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A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".

A brief summary of the last 50 years' of research into diet: Everything you can possibly eat or drink is both bad and good for you

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30 June, 2010

Another reversal of official health "wisdom"

'Grazing' used to be king, but now experts say it slows metabolism, and can cause tooth decay and diabetes

For years, nutritionists have been telling us to graze - eat little and often - to keep up our energy levels and as a tactic to avoid overeating unhealthy food.

The problem with grazing is that many people ignore the bit about eating only a little, hearing only the message to 'eat often' - the result is we've become a nation of snackers. Furthermore, we're snacking not on healthy foods, but on chocolate, crisps and other calorie-laden products.

Clearly, eating lots of junk food is not good for the waistline. But now, some experts believe that the very principle of eating between meals - whether it's healthy or junk food - is the real problem. They say snacking makes us even more hungry; it also interferes with the body's ability to burn fat, leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes, as well as tooth decay. What we should really be doing, it seems, is going back to three proper meals a day, with no snacks in between.

'For many, snacking is a major cause of weight gain,' says Professor Stephen Atkin, head of diabetes and metabolism at Hull York Medical School. Adds Naveed Sattar, professor of metabolic medicine at Glasgow University: 'Snacking gives us extra calories and the fact is, extra calories make us fat.'

But not only are snacks often highly calorific; eating all day also undermines our body's ability to burn off fat. When we eat, our body releases insulin - a hormone that helps carry sugar into the cells to burn as energy. This sugar energy will keep us going for around three hours, after which our bodies will start using energy from our fat stores.

If we can hold out for four to five hours between meals, we burn more fat. 'Fat is burned as soon as your carbohydrate stores fall and you start the mobilisation of fat for energy,' explains Professor Atkin.

Snacking also means that organs such as the liver and pancreas are under greater stress, as blood sugar and fat levels stay higher throughout the day, says professor Sattar. This also increases stress on blood vessels and, perhaps, the heart. 'In my view, the ideal would be not to snack at all,' adds Professor Atkin. 'It's normal to feel hungry before a meal.'

More here





Not so NICE

The author below criticizes NICE on liberty grounds. That their "advice" (like most official wisdom) is also crassly ignorant of the best research he overlooks. See the sidebar here for much of what they ignore

In a country where the state controls healthcare to such an extent, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) really has to exist in some form. Death panels or not, without serious reforms it is necessary that someone somewhere decides which medicines can be afforded and which can’t.

However, NICE does more than this, it also makes recommendations on “how to improve people’s health and prevent illness and disease”. Much the pity. In the space of a week they have made two headline-grabbing recommendations. First was their suggestions that:

* manufacturers should stop using trans-fats

* a maximum intake should be set set for salt of 6g per day for adults by 2015 and 3g daily by 2025

* hidden saturated fat substantially reduced

* efforts be made to make unhealthy food more expensive than healthy food

* restrictions should be enforced on unhealthy food television advertisements until after 9pm

* planning restrictions should be imposed to time-limit fast-food outlets

* unhealthy food should have traffic light labelling

To top that, yesterday they suggested that all pregnant women should have their breath measured for carbon monoxide levels when booking to see a midwife. The Department of Health is keen on the idea, stating: "We welcome the publication of these new guidelines. Smoking in pregnancy is a major public health concern posing risks to both mother and baby. We want the NHS to use this guidance to develop the best possible services for pregnant women."

It is no surprise that liberty is not a factor in the proposals of a Quango, but even they have to draw a line somewhere. Clearly on this occasion they have gone too far and should have been shot down. There are clear arguments to be made on unintended consequences – whether increased food prices for the poorest or vulnerable smoking mothers avoiding health professionals for fear of condemnation – but ultimately the argument of ‘enough is enough’ needs to win through.

Utility and efficiency are not the only measures of effective policy. Like all Quangos and regulators, their remit needs to be cut down to what is purely necessary in areas that the state is near monopolistic provider and removed entirely from nannying us.

SOURCE



29 June, 2010

Did the anti-vaccine movement help create a whooping cough epidemic?

The nutters kill kids

A whooping cough epidemic has broken out in California, which is now facing what could be the largest outbreak of the contagious disease since 1958. Over 900 cases have been confirmed in the state—more than four times as many as last year—and 600 suspected cases are being investigated. The highly contagious disease can be deadly to infants—five have already died from the disease this year in California—but it’s eminently preventable through vaccination.

Officials are still investigating the causes of the outbreak, but some have already suggested that the anti-vaccine movement could be at least partly to blame. "California is the epicenter of vaccine refusal" in the United States, said Dr. Blaise Congeni from Ohio’s Akron Children's Hospital, according to an ABC News story. While California requires that children be vaccinated from whooping cough before they attend school, "the requirement is waived if parents file a 'personal belief exemption' (PBE), which need not be based on religion or medical necessity," the story continues. And some parents have been flocking to join the vaccine refusalists. ABC News cites Ken August, spokesman for the California Department of Public Health:

He said that the overall rate for PBEs among the state's roughly 7,200 schools is about 2 percent. But rates are much higher in some schools. Records for 2009 indicated that close to 175 schools had PBE rates of 20 percent or more. A few had rates above 70 percent.

Researchers have found that vaccination rates of at least 93 percent are needed to ensure so-called herd immunity against pertussis, which prevents the disease from spreading quickly to unvaccinated individuals.

Fears about vaccines are nothing new, but they’ve been revived in recent years by anti-vaccine crusaders who’ve junked science in favor of medical myths and conspiracy theories. In the US and abroad, they’ve popularized the notion that vaccines cause autism and that whooping cough is not actually fatal, among other falsehoods. There’s also the tireless conservative argument—promulgated by folks like the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly—that government-required vaccines infringe upon individual liberty.

The claims by leading anti-vaccine activists have been thoroughly debunked. The US Court of Claims, for example, ruled last year that there was no substantive evidence to support the autism-vaccine link. The main researcher behind the claim, British doctor Andrew Wakefield, has been completely discredited and even stripped of his medical license.

But there's still reason to be concerned about the damage that the movement may have already done. Vaccine-phobia has gripped towns like Boulder, which in 2002 had the lowest school-wide vaccination rate in Colorado—and "one of the highest per capita rates of whooping cough in the United States.” And now children in California are dying of a disease that should have been made obsolete by the 21st century. If vaccine refusals are indeed behind the current epidemic, California needs to figure out the real reasons that parents are putting their own children and others at risk.*

SOURCE







Simple blood test will give women precise age at which they will no longer be fertile

Could be useful even if only approximately right

DOCTORS were set to unveil tomorrow a simple blood test that could tell young women the precise age at which they would no longer be able to have babies.

The test - which measures levels of a hormone produced by the ovaries - could allow women as young as 20 to pinpoint within a few months when they would cease to be fertile.

The procedure, to be launched in Rome at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, would be valuable to women trying to balance careers with having children.

Among Western women, menopause occurs on average at 51. However, about 15 per cent of women experience it early, under the age of 45.

“Our results suggest that the novel marker anti-Mullerian hormone (produced by the ovaries) could precisely forecast the age at menopause, even in young women,” said Dr Fahimeh Ramezani Tehrani, who led the research.

Dr Tehrani analysed levels of the hormone, which controls the development of the cells in the ovaries from which eggs develop, in 266 women aged 20 to 49.

It was known that levels of the hormone vary between women and also decline with age. Scientists previously suspected that changing levels were linked to menopause, but there was insufficient data to use this knowledge as a predictive tool.

By gathering data from a large number of women, Dr Tehrani believes she created a mathematical model that can predict the age of menopause for any woman.

The test developed by Dr Tehrani, a senior researcher at the World Health Organisation-backed Endocrine Research Centre in Tehran, would need to be validated in large-scale trials before it could come into common use.

SOURCE



28 June, 2010

Chocolate could help treat high blood pressure

Another tiny effect paraded as if it meant something

Just a chunk of chocolate a day could have the same effect on high blood pressure as half an hour of exercise, new research suggests. For those suffering from high blood pressure the effect of chocolate was so dramatic it could reduce their chances of having a heart attack or stroke by 20 per cent over five years.

Chocolate – and especially dark chocolate – contains chemicals known as flavanols which naturally open up blood vessels in the body. That means blood flows more easily and the pressure drops.

"You don't always need medication to reduce blood pressure," said Dr Karin Ried, at Adelaide University who carried out the research. "This shows that there are some foods that can help."

An estimated 15 million people in Britain suffer from high blood pressure, also known as hypertension – around half of them undiagnosed. About one in 10 sufferers cannot control the condition with medication or cannot tolerate the drugs, leaving them at greater risk. Hundreds of thousands face a lifetime on medication to reduce the risk of suffering heart disease, strokes or kidney failure.

For the latest research, Dr Ried and her team combined the results of 15 other studies looking at chocolate and cocoa between 1955 and 2009 covering hundreds of people. They found that for people with hypertension, eating chocolate could reduce the blood pressure by up to five per cent. For those with normal pressure it had no effect. "This is a significant finding," said Dr Ried. [Really??] "We’ve found that consumption can significantly, albeit modestly, reduce blood pressure for people with high blood pressure but not for people with normal blood pressure”.

She said it will take more research to see what is the optimal amount of chocolate that was needed to make the most difference. She said the studies varied from just one chunk (6g) to a whole bar (100g) a day. The research was published in the journal BMC Medicine.

People with high blood pressure are seen to have it consistently higher than 140mm Hg systolic or 90mm Hg diastolic. Normal is 90/60. The results showed that chocolate would make it drop 5mm in systolic pressure which is comparable to the known effects of 30 daily minutes of moderate physical activity such as brisk walking or swimming.

Chocolate has been found to have health giving benefits in the past. Research published earlier this year showed that people who eat just one bar a week are 22 per cent less likely to suffer a stroke. However the health giving benefits have to be weighed against its contribution to obesity.

SOURCE







A nickel-plated moron

Anger grew today after the deputy editor of a leading British parenting magazine wrote an article describing breastfeeding as "creepy", saying she wanted to maintain the sexuality of her "fun bags".

In Kathryn Blundell's article for Mother & Baby, entitled I formula fed. So what?, she explains how she never breastfed because "I wanted my body back. (And some wine) ... I also wanted to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach."

She continues with, "They're part of my sexuality, too - not just breasts, but fun bags. And when you have that attitude (and I admit I made no attempt to change it), seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy."

The UK Department of Health (DoH) recommends breastfeeding for six months and launched a controversial "Breast is Best" ad campaign to convince mothers to put down the bottles. According to the DoH, only one in 100 British mums actually does breastfeed for that long.

Of these "quitters", Blundell says, "I often wonder whether many of these women, like me, just couldn't be fagged (did not want to make the effort) or felt like getting tipsy once in a while."

The fallout from the article ranges from breastfeeding group Lactivist condemning Blundell's "generally spreading misinformation" to a Facebook group with 500 members demanding an apology.

"As a formula-feeding mum who was unable to breastfeed, I am left wondering whether, thanks to this piece, people who see me giving my baby a bottle may assume that I am doing so because I could not be fagged to breastfeed/found the idea 'creepy'," wrote one member of the Facebook group.

But Mother & Baby Editor Miranda Levy stands by her deputy's piece, telling the UK's Guardian newspaper: "We have made readers feel 'normal' and less of a 'failure' for not managing to breastfeed - a situation which is incredibly common. The way you feed your baby is not a moral issue, and at Mother & Baby we seek to support all new parents in what is a glorious, but often difficult and emotional, time."

SOURCE



27 June, 2010

Methodists 'live more than seven years longer than the rest of the British population'

Staying off the booze probably avoids a lot of harms but a tendency for Methodism to be a religion of the middle class is probably also involved.

Note also that we are comparing churchgoers with a generally irreligious overall population and religious belief does have stress-reducing effects. It would be interesting to see another study of churchgoing Presbyterians. Church of England churchgoers don't count as they rarely believe in anything religious at all

Methodists live more than seven years longer than the rest of the population, according to an academic study. Men belonging to the famously clean-living denomination live to the ripe old age of 83.9, research has found, compared with a national average of 77.

For women the difference in longevity was even greater with female Methodists dying at 91.1 on average – nine years longer than the 82 years enjoyed by most British women.

Last week Stanley Lucas died in Cornwall aged 110, having become not just the oldest male member of the Methodist Church but the oldest man in Europe.

Dr Richard Vautrey, vice president of the Methodist Conference, said, “I’m sure there are many different factors at work for Methodists to attain these numbers. “But I would guess that our emphasis on caring for our spiritual as well as physical health, avoiding excess, engaging with people in our communities and being good neighbours all help.”

Methodism, an evangelical Christian movement that split from the Church of England at the end of the 18th century, is known for its focus on social justice and for many years was at the forefront of the temperance movement that preached “total abstinence” from alcohol.

The increased life expectancy of its followers, who now number 265,000 in Britain, was calculated by researchers working for British Religion in Numbers, based at the University of Manchester.

They studied family announcements placed in the denomination’s newspaper, the Methodist Recorder, which found that the mean age of death for Methodist men and women in 1973 and 2008 was far higher than that of the general population as recorded by the Office for National Statistics.

Study of obituaries for Methodist ministers appeared to confirm the trend, with a mean age of death of 83.4 for men who died in 2009 – again more than six years older than the British average of 77.

The Methodist Conference, currently meeting in Porstmouth, begins each year with a rendition of a hymn called “And are we yet alive?”, written by one of the movement’s founders, Charles Wesley.

SOURCE






Fad diet leaves actress with brittle bones

Heh!



HOLLYWOOD star Gwyneth Paltrow was a pin-up for "healthy" living but her extreme dieting may have given her the bones of an 80-year-old woman. The 37-year-old actress - who has followed a macrobiotic diet for 11 years and exercises up to three hours a day - has revealed that she has been diagnosed with osteopenia, an illness that can lead to the serious bone disease osteoporosis.

"I suffered a pretty severe Tibial plateau fracture a few years ago (requiring surgery) which led the orthopaedic surgeon to give me a bone scan, at which point it was discovered I had the beginning stages of osteopenia," she wrote on her popular online newsletter, Goop. Osteoporosis - a common ailment among the elderly - increases a person's risk of fractures and is more prevalent among women.

"My doctors tested my vitamin D levels, which turned out to be the lowest thing they had ever seen [not a good thing]," Paltrow said.

She said she was put on prescription-strength vitamin D and told to spend more time in the sun, but some nutritionists believe her diet was also to blame for her brittle bone problem. The macrobiotic diet, which is popular among celebrities, including Madonna, requires followers to eat plenty of vegetables, wholegrains and fruit and small quantities of fish while discouraging dairy and red meat. Alcohol, chocolate, hot spices, sugar and coffee are also off limits as part of the diet.

The mother-of-two and wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin relaxed her eating regime between the births of her two children Apple, six, and Moses, four, but has since been following a less severe version of the macrobiotic diet.

"A macrobiotic diet is often lower in protein than a diet that includes dairy foods and meat so if she's doing a lot of exercise but not getting enough protein, she's not getting enough to build her bones either," Sydney nutritionist Sharon Natoli said. "Plus, vitamin D helps calcium absorption so if you're not getting enough calcium but getting enough vitamin D and vice-versa, you really need the two to be working together."

Ms Natoli advised people against following diets that excluded essential food groups. "We don't recommend fad celebrity diets," she said. "If you leave out a whole food group, then you're going to be low on something."

Source



26 June, 2010

The nastiness of NICE: The addled tyranny of the anti-junk food crusade

The idea that thousands of lives could be saved if people stopped eating the ‘wrong’ food is pie in the sky

‘Forty thousand deaths a year due to junk food’, declared the UK Daily Telegraph yesterday, reporting on new policy recommendations produced by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). But the evidence on which this claim is made is highly dubious. What the report really represents is the coming together of the same-old NGOs and health policy wonks to tell us - for the umpteenth time - how we must live our lives.

The report puts forward 12 recommendations, including:

* Introducing policies designed to cut our consumption of Bad Stuff (salt, saturated fats and trans-fats);

* restricting marketing of ‘junk’ food to children;

* introducing the ‘traffic light’ labelling of foods - green for good, amber for warning and red for unhealthy;

* assessing all government policy for its impact on cardiovascular disease;

* ensuring that EU farm spending promotes healthy foods;

* encouraging ‘physically active travel’ – for example, by scrapping subsidised car parking;

* providing ‘healthy’ meals in public-sector workplaces, schools, hospitals, etc;

* discouraging, via local authorities, the opening of takeaway food outlets near schools and in other sensitive areas.

This mish-mash of different recommendations simply reflects the wide range of groups that want to get their noses in the health trough or foist their particular hare-brained schemes upon us. The evidence that any of these policies would make any serious difference to our life expectancies - never mind save tens of thousands of lives - is flimsy to say the least.

First of all, we need to examine the claim that such measures could save the 40,000 lives apparently being destroyed by junk food. The report says: ‘Most premature deaths from CVD (cardiovascular disease) – that is, among people aged less than 75 – are preventable. In 2006, CVD accounted for around 30 per cent of premature deaths among men and 21 per cent among women, accounting for just over 40,000 premature deaths in that year.’ So actually, even on this basis, it is only most of the 40,000 premature deaths that could be prevented. But even this seems implausible. Genetics, old age, sheer luck, the quality of healthcare available, and environmental factors that aren’t preventable by lifestyle change - like air pollution - would seem to be at the very least as important as what people eat.

Above all, being a man rather than a woman makes a very substantial difference to life expectancy. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest life expectancy in the UK at birth is now 77.5 years for men and 81.8 years for women. Is this ‘preventable’? Perhaps all men over 50 should be forced to have their balls chopped off. Strangely, this policy recommendation is absent from NICE’s report.

But when we dig a little further into the various recommendations, the suggestion that the policies put forward could have any substantial impact on life expectancy is quickly revealed to be illusory. Let’s look at the evidence for the idea that if we avoid eating the wrong things we will live longer.

Salt

Poster campaigns and health professionals are forever telling us that we should reduce salt intake to lower our blood pressure and, in turn, cut cases of CVD. Yet while there may be some benefit in cutting salt intake in those who are already being medicated for high blood pressure or who have kidney disease, for most people there is no evidence that cutting salt is of any benefit at all. Indeed for some people it could be harmful.

There is a certain arrogance about the idea, repeated in the new report, that we should cut salt intake from an average of 8.5 grammes per day to six grammes per day by 2015, and then to three grammes per day by 2050. Firstly, the idea that high salt automatically equates to shortened lives is wrong: the Japanese have a very high-salt diet and enjoy longer lives than anyone else.

Secondly, our bodies are incredibly sensitive to the appropriate balance of salt and water in our blood, regulating it on a minute-by-minute basis to keep it within a very narrow range. Yet the groups and researchers proposing radical changes to our diet seem to believe that salt intake should be regulated by diktat from Whitehall rather than by our internal biology evolved over millions of years.

There is no consensus that such salt-reduction policies would be beneficial. A review in the British Medical Journal on the evidence connecting salt with high blood pressure, published in 2002, concluded: ‘Intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programmes, provide only small reductions in blood pressure and sodium excretion, and effects on deaths and cardiovascular events are unclear.’

