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Here’s something worthy from China
August 2010
BEIJING - HealthDay News revealed a global study found 10 risk factors cover 90% of all stroke risk - high blood pressure played the most potent role.
Five factors usually related to lifestyle - high blood pressure, smoking, abdominal obesity, diet, and physical activity - are to blame for 80% of all stroke risk, scientists conclude.
Findings were in the Interstroke study, a standardized study of 3,000 people from 22 countries who had had strokes, and an equal number of healthy people with no history of stroke.
It was posted online at The Lancet and presented at the World Congress on Cardiology.
It asserts the 10 factors tied most to stroke risk are high blood pressure, smoking, physical activity, abdominal obesity, diet, blood lipid (fat) levels, diabetes, alcohol intake, stress/depression, and heart disorders.
Totally, high blood pressure accounted for 33% of all stroke risk.
"It's important that most of the risk factors are modifiable," said Dr. Martin J. O'Donnell, associate professor of medicine at McMaster University in Canada, who helped lead the study.
MAYWOOD, Ill - Medical News Today warns iced tea has high doses of oxalate, a key chemical that leads to kidney stones, a common disorder of the urinary tract that affects about 10% of the U.S. population. Hot tea has oxalate, but isn't as easy to drink an amount large enough to encourage stones. Says Dr. John Milner, assistant professor, Dept. of Urology, Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine. "For people who have a tendency to form kidney stones, it's definitely one of the worst things you can drink." Men are four times more likely to get kidney stones, and the risk rises dramatically once they reach their 40s. Postmenopausal women with low estrogen and women who’ve had their ovaries removed have a higher risk of stones. They’re small crystals formed from minerals and salt normally found in the urine in the kidneys or ureters, small tubes that drain urine from the kidney to the bladder.
PHOENIX - The New York Times noted summer can be rough for anyone. For diabetics, heat/humidity can be particularly hazardous. One of the complications for type 1/type 2 is impaired ability to adjust to rises in temperature, which can cause dangerous boosts in body temp in the summer. The basic problem, nerve damage, occurs in 60-70% of U.S. diabetics; it can affect nearly every body organ, including sweat glands. When nerve damage keeps sweat glands from working properly, the body fails to cool as the mercury rises. In one small study, scientists compared diabetics and healthy control subjects exposed to rising temps. They were hooked to devices that measured skin temp, core temp, and sweat rates. As temps rose, the controls’ perspiration rates rose proportionately; their core temps stayed constant. "For subjects with diabetes, sweat seemed to plateau irrespective of an alarming rise in core temperature," scientists wrote. "The diabetic subjects’ generalized inability to sweat across the body had a profound effect on core temperature."
BETHESDA, MD - Ivanhoe Newswire reported intensive blood sugar control versus standard control - lipid therapy with a fibrate and statin - versus statin therapy alone lowered progression of diabetic retinopathy, asserts a study. Diabetic retinopathy hits adults with type 2 diabetes and is the leading vision loss cause in Americans 18-64. The Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) study had 10,251 type 2 diabetics at high risk for heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death. It evaluated three intensive strategies for lowering cardiovascular risks tied to diabetes. Intensive treatments had blood sugar control to near normal levels, blood pressure control to normal levels, and combination treatment of multiple blood lipids with Zocor versus standard treatment with simvastatin alone. Fenofibrate lowers triglycerides and raises "good" high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol; simvastatin lowers "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL). "ACCORD indicates intensive glycemic control and fibrate treatment added to statin therapy reduce progression of diabetic retinopathy," study leader Dr. Emily Chew, chief, Clinical Trials Branch/Division of Epidemiology at the National Eye Institute, stated.
WEST ORANGE, NJ - A study in Neurology shows a mentally-active lifestyle may help against memory/learning woes which often occur in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). "Many people with MS struggle with learning and memory problems. This study shows a mentally- active lifestyle might cut the harmful effects of brain damage on learning and memory. Learning and memory ability remained quite good in people with enriching lifestyles, even if they had a lot of brain damage. Persons with lesser mentally-active lifestyles were more likely to suffer learning and memory problems, even at milder levels of brain damage," said study author James Sumowski, Ph.D., of the Kessler Foundation Research Center. The study involved 44 people about 45 who had MS for about 11 years. Study authors measured lifetime enrichment with word knowledge. The study found those mentally active had good scores on the tests of learning and memory even if they had higher amounts of brain damage. Learning was slower and recall was lower after 30 minutes among those with higher brain damage versus those with less.
