Health News - Monday, March 19, 2007
Men who are obese when they're diagnosed with prostate cancer are 2.6 times more likely to die of the disease than normal-weight men, new findings suggest. The study, by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, included 752 recently diagnosed prostate cancer patients who were followed for about 10 years. Of the men in the study, 50 died of prostate cancer, and 64 died of other causes.
"I was very surprised by the findings. We found the prostate-cancer-specific mortality risk associated with obesity was similar regardless of treatment, disease grade or disease stage at the time of diagnosis," senior author Alan Kristal, associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division, said in a prepared statement. "If a man is obese at the time of diagnosis, he faces a 2.6-fold greater risk of dying as compared to a normal-weight man with the same diagnostic profile, regardless of whether he has radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy, whether or not he gets androgen-deprivation therapy, whether he has low- or high-grade disease, and whether he has localized, regional or distant disease," Kristal said. Continue reading
Smoke-stiffened arteries will slowly regain a healthy flexibility if smokers kick the habit, a new study finds. "It took a while before the arteries came back to normal," stressed Dr. Azra Mahmud, a lecturer in cardiovascular pharmacology at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, where the study was done. "It took at least 10 years before the arteries got back to where they were before smoking. The lesson is that the more quickly you give up smoking, the better it is for your arteries."
Hardened arteries can increase blood pressure, boosting the risk of cardiovascular problems such as heart attack and stroke. Mahmud and her colleagues have done a series of studies on changes in blood vessels due to smoking. This latest trial, reported Monday in the March issue of Hypertension, included 554 people who had high blood pressure but had never been treated for it. The group included 268 people who had never smoked, 150 current smokers and 136 ex-smokers. Of the ex-smokers, 22 had stopped for less than a year, 40 for 1 to 10 years and 40 for at least 10 years. Continue reading