Saturated fat

There has been plenty of evidence for a very long time that attempts to reduce saturated fat consumption have no effect on cardiovascular disease. For example, the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), which reported its findings in the early 1980s, encouraged a large number of middle-aged American men with high cholesterol to change their diet in an effort to reduce their saturated-fat intake and, therefore, their cholesterol. These test subjects were also encouraged to quit smoking and to treat their high blood pressure. Meanwhile, another large group of middle-aged men were left to their own devices. The result? Slightly more men in the low-fat diet group died than in the control group, but in reality there was no practical difference in outcomes.

Trans-fats

As for trans-fats, the evidence that reducing our intake will ‘save lives’ is once again weak. Trans-fats are a by-product of adding hydrogen to vegetable fats to make them stable at room temperature and give them a longer shelf-life, particularly in things like baked goods. While they’ve been around for decades, they became particularly popular among food manufacturers as an alternative to saturated fats.

So what’s the risk from trans-fats? A review in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 says: ‘In a meta-analysis of four prospective cohort studies involving nearly 140,000 subjects, including updated analyses from the two largest studies, a two per cent increase in energy intake from trans fatty acids was associated with a 23 per cent increase in the incidence of [coronary heart disease].’ That figure of 23 per cent sounds impressively high, but epidemiological studies are very blunt instruments.

As the US National Cancer Institute noted in 1994, ‘in epidemiological research, [increases in risk of less than 100 per cent] are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.’ As a comparison, the risk of getting lung cancer from being a regular smoker (over the course of decades, usually) is in the order of 2,000 per cent compared to non-smokers. While we can be pretty confident that active smoking significantly increases your risk of a variety of diseases, the small relative risk associated with trans-fats is much more ambiguous.

The other recommendations in the NICE report are a bunch of lame old hobbyhorses or, in the case of demanding that all government policy be assessed for its effect on CVD, they add up to a demand for a health-lobby veto on all lawmaking. Thanks, but no thanks.

But regardless of the evidence, there is a more principled basis on which we should object to these kind of policy proposals – namely, that we, and not NICE or anybody else, should have control over our own lives and our own, sometimes bad habits. Let us eat our junk, slob out on our sofas, smoke our fags and drink our booze. If these things turn out to shorten our lives, so be it (though the evidence that they will is usually as feeble as an old codger who’s avoided a ‘premature’ death). That’s surely a better way to live than to be endlessly subjected to the high-fibre, low-fat, salt-free dictatorship of Those Who Know What’s Good For Us.

SOURCE







The myth of the smokefree health miracle

The evidence that bans on public smoking reduce the number of heart attacks is still woefully thin

Recent reports of a ‘dramatic’ fall in the number of heart attacks in England after July 2007 represented the latest in a long line of attempts to find immediate health benefits from smoking bans. But a serious examination of this body of evidence suggests that the effect of smoking bans is either tiny or non-existent.

The worldwide search began in 2004, when the British Medical Journal reported a 40 per cent decline in ‘acute myocardial infarction’ (AMI), the medical term for heart attack, in the small town of Helena, Montana. Subsequent ‘heart miracles’ claimed drops in AMI of 47 per cent (Bowling Green, Ohio), 27 per cent (Pueblo, Colorado) and 17 per cent (Scotland).

As previously reported on spiked, the widely touted Scottish figure of 17 per cent was at odds with hospital admissions data showing an eight per cent drop in the first year of the ban followed by an eight per cent rise in the second year. When this inconclusive evidence is combined with hospital admissions data from Wales, Denmark, New Zealand and Australia showing smoking bans having no effect on the heart attack rate (1), the most striking aspect of this field of research is the tendency to find dramatic results in small communities and practically nonexistent effects over large populations.

The counterintuitive conclusion was that secondhand smoke was ferociously lethal in one-horse towns in the mid-West, but strangely benign in whole nations. The alternative, if more cynical, explanation was that obscure destinations like Helena and Bowling Green were brought to the world’s attention because anti-smoking campaigners had dredged the data for unusual blips that roughly coincided with provincial smoking bans.

That question seemed set to be resolved when The Sunday Times announced in September 2009 that the smoking ban in England (population 49million) ‘caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10 per cent’. The source of this claim was never disclosed and the anti-smoking campaign Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) quickly downplayed it, insisting that the 10 per cent figure was ‘not based on any research conducted to date’ (2). Nevertheless, the research was underway and it finally bore fruit a fortnight ago in the form of another British Medical Journal study.

Led by Dr Anna Gilmore, a member of ASH and the director of the Tobacco Control Research Group, the study found a post-ban drop in AMI of not 10 per cent, let alone the 40 per cent found in Helena, but of just 4.3 per cent. A welcome decline, to be sure, but since the final years of ‘smoky’ England saw similar declines of 3.2 per cent and 5.2 per cent, the evidence for a heart miracle in the most populous nation yet studied was less than compelling (11).


heart attack rates in England before and after smoking ban

Faced with data that unequivocally showed heart attacks falling at the same pedestrian rate as before the ban, Gilmore and her team turned to computer modelling. After making adjustments to the data, they concluded that, despite appearances, the smoking ban had a profound effect on the nation’s hearts. Of the 4.3 per cent drop in AMI admissions, Gilmore attributed more than half (2.4 per cent) to the smoking ban. The study concluded that ‘the implementation of smoke-free public places is associated with significant reductions in hospital admissions for myocardial infarction’. A press release was then issued, headlined ‘Smokefree legislation linked to drop in admissions for heart attacks’.

To make life simpler for busy journalists, the press release chose not to mention that this was a computer-generated estimate, instead flatly stating: ‘A 2.4 per cent drop in the number of emergency admissions to hospital for a heart attack has been observed following the implementation of smokefree legislation in England.’ As was helpfully pointed out, this 2.4 per cent drop equated to 1,200 heart attacks being ‘prevented’ by the 2007 legislation. There was no mention of the downward trend in AMI that long predated the smoking ban.

Since the 2.4 per cent figure exists only on a laptop at Bath University, the calculations that led to it can be neither verified nor debunked. The possibility that the smoking ban contributed to part of the drop in AMI admissions after July 2007 cannot be ruled out, particularly if it led to a significant drop in the number of smokers (the jury is still out on whether this happened). But since the number of heart attacks fell at a similar rate after July 2005 and July 2006, the burden of proof rests on Gilmore & Co. Without it, it is as if they were doing a rain dance in the middle of a thunderstorm and demanding credit for the rain. The onus is on them to convince us that the skies would have cleared if they hadn’t showed up, not the other way round.

Gilmore’s case rests on making adjustments for three relevant but hardly decisive confounding factors that might disguise the effect of the smoking ban: surface air temperature, population size and Christmas holidays. This is all good practice, but more significant risk factors such as smoking status, diet, statin use, exercise and stress go unaddressed. It could not be otherwise. Hospital admissions data reveal no personal information about any of the patients beyond their age and gender. This only highlights the immense difficulty of making specific assumptions from a mass of nameless aggregate data.

The only thing that can be said with any confidence is that there were 2,300 fewer heart attacks in 2007/08 than in the year before. With heart attacks and heart disease having hundreds of risk factors interacting with each other in complex and unpredictable ways, using raw data to single out any one of them is like listening out for a kazoo in a stadium full of vuvuzuelas. Any estimate made against this noisy statistical background can only be speculative to the point of wishful thinking.

Perhaps this underestimates the power of the team’s computer model, but if they have truly devised a formula that can predict the number of heart attacks by taking the temperature and seeing what day Christmas falls on, it is not one they are prepared to share with us. Effectively, the reader is told: ‘We know it doesn’t look like the smoking ban had any effect on AMI admissions but we’ve run it through a computer model and it has. Take it or leave it.’ In the context of the dubious and frequently bizarre history of ‘heart miracle’ studies, the reader could be forgiven for leaving it.

If it does nothing else, the English study confirms that the wilder claims of heart miracles in Helena and elsewhere were way off base. In the course of six years, the ‘smoking ban effect’ on heart attacks has fallen from over 40 per cent to less than five per cent. And since the heart attack rate was known to fall by more than five per cent in some years before smokefree legislation was introduced, attributing any part of the secular decline to the smoking ban becomes a matter of interpretation and conjecture.

Not that the hypothetical nature of Gilmore’s study ever impinged on the news coverage devoted to it. No one reading the newspapers two weeks ago could have gone away thinking anything other than that there were 1,200 fewer heart attacks after the smoking ban and that this decline in numbers was an unusual and remarkable event.

As was the case in Scotland two years ago, the statisticians who painstakingly collected admissions data from English hospitals might as well not have bothered. The true figures vanished, replaced by unseen adjustments and unspoken assumptions from the gatekeepers of knowledge at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. Once again we had findings erroneously leaked to the media months in advance, a press release which failed to get the most basic facts straight, and a study with no verifiable evidence to support its central conclusion. And all published just in time for the government’s review of the smoking ban. If this doesn’t warrant a little scepticism, what does?

SOURCE



25 June, 2010

Drinking wine could protect your eyes

Now I know why I didn't go into glasses until I was 60! Seriously, though, it's just the resveratrol religion again. I am not entirely clear on what they did but their claims do seem to be much more strongly-based than usual. If they have in fact used resveratrol both in laboratory glassware and mice to produce cell changes they have a good case to transfer their studies to humans. Abstract follows the popular comment below

Researchers have found that a substance found in grapes and other fruits could protect blood vessels in the eye being damaged by old age. It is effective because the compound, known as resveratrol, stops the blood vessels from being damaged.

The substance, which has been linked to anti-ageing and cancer protection in the past, is believed to work because it protects against abnormal angiogenesis – the formation of damaged or mutated blood vessels. This condition is linked to cancer, heart disease and eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.

Dr Rajendra Apte, who carried out the research at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, said the study should have a "substantial impact" on our understanding of how resveratrol works. He said it was able to "demonstrate that resveratrol, a naturally occurring compound, can directly inhibit the development of abnormal blood vessels both within and outside the eye". This he said could lead to new treatments.

Resveratrol is a natural compound that is produced in a variety of plants to prevent bacterial and fungal infections. It is found in particularly high levels in grape skin (and consequently red wine), and at lower levels in blueberries, peanuts, and other plants. Various studies have shown that resveratrol can decrease the effects of ageing and act as an anti-cancer agent.

Red wine has also received a lot of attention lately for its purported health benefits. Along with reducing stroke, moderate wine consumption has been linked to a lowered incidence of cardiovascular disease — the so-called French paradox.

Despite diets high in butter, cheese and other saturated fats, the French have a relatively low incidence of cardiovascular disease, which some have attributed to the regular drinking of red wine.

This study published in The American Journal of Pathology shows why this works.

SOURCE

Resveratrol Regulates Pathologic Angiogenesis by a Eukaryotic Elongation Factor-2 Kinase-Regulated Pathway

By Aslam A. Khan et al.

Abstract

Abnormal angiogenesis is central to the pathophysiology of diverse disease processes including cancers, ischemic and atherosclerotic heart disease, and visually debilitating eye disease. Resveratrol is a naturally occurring phytoalexin that has been demonstrated to ameliorate and decelerate the aging process as well as blunt end organ damage from obesity.

These effects of resveratrol are largely mediated by members of the sirtuin family of proteins. We demonstrate that resveratrol can inhibit pathological angiogenesis in vivo and in vitro by a sirtuin-independent pathway. Resveratrol inhibits the proliferation and migration of vascular endothelial cells by activating eukaryotic elongation factor-2 kinase. The active kinase in turn phosphorylates and inactivates elongation factor-2, a key mediator of ribosomal transfer and protein translation.

Functional inhibition of the kinase by gene deletion in vivo or RNA as well as pharmacological inhibition in vitro is able to completely reverse the effects of resveratrol on blood vessel growth. These studies have identified a novel and critical pathway that promotes aberrant vascular proliferation and one that is amenable to modulation by pharmacological means. In addition, these results have uncovered a sirtuin-independent pathway by which resveratrol regulates angiogenesis.

American Journal of Pathology, May 14, 2010

Abortion 'triples breast cancer risk'

Ho hum! The usual determination to ignore social class, despite the fact that it repeatedly shows up as an influence when examined. Like women elsewhere, lower class women in Sri Lanka were most probably more likely to abort and also more likely to get cancer. The possibility that they would have got more cancer anyway, regardless of whether they had abortions, was not considered

An abortion can triple a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer in later life, researchers say. A team of scientists made the claim while carrying out research into how breastfeeding can protect women from developing the killer disease.

While concluding that breastfeeding offered significant protection from cancer, they also noted that the highest reported risk factor in developing the disease was abortion. Other factors included the onset of the menopause and smoking.

The findings, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, are the latest research to show a link between abortion and breast cancer.

The research was carried out by scientists at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. It is the fourth epidemiological study to report such a link in the past 14 months, with research in China, Turkey and the U.S. showing similar conclusions.

But Cancer Research UK questioned the accuracy of the figures and said women should not be unduly worried. Dr Kat Arney, the charity’s science information manager, said: ‘This is a very small study of only 300 women, so there are likely to be statistical errors in a sample of this size. ‘Much larger studies involving tens of thousands of women have shown no significant links.’

But the findings prompted accusations that women in Britain are not being properly informed of the dangers of abortion. Professor Jack Scarisbrick, the chairman of Life, a pregnancy counselling charity, said: ‘This is devastating new evidence of the abortion-breast cancer link.

‘We have encountered from the pro-abortion lobby manipulation of the evidence on a truly disgraceful scale. This study is further evidence that has been gathering from all around the world that abortion is a major risk factor for breast cancer. ‘When will the (medical) establishment face up to this fact and pull its head out of the sand? ‘It is betraying women by failing to warn that what they are doing to their bodies – the quick fix of abortion – can do grave harm.’

Although the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has acknowledged the possibility of an abortion-breast cancer link, most medical professionals in Britain remain unconvinced. This is because an international study led by Oxford University concluded in 2004 that having an abortion does not heighten a woman’s risk.

Some scientists say, however, that the Oxford research was flawed because many of the women studied were too young to have developed the disease.

Those who believe there is a link say breast cancer is caused by high levels of oestradiol, a hormone that stimulates breast growth during pregnancy. Its effects are minimised in women who take pregnancy to full term but it remains at dangerous levels in those who have abortions.

There has been an 80 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer since 1971, when in the wake of the Abortion Act, the number of abortions rose from 18,000 to nearly 200,000 a year.

Earlier this year, Dr Louise Brinton, a senior researcher with the U.S. National Cancer Institute who did not accept the link, reversed her position to say she was now convinced abortion increased the risk of breast cancer by about 40 per cent.

Source



24 June, 2010

Were the phrenologists right after all?



Phrenology is the long-discredited theory that head-shapes and "bumps" in the skull determine your personality and abilities. From the research summarized below, however, it seems that the phrenologists may have been onto something. Skulls may not be a reliable guide to much but brain differentiation may be.

Most past studies of genetic influences on personality have found that the personality traits studied do in fact show substantial genetic heritability. And Even your political attitudes have been shown to have a substantial genetic basis. So the findings below are not inherently surprising. But I think that most of us have assumed that the brain differences involved are more subtle that what is reported below.

As someone with long research involvement in the field of personality measurement, the major reservation I have is that the way personality is "chopped up" in the study below is rather arbitrary. The five factor model is certainly widely used but so is Eysenck's three factor model and Cattell's 16 factors.

The broad way that extraversion is described below, for instance, has much in common with the early Eysenck but is rather jarring when looked at in the light of the later finding that two of the components in extraversion -- sociability and impulsiveness -- are largely independant of one-another. So which of those is influenced by the "bump" in the brain that was found to be correlated with extraversion? As the old saying goes, more research is needed.

Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.

Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain.

For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Several links were found between the size of certain brain regions and personality. The research appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

For example, "Everybody, I think, has a common sense of what extraversion is -- someone who is talkative, outgoing, brash," says DeYoung. "They get more pleasure out of things like social interaction, amusement parks, or really just about anything, and they're also more motivated to seek reward, which is part of why they're more assertive." That quest for reward is thought to be a leading factor in extraversion. Earlier studies had found parts of the brain that are active in considering rewards. So DeYoung and his colleagues reasoned that those regions should be bigger in people who are more extraverted. Indeed, they found that one of those regions, the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- it's just above and behind the eyes -- was significantly larger in study subjects with a lot of extraversion.

The study found similar associations for conscientiousness, which is associated with planning; neuroticism, a tendency to experience negative emotions that is associated with sensitivity to threat and punishment; and agreeableness, which relates to parts of the brain that allow us to understand each other's emotions, intentions, and mental states. Only openness/intellect didn't associate clearly with any of the predicted brain structures.

"This starts to indicate that we can actually find the biological systems that are responsible for these patterns of complex behavior and experience that make people individuals," says DeYoung. He points out, though, that this doesn't mean that your personality is fixed from birth; the brain grows and changes as it grows. Experiences change the brain as it develops, and those changes in the brain can change personality.

Source. Journal Reference is: DeYoung et al. "Testing Predictions From Personality Neuroscience: Brain Structure and the Big Five", Psychol Sci. 2010 Jun;21(6):820-8. Abstract here






News that will be ignored: Large study finds no cell phone mast link to cancer

The harmlessness of mobile phones is like the racial correlates of IQ: Many people don't want to believe it so they won't, no matter how much evidence is put before them

British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman's baby developing cancer.

In a study looking at almost 7,000 children and patterns of early childhood cancers across Britain, the researchers found that those who developed cancer before the age of five were no more likely to have been born close to a mast than their peers.

"These results are reassuring," said Paul Elliot, director of the center for environment and health at Imperial College London, who worked on the study.

"We found no pattern to suggest that the children of mums living near a base station during pregnancy had a greater risk of developing cancer than those who lived elsewhere."

Use of cell phones has increased dramatically in recent years and questions have been raised about possible health effects, including whether they may be linked to brain tumors or other cancers.

Opinion polls have also shown high levels of public concern about the potential risks of living near mobile phone mast.

But Elliot, whose study was published in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, said his work would add to a body of scientific research which has found no links between cell phones and cancer.

Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 year hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumors published the results of their research last month and found no clear answer.

But many previous studies have failed to find any links.

For this study, researchers had data from Britain's four national mobile phone operators -- Vodafone, O2, France Telecom's's Orange, and Deutsche Telekom's's T-Mobile -- on all of the 81,781 mobile phone masts in use from January 1996 to December 2001.

Commenting on Elliot's study, Eileen Rubery, former head of British government's public health prevention department, said its methods and findings were robust.

"This is a carefully done study by a highly reputable group of environmental scientists," she said. "It is reassuring that no adverse affects have been found and this fits with the anticipated and known biological effects from such sites."

Source



23 June, 2010

NICE is getting above itself -- entering the diet wars

Their job is to evaluate the economic effectiveness of drug therapies -- a job they do badly, according to most. But they are apparently a very ambitious little bureaucracy so are now striking out in new directions. But the statements below are just conventional crap showing no knowledge of the double blind studies. If that is testament to their scholarly standards, no wonder they do their original job in a way so disappointing to many

More than 40,000 Britons are dying unnecessarily every year because of high levels of salt and fat in their diets, the Government’s public health watchdog Nice has warned. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) says that unhealthy foods have wreaked a “terrible toll of ill health” on the nation and placed a “substantial” strain on the economy.

For the first time, the organisation publishes landmark guidance on how to prevent the “huge number of unnecessary deaths” from conditions such as heart disease that are linked to the consumption of ready meals and processed food.

It calls for sweeping changes to food production and government policy to encourage lifestyle changes, and to reduce significantly the amount of salt and saturated fat the nation consumes.