LEIPZIG, GERMANY - "We’ve met Neanderthal and he is us - at least a little," Sciencemag.org asserts. The most detailed look yet at the Neanderthal genome helps answer a hotly debated anthropology query: Did Neanderthals and modern humans mate? The reply is "yes," there’s at least some cave man in most of us; 1-4% of genes in people from Europe and Asia go back to Neanderthals. "They live on, a little bit," says Svante Paabo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). Scientists led by Paabo, Richard Green (University of California/Santa Cruz), and David Reich (Harvard Medical School) compared genetic material from bones of three Neanderthals with that from five modern humans. Findings in the journal Science show a tie between Neanderthals and modern people outside Africa, Paabo said. That suggests interbreeding in the Middle East, where modern humans and Neanderthals lived thousands of years ago, he said.
NEW YORK - Reuters Health noted that where a person has extra weight may influence pancreatic cancer risk. Women with more fat on their waist are at greater risk. A study confirms the risk climbs with body mass index, a standard measure of weight in relation to height used to gauge obesity. While a link of obesity/pancreatic cancer has been suggested, studies checking the tie have yielded mixed results, Dr. Alan Arslan, of the New York University School of Medicine, and his team note in Archives of Internal Medicine. To study the tie, they analyzed data on 2,170 people with pancreatic cancer and 2,209 people without it from the National Cancer Institute Pancreatic Cancer Cohort Consortium, a project launched in 2006 to identify genes tied to the disease plus lifestyle, environmental, and genetic risk factors. For all subjects, there was a positive link of wider BMI and higher risk for pancreatic cancer. Scientists found people in the top 25% based on BMI were at 33% higher risk.
BOSTON - The Health Behavior News Service noted that even with widespread use of the Internet to get our daily dose of information, people who rely on the print media for their health data - and community organizations - tend to do better than Web-seekers at following a healthy lifestyle, research finds. "I think much is to be learned about health information-seeking behaviors and their relationship to the adoption of health behaviors in various demographic groups," said Dr. Nicole Redmond, who led the team. "One of the challenges in this area is the rapidly-evolving nature of information technology. Telecommunications, such as text messaging and Internet access through smart phones and social networking sites have created a very different communications landscape in a very short time frame." Dr. Redmond is in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine used data from the 2005 and 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) and included responses from more than 10,000 participants.
LONDON - People who work 10-11 hours daily are more likely to have serious heart ills, including heart attacks, than those who quit after seven hours, scientists told Reuters. The 11-year study of 6,000 British civil servants doesn’t yield definitive proof that long hours cause coronary heart woes but shows a clear link, which experts said may reflect stress. There were 369 deaths due to heart disease, non-fatal heart attacks, and angina among the study group - and the risk of having an adverse event was 60% higher for those who worked 3-4 hours overtime. Working 1-2 hours beyond a seven-hour day wasn’t related to increased risk. "It seems there might be a threshold; it isn’t so bad if you work an hour or so more than usual," said Dr. Marianna Virtanen, an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. Higher heart woes among those on overtime was outside a range of other factors - i.e., smoking, being overweight, or high cholesterol. Dr. Virtanen said it was possible the lifestyle of people working long hours deteriorated, perhaps due to poor diet or greater alcohol consumption.
CHICAGO - Reuters reported that although they sometimes make spicy meals go down easier, heartburn drugs should be used with caution, five studies show. The drugs - proton pump inhibitors, or PPIs - include AstraZeneca's Nexium and Prilosec. Prilosec is available generically as omeprazole and is also sold over-the-counter by Procter & Gamble Co. While the drugs help the right patients, they can raise the fracture risks in post-menopausal women and cause bacterial infections in many patients, asserts a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Annually in the U.S., patients fill an estimated 113 million prescriptions for PPIs, which treat esophagus inflammation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, ulcers, and several other conditions. Says Dr. Mitchell Katz, of the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health, "That (PPIs) relieve dyspepsia is without question, but at what cost (and I don’t mean financial)?"
