Health News - Friday, February 9, 2007
Patients in phase 1 cancer trials may be skewing the results if they are also taking vitamins, herbal preparations, minerals and other dietary supplements, researchers report.
More than one-third of patients in these trials report taking these alternative medications, according to a report in the Feb. 10 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Phase 1 trials are designed to test the safety of an experimental drug and to determine if there are any harmful side effects. Since the biological activity of herbals and other natural supplements aren't always known, taking them could mask the effect of the drug under study, explained lead author Dr. Christopher Daugherty, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. Continue reading
Pre-teen girls between the ages of nine and 12 are most likely to gain weight, a new study says. For this study, U.S. researchers enrolled more than 2,300 girls aged nine and 10 and followed them for at least a decade.
Researchers measured their height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol every year through age 18, then had the teens report their own measures at ages 21 through 23. Roughly half of the girls were white and half were black. The study finds that rates of overweight among the participants increased through adolescence, from 7 percent to 10 percent in the white girls and 17 percent to 24 percent in the black girls. Continue reading
Taking 1,000 to 2,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D each day may safely reduce the risk of colorectal cancer, according to pooled data from published studies. The current findings contradict some prior individual studies that found that vitamin D intake did not seem to protect against colorectal cancer. However, it is possible that the dose may simply have been too low to provide a benefit, researchers say.
The present analysis, reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, included data from five studies that looked at the association between blood levels of 25-hydroxy-vitamin D, which provides a good estimate of vitamin D levels in the body, and colorectal cancer risk. Dr. Edward D. Gorham, from the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, California, and colleagues found that as blood levels of vitamin D rose, the risk of colorectal cancer fell. Risk was reduced by 54 percent in groups with the highest vitamin D levels relative to those with the lowest levels. Continue reading