It says “toxic” artificial fats known as trans fats, which have no nutritional value and are linked to heart disease, should be banned. The organisation says that ministers should consider introducing legislation if food manufacturers failed to make their products healthier.

Nice says it has brought together all the available evidence to illustrate the link between unhealthy food and public health, partly in response to increasing concern about obesity in Britain, particularly among children.

It says there are about five million people in the country suffering the effects of cardiovascular disease — a “largely avoidable” condition that includes heart attacks, heart disease and stroke — and that it causes 150,000 deaths annually. Nice says 40,000 of these deaths could be prevented, and hundreds of millions of pounds saved, if its measures were introduced.

The guidance, which was commissioned by the Department of Health, also recommends that:

• Low-salt and low-fat foods should be sold more cheaply than their unhealthy counterparts, through the use of subsidies if necessary;

• Advertising of unhealthy foods should be banned until after 9pm and planning laws should be used to restrict the number of fast food outlets, especially near schools;

• The Common Agricultural Policy should focus more on public health, ensuring farmers are paid to produce healthier foods;

• Action should also be taken to introduce a “traffic light” food labelling system, even though the European Parliament recently voted against this;

• Local authorities must act to encourage walking and cycling and public sector caterers must provide healthier meals;

• All lobbying of the Government and its agencies by the food and drink industry should be fully disclosed.

Prof Klim McPherson, the Chairman of the Nice Guidance Development Group and professor of epidemiology at Oxford University, said: “Where food is concerned, we want the healthy choice to be the easy choice. Going even further, we want the healthy choice to be the less expensive, more attractive choice.

“Put simply, this guidance can help the Government and the food industry to take action to prevent huge numbers of unnecessary deaths and illnesses caused by heart disease and stroke.” The average person in Britain consumes more than eight grams of salt a day. The body only requires one gram to function. Targets are already in place to reduce salt consumption to six grams by 2015 and this should be extended to three grams by 2050, the guidance says.

Nice says children should consume considerably less salt than adults and that, because the bulk of salt in their diets comes from prepared food such as bread, cereal, soups, meat and cheese products, manufacturers have a significant role to play in reducing it.

The organisation says that most consumers did not even notice a difference in taste if salt levels were reduced by 5-10 per cent a year because their taste buds adjusted.

More crap here





'One size fits all' allergy jab for hay fever, asthma and eczema on the way

Sounds unlikely but one can only hope. The results reported from the small study below were fairly weak and there is no indication that they were double blind. Unless they were, the results are not impressive at all

A jab that could provide a "one size fits all" approach to tackling hay fever, asthma and eczema could be available within a few years, a conference heard.

Swiss researchers claimed allergies that blight the lives of 10 million British sufferers could be largely eradicated with a single vaccine. An allergy conference in London heard the “one size fits all” injection that wards off asthma, eczema, hay fever and even peanut allergies could be on the shelves within four to five years.

Experts say if the jab, known only as CYT003-Qbg10 which has been tested on humans, is properly developed it become the “hail grail” of vaccines due to it helping ward off multiple allergies. It would be welcome news to the estimated one in five Britons, or 10 million people, who suffer from hay fever.

A trial, conducted by scientists from Cytos Biotechnology, a firm based in Zurich, concluded that a course of the vaccine was almost as good as steroids at keeping asthma under control.

At the jab’s heart are pieces of synthetic DNA similar to those found in the bug that causes tuberculosis or TB. The DNA fools the body into thinking it is under attack from a dangerous bug, kick-starting a multi-pronged immune response.

A total of 63 asthmatic patients were given the course of the jab or a series of injections of a dummy drug over two or three months. Researchers found it cut asthma attacks or symptoms by a third.

In another trial, an injection every week over a month and half, cut the amount of runny noses and weepy eyes by almost 39 per cent. Quality of life was boosted by 42 per cent, they added.

Dr Wolfgang Renner, the chief executive of Cytos, told the Daily Mail the results were exciting. “We think it is a one-size-fits all mechanism,” he said. “We are very excited about it.”

Dr Renner suggested the first large-scale human trial could start next year and a vaccine within a few years.

A spokesman for Allergy UK said: “It does sound a very promising treatment, giving hope for those with severe asthma/allergy symptoms for whom the usual treatments aren’t enough, but there is still a long way to go before it will be available.”

Leanne Metcalf, director of Research at Asthma UK, added: “Over three quarters of people with asthma also have an allergy, which can often trigger their asthma symptoms. “We are, therefore, excited about the potential of this vaccine to make a real difference to people with asthma and allergies, especially as it has been shown in clinical trials to have relatively few side effects.”

Tuesday is thought to be the worst day of the year for hay fever.

The NHS currently estimates around ten million people suffer symptoms of hay fever – such as sneezing, runny nose and itchy eyes – in the spring and summer as grasses and trees release their pollen into the air.

But that number could reach 30 million within 20 years as city living, pollution and climate change exacerbate symptoms, experts warned earlier this year.

Source



22 June, 2010

Father involvement in pregnancy could reduce infant mortality (?)

The usual confusion of cause and effect. The "particularly if the infant is black" highlights that. A black father who sticks around is of unusual high quality, almost certainly middle class. And middle class people are healthier and pass that on to their children genetically. It's the man's genes, not his presence at the birth, that creates healthier babies

Studies have shown fathers who are active in their children's upbringing can significantly benefit their children's early development, academic achievement and well being. Now, a new study by University of South Florida researchers suggests that a father's involvement before his child is born may play an important role in preventing death during the first year of life - particularly if the infant is black.

The USF team sought to evaluate whether the absence of fathers during pregnancy contributes to racial and ethnic disparities in infant survival and health. Their findings were recently reported online in the Journal of Community Health.

"Our study suggests that lack of paternal involvement during pregnancy is an important and potentially modifiable risk factor for infant mortality,"



30 June, 2010

Another reversal of official health "wisdom"

'Grazing' used to be king, but now experts say it slows metabolism, and can cause tooth decay and diabetes

For years, nutritionists have been telling us to graze - eat little and often - to keep up our energy levels and as a tactic to avoid overeating unhealthy food.

The problem with grazing is that many people ignore the bit about eating only a little, hearing only the message to 'eat often' - the result is we've become a nation of snackers. Furthermore, we're snacking not on healthy foods, but on chocolate, crisps and other calorie-laden products.

Clearly, eating lots of junk food is not good for the waistline. But now, some experts believe that the very principle of eating between meals - whether it's healthy or junk food - is the real problem. They say snacking makes us even more hungry; it also interferes with the body's ability to burn fat, leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes, as well as tooth decay. What we should really be doing, it seems, is going back to three proper meals a day, with no snacks in between.

'For many, snacking is a major cause of weight gain,' says Professor Stephen Atkin, head of diabetes and metabolism at Hull York Medical School. Adds Naveed Sattar, professor of metabolic medicine at Glasgow University: 'Snacking gives us extra calories and the fact is, extra calories make us fat.'

But not only are snacks often highly calorific; eating all day also undermines our body's ability to burn off fat. When we eat, our body releases insulin - a hormone that helps carry sugar into the cells to burn as energy. This sugar energy will keep us going for around three hours, after which our bodies will start using energy from our fat stores.

If we can hold out for four to five hours between meals, we burn more fat. 'Fat is burned as soon as your carbohydrate stores fall and you start the mobilisation of fat for energy,' explains Professor Atkin.

Snacking also means that organs such as the liver and pancreas are under greater stress, as blood sugar and fat levels stay higher throughout the day, says professor Sattar. This also increases stress on blood vessels and, perhaps, the heart. 'In my view, the ideal would be not to snack at all,' adds Professor Atkin. 'It's normal to feel hungry before a meal.'

More here





Not so NICE

The author below criticizes NICE on liberty grounds. That their "advice" (like most official wisdom) is also crassly ignorant of the best research he overlooks. See the sidebar here for much of what they ignore

In a country where the state controls healthcare to such an extent, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) really has to exist in some form. Death panels or not, without serious reforms it is necessary that someone somewhere decides which medicines can be afforded and which can’t.

However, NICE does more than this, it also makes recommendations on “how to improve people’s health and prevent illness and disease”. Much the pity. In the space of a week they have made two headline-grabbing recommendations. First was their suggestions that:

* manufacturers should stop using trans-fats

* a maximum intake should be set set for salt of 6g per day for adults by 2015 and 3g daily by 2025

* hidden saturated fat substantially reduced

* efforts be made to make unhealthy food more expensive than healthy food

* restrictions should be enforced on unhealthy food television advertisements until after 9pm

* planning restrictions should be imposed to time-limit fast-food outlets

* unhealthy food should have traffic light labelling

To top that, yesterday they suggested that all pregnant women should have their breath measured for carbon monoxide levels when booking to see a midwife. The Department of Health is keen on the idea, stating: "We welcome the publication of these new guidelines. Smoking in pregnancy is a major public health concern posing risks to both mother and baby. We want the NHS to use this guidance to develop the best possible services for pregnant women."

It is no surprise that liberty is not a factor in the proposals of a Quango, but even they have to draw a line somewhere. Clearly on this occasion they have gone too far and should have been shot down. There are clear arguments to be made on unintended consequences – whether increased food prices for the poorest or vulnerable smoking mothers avoiding health professionals for fear of condemnation – but ultimately the argument of ‘enough is enough’ needs to win through.

Utility and efficiency are not the only measures of effective policy. Like all Quangos and regulators, their remit needs to be cut down to what is purely necessary in areas that the state is near monopolistic provider and removed entirely from nannying us.

SOURCE



29 June, 2010

Did the anti-vaccine movement help create a whooping cough epidemic?

The nutters kill kids

A whooping cough epidemic has broken out in California, which is now facing what could be the largest outbreak of the contagious disease since 1958. Over 900 cases have been confirmed in the state—more than four times as many as last year—and 600 suspected cases are being investigated. The highly contagious disease can be deadly to infants—five have already died from the disease this year in California—but it’s eminently preventable through vaccination.

Officials are still investigating the causes of the outbreak, but some have already suggested that the anti-vaccine movement could be at least partly to blame. "California is the epicenter of vaccine refusal" in the United States, said Dr. Blaise Congeni from Ohio’s Akron Children's Hospital, according to an ABC News story. While California requires that children be vaccinated from whooping cough before they attend school, "the requirement is waived if parents file a 'personal belief exemption' (PBE), which need not be based on religion or medical necessity," the story continues. And some parents have been flocking to join the vaccine refusalists. ABC News cites Ken August, spokesman for the California Department of Public Health:

He said that the overall rate for PBEs among the state's roughly 7,200 schools is about 2 percent. But rates are much higher in some schools. Records for 2009 indicated that close to 175 schools had PBE rates of 20 percent or more. A few had rates above 70 percent.

Researchers have found that vaccination rates of at least 93 percent are needed to ensure so-called herd immunity against pertussis, which prevents the disease from spreading quickly to unvaccinated individuals.

Fears about vaccines are nothing new, but they’ve been revived in recent years by anti-vaccine crusaders who’ve junked science in favor of medical myths and conspiracy theories. In the US and abroad, they’ve popularized the notion that vaccines cause autism and that whooping cough is not actually fatal, among other falsehoods. There’s also the tireless conservative argument—promulgated by folks like the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly—that government-required vaccines infringe upon individual liberty.

The claims by leading anti-vaccine activists have been thoroughly debunked. The US Court of Claims, for example, ruled last year that there was no substantive evidence to support the autism-vaccine link. The main researcher behind the claim, British doctor Andrew Wakefield, has been completely discredited and even stripped of his medical license.

But there's still reason to be concerned about the damage that the movement may have already done. Vaccine-phobia has gripped towns like Boulder, which in 2002 had the lowest school-wide vaccination rate in Colorado—and "one of the highest per capita rates of whooping cough in the United States.” And now children in California are dying of a disease that should have been made obsolete by the 21st century. If vaccine refusals are indeed behind the current epidemic, California needs to figure out the real reasons that parents are putting their own children and others at risk.*

SOURCE







Simple blood test will give women precise age at which they will no longer be fertile

Could be useful even if only approximately right

DOCTORS were set to unveil tomorrow a simple blood test that could tell young women the precise age at which they would no longer be able to have babies.

The test - which measures levels of a hormone produced by the ovaries - could allow women as young as 20 to pinpoint within a few months when they would cease to be fertile.

The procedure, to be launched in Rome at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, would be valuable to women trying to balance careers with having children.

Among Western women, menopause occurs on average at 51. However, about 15 per cent of women experience it early, under the age of 45.

“Our results suggest that the novel marker anti-Mullerian hormone (produced by the ovaries) could precisely forecast the age at menopause, even in young women,” said Dr Fahimeh Ramezani Tehrani, who led the research.

Dr Tehrani analysed levels of the hormone, which controls the development of the cells in the ovaries from which eggs develop, in 266 women aged 20 to 49.

It was known that levels of the hormone vary between women and also decline with age. Scientists previously suspected that changing levels were linked to menopause, but there was insufficient data to use this knowledge as a predictive tool.

By gathering data from a large number of women, Dr Tehrani believes she created a mathematical model that can predict the age of menopause for any woman.

The test developed by Dr Tehrani, a senior researcher at the World Health Organisation-backed Endocrine Research Centre in Tehran, would need to be validated in large-scale trials before it could come into common use.

SOURCE



28 June, 2010

Chocolate could help treat high blood pressure

Another tiny effect paraded as if it meant something

Just a chunk of chocolate a day could have the same effect on high blood pressure as half an hour of exercise, new research suggests. For those suffering from high blood pressure the effect of chocolate was so dramatic it could reduce their chances of having a heart attack or stroke by 20 per cent over five years.

Chocolate – and especially dark chocolate – contains chemicals known as flavanols which naturally open up blood vessels in the body. That means blood flows more easily and the pressure drops.

"You don't always need medication to reduce blood pressure," said Dr Karin Ried, at Adelaide University who carried out the research. "This shows that there are some foods that can help."

An estimated 15 million people in Britain suffer from high blood pressure, also known as hypertension – around half of them undiagnosed. About one in 10 sufferers cannot control the condition with medication or cannot tolerate the drugs, leaving them at greater risk. Hundreds of thousands face a lifetime on medication to reduce the risk of suffering heart disease, strokes or kidney failure.

For the latest research, Dr Ried and her team combined the results of 15 other studies looking at chocolate and cocoa between 1955 and 2009 covering hundreds of people. They found that for people with hypertension, eating chocolate could reduce the blood pressure by up to five per cent. For those with normal pressure it had no effect. "This is a significant finding," said Dr Ried. [Really??] "We’ve found that consumption can significantly, albeit modestly, reduce blood pressure for people with high blood pressure but not for people with normal blood pressure”.

She said it will take more research to see what is the optimal amount of chocolate that was needed to make the most difference. She said the studies varied from just one chunk (6g) to a whole bar (100g) a day. The research was published in the journal BMC Medicine.

People with high blood pressure are seen to have it consistently higher than 140mm Hg systolic or 90mm Hg diastolic. Normal is 90/60. The results showed that chocolate would make it drop 5mm in systolic pressure which is comparable to the known effects of 30 daily minutes of moderate physical activity such as brisk walking or swimming.

Chocolate has been found to have health giving benefits in the past. Research published earlier this year showed that people who eat just one bar a week are 22 per cent less likely to suffer a stroke. However the health giving benefits have to be weighed against its contribution to obesity.

SOURCE







A nickel-plated moron

Anger grew today after the deputy editor of a leading British parenting magazine wrote an article describing breastfeeding as "creepy", saying she wanted to maintain the sexuality of her "fun bags".

In Kathryn Blundell's article for Mother & Baby, entitled I formula fed. So what?, she explains how she never breastfed because "I wanted my body back. (And some wine) ... I also wanted to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach."

She continues with, "They're part of my sexuality, too - not just breasts, but fun bags. And when you have that attitude (and I admit I made no attempt to change it), seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy."

The UK Department of Health (DoH) recommends breastfeeding for six months and launched a controversial "Breast is Best" ad campaign to convince mothers to put down the bottles. According to the DoH, only one in 100 British mums actually does breastfeed for that long.

Of these "quitters", Blundell says, "I often wonder whether many of these women, like me, just couldn't be fagged (did not want to make the effort) or felt like getting tipsy once in a while."

The fallout from the article ranges from breastfeeding group Lactivist condemning Blundell's "generally spreading misinformation" to a Facebook group with 500 members demanding an apology.

"As a formula-feeding mum who was unable to breastfeed, I am left wondering whether, thanks to this piece, people who see me giving my baby a bottle may assume that I am doing so because I could not be fagged to breastfeed/found the idea 'creepy'," wrote one member of the Facebook group.

But Mother & Baby Editor Miranda Levy stands by her deputy's piece, telling the UK's Guardian newspaper: "We have made readers feel 'normal' and less of a 'failure' for not managing to breastfeed - a situation which is incredibly common. The way you feed your baby is not a moral issue, and at Mother & Baby we seek to support all new parents in what is a glorious, but often difficult and emotional, time."

SOURCE



27 June, 2010

Methodists 'live more than seven years longer than the rest of the British population'

Staying off the booze probably avoids a lot of harms but a tendency for Methodism to be a religion of the middle class is probably also involved.

Note also that we are comparing churchgoers with a generally irreligious overall population and religious belief does have stress-reducing effects. It would be interesting to see another study of churchgoing Presbyterians. Church of England churchgoers don't count as they rarely believe in anything religious at all

Methodists live more than seven years longer than the rest of the population, according to an academic study. Men belonging to the famously clean-living denomination live to the ripe old age of 83.9, research has found, compared with a national average of 77.

For women the difference in longevity was even greater with female Methodists dying at 91.1 on average – nine years longer than the 82 years enjoyed by most British women.

Last week Stanley Lucas died in Cornwall aged 110, having become not just the oldest male member of the Methodist Church but the oldest man in Europe.

Dr Richard Vautrey, vice president of the Methodist Conference, said, “I’m sure there are many different factors at work for Methodists to attain these numbers. “But I would guess that our emphasis on caring for our spiritual as well as physical health, avoiding excess, engaging with people in our communities and being good neighbours all help.”

Methodism, an evangelical Christian movement that split from the Church of England at the end of the 18th century, is known for its focus on social justice and for many years was at the forefront of the temperance movement that preached “total abstinence” from alcohol.

The increased life expectancy of its followers, who now number 265,000 in Britain, was calculated by researchers working for British Religion in Numbers, based at the University of Manchester.

They studied family announcements placed in the denomination’s newspaper, the Methodist Recorder, which found that the mean age of death for Methodist men and women in 1973 and 2008 was far higher than that of the general population as recorded by the Office for National Statistics.

Study of obituaries for Methodist ministers appeared to confirm the trend, with a mean age of death of 83.4 for men who died in 2009 – again more than six years older than the British average of 77.

The Methodist Conference, currently meeting in Porstmouth, begins each year with a rendition of a hymn called “And are we yet alive?”, written by one of the movement’s founders, Charles Wesley.

SOURCE






Fad diet leaves actress with brittle bones

Heh!



HOLLYWOOD star Gwyneth Paltrow was a pin-up for "healthy" living but her extreme dieting may have given her the bones of an 80-year-old woman. The 37-year-old actress - who has followed a macrobiotic diet for 11 years and exercises up to three hours a day - has revealed that she has been diagnosed with osteopenia, an illness that can lead to the serious bone disease osteoporosis.