ROCHESTER, MN - When disability/illness makes it difficult to open a door, pick up keys, or seek help, a service dog might ease frustrations. The Mayo Clinic Health Letter conveys many ways these dogs help those with disabilities. The modern era of service dogs began after World War I, when dogs were trained to guide blind war vets. Today, they’re trained in specialties including: skilled assist dogs to help the physically disabled; hearing dogs alert handlers to alarm clocks, doorbells, smoke alarms, oncoming vehicles, or someone calling the handler; diabetes response dogs carry objects such as juice bottles and can get a phone or sniff the handler's breath for low blood sugar; Alzheimer's helper dogs are trained to stay with a person who has Alzheimer's - or fetch help - if they start to wander or get into an unsafe situation; Parkinson's dogs can assist with balance; psychiatric service dogs help people who are disabled by severe mental illness by calming anxieties, prodding the handler to take meds and halting harmful compulsions. Labrador or Golden retrievers are most often used.
GAINESVILLE, FL - Research shows that migraines and depression may share a strong genetic component. In a study online at Neurology, Dr. Andrew Ahn, Ph.D., states: "Understanding the genetic factors that contribute to these disabling disorders could lead to better strategies to manage the course of these diseases when they occur together." Dr. Ahn, at the University of Florida, wrote an editorial with the study. "In the meantime, people with migraine or depression should tell their doctors about any family history of either disease to help us better understand the link between the two." The study had 2,652 people who were in the larger Erasmus Rucphen Family study. All participants are descendants of 22 couples who lived in Rucphen, the Netherlands,1850s-1900s. "Genealogical information has shown them all to be part of a large extended family, which makes this type of genetic study possible," said study author Dr. Gisela M. Terwindt, Ph.D., of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
BALTIMORE - MedPage Today noted mothers who had in-home visits from counselors after giving birth were less likely to report being involved in intimate partner violence, a study found. Mothers visited at home reported fewer cases in which they were victim or perpetrator of intimate partner violence (IPV) versus women who didn’t get visits, notes the study online at the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. "To our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trial to describe an intervention that decreases rates of female-perpetrated IPV," Dr. Megan H. Bair-Merritt, of Johns Hopkins University, and her team wrote. IPV, in which physical or sexual violence, threats, and emotional abuse occur between current or former spouses or dating partners, is disproportionately high in families with children younger than five. IPV victimization and exposure to IPV as a child are tied to adverse health consequences; few interventions are available.
SAN DIEGO - A fast metabolism is critical to burn fat and manage body weight. The American Council on Exercise recommends resistance training for weight management. Think of your muscles as your body's engine. The bigger your engine, the more energy you can burn. Adding a resistance training plan is a method of raising your metabolism naturally. Also, stay hydrated - inadequate water intake can slow metabolism. Water is responsible for several metabolic processes, including digestion, waste management, and temperature regulation. The Mayo Clinic urges drinking two liters of water daily. You can fight hunger and raise your metabolism by drinking a glass before each meal. To yield an extra boost, make sure your water is ice cold. Your body burns extra calories heating it to room temperature. As for coffee, you might be waking up to an effective natural metabolism booster. The caffeine present in coffee raises metabolism and can improve fat oxidation.
LONDON - Medical News Today disclosed a leading British cancer charity has figures which show people diagnosed with breast, bowel, and ovarian cancers, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now twice as likely to survive at least 10 years after diagnosis than those diagnosed in the early ‘70s. Cancer Research UK analyzed survival trends for common cancers in England/Wales over 40 years. Dr Michel Coleman, who heads the cancer survival group and is professor of epidemiology/vital statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "These big (gains) in long-term survival since the ‘70s reflect real progress in cancer diagnosis and treatment, and confirm the immense value of a National Cancer Registry that holds simple information about all cancer patients diagnosed during the last 30-40 years. For most cancers, the true 10-year survival will turn out to be higher than we report."
