good grocery stores are far away and pricey and the fast-food outlets are cheap and plentiful, it may be harder to make the healthy choice. Research led by the University of Alberta and funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Information confirms there are links between our urban surroundings and how likely we are to struggle with obesity.
The startling rise in obesity rates in North America over the past two decades has led to calls for more effective approaches to help people achieve healthy weights. The State of the Evidence Review on Urban Health and Healthy Weights, released to the public this week, synthesizes the findings of hundreds of population health studies published over the years and shines a spotlight on aspects of our urban environments that can either inhibit or promote our ability to maintain a healthy weight.
“Two key areas we looked at were economic environments and built environments—meaning the ways in which the neighbourhoods and the cities in which we live are planned and developed,” said Kim Raine, director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Health Promotion Studies and lead author of the report.
Body Mass Index may serve as prognostic tool for advanced, aggressive breast cancers
Body Mass Index (BMI), the measure of a person’s fat based on their height and weight, may be an effective prognostic tool for specific types of breast cancer, according to research from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The study, published in the March 15 issue of Cancer Research, reports that women with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) and inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) with high BMIs had worse prognosis than women with the disease whose BMIs were in the healthy range.
One’s BMI is scored based on height and weight. A score less than 18.5 indicates that a person is underweight and a score of 18.5 -24.9 indicates that one is in a normal or healthy range. A person is overweight if their score is 25-29.9 and any score above 30 classifies that a person as obese.
Australian men care about their health
A study of male attitudes to health and how they use health services, published in the online open access journal, BMC Health Services Research, challenges the usual stereotype that men are uninterested in their health. Rather than procrastinating, men may delay going to the doctor so that they can watch a health problem to see if it will fix itself. Indeed, a picture emerges of men as personal health detectives, monitoring rather than ignoring symptoms, and visiting the doctor only if a problem fails to resolve itself.
The results will surprise those people who envisage the Australian pub-going male as brusque and disinterested in all things medical. When men do see a physician, they usually expect a quick-fix solution.
Snoring may be chronic despite surgery
Children who gain weight rapidly after having their tonsils and adenoids removed to treat sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) may improve in the short-term, but over time they may relapse or even worsen. African-American children also tend to relapse, according to new research from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
Adenotonsillectomy is the most commonly performed surgery in children, ranging from about 19 per 10,000 in Canada to 115 per 10,000 in the Netherlands. In the U.S., the rate is about 50 per 10,000. It is the first line of treatment for SDB in children. For many kids, undergoing this major surgery provides only temporary relief.
“The high rate of recurrence we observed in both obese and non-obese children indicates that SDB is a chronic condition,” said Raouf Amin, M.D., director of pulmonary medicine at the hospital.
Toddlers affected most by secondhand smoke exposure at home
Secondhand smoke in the home appears to induce markers for heart disease as early as the toddler years, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s 48th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.
It has long been known that many forms of cardiovascular disease in adults are initiated and progress silently during childhood. Now researchers have found a young child’s response to smoke may not just affect the respiratory system, but the cardiovascular system as well.
“This is the first study that looks at the response of a young child’s cardiovascular system to secondhand smoke,” said Judith Groner, M.D., lead author of the study, pediatrician and ambulatory care physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio.
Parkinson’s Disease Drug Might Work in Cancer Patients
A study published in the March 13 online issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that dopamine, a drug currently used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses, also might work in cancer patients. The study, which was done in mouse and laboratory models, shows that dopamine could possibly prevent new blood vessels from growing and as a result, slow cancer progression.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates movement and affects behavior. In its synthetic form, dopamine is used to treat heart attack victims, Parkinson’s disease and pituitary tumors. But it wasn’t known until now that dopamine worked by blocking the growth of new blood vessels (a process called angiogenesis).
“Researchers now can test this concept in solid tumors where angiogenesis plays a critical role in the growth and progression of these cancers,” says Sujit Basu, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic scientist who conducted this study with Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, Ph.D., a scientist with the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Calcutta, India.; and, Debanjan Chakroborty, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Mayo Clinic and CNCI.
Study Offers Clues About Patient Allergies to Cancer Drug
Members of a study team led by Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills of the University of Virginia Health System knew they had a medical mystery on their hands. When treated with the widely-used cancer drug, cetuximab, patients in several states – mostly in the Southeast – were experiencing allergic reactions more frequently and more severely than those living elsewhere. Reactions typically occurred during initial treatment and sometimes included anaphylaxis, a life-threatening condition characterized by a rapid drop in blood pressure, fainting, difficulty breathing, and wheezing.
Previous research had shown that 22 percent of patients in Tennessee and North Carolina had severe allergic reactions to the drug. Even higher reaction rates and clusters of cases had been reported in Arkansas, Missouri and Virginia. This data contrasted sharply with the drug’s label, which states that three percent of patients experienced severe allergic reactions, and with results in the northeast, where less than one percent of patients receiving cetuximab had allergic reactions.
“There seemed to be a link between geographic location and allergic response, and we wanted to know why,” explains Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, Professor of Medicine, Allergy and Clinical Immunology at UVA. The team’s findings, published in the March 13, 2008 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, offer a key clue to solving this mystery.