"I suffered a pretty severe Tibial plateau fracture a few years ago (requiring surgery) which led the orthopaedic surgeon to give me a bone scan, at which point it was discovered I had the beginning stages of osteopenia," she wrote on her popular online newsletter, Goop. Osteoporosis - a common ailment among the elderly - increases a person's risk of fractures and is more prevalent among women.

"My doctors tested my vitamin D levels, which turned out to be the lowest thing they had ever seen [not a good thing]," Paltrow said.

She said she was put on prescription-strength vitamin D and told to spend more time in the sun, but some nutritionists believe her diet was also to blame for her brittle bone problem. The macrobiotic diet, which is popular among celebrities, including Madonna, requires followers to eat plenty of vegetables, wholegrains and fruit and small quantities of fish while discouraging dairy and red meat. Alcohol, chocolate, hot spices, sugar and coffee are also off limits as part of the diet.

The mother-of-two and wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin relaxed her eating regime between the births of her two children Apple, six, and Moses, four, but has since been following a less severe version of the macrobiotic diet.

"A macrobiotic diet is often lower in protein than a diet that includes dairy foods and meat so if she's doing a lot of exercise but not getting enough protein, she's not getting enough to build her bones either," Sydney nutritionist Sharon Natoli said. "Plus, vitamin D helps calcium absorption so if you're not getting enough calcium but getting enough vitamin D and vice-versa, you really need the two to be working together."

Ms Natoli advised people against following diets that excluded essential food groups. "We don't recommend fad celebrity diets," she said. "If you leave out a whole food group, then you're going to be low on something."

Source



26 June, 2010

The nastiness of NICE: The addled tyranny of the anti-junk food crusade

The idea that thousands of lives could be saved if people stopped eating the ‘wrong’ food is pie in the sky

‘Forty thousand deaths a year due to junk food’, declared the UK Daily Telegraph yesterday, reporting on new policy recommendations produced by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). But the evidence on which this claim is made is highly dubious. What the report really represents is the coming together of the same-old NGOs and health policy wonks to tell us - for the umpteenth time - how we must live our lives.

The report puts forward 12 recommendations, including:

* Introducing policies designed to cut our consumption of Bad Stuff (salt, saturated fats and trans-fats);

* restricting marketing of ‘junk’ food to children;

* introducing the ‘traffic light’ labelling of foods - green for good, amber for warning and red for unhealthy;

* assessing all government policy for its impact on cardiovascular disease;

* ensuring that EU farm spending promotes healthy foods;

* encouraging ‘physically active travel’ – for example, by scrapping subsidised car parking;

* providing ‘healthy’ meals in public-sector workplaces, schools, hospitals, etc;

* discouraging, via local authorities, the opening of takeaway food outlets near schools and in other sensitive areas.

This mish-mash of different recommendations simply reflects the wide range of groups that want to get their noses in the health trough or foist their particular hare-brained schemes upon us. The evidence that any of these policies would make any serious difference to our life expectancies - never mind save tens of thousands of lives - is flimsy to say the least.

First of all, we need to examine the claim that such measures could save the 40,000 lives apparently being destroyed by junk food. The report says: ‘Most premature deaths from CVD (cardiovascular disease) – that is, among people aged less than 75 – are preventable. In 2006, CVD accounted for around 30 per cent of premature deaths among men and 21 per cent among women, accounting for just over 40,000 premature deaths in that year.’ So actually, even on this basis, it is only most of the 40,000 premature deaths that could be prevented. But even this seems implausible. Genetics, old age, sheer luck, the quality of healthcare available, and environmental factors that aren’t preventable by lifestyle change - like air pollution - would seem to be at the very least as important as what people eat.

Above all, being a man rather than a woman makes a very substantial difference to life expectancy. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest life expectancy in the UK at birth is now 77.5 years for men and 81.8 years for women. Is this ‘preventable’? Perhaps all men over 50 should be forced to have their balls chopped off. Strangely, this policy recommendation is absent from NICE’s report.

But when we dig a little further into the various recommendations, the suggestion that the policies put forward could have any substantial impact on life expectancy is quickly revealed to be illusory. Let’s look at the evidence for the idea that if we avoid eating the wrong things we will live longer.

Salt

Poster campaigns and health professionals are forever telling us that we should reduce salt intake to lower our blood pressure and, in turn, cut cases of CVD. Yet while there may be some benefit in cutting salt intake in those who are already being medicated for high blood pressure or who have kidney disease, for most people there is no evidence that cutting salt is of any benefit at all. Indeed for some people it could be harmful.

There is a certain arrogance about the idea, repeated in the new report, that we should cut salt intake from an average of 8.5 grammes per day to six grammes per day by 2015, and then to three grammes per day by 2050. Firstly, the idea that high salt automatically equates to shortened lives is wrong: the Japanese have a very high-salt diet and enjoy longer lives than anyone else.

Secondly, our bodies are incredibly sensitive to the appropriate balance of salt and water in our blood, regulating it on a minute-by-minute basis to keep it within a very narrow range. Yet the groups and researchers proposing radical changes to our diet seem to believe that salt intake should be regulated by diktat from Whitehall rather than by our internal biology evolved over millions of years.

There is no consensus that such salt-reduction policies would be beneficial. A review in the British Medical Journal on the evidence connecting salt with high blood pressure, published in 2002, concluded: ‘Intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programmes, provide only small reductions in blood pressure and sodium excretion, and effects on deaths and cardiovascular events are unclear.’

Saturated fat

There has been plenty of evidence for a very long time that attempts to reduce saturated fat consumption have no effect on cardiovascular disease. For example, the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), which reported its findings in the early 1980s, encouraged a large number of middle-aged American men with high cholesterol to change their diet in an effort to reduce their saturated-fat intake and, therefore, their cholesterol. These test subjects were also encouraged to quit smoking and to treat their high blood pressure. Meanwhile, another large group of middle-aged men were left to their own devices. The result? Slightly more men in the low-fat diet group died than in the control group, but in reality there was no practical difference in outcomes.

Trans-fats

As for trans-fats, the evidence that reducing our intake will ‘save lives’ is once again weak. Trans-fats are a by-product of adding hydrogen to vegetable fats to make them stable at room temperature and give them a longer shelf-life, particularly in things like baked goods. While they’ve been around for decades, they became particularly popular among food manufacturers as an alternative to saturated fats.

So what’s the risk from trans-fats? A review in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 says: ‘In a meta-analysis of four prospective cohort studies involving nearly 140,000 subjects, including updated analyses from the two largest studies, a two per cent increase in energy intake from trans fatty acids was associated with a 23 per cent increase in the incidence of [coronary heart disease].’ That figure of 23 per cent sounds impressively high, but epidemiological studies are very blunt instruments.

As the US National Cancer Institute noted in 1994, ‘in epidemiological research, [increases in risk of less than 100 per cent] are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.’ As a comparison, the risk of getting lung cancer from being a regular smoker (over the course of decades, usually) is in the order of 2,000 per cent compared to non-smokers. While we can be pretty confident that active smoking significantly increases your risk of a variety of diseases, the small relative risk associated with trans-fats is much more ambiguous.

The other recommendations in the NICE report are a bunch of lame old hobbyhorses or, in the case of demanding that all government policy be assessed for its effect on CVD, they add up to a demand for a health-lobby veto on all lawmaking. Thanks, but no thanks.

But regardless of the evidence, there is a more principled basis on which we should object to these kind of policy proposals – namely, that we, and not NICE or anybody else, should have control over our own lives and our own, sometimes bad habits. Let us eat our junk, slob out on our sofas, smoke our fags and drink our booze. If these things turn out to shorten our lives, so be it (though the evidence that they will is usually as feeble as an old codger who’s avoided a ‘premature’ death). That’s surely a better way to live than to be endlessly subjected to the high-fibre, low-fat, salt-free dictatorship of Those Who Know What’s Good For Us.

SOURCE







The myth of the smokefree health miracle

The evidence that bans on public smoking reduce the number of heart attacks is still woefully thin

Recent reports of a ‘dramatic’ fall in the number of heart attacks in England after July 2007 represented the latest in a long line of attempts to find immediate health benefits from smoking bans. But a serious examination of this body of evidence suggests that the effect of smoking bans is either tiny or non-existent.

The worldwide search began in 2004, when the British Medical Journal reported a 40 per cent decline in ‘acute myocardial infarction’ (AMI), the medical term for heart attack, in the small town of Helena, Montana. Subsequent ‘heart miracles’ claimed drops in AMI of 47 per cent (Bowling Green, Ohio), 27 per cent (Pueblo, Colorado) and 17 per cent (Scotland).

As previously reported on spiked, the widely touted Scottish figure of 17 per cent was at odds with hospital admissions data showing an eight per cent drop in the first year of the ban followed by an eight per cent rise in the second year. When this inconclusive evidence is combined with hospital admissions data from Wales, Denmark, New Zealand and Australia showing smoking bans having no effect on the heart attack rate (1), the most striking aspect of this field of research is the tendency to find dramatic results in small communities and practically nonexistent effects over large populations.

The counterintuitive conclusion was that secondhand smoke was ferociously lethal in one-horse towns in the mid-West, but strangely benign in whole nations. The alternative, if more cynical, explanation was that obscure destinations like Helena and Bowling Green were brought to the world’s attention because anti-smoking campaigners had dredged the data for unusual blips that roughly coincided with provincial smoking bans.

That question seemed set to be resolved when The Sunday Times announced in September 2009 that the smoking ban in England (population 49million) ‘caused a fall in heart attack rates of about 10 per cent’. The source of this claim was never disclosed and the anti-smoking campaign Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) quickly downplayed it, insisting that the 10 per cent figure was ‘not based on any research conducted to date’ (2). Nevertheless, the research was underway and it finally bore fruit a fortnight ago in the form of another British Medical Journal study.

Led by Dr Anna Gilmore, a member of ASH and the director of the Tobacco Control Research Group, the study found a post-ban drop in AMI of not 10 per cent, let alone the 40 per cent found in Helena, but of just 4.3 per cent. A welcome decline, to be sure, but since the final years of ‘smoky’ England saw similar declines of 3.2 per cent and 5.2 per cent, the evidence for a heart miracle in the most populous nation yet studied was less than compelling (11).


heart attack rates in England before and after smoking ban

Faced with data that unequivocally showed heart attacks falling at the same pedestrian rate as before the ban, Gilmore and her team turned to computer modelling. After making adjustments to the data, they concluded that, despite appearances, the smoking ban had a profound effect on the nation’s hearts. Of the 4.3 per cent drop in AMI admissions, Gilmore attributed more than half (2.4 per cent) to the smoking ban. The study concluded that ‘the implementation of smoke-free public places is associated with significant reductions in hospital admissions for myocardial infarction’. A press release was then issued, headlined ‘Smokefree legislation linked to drop in admissions for heart attacks’.

To make life simpler for busy journalists, the press release chose not to mention that this was a computer-generated estimate, instead flatly stating: ‘A 2.4 per cent drop in the number of emergency admissions to hospital for a heart attack has been observed following the implementation of smokefree legislation in England.’ As was helpfully pointed out, this 2.4 per cent drop equated to 1,200 heart attacks being ‘prevented’ by the 2007 legislation. There was no mention of the downward trend in AMI that long predated the smoking ban.

Since the 2.4 per cent figure exists only on a laptop at Bath University, the calculations that led to it can be neither verified nor debunked. The possibility that the smoking ban contributed to part of the drop in AMI admissions after July 2007 cannot be ruled out, particularly if it led to a significant drop in the number of smokers (the jury is still out on whether this happened). But since the number of heart attacks fell at a similar rate after July 2005 and July 2006, the burden of proof rests on Gilmore & Co. Without it, it is as if they were doing a rain dance in the middle of a thunderstorm and demanding credit for the rain. The onus is on them to convince us that the skies would have cleared if they hadn’t showed up, not the other way round.

Gilmore’s case rests on making adjustments for three relevant but hardly decisive confounding factors that might disguise the effect of the smoking ban: surface air temperature, population size and Christmas holidays. This is all good practice, but more significant risk factors such as smoking status, diet, statin use, exercise and stress go unaddressed. It could not be otherwise. Hospital admissions data reveal no personal information about any of the patients beyond their age and gender. This only highlights the immense difficulty of making specific assumptions from a mass of nameless aggregate data.

The only thing that can be said with any confidence is that there were 2,300 fewer heart attacks in 2007/08 than in the year before. With heart attacks and heart disease having hundreds of risk factors interacting with each other in complex and unpredictable ways, using raw data to single out any one of them is like listening out for a kazoo in a stadium full of vuvuzuelas. Any estimate made against this noisy statistical background can only be speculative to the point of wishful thinking.

Perhaps this underestimates the power of the team’s computer model, but if they have truly devised a formula that can predict the number of heart attacks by taking the temperature and seeing what day Christmas falls on, it is not one they are prepared to share with us. Effectively, the reader is told: ‘We know it doesn’t look like the smoking ban had any effect on AMI admissions but we’ve run it through a computer model and it has. Take it or leave it.’ In the context of the dubious and frequently bizarre history of ‘heart miracle’ studies, the reader could be forgiven for leaving it.

If it does nothing else, the English study confirms that the wilder claims of heart miracles in Helena and elsewhere were way off base. In the course of six years, the ‘smoking ban effect’ on heart attacks has fallen from over 40 per cent to less than five per cent. And since the heart attack rate was known to fall by more than five per cent in some years before smokefree legislation was introduced, attributing any part of the secular decline to the smoking ban becomes a matter of interpretation and conjecture.

Not that the hypothetical nature of Gilmore’s study ever impinged on the news coverage devoted to it. No one reading the newspapers two weeks ago could have gone away thinking anything other than that there were 1,200 fewer heart attacks after the smoking ban and that this decline in numbers was an unusual and remarkable event.

As was the case in Scotland two years ago, the statisticians who painstakingly collected admissions data from English hospitals might as well not have bothered. The true figures vanished, replaced by unseen adjustments and unspoken assumptions from the gatekeepers of knowledge at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. Once again we had findings erroneously leaked to the media months in advance, a press release which failed to get the most basic facts straight, and a study with no verifiable evidence to support its central conclusion. And all published just in time for the government’s review of the smoking ban. If this doesn’t warrant a little scepticism, what does?

SOURCE



25 June, 2010

Drinking wine could protect your eyes

Now I know why I didn't go into glasses until I was 60! Seriously, though, it's just the resveratrol religion again. I am not entirely clear on what they did but their claims do seem to be much more strongly-based than usual. If they have in fact used resveratrol both in laboratory glassware and mice to produce cell changes they have a good case to transfer their studies to humans. Abstract follows the popular comment below

Researchers have found that a substance found in grapes and other fruits could protect blood vessels in the eye being damaged by old age. It is effective because the compound, known as resveratrol, stops the blood vessels from being damaged.

The substance, which has been linked to anti-ageing and cancer protection in the past, is believed to work because it protects against abnormal angiogenesis – the formation of damaged or mutated blood vessels. This condition is linked to cancer, heart disease and eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.

Dr Rajendra Apte, who carried out the research at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, said the study should have a "substantial impact" on our understanding of how resveratrol works. He said it was able to "demonstrate that resveratrol, a naturally occurring compound, can directly inhibit the development of abnormal blood vessels both within and outside the eye". This he said could lead to new treatments.

Resveratrol is a natural compound that is produced in a variety of plants to prevent bacterial and fungal infections. It is found in particularly high levels in grape skin (and consequently red wine), and at lower levels in blueberries, peanuts, and other plants. Various studies have shown that resveratrol can decrease the effects of ageing and act as an anti-cancer agent.

Red wine has also received a lot of attention lately for its purported health benefits. Along with reducing stroke, moderate wine consumption has been linked to a lowered incidence of cardiovascular disease — the so-called French paradox.

Despite diets high in butter, cheese and other saturated fats, the French have a relatively low incidence of cardiovascular disease, which some have attributed to the regular drinking of red wine.

This study published in The American Journal of Pathology shows why this works.

SOURCE

Resveratrol Regulates Pathologic Angiogenesis by a Eukaryotic Elongation Factor-2 Kinase-Regulated Pathway

By Aslam A. Khan et al.

Abstract

Abnormal angiogenesis is central to the pathophysiology of diverse disease processes including cancers, ischemic and atherosclerotic heart disease, and visually debilitating eye disease. Resveratrol is a naturally occurring phytoalexin that has been demonstrated to ameliorate and decelerate the aging process as well as blunt end organ damage from obesity.

These effects of resveratrol are largely mediated by members of the sirtuin family of proteins. We demonstrate that resveratrol can inhibit pathological angiogenesis in vivo and in vitro by a sirtuin-independent pathway. Resveratrol inhibits the proliferation and migration of vascular endothelial cells by activating eukaryotic elongation factor-2 kinase. The active kinase in turn phosphorylates and inactivates elongation factor-2, a key mediator of ribosomal transfer and protein translation.

Functional inhibition of the kinase by gene deletion in vivo or RNA as well as pharmacological inhibition in vitro is able to completely reverse the effects of resveratrol on blood vessel growth. These studies have identified a novel and critical pathway that promotes aberrant vascular proliferation and one that is amenable to modulation by pharmacological means. In addition, these results have uncovered a sirtuin-independent pathway by which resveratrol regulates angiogenesis.

American Journal of Pathology, May 14, 2010

Abortion 'triples breast cancer risk'

Ho hum! The usual determination to ignore social class, despite the fact that it repeatedly shows up as an influence when examined. Like women elsewhere, lower class women in Sri Lanka were most probably more likely to abort and also more likely to get cancer. The possibility that they would have got more cancer anyway, regardless of whether they had abortions, was not considered

An abortion can triple a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer in later life, researchers say. A team of scientists made the claim while carrying out research into how breastfeeding can protect women from developing the killer disease.

While concluding that breastfeeding offered significant protection from cancer, they also noted that the highest reported risk factor in developing the disease was abortion. Other factors included the onset of the menopause and smoking.

The findings, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, are the latest research to show a link between abortion and breast cancer.

The research was carried out by scientists at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. It is the fourth epidemiological study to report such a link in the past 14 months, with research in China, Turkey and the U.S. showing similar conclusions.

But Cancer Research UK questioned the accuracy of the figures and said women should not be unduly worried. Dr Kat Arney, the charity’s science information manager, said: ‘This is a very small study of only 300 women, so there are likely to be statistical errors in a sample of this size. ‘Much larger studies involving tens of thousands of women have shown no significant links.’

But the findings prompted accusations that women in Britain are not being properly informed of the dangers of abortion. Professor Jack Scarisbrick, the chairman of Life, a pregnancy counselling charity, said: ‘This is devastating new evidence of the abortion-breast cancer link.

‘We have encountered from the pro-abortion lobby manipulation of the evidence on a truly disgraceful scale. This study is further evidence that has been gathering from all around the world that abortion is a major risk factor for breast cancer. ‘When will the (medical) establishment face up to this fact and pull its head out of the sand? ‘It is betraying women by failing to warn that what they are doing to their bodies – the quick fix of abortion – can do grave harm.’

Although the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has acknowledged the possibility of an abortion-breast cancer link, most medical professionals in Britain remain unconvinced. This is because an international study led by Oxford University concluded in 2004 that having an abortion does not heighten a woman’s risk.