BALTIMORE - Reuters Health noted older adults who eat fatty fish at least once a week may have a lower risk of serious vision loss from age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), a study suggests. Bonnielin K. Swenor and a team at Johns Hopkins University analyzed data from 2,520 adults 65-84 who had eye exams and filled in dietary questionnaires. Findings in the journal Ophthalmology don’t prove eating fish cuts the risk of AMD’s advanced stage, but add evidence showing fish eaters tend to have lower rates of AMD than people who eat fish infrequently. They support the theory that omega-3 fatty acids - found mostly in oily fish like salmon, mackerel, and albacore tuna - may affect development or progress of AMD. AMD is caused by abnormal blood vessel growth behind the retina or breakdown of light-sensitive cells within the retina. It’s the leading cause of blindness in older adults, with no cure.
MAYWOOD, Ill - Medical News Today warns iced tea has high doses of oxalate, a key chemical that leads to kidney stones, a common disorder of the urinary tract that affects about 10% of the U.S. population. Hot tea has oxalate, but isn't as easy to drink an amount large enough to encourage stones. Says Dr. John Milner, assistant professor, Dept. of Urology, Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine. "For people who have a tendency to form kidney stones, it's definitely one of the worst things you can drink." Men are four times more likely to get kidney stones, and the risk rises dramatically once they reach their 40s. Postmenopausal women with low estrogen and women who’ve had their ovaries removed have a higher risk of stones. They’re small crystals formed from minerals and salt normally found in the urine in the kidneys or ureters, small tubes that drain urine from the kidney to the bladder.
PHOENIX - The New York Times noted summer can be rough for anyone. For diabetics, heat/humidity can be particularly hazardous. One of the complications for type 1/type 2 is impaired ability to adjust to rises in temperature, which can cause dangerous boosts in body temp in the summer. The basic problem, nerve damage, occurs in 60-70% of U.S. diabetics; it can affect nearly every body organ, including sweat glands. When nerve damage keeps sweat glands from working properly, the body fails to cool as the mercury rises. In one small study, scientists compared diabetics and healthy control subjects exposed to rising temps. They were hooked to devices that measured skin temp, core temp, and sweat rates. As temps rose, the controls’ perspiration rates rose proportionately; their core temps stayed constant. "For subjects with diabetes, sweat seemed to plateau irrespective of an alarming rise in core temperature," scientists wrote. "The diabetic subjects’ generalized inability to sweat across the body had a profound effect on core temperature."
BETHESDA, MD - Ivanhoe Newswire reported intensive blood sugar control versus standard control - lipid therapy with a fibrate and statin - versus statin therapy alone lowered progression of diabetic retinopathy, asserts a study. Diabetic retinopathy hits adults with type 2 diabetes and is the leading vision loss cause in Americans 18-64. The Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) study had 10,251 type 2 diabetics at high risk for heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death. It evaluated three intensive strategies for lowering cardiovascular risks tied to diabetes. Intensive treatments had blood sugar control to near normal levels, blood pressure control to normal levels, and combination treatment of multiple blood lipids with Zocor versus standard treatment with simvastatin alone. Fenofibrate lowers triglycerides and raises "good" high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol; simvastatin lowers "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL). "ACCORD indicates intensive glycemic control and fibrate treatment added to statin therapy reduce progression of diabetic retinopathy," study leader Dr. Emily Chew, chief, Clinical Trials Branch/Division of Epidemiology at the National Eye Institute, stated.
WEST ORANGE, NJ - A study in Neurology shows a mentally-active lifestyle may help against memory/learning woes which often occur in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). "Many people with MS struggle with learning and memory problems. This study shows a mentally- active lifestyle might cut the harmful effects of brain damage on learning and memory. Learning and memory ability remained quite good in people with enriching lifestyles, even if they had a lot of brain damage. Persons with lesser mentally-active lifestyles were more likely to suffer learning and memory problems, even at milder levels of brain damage," said study author James Sumowski, Ph.D., of the Kessler Foundation Research Center. The study involved 44 people about 45 who had MS for about 11 years. Study authors measured lifetime enrichment with word knowledge. The study found those mentally active had good scores on the tests of learning and memory even if they had higher amounts of brain damage. Learning was slower and recall was lower after 30 minutes among those with higher brain damage versus those with less.
