Health News - Friday, March 9, 2007
Oral contraceptives with low levels of estrogen and progestin reduce the risk of ovarian cancer even more than older versions of the "Pill", according to investigators at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. The benefits of oral contraceptive pills in protecting against ovarian cancer have long been recognized, Dr. Galina Lurie and her colleagues note in their report in the medical journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. However, over the last 30 years the doses of hormones in the pills have been decreased, to reduce side effects.
To see how this might have affected ovarian cancer risk, Lurie's group conducted a population-based study in Hawaii and Los Angeles involving 745 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer and a comparison group of 943 women matched by age and ethnicity and who were free of cancer. Health information was collected by standard questionnaires, and interviewers used photo albums to help participants identify the specific oral contraceptive pills they had used. Continue reading
Heart attack survivors are more likely to suffer further heart problems if they are regularly exposed to second-hand smoke, Greek researchers report. Individuals hospitalized for a heart attack or a severe type of chest pain called unstable angina were 61 percent more likely to have another so-called "acute coronary event" during the subsequent 30 days if they reported being exposed to other people's cigarette smoke, Dr. Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos of Harokopio University in Athens and colleagues found.
"Taking into account that the risk of recurrent events in people who have had a cardiac event is much higher during the first 30 days after the event, chronic exposure to second-hand smoke seems to add significantly to the excess risk," they write in the medical journal Heart. The researchers followed 2,172 patients admitted to six hospitals for a heart attack or unstable angina. Forty-six percent reported being exposed to second-hand smoke on the job or at home. Continue reading
Teaching teenagers about eating disorders can make them more knowledgeable about the problem, but it may also have some inadvertent effects, a new study suggests. Yale University researchers found that when they presented female high school students with videos on eating disorders, it met the intended goal of boosting their knowledge about anorexia and bulimia.
However, the team saw that the students didn't necessarily find the results of eating disorders unappealing. Teens who watched a video featuring a woman recovering from an eating disorder became more likely to view girls with eating disorders as "very pretty," and some thought it would be "nice to look like" the woman in the video. The findings suggest that more research should go into the unintended effects of eating disorder education before such programs are widely used, the researchers conclude in their article in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Continue reading
In middle-aged people with type 2 diabetes, an inadequate blood level of zinc -- a micronutrient with antioxidant activity -- appears to increase the risk of heart attack and death from heart disease, a Finnish study hints. "Theoretically our results are in favor of the possibility that zinc supplementation might be useful in preventing (heart-related) complications in patients with type 2 diabetes," the study team writes.
Dr. Minna Soinio from University of Turku and colleagues assessed death due to coronary heart disease and the incidence of heart attack in relation to serum zinc levels in 1,050 people, aged 45 to 64, who had type 2 diabetes for 8 years, on average. During 7 years of follow up, 156 of the subjects died from heart disease and 254 had a fatal or non-fatal heart attack, the investigators report in the journal Diabetes Care. Continue reading
People who want to learn things might do better by simply stopping to smell the roses, researchers reported on Thursday. German researchers found they could use odors to re-activate new memories in the brains of people while they slept -- and the volunteers remembered better later.
Writing in the journal Science, they said their study showed that memories are indeed consolidated during sleep, and show that smells and perhaps other stimuli can reinforce brain learning pathways. Jan Born of the University of Lubeck in Germany and colleagues had 74 volunteers learn to play games similar to the game of "Concentration" in which they must find matched pairs of objects or cards by turning only one over at a time. Continue reading
Calls made on cell phones do not affect hospital medical devices, U.S. researchers said on Friday, but store anti-theft alarms might make implanted heart devices misfire. Tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota showed normal use of cell phones, also called mobile phones, caused no noticeable interference with patient care equipment, they said.
But a portable CD player caused an abnormal electrocardiographic (ECG) reading when a patient used it near one of the leads of the device, according to one of several reports in the March issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. And at least two reports suggest that anti-theft devices set up near the doors of retail stores can cause implantable rhythm devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators to malfunction. Continue reading