Some scientists say, however, that the Oxford research was flawed because many of the women studied were too young to have developed the disease.

Those who believe there is a link say breast cancer is caused by high levels of oestradiol, a hormone that stimulates breast growth during pregnancy. Its effects are minimised in women who take pregnancy to full term but it remains at dangerous levels in those who have abortions.

There has been an 80 per cent increase in the rate of breast cancer since 1971, when in the wake of the Abortion Act, the number of abortions rose from 18,000 to nearly 200,000 a year.

Earlier this year, Dr Louise Brinton, a senior researcher with the U.S. National Cancer Institute who did not accept the link, reversed her position to say she was now convinced abortion increased the risk of breast cancer by about 40 per cent.

Source



24 June, 2010

Were the phrenologists right after all?



Phrenology is the long-discredited theory that head-shapes and "bumps" in the skull determine your personality and abilities. From the research summarized below, however, it seems that the phrenologists may have been onto something. Skulls may not be a reliable guide to much but brain differentiation may be.

Most past studies of genetic influences on personality have found that the personality traits studied do in fact show substantial genetic heritability. And Even your political attitudes have been shown to have a substantial genetic basis. So the findings below are not inherently surprising. But I think that most of us have assumed that the brain differences involved are more subtle that what is reported below.

As someone with long research involvement in the field of personality measurement, the major reservation I have is that the way personality is "chopped up" in the study below is rather arbitrary. The five factor model is certainly widely used but so is Eysenck's three factor model and Cattell's 16 factors.

The broad way that extraversion is described below, for instance, has much in common with the early Eysenck but is rather jarring when looked at in the light of the later finding that two of the components in extraversion -- sociability and impulsiveness -- are largely independant of one-another. So which of those is influenced by the "bump" in the brain that was found to be correlated with extraversion? As the old saying goes, more research is needed.

Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.

Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain.

For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Several links were found between the size of certain brain regions and personality. The research appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

For example, "Everybody, I think, has a common sense of what extraversion is -- someone who is talkative, outgoing, brash," says DeYoung. "They get more pleasure out of things like social interaction, amusement parks, or really just about anything, and they're also more motivated to seek reward, which is part of why they're more assertive." That quest for reward is thought to be a leading factor in extraversion. Earlier studies had found parts of the brain that are active in considering rewards. So DeYoung and his colleagues reasoned that those regions should be bigger in people who are more extraverted. Indeed, they found that one of those regions, the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- it's just above and behind the eyes -- was significantly larger in study subjects with a lot of extraversion.

The study found similar associations for conscientiousness, which is associated with planning; neuroticism, a tendency to experience negative emotions that is associated with sensitivity to threat and punishment; and agreeableness, which relates to parts of the brain that allow us to understand each other's emotions, intentions, and mental states. Only openness/intellect didn't associate clearly with any of the predicted brain structures.

"This starts to indicate that we can actually find the biological systems that are responsible for these patterns of complex behavior and experience that make people individuals," says DeYoung. He points out, though, that this doesn't mean that your personality is fixed from birth; the brain grows and changes as it grows. Experiences change the brain as it develops, and those changes in the brain can change personality.

Source. Journal Reference is: DeYoung et al. "Testing Predictions From Personality Neuroscience: Brain Structure and the Big Five", Psychol Sci. 2010 Jun;21(6):820-8. Abstract here






News that will be ignored: Large study finds no cell phone mast link to cancer

The harmlessness of mobile phones is like the racial correlates of IQ: Many people don't want to believe it so they won't, no matter how much evidence is put before them

British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman's baby developing cancer.

In a study looking at almost 7,000 children and patterns of early childhood cancers across Britain, the researchers found that those who developed cancer before the age of five were no more likely to have been born close to a mast than their peers.

"These results are reassuring," said Paul Elliot, director of the center for environment and health at Imperial College London, who worked on the study.

"We found no pattern to suggest that the children of mums living near a base station during pregnancy had a greater risk of developing cancer than those who lived elsewhere."

Use of cell phones has increased dramatically in recent years and questions have been raised about possible health effects, including whether they may be linked to brain tumors or other cancers.

Opinion polls have also shown high levels of public concern about the potential risks of living near mobile phone mast.

But Elliot, whose study was published in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday, said his work would add to a body of scientific research which has found no links between cell phones and cancer.

Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 year hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumors published the results of their research last month and found no clear answer.

But many previous studies have failed to find any links.

For this study, researchers had data from Britain's four national mobile phone operators -- Vodafone, O2, France Telecom's's Orange, and Deutsche Telekom's's T-Mobile -- on all of the 81,781 mobile phone masts in use from January 1996 to December 2001.

Commenting on Elliot's study, Eileen Rubery, former head of British government's public health prevention department, said its methods and findings were robust.

"This is a carefully done study by a highly reputable group of environmental scientists," she said. "It is reassuring that no adverse affects have been found and this fits with the anticipated and known biological effects from such sites."

Source



23 June, 2010

NICE is getting above itself -- entering the diet wars

Their job is to evaluate the economic effectiveness of drug therapies -- a job they do badly, according to most. But they are apparently a very ambitious little bureaucracy so are now striking out in new directions. But the statements below are just conventional crap showing no knowledge of the double blind studies. If that is testament to their scholarly standards, no wonder they do their original job in a way so disappointing to many

More than 40,000 Britons are dying unnecessarily every year because of high levels of salt and fat in their diets, the Government’s public health watchdog Nice has warned. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) says that unhealthy foods have wreaked a “terrible toll of ill health” on the nation and placed a “substantial” strain on the economy.

For the first time, the organisation publishes landmark guidance on how to prevent the “huge number of unnecessary deaths” from conditions such as heart disease that are linked to the consumption of ready meals and processed food.

It calls for sweeping changes to food production and government policy to encourage lifestyle changes, and to reduce significantly the amount of salt and saturated fat the nation consumes.

It says “toxic” artificial fats known as trans fats, which have no nutritional value and are linked to heart disease, should be banned. The organisation says that ministers should consider introducing legislation if food manufacturers failed to make their products healthier.

Nice says it has brought together all the available evidence to illustrate the link between unhealthy food and public health, partly in response to increasing concern about obesity in Britain, particularly among children.

It says there are about five million people in the country suffering the effects of cardiovascular disease — a “largely avoidable” condition that includes heart attacks, heart disease and stroke — and that it causes 150,000 deaths annually. Nice says 40,000 of these deaths could be prevented, and hundreds of millions of pounds saved, if its measures were introduced.

The guidance, which was commissioned by the Department of Health, also recommends that:

• Low-salt and low-fat foods should be sold more cheaply than their unhealthy counterparts, through the use of subsidies if necessary;

• Advertising of unhealthy foods should be banned until after 9pm and planning laws should be used to restrict the number of fast food outlets, especially near schools;

• The Common Agricultural Policy should focus more on public health, ensuring farmers are paid to produce healthier foods;

• Action should also be taken to introduce a “traffic light” food labelling system, even though the European Parliament recently voted against this;

• Local authorities must act to encourage walking and cycling and public sector caterers must provide healthier meals;

• All lobbying of the Government and its agencies by the food and drink industry should be fully disclosed.

Prof Klim McPherson, the Chairman of the Nice Guidance Development Group and professor of epidemiology at Oxford University, said: “Where food is concerned, we want the healthy choice to be the easy choice. Going even further, we want the healthy choice to be the less expensive, more attractive choice.

“Put simply, this guidance can help the Government and the food industry to take action to prevent huge numbers of unnecessary deaths and illnesses caused by heart disease and stroke.” The average person in Britain consumes more than eight grams of salt a day. The body only requires one gram to function. Targets are already in place to reduce salt consumption to six grams by 2015 and this should be extended to three grams by 2050, the guidance says.

Nice says children should consume considerably less salt than adults and that, because the bulk of salt in their diets comes from prepared food such as bread, cereal, soups, meat and cheese products, manufacturers have a significant role to play in reducing it.

The organisation says that most consumers did not even notice a difference in taste if salt levels were reduced by 5-10 per cent a year because their taste buds adjusted.

More crap here





'One size fits all' allergy jab for hay fever, asthma and eczema on the way

Sounds unlikely but one can only hope. The results reported from the small study below were fairly weak and there is no indication that they were double blind. Unless they were, the results are not impressive at all

A jab that could provide a "one size fits all" approach to tackling hay fever, asthma and eczema could be available within a few years, a conference heard.

Swiss researchers claimed allergies that blight the lives of 10 million British sufferers could be largely eradicated with a single vaccine. An allergy conference in London heard the “one size fits all” injection that wards off asthma, eczema, hay fever and even peanut allergies could be on the shelves within four to five years.

Experts say if the jab, known only as CYT003-Qbg10 which has been tested on humans, is properly developed it become the “hail grail” of vaccines due to it helping ward off multiple allergies. It would be welcome news to the estimated one in five Britons, or 10 million people, who suffer from hay fever.

A trial, conducted by scientists from Cytos Biotechnology, a firm based in Zurich, concluded that a course of the vaccine was almost as good as steroids at keeping asthma under control.

At the jab’s heart are pieces of synthetic DNA similar to those found in the bug that causes tuberculosis or TB. The DNA fools the body into thinking it is under attack from a dangerous bug, kick-starting a multi-pronged immune response.

A total of 63 asthmatic patients were given the course of the jab or a series of injections of a dummy drug over two or three months. Researchers found it cut asthma attacks or symptoms by a third.

In another trial, an injection every week over a month and half, cut the amount of runny noses and weepy eyes by almost 39 per cent. Quality of life was boosted by 42 per cent, they added.

Dr Wolfgang Renner, the chief executive of Cytos, told the Daily Mail the results were exciting. “We think it is a one-size-fits all mechanism,” he said. “We are very excited about it.”

Dr Renner suggested the first large-scale human trial could start next year and a vaccine within a few years.

A spokesman for Allergy UK said: “It does sound a very promising treatment, giving hope for those with severe asthma/allergy symptoms for whom the usual treatments aren’t enough, but there is still a long way to go before it will be available.”

Leanne Metcalf, director of Research at Asthma UK, added: “Over three quarters of people with asthma also have an allergy, which can often trigger their asthma symptoms. “We are, therefore, excited about the potential of this vaccine to make a real difference to people with asthma and allergies, especially as it has been shown in clinical trials to have relatively few side effects.”

Tuesday is thought to be the worst day of the year for hay fever.

The NHS currently estimates around ten million people suffer symptoms of hay fever – such as sneezing, runny nose and itchy eyes – in the spring and summer as grasses and trees release their pollen into the air.

But that number could reach 30 million within 20 years as city living, pollution and climate change exacerbate symptoms, experts warned earlier this year.

Source



22 June, 2010

Father involvement in pregnancy could reduce infant mortality (?)

The usual confusion of cause and effect. The "particularly if the infant is black" highlights that. A black father who sticks around is of unusual high quality, almost certainly middle class. And middle class people are healthier and pass that on to their children genetically. It's the man's genes, not his presence at the birth, that creates healthier babies

Studies have shown fathers who are active in their children's upbringing can significantly benefit their children's early development, academic achievement and well being. Now, a new study by University of South Florida researchers suggests that a father's involvement before his child is born may play an important role in preventing death during the first year of life - particularly if the infant is black.

The USF team sought to evaluate whether the absence of fathers during pregnancy contributes to racial and ethnic disparities in infant survival and health. Their findings were recently reported online in the Journal of Community Health.

"Our study suggests that lack of paternal involvement during pregnancy is an important and potentially modifiable risk factor for infant mortality," concluded the study's lead author Amina Alio, PhD, research assistant professor of community and family health at the USF College of Public Health. "A significant proportion of infant deaths could be prevented if fathers were to become more involved."

The researchers examined the records of all births in Florida from 1998 to 2005 - more than 1.39 million live births. Father involvement was defined by the presence of the father's name on the infant's birth certificate. While this measure does not assess the extent or quality of a father's involvement during pregnancy, other studies have established a link between paternal information on a birth record and prenatal paternal involvement.

Among the study's findings:

* Infants with absent fathers were more likely to be born with lower birth weights, to be preterm and small for gestational age.

* Regardless of race or ethnicity, the neonatal death rate of father-absent infants was nearly four times that of their counterparts with involved fathers.

* The risk of poor birth outcomes was highest for infants born to black women whose babies' fathers were absent during their pregnancies. Even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences, these babies were seven times more likely to die in infancy than babies born to Hispanic and white women in the same situation.

* Obstetric complications contributing to premature births, such as anemia, chronic high blood pressure, eclampsia and placental abruption, were more prevalent among women whose babies' fathers were absent during pregnancy.

* Expectant mothers in the father-absent group tended to be younger, more educated, more likely to never have given birth, more likely to be black, and had a higher percentage of risk factors like smoking and inadequate prenatal care than mothers in the father-involved group.

Paternal support may decrease the mother's emotional stress, which has been linked to poor pregnancy outcomes, or promote healthy prenatal behavior, Dr. Alio suggested. For instance, some studies, including USF's, indicate that pregnant women with absent partners are more likely to report smoking during pregnancy and get inadequate prenatal care. Barriers to expectant fathers' involvement in the lives of their pregnant partners, including issues like unemployment, relationship status, and participation in prenatal visits, must be examined to increase the role of men during pregnancy, she said.

Improving the involvement of expectant fathers holds promise for reducing costly medical treatments for the complications of premature births as well as reducing infant mortality rates, particularly in black communities, Dr. Alio said. "When fathers are involved, children thrive in school and in their development. So, it should be no surprise that when fathers are present in the lives of pregnant mothers, babies fare much better."

Source






'Health' foods that will rot your teeth

Heh!

SNACKS perceived as healthy, including some muesli bars and orange juices, are just as likely to rot your teeth as lollies [candies] and fizzy drinks.

Consumer advocate Choice and the Australian Dental Association's Victorian branch compared the sugar content and acidity of 85 processed foods and drinks and their potential for tooth decay. While fizzy drinks and lollies were unsurprisingly considered high risk, energy drinks such as Red Bull and V Energy, Uncle Tobys apricot muesli bars and Golden Circle Orange Juice were among the worst offenders.

Choice spokesman Brad Schmitt said many of the poor performers were commonly found in student lunch boxes.

Australian Dental Association oral health committee chairwoman Dr Philippa Sawyer said the review results highlighted why tooth decay rates were sky-rocketing. "People don't necessarily understand what causes tooth decay," she said. "We've seen a rapid increase in the tooth decay rate of young children in particular and it's because they snack throughout the day, rather than having the recommended three meals and two snacks."

Nutrition Professionals Australia dietitian Tania Ferraretto said many fruits also contained sugar and were acidic, so potentially a risk to teeth, but should not be avoided. "Foods should always be judged on nutritional value and if you brush your teeth twice a day, then you're on track to avoiding tooth decay," she said.

Australian Food and Grocery Council chief executive Kate Carnell said the industry had produced many new low-sugar, fat and salt alternatives in recent years.

A Nestle spokeswoman said the sugar level in Uncle Tobys Apricot Chew Muesli Bar was only seven per cent of the recommended daily intake and the product contained whole grains and fibre, making a "positive contribution" to diet.

A Golden Circle spokeswoman said a moderate intake of fruit juice could be considered as a serve of fruit, while drinking through a straw and drinking juice with a meal could reduce the impact of acid in drinks.

Source concluded the study's lead author Amina Alio, PhD, research assistant professor of community and family health at the USF College of Public Health. "A significant proportion of infant deaths could be prevented if fathers were to become more involved."

The researchers examined the records of all births in Florida from 1998 to 2005 - more than 1.39 million live births. Father involvement was defined by the presence of the father's name on the infant's birth certificate. While this measure does not assess the extent or quality of a father's involvement during pregnancy, other studies have established a link between paternal information on a birth record and prenatal paternal involvement.

Among the study's findings:

* Infants with absent fathers were more likely to be born with lower birth weights, to be preterm and small for gestational age.

* Regardless of race or ethnicity, the neonatal death rate of father-absent infants was nearly four times that of their counterparts with involved fathers.

* The risk of poor birth outcomes was highest for infants born to black women whose babies' fathers were absent during their pregnancies. Even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences, these babies were seven times more likely to die in infancy than babies born to Hispanic and white women in the same situation.

* Obstetric complications contributing to premature births, such as anemia, chronic high blood pressure, eclampsia and placental abruption, were more prevalent among women whose babies' fathers were absent during pregnancy.

* Expectant mothers in the father-absent group tended to be younger, more educated, more likely to never have given birth, more likely to be black, and had a higher percentage of risk factors like smoking and inadequate prenatal care than mothers in the father-involved group.

Paternal support may decrease the mother's emotional stress, which has been linked to poor pregnancy outcomes, or promote healthy prenatal behavior, Dr. Alio suggested. For instance, some studies, including USF's, indicate that pregnant women with absent partners are more likely to report smoking during pregnancy and get inadequate prenatal care. Barriers to expectant fathers' involvement in the lives of their pregnant partners, including issues like unemployment, relationship status, and participation in prenatal visits, must be examined to increase the role of men during pregnancy, she said.

Improving the involvement of expectant fathers holds promise for reducing costly medical treatments for the complications of premature births as well as reducing infant mortality rates, particularly in black communities, Dr. Alio said. "When fathers are involved, children thrive in school and in their development. So, it should be no surprise that when fathers are present in the lives of pregnant mothers, babies fare much better."

Source






'Health' foods that will rot your teeth

Heh!

SNACKS perceived as healthy, including some muesli bars and orange juices, are just as likely to rot your teeth as lollies [candies] and fizzy drinks.

Consumer advocate Choice and the Australian Dental Association's Victorian branch compared the sugar content and acidity of 85 processed foods and drinks and their potential for tooth decay. While fizzy drinks and lollies were unsurprisingly considered high risk, energy drinks such as Red Bull and V Energy, Uncle Tobys apricot muesli bars and Golden Circle Orange Juice were among the worst offenders.

Choice spokesman Brad Schmitt said many of the poor performers were commonly found in student lunch boxes.

Australian Dental Association oral health committee chairwoman Dr Philippa Sawyer said the review results highlighted why tooth decay rates were sky-rocketing. "People don't necessarily understand what causes tooth decay," she said. "We've seen a rapid increase in the tooth decay rate of young children in particular and it's because they snack throughout the day, rather than having the recommended three meals and two snacks."

Nutrition Professionals Australia dietitian Tania Ferraretto said many fruits also contained sugar and were acidic, so potentially a risk to teeth, but should not be avoided. "Foods should always be judged on nutritional value and if you brush your teeth twice a day, then you're on track to avoiding tooth decay," she said.

Australian Food and Grocery Council chief executive Kate Carnell said the industry had produced many new low-sugar, fat and salt alternatives in recent years.

A Nestle spokeswoman said the sugar level in Uncle Tobys Apricot Chew Muesli Bar was only seven per cent of the recommended daily intake and the product contained whole grains and fibre, making a "positive contribution" to diet.

A Golden Circle spokeswoman said a moderate intake of fruit juice could be considered as a serve of fruit, while drinking through a straw and drinking juice with a meal could reduce the impact of acid in drinks.

Source



21 June, 2010

Four coffees a day 'will keep mouth cancer at bay'

This report appears to be based on a press release only. The full article has yet to appear online, apparently. That makes it hard to evaluate.