LEIPZIG, GERMANY - "We’ve met Neanderthal and he is us - at least a little," Sciencemag.org asserts. The most detailed look yet at the Neanderthal genome helps answer a hotly debated anthropology query: Did Neanderthals and modern humans mate? The reply is "yes," there’s at least some cave man in most of us; 1-4% of genes in people from Europe and Asia go back to Neanderthals. "They live on, a little bit," says Svante Paabo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). Scientists led by Paabo, Richard Green (University of California/Santa Cruz), and David Reich (Harvard Medical School) compared genetic material from bones of three Neanderthals with that from five modern humans. Findings in the journal Science show a tie between Neanderthals and modern people outside Africa, Paabo said. That suggests interbreeding in the Middle East, where modern humans and Neanderthals lived thousands of years ago, he said.
NEW YORK - Reuters Health noted that where a person has extra weight may influence pancreatic cancer risk. Women with more fat on their waist are at greater risk. A study confirms the risk climbs with body mass index, a standard measure of weight in relation to height used to gauge obesity. While a link of obesity/pancreatic cancer has been suggested, studies checking the tie have yielded mixed results, Dr. Alan Arslan, of the New York University School of Medicine, and his team note in Archives of Internal Medicine. To study the tie, they analyzed data on 2,170 people with pancreatic cancer and 2,209 people without it from the National Cancer Institute Pancreatic Cancer Cohort Consortium, a project launched in 2006 to identify genes tied to the disease plus lifestyle, environmental, and genetic risk factors. For all subjects, there was a positive link of wider BMI and higher risk for pancreatic cancer. Scientists found people in the top 25% based on BMI were at 33% higher risk.
BOSTON - The Health Behavior News Service noted that even with widespread use of the Internet to get our daily dose of information, people who rely on the print media for their health data - and community organizations - tend to do better than Web-seekers at following a healthy lifestyle, research finds. "I think much is to be learned about health information-seeking behaviors and their relationship to the adoption of health behaviors in various demographic groups," said Dr. Nicole Redmond, who led the team. "One of the challenges in this area is the rapidly-evolving nature of information technology. Telecommunications, such as text messaging and Internet access through smart phones and social networking sites have created a very different communications landscape in a very short time frame." Dr. Redmond is in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine used data from the 2005 and 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) and included responses from more than 10,000 participants.
LONDON - People who work 10-11 hours daily are more likely to have serious heart ills, including heart attacks, than those who quit after seven hours, scientists told Reuters. The 11-year study of 6,000 British civil servants doesn’t yield definitive proof that long hours cause coronary heart woes but shows a clear link, which experts said may reflect stress. There were 369 deaths due to heart disease, non-fatal heart attacks, and angina among the study group - and the risk of having an adverse event was 60% higher for those who worked 3-4 hours overtime. Working 1-2 hours beyond a seven-hour day wasn’t related to increased risk. "It seems there might be a threshold; it isn’t so bad if you work an hour or so more than usual," said Dr. Marianna Virtanen, an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. Higher heart woes among those on overtime was outside a range of other factors - i.e., smoking, being overweight, or high cholesterol. Dr. Virtanen said it was possible the lifestyle of people working long hours deteriorated, perhaps due to poor diet or greater alcohol consumption.
CHICAGO - Reuters reported that although they sometimes make spicy meals go down easier, heartburn drugs should be used with caution, five studies show. The drugs - proton pump inhibitors, or PPIs - include AstraZeneca's Nexium and Prilosec. Prilosec is available generically as omeprazole and is also sold over-the-counter by Procter & Gamble Co. While the drugs help the right patients, they can raise the fracture risks in post-menopausal women and cause bacterial infections in many patients, asserts a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Annually in the U.S., patients fill an estimated 113 million prescriptions for PPIs, which treat esophagus inflammation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, ulcers, and several other conditions. Says Dr. Mitchell Katz, of the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health, "That (PPIs) relieve dyspepsia is without question, but at what cost (and I don’t mean financial)?"