Note however that the study is epidemiological and, as in most of its ilk, the size of the effect falls well below the standard required to make causal inferences. And note that previous findings have been mixed. A proper meta-analysis might have helped to resolve that but the analysis reported below was based on a small collection of studies (selected how?) rather than being any sort of meta-analysis

Drinking four cups of coffee a day protects against oral cancer, a study shows. People with a heavy coffee habit are 39 per cent less likely to suffer from cancers of the mouth and pharynx, it suggests.

Doctors say people should drink coffee in moderation because caffeine can increase heart rate and blood pressure. However, the researchers insist evidence is strong that some of the 1,000 chemicals in coffee - including antioxidants - can offer protection against the cancers.

The American scientists used information gleaned from nine studies from Europe, America and Central America, which compared the coffee habits of around 5,000 cancer patients and more than 9,000 healthy people.

After taking into account smoking, diet and alcohol habits, they found that regular coffee drinkers were 39 per cent less likely to develop cancers of the mouth and pharynx than people who drank no coffee.

Lead author Dr Mia Hashibe, from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, said: 'Since coffee is so widely used and there is a relatively high incidence and low survival rate of these forms of cancers, our results have important public health implications that need to be further addressed. What makes our results so unique is that we had a very large sample size, and since we combined data across many studies, we had more statistical power to detect associations between cancer and coffee.'

Around 5,500 Britons are diagnosed with cancers of the lips, tongue, tonsils, gum and other parts of the mouth each year, while 1,800 people die from the disease. Oral cancer - mostly caused by smoking and alcohol - is on the rise in young and middle aged men. It is difficult to treat and is sometimes disfiguring. Other risk factors include a poor diet and harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun on the lips.

Early symptoms include ulcers that fail to heal, or which bleed easily, red or red and white patches in the mouth that do not go away, lumps in the tongue, mouth or throat, difficulty swallowing or chewing and persistent pain.

Studies on the links between coffee and cancer have produced confusing and sometimes contradictory results. These results confused because coffee drinking could be a marker for some other lifestyle factor that increases cancer risk, such as smoking and alcohol.

However, recent studies have shown that coffee may reduce the risk of cancers of the pancreas, colon, brain and gullet.

The study was published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Source






Why beer is one of the healthiest alcoholic drinks available

This sounds like an attempt to correct misconceptions rather than new science but there is no doubt that beer does contain a lot of nutrients

The healthy properties of beer when consumed in moderation are not well understood, according to a new report. The drink is a rich source of vitamins, fibre, minerals and antioxidants and has a relatively low calorific value compared with many other alcoholic beverages, the study says.

The report, commissioned by The Beer Academy, which aims to help people enjoy beer sensibly, found that when drunk in moderation, beer is one of the healthiest alcoholic drinks available.

A spokeswoman said: 'Beer contains vitamins which can help you to maintain a well-balanced healthy diet, fibre to keep you regular, readily absorbed antioxidants and minerals such as silicon which may help to lower your risk of osteoporosis.'

A survey found that while 68% of people consider beer to be Britain's national drink, some 10% wrongly believe that beer contains fat, and 13% incorrectly believe that beer is made from chemicals rather than malted barley and hops.

The report also explores the psychological and sociability benefits of people enjoying a pint in their local pub - yet pubs are closing at a rate of 39 a week.

It argues that the pub is at the heart of every community and a place where people go to enjoy company and find out local news and information.

Pete Brown, an award-winning author, said: 'Still, we persist in the myth that somehow beer is an inferior drink to foreign imports such as wine. From Government receptions through to weddings and business occasions, wine rather than beer is served.

'It has been fashionable to look down on our own national drink in favour of overseas imports. But to do that is to turn our backs on our great British success story and our own heritage, and miss out on the myriad tastes and complexities that beer can offer.'

:: ICM interviewed a random sample of 2,004 adults aged 18 and over online between February 26 and 28 this year.

Source



20 June, 2010

Free-range eggs 'contain five times as much pollution as those from caged birds'

Heh!

Ethical shoppers are being warned that free-range eggs may be less healthy than those from caged birds. Scientists found that free-range eggs contain at least five times higher levels of certain pollutants than normal eggs. Around 17 per cent of the free range eggs had levels that European regulators would have deemed unsafe for consumption. The study was carried out in Taiwan but the findings will raise concerns about the safety of eating free-range chicken eggs in the UK.

Free-range chickens are those that have continuous access to fresh air, sunshine, and exercise, in contrast to chickens that are confined to cages.

But scientists suspect that free-range chickens may risk getting higher levels of exposure to environmental pollutants, particularly PCDDs and PCDFs, potentially toxic substances that are produced as by-products of burning waste. Also known as dioxins, these substances may cause a wide range of health problems in humans, including reproductive and developmental problems and cancer.

They found that the free-range eggs contained 5.7 times higher levels of PCDDs and PCDFs than the regular eggs. The scientists collected six free-range eggs and 12 regular eggs from farms and markets in Taiwan and analysed the eggs for their content of dioxins.

Taiwan is a heavily populated, industrialized island with many of the municipal incinerators that release PCDDs and PCDFs.

But the authors of the report warned that the issue could be more widespread. They wrote: 'The issue of contamination in free range eggs could be a global issue, and more research should be done to identify the factors from the external environment that influence and modify the PCDD/F levels in eggs from free range hens.'

The researchers believe the free range eggs contain pollutants which the hens pick up from being free to feed in the open. They said the chemicals were present in 'feedstuffs, soil, plants, worms and insects'.

Demand for eggs from free-range chickens has increased steadily due to their supposed better nutritional qualities, including higher levels of certain healthy fats.

The findings appear in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Source






San Francisco pols approve cell phone radiation law

Preferring to err on the side of caution, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted 10-1 to require cell phone makers to post notices in their stores with details on the level of radiation each model emits.

The ordinance requires retailers to post information on what is called the "specific absorption rate" (SAR) of its products. The SAR rates measure the amount of radio wave radiation absorbed into the user's body tissue.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who supports the ordinance, is expected to sign it into law. It would take effect in February, with a $300 fine for those found in violation. Other jurisdictions, including Maine and California, have considered similar legislation, but it appears San Francisco would be the first to enact it.

Some worry that prolonged exposure to cell phone radiation may cause brain cancer, although scientific studies have proven inconclusive. The most recent and most comprehensive study, conducted by Interphone and published May 17, found no increased risk for the two most common types of brain cancer.

The lack of certainty [Nothing would make the SF kooks certain] one way or the other poses a conundrum. If the government issues warnings just to be safe, it may scare consumers needlessly. On the other hand, if a risk does indeed exist, the government is obligated to alert the public of the potential harm.

The Federal Communication Commission, which regulates cell phone safety along with the Food and Drug Administration, states on its Web site "there is no scientific evidence to date that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other health effects," but goes on to note that "studies are ongoing."

The FCC has set a standard that no cell phone sold in the United States can have a SAR in excess of 1.6 watts per kilogram.

Enterprising consumers can find SAR information on the FCC Web site, but they need to have the product's FCC ID code. San Francisco's new law would put that hard-to-find data directly in front of consumers in stores.

Not surprisingly, representatives of the cell phone industry oppose the law, citing both the existing FCC standard and the lack of definitive scientific evidence linking cell phone use to brain cancer. John Walls, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the law "will potentially mislead consumers with point-of-sale requirements suggesting that some phones are safer than others, based on radio emissions."

That argument did not sway the lawmakers in city of San Francisco, who say it will serve the public. "This is a modest and commonsense measure to provide greater transparency and information to consumer," Tony Winnicker, a spokesman for Mayor Newsom, told the Chronicle.

Source



19 June, 2010

Tea's good for you, says new study

I am almost at a loss for words to describe this deceptive crap. The only important finding of the study is only obliquely alluded to: That both tea and coffee drinking have NO effect on your lifespan -- one way or the other. As you will see from the abstract that I have also reproduced below: "Neither coffee nor tea was associated with ... all-cause mortality". In the circumstances, it is pointless to say anything about the other holes in the study. No wonder that research in the area is plagued by contradictory conclusions when any old rubbish seems to be publishable

Regularly drinking tea and coffee can significantly reduce the risk of developing heart disease, one of the biggest studies of its kind suggests. Researchers found that moderate consumption of both drinks can reduce your chance of death from a heart attack by at least a fifth. At the same time, it showed that risks for other diseases such as stroke were not increased. [Only yesterday, tea increased your risk of autoimmune diseases!]

"Our results found the benefits of drinking coffee and tea occur without increasing risk of stroke or death from all causes," said Dr Yvonne van der Schouw, professor of chronic disease at the University Medical Center Utrecht, Netherlands.

For the research her team studied tea and coffee consumption among 37,514 people, and followed the participants for 13 years to monitor heart disease and death. They found that tea had the biggest impact on heart disease but that all but heavy consumption of coffee was also beneficial.

Those who drink between three and six cups are 45 per cent less likely to suffer coronary problems compared to people who had less than one cup daily, a study found. And drinking more than six cups was associated with a 36 per cent lower risk of heart disease.

It was good news for coffee drinkers too, with the study saying that a modest intake – two to four cups a day – may lead to a 20 per cent lower risk of heart problems.

The researchers believe that the health benefits are down to antioxidants found in both drinks which remove damaging free radicals from the body.

The team, whose research is published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association, also noted that tea and coffee drinkers have different health behaviours – with more coffee drinkers prone to smoke and have a less healthy diet.

This is the latest research into the relative health benefits of two of the world's favourite beverages. It has been claimed that they can reduce risks of some cancers, diabetes, stress and even acne. But they have also been linked to increased rates of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and high blood pressure.

Ellen Mason, Senior Cardiac Nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This study adds further weight to the evidence that drinking tea and coffee in moderation is not harmful for most people, and may even lower your risk of developing or dying from heart disease. “However, it’s worth remembering that leading a healthy lifestyle is the thing that really matters when it comes to keeping your heart in top condition.

“Having a cigarette with your coffee could completely cancel any benefits, while drinking lots of tea in front of the TV for hours on end without exercising is unlikely to offer your heart much protection at all.”

Source

Tea and Coffee Consumption and Cardiovascular Morbidity and Mortality

By de Koning Gans, J. Margot et al.

Objective-: To examine the associations of coffee and tea consumption with risk of morbidity and mortality of stroke and coronary heart disease (CHD) and with all-cause mortality.

Methods and Results-: Coffee and tea consumption were assessed with a validated food-frequency questionnaire, and 37 514 participants were observed for 13 years for the occurrence of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. A U-shaped association between coffee and CHD was found, with the lowest hazard ratio (HR [95% CI]) for 2.1 to 3.0 cups per day (0.79 [0.65 to 0.96]; Ptrend=0.01). Tea was inversely associated with CHD, with the lowest HR (95% CI) for more than 6.0 cups per day (0.64 [0.46 to 0.90]; Ptrend=0.02). No associations between tea or coffee and stroke were found (Ptrend=0.63 and Ptrend=0.32, respectively). Although not significant, coffee slightly reduced the risk for CHD mortality (HR, 0.64; 95% CI, 0.37 to 1.11; Ptrend=0.12) for 3.1 to 6.0 cups per day. A U-shaped association between tea and CHD mortality was observed, with an HR of 0.55 (95% CI, 0.31 to 0.97; Ptrend=0.03) for 3.1 to 6.0 cups per day. Neither coffee nor tea was associated with stroke (Ptrend=0.22 and Ptrend=0.74, respectively) and all-cause mortality (Ptrend=0.33 and Ptrend=0.43, respectively).

Conclusion-: High tea consumption is associated with a reduced risk of CHD mortality. Our results suggest a slight risk reduction for CHD mortality with moderate coffee consumption and strengthen the evidence on the lower risk of CHD with coffee and tea consumption.

Source

A bit of booze breeds better babies?

The usual epidemiological rubbish. Women who drink but control it are probably more likely to be middle class and hence heathier anyway -- which they pass on to their children

New evidence has emerged that pregnant women who indulge in one glass of wine a day in their first trimester may have better behaved children than those who abstain from alcohol or drink heavily. In a study of more than 2300 mothers, Perth researchers found pregnant women who drank light to moderate amounts of alcohol had babies with fewer emotional and behavioural difficulties.

The team from the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research set the "moderate" consumption limit at one alcoholic drink a day. But study leader Dr Monique Robinson advised pregnant women to stick to national guidelines, which recommend expectant mothers abstain from alcohol, and to speak to their doctor.

She said that child behavior was "just one of many outcomes that might be assessed with regards to alcohol consumption during pregnancy". "While our study found light drinking during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk for the child, national guidelines recommend the safest choice is to avoid alcohol once the pregnancy is known."

The study, published in the obstetrics and gynecology journal BJOG, was based on 14 years of data. The researchers recorded the weekly drinking habits of women during the early stages of pregnancy, then monitored the behavioural and emotional patterns of their children during their early teenage years.

Almost 60 per cent of expectant mothers had not drunk during pregnancy, but 3 per cent threw back between seven and 10 drinks and 2 per cent consumed 11 alcoholic drinks each week. About 20 per cent admitted to an occasional tipple of up to one drink a week and 15 per cent had consumed two to six drinks a week.

Researchers checked on the 2370 children involved in the study every few years between the ages of two and 14 and concluded mothers who didn't drink during their first trimester had trouble getting their children to behave.

Children of light drinkers early in pregnancy had a "clinically meaningful" lower risk of becoming depressed or reacting aggressively than the children of non-drinkers. The results were determined through a standard checklist used by psychologists.

They have warned against heavy drinking during pregnancy. Researchers noted 13 per cent of children who were born to mothers who did drink heavily had aggression problems and 10 per cent had depression.

Dr Robinson said the research would help alleviate any guilt for women who had drunk alcohol before they found out they were pregnant. "Women may be drinking alcohol in small amounts prior to recognition of the pregnancy and we feel these data highlight that it is unlikely that this has harmed their unborn child's mental health," she said. "Women should not feel guilty or anxious about low-level drinking effects prior to recognition of the pregnancy. However, binge and large alcohol intake should still be avoided as this does have potential for harm."

King Edward Memorial Hospital's Women and Newborn Health Service recommends pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers follow Australian guidelines that suggest there is no "safe" level of drinking.

Women and Newborn Drug and Alcohol Service clinical midwifery consultant Sadie Geraghty said the amount of alcohol consumed, the frequency and timing of consumption are all factors in the way drinking can affect a foetus. "How does one define moderation of alcohol consumption? One standard glass of wine is 100mls - how many people fill their glass and call that a standard drink?" Ms Geraghty said. "There is no safe time to drink alcohol during pregnancy."

Source



18 June, 2010

Tea's bad for you, says new study

Groan! Americans are almost all coffee drinkers so tea drinkers are outliers anyway. Maybe many are health freaks -- as tea is often promoted as being good for you. And why would somebody be a health freak? Sometimes because they are in poor health anyway. So does this simply show that health freaks are more likely to suffer from auto-immune diseases? Perhaps. Nobody knows what the causal chain is. Saying that tea CAUSES such ailments is a complete abrogation of scientific caution

Drinking a lot of tea increases the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, US researchers said on Friday. A US study on more than 76,000 women found consuming tea raised the risk while drinking coffee had no impact. Tea lovers who enjoyed more than four cups a day had the highest risk - being 78 per cent more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than those who drank none. But drinking any amount of tea increased the chance by 40 per cent, compared with people who never drank tea.

The findings were presented at the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Rome.

Professor Christopher Collins, from Georgetown University Medical Centre in the US, said he was surprised by the differences between coffee and tea. He said: "We set out to determine whether tea or coffee consumption, or the method of preparation of the drinks was associated with an increased risk of [rheumatoid arthritis]. "It is surprising that we saw such differences in results between tea and coffee drinkers.

"This does make us wonder what it is in tea, or in the method of preparation of tea that causes the significant increase in risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis."

The researchers also examined whether filtered coffee versus unfiltered coffee affected the results, and also looked at the impact of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee. However, they found no significant associations with rheumatoid arthritis or the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

The women in the study were aged 50 to 79 and filled in questionnaires on their daily intake of coffee and tea.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic, progressive and disabling auto-immune disease which affects millions around the world. Three times more women get it than men and it usually starts between the ages of 40 and 60. The disease can cause swelling and damage to the cartilage and bone around the joints, most commonly the hands, feet and wrists. Children under the age of 16 have the juvenile form of the disease.

Professor Collins said he did not recommend that people change their tea-drinking habits based on the research. "This was an unusual and complex finding but, from the data we have, there is a relationship between tea and the disease. "There have been other studies which have either stated that tea has no effect on risk of arthritis, and one study which found tea had a protective effect."

He said the team had looked for supporting information that could explain their own findings. "We found a study which said that an increased intake of flavonoids - which are in tea - from various sources resulted in an increased risk of rheumatoid arthritis."

The team had analysed data on caffeine separately and had found no link, suggesting it was something specific to tea, he added. "It's definitely an association but the risk is very small. "Nevertheless, when you look at enough people, a very small relationship can still be meaningful."

Professor Collins said women were only asked about their consumption of tea, and so no detail was available on whether they had drunk black tea, tea with milk or herbal teas.

His team analysed the results to find out how many women who were tea drinkers had developed rheumatoid arthritis during the course of the study. "We did not ask if they had been lifelong tea drinkers," he said. "Some may infer that if they drank four cups at that point in time, they may have done so in the past."

Source






A good example of why epidemiological relationships should be treated with a large grain of salt

Data dredging will always turn up such relationships -- entirely randomly, with no causal relationships at all

If you know a man called Colin, it might just be worth checking he is in good health. But any Daniels in your life, it seems, have nothing to worry about and can look forward to a long and happy existence.

Research has found that men named Colin are more likely to have high blood pressure, and a higher risk of heart attack, while Daniels have the lowest chance of suffering from the condition.

The survey, by Lloyds Pharmacy, also shows that women called Emily are likely to have a much healthier heart than those called Margaret.

Experts compared naming trends over the past 80 years with the rate of heart problems. Their analysis found that some names linked to the working classes or particular parts of the country came off worse.

For example, Colin is a very popular name in Scotland where heart problems are more prevalent than anywhere else in the UK, while Daniel is seen as a middle-class name.

And those with 'older' names, such as Keith and Maureen, are more likely to have heart problems than younger individuals such as Chloes or Sophies. The survey found that men called Colin, Brian and Alan have a 47 per cent chance of having high blood pressure.

Those called Simon, Mark and Kevin have just a 16 per cent chance of raised blood pressure and cardiac problems. And if your name is Daniel, Liam or Thomas then your chance of high blood pressure drops to 6 per cent.

Similarly, women called Linda, Margaret or Ann have a 50 per cent chance of suffering from the condition while those called Emily, Chloe or Sophie have a mere one per cent risk. For a Claire, Helen or Jane the risk of high blood pressure is 10 per cent.

The analysis also found that Brians and Colins are five times more likely than Simons, Marks and Kevins to have diabetes and 20 times more likely to suffer a stroke. In addition, the study showed that those named Brian and Ronald are 72 times more likely to suffer a stroke than Ethan, Joseph or Samuel.

Source



17 June, 2010

Excess medical radiation growing risk for Americans (?)

The stuff below is conventional rubbish but it is rubbish nonetheless. How else do they explain the very long life of "Lucky" Yamaguchi -- who survived encounters with TWO nuclear blasts? Low-dose ionizing radiation is in fact good for you. Google "hormesis"

We fret about airport scanners, power lines, cellphones, and even microwaves. It’s true that we get too much radiation. But not from those sources — it’s from too many medical tests.

Americans get the most medical radiation in the world, even more than folks in other rich countries, according to several studies reviewed by the Associated Press. The US accounts for half of the most advanced procedures that use radiation, and the average American’s dose has grown sixfold over the last couple of decades.

Too much radiation raises the risk of cancer. That risk is growing because people in everyday situations are getting imaging tests far too often.

Like the New Hampshire teen who was about to get a CT scan to check for kidney stones until radiologist Steven Birnbaum discovered he had already had 14 of these powerful X-rays for previous episodes. Adding up the total dose, “I was horrified’’ at the cancer risk it posed, Birnbaum said.

After his own daughter, Molly, was given too many scans following a car accident, Birnbaum took action: He asked the two hospitals where he works to watch for any patients who had had 10 or more CT scans, or patients under 40 who had had five — clearly dangerous amounts. They found 50 people over a three-year period, including a young woman with 31 abdominal scans.

Of the many ways Americans are overtested and overtreated, imaging is one of the most common and insidious. CT scans — “super X-rays’’ that give fast, extremely detailed images — have soared in use over the last decade, often replacing tests that don’t require radiation, such as ultrasound and MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.

Radiation is a hidden danger — you don’t feel it when you get it, and any damage usually doesn’t show up for years. Taken individually, tests that use radiation pose little risk. Over time, though, the dose accumulates.

Doctors don’t keep track of radiation given their patients — they order a test, not a dose. Except for mammograms, there are no federal rules on radiation dose. Children and young women, who are most vulnerable to radiation harm, sometimes get too much at busy imaging centers that don’t adjust doses for each patient’s size.

That may soon change. In interviews, US Food and Drug Administration officials described steps in the works, including possibly requiring device makers to print the radiation dose on each X-ray or other image so patients and doctors can see how much was given. The FDA also is pushing industry and doctors to set standard doses for common tests such as CT scans.

“We are considering requirements and guidelines for record-keeping of dose and other technical parameters of the imaging exam,’’ said Sean Boyd, chief of the FDA’s diagnostic devices branch.

A near-term goal: developing a “radiation medical record’’ to track doses from cradle to grave.

The best guess at how much radiation is risky is based on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and studies of Japanese atomic bomb survivors who had excess cancer risk after exposures of 50 to 150 millisieverts of radiation.

A chest or abdominal CT scan involves 10 to 20 millisieverts (a measure of dose), versus 0.01 to 0.1 for an ordinary chest X-ray, less than 1 for a mammogram, and as little as 0.005 for a dental X-ray. Natural radiation from the sun and soil accounts for about 2 millisieverts a year. A study last year estimated that 4 million Americans get more than 20 millisieverts a year from medical imaging. Two percent of people in the study had high exposure — 20 to 50 millisieverts.

Source






Health fanatic dies of her fanaticism

No sympathy for such a stupid egotist from me, I am afraid. Though the quacks involved could do with prosecution for holding out false hope

A NURSE has described her "state of shock" upon seeing the distressing condition of a woman who tried to use homeopathy to fight cancer.

In an inquest at the Perth Coroner’s Court, registered nurse and family friend Deborah Combes said she believed Penelope Dingle was dying after being called to assist the ailing woman in October 2003. Mrs Dingle, who attempted to treat her colorectal cancer with homeopathy and natural remedies after being diagnosed in 2003, died in August 2005.

The Coroner's Court was told Ms Combes was called by one of Mrs Dingle’s sisters to help Mrs Dingle shortly before she was admitted to hospital for emergency surgery. Ms Combes told the court Mrs Dingle was in an emaciated state, and was sweaty and breathless with her eyes sunken. She said Mrs Dingle was “writhing in pain” and was “screaming and very frightened”.

She said Mrs Dingle’s husband, prominent Perth toxicologist Peter Dingle, told her she had not seen a doctor “for months” and was instead relying on the directions of homeopath Francine Scrayen.

Ms Combes said Mrs Dingle was “completely obsessed” with the homeopathic regime and initially refused to take pain relief. “I couldn’t understand why someone would go through so much pain and agony,” Ms Combes said. “She would hold her abdomen like a pregnant woman does. “She was in pain - she was ill.

“(But) it was extremely difficult to reason with Pen (so as) not to make a mistake in the complex regime.”

Source



16 June, 2010

Vitamin B6 and protein reduces lung cancer risk

Hmmm... I'm dubious about this. How would nutrients reduce cancer? It seems to me more likely that well-off people are both better fed and in general more healthy. So the factors are associated but one is not the cause of the other. I note that income does not appear to have been controlled for.

The journal article is "Serum B Vitamin Levels and Risk of Lung Cancer". There is a fuller summary of the study here with some worthwhile cautions expressed.

SMOKERS with higher levels of vitamin B6 and a certain essential amino acid have less risk of developing lung cancer than those lacking the nutrients. A study of nearly 400,000 participants that included current and former smokers in 10 European countries found that people with high levels of vitamin B6 and the essential amino acid methionine - found in most protein - were at least half as likely of getting lung cancer.

But the researchers did not conclude that consuming more of the nutrients reduced risk of lung cancer, the deadliest cancer worldwide, and stressed the importance of quitting smoking. "Similar and consistent decreases in risk were observed in never, former, and current smokers, indicating that results were not due to confounding (factors that can influence outcomes) by smoking," the researchers wrote. "The magnitude of risk was also constant with increasing length of follow-up, indicating that the associations were not explained by preclinical disease."

Former and current smokers with higher serum folate levels - in addition to high amounts of vitamin B6 and methionine in their blood - also had 67 per cent less risk of developing the disease.

Lung cancer claims some 1.3 million lives worldwide each year, accounting for nearly 18 per cent of all cancer deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

The researchers, whose study was published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, also noted that many former smokers have lung cancer and that a "non-trivial" number of people who never smoked get the disease, especially among women in parts of Asia.

Paul Brennan of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, led the study of nearly 900 lung cancer patients.

Source





Violent videogames harmless for most kids: studies

"Baroness" (brown-nose) Greenfield won't want to know about this

Violent videogames can increase aggression and hostility in some players but they can also benefit others by honing their visual/spatial skills and improving social networking ability, scientists said.

In a special issue of the journal Review of General Psychology published by the American Psychological Association, researchers said the games can also help to control diabetes and pain and work as a tool to complement psychotherapy.

"Violent video games are like peanut butter," said Christopher J. Ferguson, of Texas A&M International University. "They are harmless for the vast majority of kids but are harmful to a small minority with pre-existing personality or mental health problems."

He added that studies have revealed that violent games have not created a generation of problem youngsters.

"Recent research has shown that as video games have become more popular, children in the United States and Europe are having fewer behavior problems, are less violent and score better on standardized tests," Ferguson, a guest editor for the journal, explained.

Patrick Markey, of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, found in a study of 118 teenagers that certain personality traits can predict which children will be negatively influenced by videogame. If someone is easily upset, depressed and emotional or is indifferent to the feelings of other people, breaks rules and fails to keep promises, they may be more likely to be hostile after playing violent videogames.

"These results suggest that it is the simultaneous combination of these personality traits which yield a more powerful predictor of violent video games," Markey said. "Those who are negatively affected have pre-existing dispositions, which make them susceptible to such violent media."

But on a more positive note Pamela Kato, of University Medical Center in Utrecht in the Netherlands, showed in her research that specially tailored games can help to prevent asthma attacks, and ease pain management and diabetes treatment.

SOURCE



15 June, 2010

Talking therapies are more effective than Prozac-type drugs, says scientist

The conclusions below by Prof. Cherry (Kirsch is German for Cherry) are certainly tempting but I would need to see more about the taxonomy of depression used in the study concerned. There is a tendency to class all mental states with suicidal ideation as "depression" but I have long maintained that a variety of mental states could give rise to suicidal ideation and it could be that the three different drugs mentioned below work on different sources of "depression" -- so all give positive results.

And calling the results a placebo effect is pretty absurd. All three drugs gave relief rates at roughly twice the normal placebo level

Antidepressants of the Prozac type are no better than a placebo, a leading psychologist has claimed. According to Irving Kirsch, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no link between depression and serotonin, the brain chemical that such drugs are supposed to affect.

Practising psychiatrists, however, say that it would be disastrous to use stricter criteria for the prescription of antidepressants on the basis of Professor Kirsch’s research findings. “Be very careful what you advise, because we in the surgeries will be left to pick up the pieces,” said Amjad Uppal, a consultant psychiatrist for the Gloucestershire NHS Trust.

Last year in England the NHS issued 39 million prescriptions to treat depression, more than half being for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” (SSRI) drugs. Three million people took antidepressants daily. Antidepressants including Prozac and the newer generation of SSRIs, such as Seroxat, are taken to increase the level of serotonin in the brain.

Professor Kirsch argued that they worked through the placebo effect — patients expect to be made to feel better — and said that “talking treatments” such as cognitive behavioural therapy were more effective in the long term.

“Although the chemical-imbalance theory is often presented as if it were fact, it is actually a controversial hypothesis,” he said. “This is about as close as a theory gets in science to being disproven by the evidence.”

Others maintain that antidepressants do have an active biochemical influence. “We do not fully understand how these drugs work, but there is evidence that they influence the number of neurons and the connections between neurons. You can’t draw conclusions about this because of the nature of the study,” said Hamish McAllister- Williams, a consultant psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at Newcastle University.

He said that depression was a dangerous illness, noting that sufferers were at as high a risk of a heart attack as those who smoked 20 cigarettes a day.

Dr McAllister-Williams believed that “at least a proportion” of the effect of the drugs was “due to active ingredients, but either way they work and we really need an effective treatment”. Dr Uppal said: “I have a very high threshold for prescribing antidepressants, but there’s no doubt in my mind they work. Research studies are artificial and do not capture the difference between effectiveness and efficacy.”

Professor Kirsch’s research, presented at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival, shows that a new drug, tianeptine, is just as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. Tianeptine, which is a serotonin reuptake enhancer, actually decreases the level of the chemical.

In comparisons of tianeptine with SSRIs and the earlier tricyclic antidepressants, the three produced virtually identical response rates: 63 per cent of patients responded to tianeptine, 62 per cent to SSRIs and 65 per cent to tricyclics. If drugs having three different effects on serotonin brought similar benefits, these could not be due to their specific chemical activity, Professor Kirsch said. “The idea that the neurotransmitter serotonin is a causal factor in depression is wrong.”

SOURCE





Simple drug could save 100,000 lives each year - Lancet

AN easy-to-use blood-clotting drug that costs just a few dollars could save up to 100,000 lives each year from road accidents and violence.

The Lancet reports doctors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tested an off-patent treatment called tranexamic acid (TXA) among 20,000 severely-injured adults in 274 hospitals in 40 countries.

Participants received either one gram of TXA by injection followed by another one gram in a drip over the following eight hours, or a dummy lookalike. TXA reduced the risk of death by any cause by 10 per cent compared with the placebo, the paper said. When it came to the risk of death by bleeding, TXA scored a reduction of 15 per cent over the placebo.

Each year, more than a million people die as a result of traffic injuries, and another 1.6 million die as a result of acts of violence, and many could be saved by swift action to stop haemorrhaging, the researchers said. "Each year about 600,000 injured patients bleed to death worldwide," said lead author Ian Roberts, a professor of epidemiology. "Injuries may be accidental, for example, road crashes, or intentional, such as shootings, stabbings or land-mine injuries, and the majority of deaths occur soon after injury."

TXA works by reducing the breakdown of clots. The drug is manufactured by a number of companies, and a gram of it costs about $4.50.

If TXA became widely available and was used promptly, it could save as many as 100,000 lives a year, 13,000 of them in India and 12,000 in China, where road deaths are surging, the paper said. "The drug is inexpensive and could be given in hospitals worldwide," said Etienne Krug, director of violence and injury prevention and disability at the UN's World Health Organisation. "It is essential that doctors are aware of these results and take them into account in the emergency management of seriously injured patients."

The trial was carried out to see whether TXA was effective and whether it had bad side effects, such as increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and lung clots. On the latter score, there was no increase in any of these complications, the authors said.

Source



14 June, 2010

IVF slightly increases the risk of abnormal babies

I could believe the report below if there is a high incidence of the more risky ICSI procedures in the sample but I am unaware of how common such procedures are in France. At a minimum, the data should be segregated into ICSI and non-ICSI procedures. All we have at the moment is a press release rather than a peer reviewd article so evaluation is a bit difficult.

A more detailed report does however have a wise conclusion: "These results could be due to the effect of a number of different mechanisms. They could be due to the infertility itself, the ovarian stimulation for supernumerary oocyte production, the in vitro maturation of oocytes, the use of ICSI (direct injection of sperm), the culture media, the cryopreservation of gametes and embryos – we just don't know at present"

I note further that the data were derived from questionnaires -- which can be unreliable. It's a long way from a double blind study

BABIES conceived through fertility treatments are at sharply increased risk of serious congenital malformations, according to a study.

Research into the health of 15,162 babies born after assisted conceptions found that 4.24% had serious malformations, roughly double the rate for all children. The study, carried out in France, is the largest of its kind.

The study has significant implications for Britain, where some 200,000 babies have been born after assisted conception since 1991. Because of data protection laws it has not been possible to calculate an increased rate of malformation in Britain. If France’s rates also apply to British babies, between 3,000 and 4,000 above the number expected in natural births may have been born with malformations.

The reasons for the defects are not known, but it is thought the fertilisation process may damage embryos.

Lisa Jardine, chairwoman of Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: “This is a serious issue and the new research is very significant. People seeking fertility treatment should not be alarmed because the overall extra risk is still quite small, but we need to make sure they are made fully aware.”

The findings are set out in a paper submitted to the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics, which is is being held in Sweden.

Dr Geraldine Viot, clinical geneticist at the Maternité Port-Royal hospital, Paris, who oversaw the research, says in the abstract: “A major congenital malformation was found in 4.24% of children (v 2-3% expected). This higher rate was partly due to an excess of heart diseases and malformations in the urogenital system.”

Viot also found a greater rate of minor malformations, with 365 children suffering from angiomas (a benign skin tumour), five times higher than the overall rate.

There was an increase in rare genetic disorders, which affected 110 of the 15,162 children. Six had Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, when only one would normally be expected in such a sample size.

SOURCE





Rainforest cancer drug EBC-46 set for human trials

A BREAKTHROUGH Queensland drug that has cured cancer tumours in pet dogs, cats and horses is to be trialled on humans.

Queensland life science company QBiotics Limited's chief executive Dr Victoria Gordon says it will fast-track human trials for their cancer drug EBC-46.

She said EBC-46 would be the first drug discovered from Australia's unique rainforests to enter human clinical trials.

Dr Gordon said the drug had successfully reduced or eliminated inoperable solid tumours in more than 100 pet dogs, cats and horses.

She said the drug could help treat human skin cancer, head and neck cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer. "Many pet owners involved in veterinary trials of EBC-46 have . . . literally watched the deadly tumours on their pets disintegrate within five to seven days of being treated," she said in a statement. "It is absolutely amazing to see this drug in action. "The tumours almost shrink before your eyes."

The drug was developed during six years of research into the seed of a Queensland rainforest plant. "The drug, which is a previously unknown molecule, works differently to most current chemotherapy agents, in that it is not highly toxic to cells," Dr Gordon said.

The company QBiotics, established in 2004, is raising $10 million to fund human trials, which will be run in Australia. The capital raising is being managed by corporate finance manager Reuben Buchanan.

QBiotics has a target of making EBC-46 commercially available for veterinary markets in Australia this year, with human clinical trials commencing in early 2011.

SOURCE



13 June, 2010

Australia a land of centenarians

And the traditional Australian diet they grew up on -- full of fatty food and plenty of salt -- would give food freaks a fainting fit: Sausage rolls dripping with fat, beef pies, hamburgers, sausages and steak fried in dripping etc. Some young people probably don't even know what dripping is these days but the oldies almost invariably stick to their traditional diet. If long term survival is the aim, it is the Australian diet, not the Mediterranean diet, that should be promoted. But it won't be. It goes against the conventional food religion

REACHING the age of 100 may be enough to get a letter from the Queen but soon it may not qualify you for a retirement party from work. Medical research shows half of the Australians - particularly women - born this century could live to at least 100, while improved health and lifestyle will ensure we are able to work and stay active for longer.

John Beard from the World Health Organisation thinks Australian companies could have 100-year-old employees within 20 years as more workers are encouraged to postpone retirement. "A woman in the United States just celebrated her 100th birthday at work. I don't think that will be unusual in 20 years' time," he said.

The ageing of the workforce will require a major change in thinking, however. He warned that the most rapid period of population ageing was still to come and pouring money into hospitals and pension plans was not the solution.

"We have retirement policies which provide incentives for early retirement, we have entrenched ageism in the system where older workers are viewed as untrainable in new technologies," Mr Beard said. "We need to be rethinking those [policies] at the same time as putting in place some of the social services that may be required for the truly disabled older people."

Experts warn that as the population ages rapidly and as we work longer and earn more, the cost of keeping us alive will also increase.

KPMG demographer Bernard Salt predicts that as the growth in the number of centenarians continues to outpace every other age group in Australia, governments will struggle to afford to keep them alive. "These are very expensive years to maintain," he said.

"Do you believe a 90-year-old or 100-year-old should have access to a $1 million piece of equipment to keep them alive for another three months, or as a society should we be spending that $1 million on a piece of sporting or education equipment for a 23-year-old?

"We need to have that debate and decide the limits of what we're prepared to allocate to health and aged care because the demands will be infinite and the technology means we can keep people alive beyond 100, perhaps even 110 or 120 years."

Mr Salt said there would come a time when rich people would be able to buy extra years of life. "In other words, life and death and quality of life beyond 80 will be a matter of money in 20 years' time," he said.

Australia already has one of the highest proportions of centenarians in the world, behind the United States, Norway and Sardinia. They number between 3000 and 4000 today and some suggest that figure will balloon to 12,000 centenarians in 10 years and to 50,000 by 2050.

Results from the University of NSW's Australian Centenarian Study, conducted by Professor Robyn Richmond, found that despite their frail image, many centenarians were independent and relatively healthy.

More than one in four men aged over 100 lived alone and only about half of those aged 100 or over lived in nursing homes. But more home-based services would allow a larger number of centenarians to remain in their homes, Professor Richmond said.

Heather Booth, from the Australian National University's Demographic and Social Research Institute, said there had been little planning for a larger and more active older population, who would demand things such as better transport and age-friendly shops and restaurants. "We're going to need more public transport," she said.

"These people are not just going to stay at home, they'll be organising themselves to enjoy life as well, and demanding that society responds to their needs." One of these needs will be wanting to work well past the traditional retirement age of about 65.

John McCormack, director of the Australian Centenarian Study at La Trobe University, found most centenarians would like to continue working: "We've got to be more age-integrated rather than age-segregated."

SOURCE






Hope for liver cancer patients

A RADICAL cancer treatment pioneered in Melbourne is being hailed a global lifesaver. A Victorian woman who had incurable liver cancer has been treated and her specialist is convinced she is cured.

Another patient, told he had only months to live in November, will celebrate his birthday on Tuesday with the news that his liver tumours have shrunk significantly. Gordon Howgate, 58, said he was feeling pretty good and "I am optimistic that soon all the tumours will be gone".