ROCHESTER, MN - When disability/illness makes it difficult to open a door, pick up keys, or seek help, a service dog might ease frustrations. The Mayo Clinic Health Letter conveys many ways these dogs help those with disabilities. The modern era of service dogs began after World War I, when dogs were trained to guide blind war vets. Today, they’re trained in specialties including: skilled assist dogs to help the physically disabled; hearing dogs alert handlers to alarm clocks, doorbells, smoke alarms, oncoming vehicles, or someone calling the handler; diabetes response dogs carry objects such as juice bottles and can get a phone or sniff the handler's breath for low blood sugar; Alzheimer's helper dogs are trained to stay with a person who has Alzheimer's - or fetch help - if they start to wander or get into an unsafe situation; Parkinson's dogs can assist with balance; psychiatric service dogs help people who are disabled by severe mental illness by calming anxieties, prodding the handler to take meds and halting harmful compulsions. Labrador or Golden retrievers are most often used.
GAINESVILLE, FL - Research shows that migraines and depression may share a strong genetic component. In a study online at Neurology, Dr. Andrew Ahn, Ph.D., states: "Understanding the genetic factors that contribute to these disabling disorders could lead to better strategies to manage the course of these diseases when they occur together." Dr. Ahn, at the University of Florida, wrote an editorial with the study. "In the meantime, people with migraine or depression should tell their doctors about any family history of either disease to help us better understand the link between the two." The study had 2,652 people who were in the larger Erasmus Rucphen Family study. All participants are descendants of 22 couples who lived in Rucphen, the Netherlands,1850s-1900s. "Genealogical information has shown them all to be part of a large extended family, which makes this type of genetic study possible," said study author Dr. Gisela M. Terwindt, Ph.D., of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
BALTIMORE - MedPage Today noted mothers who had in-home visits from counselors after giving birth were less likely to report being involved in intimate partner violence, a study found. Mothers visited at home reported fewer cases in which they were victim or perpetrator of intimate partner violence (IPV) versus women who didn’t get visits, notes the study online at the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. "To our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trial to describe an intervention that decreases rates of female-perpetrated IPV," Dr. Megan H. Bair-Merritt, of Johns Hopkins University, and her team wrote. IPV, in which physical or sexual violence, threats, and emotional abuse occur between current or former spouses or dating partners, is disproportionately high in families with children younger than five. IPV victimization and exposure to IPV as a child are tied to adverse health consequences; few interventions are available.
SAN DIEGO - A fast metabolism is critical to burn fat and manage body weight. The American Council on Exercise recommends resistance training for weight management. Think of your muscles as your body's engine. The bigger your engine, the more energy you can burn. Adding a resistance training plan is a method of raising your metabolism naturally. Also, stay hydrated - inadequate water intake can slow metabolism. Water is responsible for several metabolic processes, including digestion, waste management, and temperature regulation. The Mayo Clinic urges drinking two liters of water daily. You can fight hunger and raise your metabolism by drinking a glass before each meal. To yield an extra boost, make sure your water is ice cold. Your body burns extra calories heating it to room temperature. As for coffee, you might be waking up to an effective natural metabolism booster. The caffeine present in coffee raises metabolism and can improve fat oxidation.
LONDON - Medical News Today disclosed a leading British cancer charity has figures which show people diagnosed with breast, bowel, and ovarian cancers, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now twice as likely to survive at least 10 years after diagnosis than those diagnosed in the early ‘70s. Cancer Research UK analyzed survival trends for common cancers in England/Wales over 40 years. Dr Michel Coleman, who heads the cancer survival group and is professor of epidemiology/vital statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "These big (gains) in long-term survival since the ‘70s reflect real progress in cancer diagnosis and treatment, and confirm the immense value of a National Cancer Registry that holds simple information about all cancer patients diagnosed during the last 30-40 years. For most cancers, the true 10-year survival will turn out to be higher than we report."
BALTIMORE - Reuters Health noted older adults who eat fatty fish at least once a week may have a lower risk of serious vision loss from age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), a study suggests. Bonnielin K. Swenor and a team at Johns Hopkins University analyzed data from 2,520 adults 65-84 who had eye exams and filled in dietary questionnaires. Findings in the journal Ophthalmology don’t prove eating fish cuts the risk of AMD’s advanced stage, but add evidence showing fish eaters tend to have lower rates of AMD than people who eat fish infrequently. They support the theory that omega-3 fatty acids - found mostly in oily fish like salmon, mackerel, and albacore tuna - may affect development or progress of AMD. AMD is caused by abnormal blood vessel growth behind the retina or breakdown of light-sensitive cells within the retina. It’s the leading cause of blindness in older adults, with no cure.