More than 100 Victorians with inoperable liver cancer have been treated successfully with the revolutionary therapy known as SIRT (selective internal radiation therapy). They are part of a Melbourne-led international human trial of SIRT, used in conjunction with the chemotherapy drug sorafenib.

An Australian-owned discovery, SIRT is a one-off treatment where tiny radioactive beads, about one-third the width of a human hair, are injected into an artery near the groin. There, the beads lodge in the liver and release a radiation dose over a number of days to shrink tumours.

Associate Prof Peter Gibbs is a medical oncologist from the Royal Melbourne Hospital who has pioneered the therapy that was discovered by surgeon Bruce Gray. Seven years ago Prof Gibbs first used the SIRT on a patient, a lecturer at Melbourne University, with incurable liver cancer. "Her tumours slowly disappeared and she remains tumour free. I am convinced that she is cured," he said.

She is one of more than 100 Victorians with inoperable liver cancer treated successfully. Most had a secondary cancer from bowel, breast or other organs spread to the liver. Though primary liver cancer is rare in Australia, it is one of the most common and deadliest cancers worldwide.

Usually caused by exposure to hepatitis B and C, lifestyle is also a potential factor with excessive alcohol consumption a major risk.

In the past decade there has been a 50 per cent increase in this cancer in Australia, with men more at risk. Until now there was no potential cure because most patients could not be operated on or tolerate chemotherapy.

Mr Howgate was diagnosed with bowel cancer last year that had spread extensively to his liver. "I asked how long I had without treatment and was told three to six months," Mr Howgate said. The Melton father is one of our oldest surviving kidney transplant patients.

Following his treatment in November and six months of chemo, recent scans reveal his liver cancer has shrunk significantly and continues to.

Prof Gibbs said in about 5 per cent of patients tumours disappeared and in most others it was prolonging lives. He leads the world's biggest clinical trial of the therapy.

SOURCE



12 June, 2010

Claim: Girls with a high meat diet more likely to start periods early AND increase risk of breast cancer and heart disease

Pure speculation. Girls with a high meat diet may well reach puberty earlier but there is no evidence that they have health problems

A diet high in meat may put girls at higher risk of breast cancer and heart disease by bringing on early puberty, according to scientists. A study of 3,000 girls found that girls with higher intakes of meat and protein were more likely to have started their periods by the time they were 12 and a half.

Girls who start puberty early are believed to be at higher risk of a number of diseases - including breast cancer, ovarian cancer and heart disease.

The study, carried out at the University of Brighton in East Sussex, found that 49 per cent of girls eating more than 12 portions of meat a week at the age of seven had started their periods by 12 and a half. This compares with just 35 per cent of girls who ate fewer than four portions a week.

And three year olds who ate more than eight portions of meat a week were also more likely to have early periods.

A portion is defined as the normal amount of meat a child would eat in a full meal. A portion is therefore smaller for a 3 year old child than for a 7 year old one. A small meat-based snack such as a ham sandwich would only be around half a portion, but a Sunday roast would include a full portion.

However study author Dr Imogen Rogers, a senior lecturer at the university's school of pharmacy, cautioned parents cutting meat out of their daughters' diets. 'Meat is a good source of many important nutrients including iron and zinc and there is no reason why girls should adopt a vegetarian diet or that meat in moderation cannot form a valuable part of a balanced diet for children,' she said.

Zinc and iron were both needed in high quantities during pregnancy, she said, which suggests a diet rich in meat could prepare the body for pregnancy. 'A meat-rich diet could be seen as indicating suitable nutritional conditions for a successful pregnancy,' she said.

She said the findings needed repeating in other populations before firm recommendations on diet can be made. But she added: 'These results add to the evidence that it is healthiest to avoid diets containing very high amounts of meat.' [Really??]

The research, funded by the World Cancer Research Fund, was published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.

The average age at which girls start puberty fell dramatically over the 20th century: perhaps reflecting easier access to meat. While the average is now 12, although the average is now levelling off.

Obesity is also a factor in the declining average age, but Dr Rogers said it could not be the only one because the average age was now no longer falling even though child obesity was on the rise.

Early periods could be linked with breast cancer - possibly because women are exposed to higher levels of oestrogen over their lifetime.

Dr Ken Ong, paediatric endocrinologist at the Medical Research Council, said there had been 'vast shifts' in the timing of first periods over the past century. He told the BBC that the link with meat consumption was a 'plausible' one.

'This was not related to larger body size, but rather could be due to a more direct effect of dietary protein on the body's hormone levels.'

SOURCE






Health superstition infects the British judiciary

A takeaway has been banned from opening near a secondary school in a landmark legal ruling. The decision by a High Court judge will force councils to take into account the health and well-being of pupils when making planning decisions. Mr Justice Cranston said that Tower Hamlets council, East London, 'acted unlawfully' by allowing a Fried & Fabulous to open on the site of a former grocery shop.

The takeaway selling burgers, chicken and chips was too close to the Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School, just 500 yards away, he said.

The unprecedented ruling follows a crackdown on unhealthy eating by national and local government. It comes a year after Waltham Forest became the first council to ban fast food businesses from opening close to schools.

Other local authorities are considering similar laws and yesterday's ruling means councillors could appeal against the planning permission of unhealthy takeaways if they are close to schools.

Tower Hamlets council had initially allowed the Fried & Fabulous but parents and teachers objected, fearing it would jeopardise the school's healthy-eating policy. Resident Edward Copeland was so angry that he brought the case to the High Court.

All 1,700 pupils follow strict rules stating 'no chips, fatty foods, sweets, fizzy drinks etc' can be sold at the school.

The school's head Catherine Myers was so concerned about the takeaway that she wrote a letter to the council explaining that the school was achieving outstanding examination results by educating 'the whole person'. She said the governors and student council and their neighbours 'objected strongly' and felt 'undermined' by a takeaway setting up.

'Approximately 500 students remain in school at the end of the day to take extra classes and already several takeaway shops quite cynically open up specifically to make a profit from selling cheap junk food to vulnerable teenagers,' she wrote.

Yesterday Mr Justice Cranston said that the councillors who had agreed the takeaway's opening had been wrongly informed that they could not take into account that it was so close to the secondary school.

After the ruling, Councillor Peter Golds, leader of the Tower Hamlets Conservative group, said: 'This is a very important High Court decision. 'It clarifies the law and sets a benchmark that will enable local authorities everywhere to take account of health and well-being - particularly of schoolchildren - as factors in determining planning applications.'

Schools have been increasingly adopting healthy eating policies over the last few years - many inspired by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. He launched a national campaign tied in with the TV series Jamie's School Dinners in 2006 encouraging schools to ditch unhealthy lunches and replace them with pasta and salad.

Many schools have gone further by banning vending machines on their premises and imposing 'lock-in' policies whereby pupils are not allowed outside school grounds in case they stray into takeaways.

Last year Labour-run Waltham Forest council shut down a Jamaican fast-food outlet that was deemed to be too close to a primary and secondary school. The council's rules - which apply only to those takeaways yet to receive planning permission - prevent them from opening close to one another or near schools and public places.

SOURCE



11 June, 2010

FDA: Protecting us to death

Today former FDA deputy commissioner Scott Gottlieb argues that:

“The time from lab to market for new drugs keeps getting shorter, but bad government policies threaten to reverse this trend ... News from this week's gathering of the American Society of Clinical Oncology … underscores how good we have become at turning new scientific principles into superior medicines.

Bristol Myers's drug Ipilimumab, the first treatment to extend the lives of patients with advanced melanoma skin cancer, is based on science that is 30 years in the making. Pfizer's drug Crizotinib, which shrank some of the most resistant and fatal forms of lung cancer, was developed as a result of science done over the last decade.”

Given that most drug research leads to no marketable product, it’s great that a few drug companies are able to shepherd their discoveries through the torturous regulatory system. However, my big brother warns that “pharamascolds” threaten that progress. Gottlieb agrees:

“Like all fragile ecosystems, the critical path for translating basic scientific principles into effective medicines is susceptible to outside forces. Lately, these are policies that shrink the incentives that drive the capital investment needed to underwrite these long and risky endeavors, or growing regulation by the Food and Drug Administration that makes it harder to get treatments to market.

Most ominous, the journey from lab to treatment is at risk from activists' and regulators' growing suspicion of the collaboration between the academic researchers who uncover basic science and the drug industry that is able to design and manufacture medicines. Yet that hand-off from researcher to manufacturer was behind Ipilimumab, Crizotinib and many of our best cancer treatments. …. Now Congress is endeavoring to investigate scientists who get National Institutes of Health research grants and also collaborate with industry.”

Gottlieb claims the future will bring even quicker development of useful medicines. However:

“Severing the links between the academic researchers that firm up basic science and the industries that craft medicines is the surest way to reverse this trend.”

SOURCE






Cheap cancer drug 'could save the sight of tens of thousands of older people'

A drug initially developed to fight cancer could provide a cheap way to save the sight of tens of thousands of older people, according to a new study. Doctors found that Avastin improved the sight of patients suffering from the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, a condition called age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

The drug could cost as little as £350 annually, much less than the £10,000-a-year price tag of the current therapy.

Developed to treat bowel cancer, Avastin is not yet licensed as a therapy for sight problems. However, based on early trials, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s drugs rationing body, has started to look at whether it would be effective for AMD.

A new study by researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London suggests that it would. The drug significantly improved the sight of most patients and did not appear to cause any harm to the eyes, it found.

Avastin works by targeting a protein involved in the formation of new blood vessels. This is crucial in AMD, which is caused by damage to the back of the eye triggered by leaking from abnormal blood vessels. More than 250,000 people in Britain currently suffer from the condition, with around 25,000 new cases diagnosed every year.

Campaigners fought a long battle with Nice to have access to Lucentis, which was initially deemed too expensive for the NHS.

Avastin is also expensive when it is used as a cancer drug, and it has been down for use as a bowel cancer treatment on the NHS by NICE, which said that at £21,000-a-year its costs outweighed its benefits.

However, the drug can be used much more cheaply to treat AMD. Doctors need only a fraction of the amount required to fight cancer, and treatment need only be given around seven times a year, bringing the costs down to around £50 a time, or £350 annually.

However, the trial, which is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), did not directly compare the effectiveness of Avastin to Lucentis.

Adnan Tufail, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields, who led the latest study, said that before patients were moved on to the cheaper drug further trials were needed to ensure that Avastin was at least as successful in treating the condition.

Barbara McLaughlan, from Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), said that patients should continue to be treated with Lucentis until "robust evidence" was available on the safety and effectiveness of Avastin.

SOURCE



10 June, 2010

Passive smoking 'increases the risk of mental health problems'

Since some very strong studies have shown no adverse health effects of passive smoking, the study below must be approached with caution. And the alarm bells really ring when we find that the effects were confined to men. Are male and female brains all that different?

The study is of course epidemiological rather than experimental so there is a lot of room for "holes" in its conclusions. There are three important holes in the study: Taxonomy, direction of causation assumptions and social class measurement.

Taxonomy: The researchers wisely reclassified people who claimed to be non-smokers if they had high levels of nicotine metabolites in their blood and used primarily levels of such metabolites (cotinine) as their classificatory variable. But that does cast something of a pall over their study. All that they really have is the association between mental health and cotinine level. How much of the cotinine level is actually due to passive smoke versus light smoking we do not know. If just some "non-smokers" were in fact light smokers, the whole study falls into a pit. All observed effects could be due simply to the light smokers in the sample.

Causation: The researchers observed a clear gradient between levels of cotinine and mental health. Regular smokers were the maddest. But that exposes the direction of causation assumptions. Mentally ill people regularly use nicotine as a form of self-medication: Almost all mad people smoke. So again we ask whether some of the mentally ill "non-smokers" were in fact light smokers and add the consideration that they may smoke BECAUSE they were mentally ill rather than the other way around.

Social class: An occupational categorization only was used. Education, IQ and income were not considered, even though all have social class implications and are not well correlated with one another. And since dumber people, less educated and poorer people are all more likely to smoke -- and presumably associate with similar people who do -- that was an omission large enough to leave the results moot all by itself. We may simply be seeing social class effects on mental health

The journal article is "Objectively Assessed Secondhand Smoke Exposure and Mental Health in Adults"

Passive smoking is known to increase a person's risk of heart disease and lung cancer, now research suggests it could affect mental health as well.

Scientists from the University College of London found that non-smokers exposed to a lot of secondhand smoke were 50 per cent more likely to suffer from psychological distress than those not exposed to other people's smoke.

Their risk of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital over the next six years was nearly tripled, while it was almost quadrupled for smokers.
The study found the higher a person's secondhand smoke exposure, the greater their risk of psychological distress

The study found the higher a person's secondhand smoke exposure, the greater their risk of psychological distress

Passive smoking is very common with one US study finding evidence of secondhand smoke in 60 per cent of non-smokers.

Dr Mark Hamer of UCL said that although the physical effects have been measured there is 'very limited information' on how other people's smoke might affect mental health.

To investigate, Dr Hamer and his colleagues studied 5,560 non-smoking adults and 2,595 smoking adults, none of whom had a history of mental illness.

The study subjects answered questions about psychological distress and admissions to psychiatric hospitals were tracked for six years.

Exposure to secondhand smoke among non-smokers was determined using saliva levels of cotinine, which is formed when nicotine is broken down in the body and is an established marker of nicotine exposure.

A total of 14.5 percent of study subjects reported psychological distress.

According to the investigators, the higher a person's secondhand smoke exposure, the greater their risk of psychological distress, while the risk was highest for people who were themselves smokers.

People with high exposure to secondhand smoke (those with the highest cotinine levels) who didn't actually smoke themselves were 62 per cent more likely to report psychological distress than those unexposed to secondhand smoke, while the risk for smokers was 2.45 times greater.

During follow-up, which averaged about six years, 41 people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals. The risk of hospitalization was 2.8 times greater for secondhand smokers compared to people not exposed to secondhand smoke, while it was 3.7 times greater for smokers.

The effects were stronger for never-smokers than for ex-smokers, Dr Hamer noted; the fact that former smokers were able to quit could suggest they were intrinsically less vulnerable to the effects of nicotine.

Dr Hamer said the link remained even after he and his colleagues accounted for social status, alcohol intake and other factors that could influence both the risk of mental health problems and the likelihood of being exposed to secondhand smoke. 'We did see pretty robust associations that remained after those adjustments,' he said.

Moreover, Dr Hamer and colleagues note that animal studies have hinted that tobacco may depress a person's mood and some human studies have also suggested a potential link between smoking and depression.

'Taken together, therefore, our data are consistent with other emerging evidence to suggest a causal role of nicotine exposure in mental health,' the investigators concluded in their study that appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

SOURCE






Bad health news for shorties

One wise comment below: "We need to understand the mechanism behind it". The causal chain is certainly not clear but it is consistent with other findings suggesting a general syndrome of biological fitness. Nutrition seems an unlikely explanation in a place as well-fed as Europe

Short people have a 50 percent higher risk of having a heart problem or dying from one than tall people, a new study says, though weight, blood pressure and smoking habits remain more important factors.

Previous studies have suggested a link between height and heart problems like angina, heart attacks and angioplasties. This is the first major review of such studies, including research from around the world, confirming the relationship.

Researchers in Finland looked at 52 previous papers with data on height and heart problems in more than 3 million men and women.

Experts did not consider patients' heights objectively, but within the context of a particular country's population. They found the shortest people in the population were one and a half times more likely to have heart problems or die from them than the tallest people.

On average, short people were under 161 centimetres and tall people were at least 174 centimetres.

The study was paid for by the Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research and others. It was published online Wednesday in the European Heart Journal.

"We don't want to scare short people, but perhaps they should be extra cautious about their lifestyle," said Borge Nordestgaard, a professor of genetic epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen. He was not connected to the study.

Height's impact on heart disease was still less important than things like smoking, which increases the chance of a heart ailment by up to four times, he said.

Scientists aren't sure why short people might be more susceptible to heart problems, but think there could be several explanations. Being short might be a result of being poor, meaning people of small stature could be undernourished and vulnerable to health problems in general.

Experts also suggested there could be a biological explanation, such as a hormone imbalance that hurts the heart. Scientists also suspect that because short people have smaller arteries, those could theoretically get clogged quicker with cholesterol and be more easily damaged by any changes in blood pressure.

But Joep Perk, a professor of health sciences at Linnaeus University in Sweden and a spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology, said it was too early to conclude short people had potentially problematic hearts. "We should be very cautious to tell short people they're at risk," he said. "This could unfairly stigmatise them."

He said it was premature for cardiologists to consider height as a risk factor. "We need to understand the mechanism behind it before we can do anything with this information," he said. "This is an interesting observation, but I want to know what I can do for my patients."

Tuula Paajanen, the study's lead author from Tampere University Hospital in Finland, said short people shouldn't be alarmed about the findings. "Height is only one factor (among many) that may contribute to heart disease risk," she said.

Paajanen recommended people focus on other things like not smoking, eating a balanced diet and exercise. "Those are easier to change than your height."

SOURCE



9 June, 2010

Risk for babies born ONE WEEK early: Serious health problems more likely, warn British researchers

This is utter rubbish: A tiny effect (an increased risk of one third of one percent!) and no real enquiry why. Has it occurred to no-one that mothers who deliver early might be more likely to be in poor health generally and that the causes of poor health might be genetically transmitted -- leaving a child with more likelihood of problems than normal? This is just another attempt to deny genetic differences

Babies born only a week early are at higher risk of a host of serious health problems from autism to deafness, research has shown.

A study of hundreds of thousands of British schoolchildren found that those born at 39 weeks are more likely to need extra help in the classroom than those delivered after a full 40 weeks in the womb.

The findings are particularly worrying because one in five babies in England and Wales is born by C-section. With most planned caesareans carried out at 39 weeks, the finding raises concerns that women who have the operation for non-medical reasons could unwittingly be endangering the health and prospects of their children.

Obstetricians said it emphasises the need for surgical deliveries to be put off for as long as is safe for mother and child.

The finding also reinforces calls for more research into the causes of premature births – and ways of preventing them.

Jill Pell, a professor of public health, made the link after studying the school and hospital records of 400,000 children.

Almost 18,000 had been classed as having special educational needs. The term covers learning disabilities such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and dyslexia, and physical problems such as deafness and poor vision.

The risk was highest in those who spent the shortest time in the womb. For instance, babies born at between 24 and 27 weeks were almost seven times more likely to need help at school than those delivered at 40 weeks. But even being born just a few weeks early made a difference, the journal PLoS Medicine reports.

Those born at 37 weeks were 36 per cent more likely to have learning difficulties, while for those born at 38 weeks the figure stood at 19 per cent. Babies born at 39 weeks – both naturally and by caesarean – were 9 per cent more likely to have special needs.

In England & Wales, 22 per cent of babies are born at 39 weeks. And 41 per cent of babies are born at between 37 and 39 weeks – a figure that is on the rise, largely because of an increase in nonemergency or elective caesareans.

One in four babies is delivered by C-section – almost double the World Health Organisation’s recommended rate. That figure rises to more than one in two at some private hospitals.

Most will be performed for medical reasons but up to 7 per cent are carried out at the mother’s request.

Professor Pell, of Glasgow University, stressed that women having planned caesareans shouldn’t panic about the increased odds of special needs, because the chances of any one baby being affected are very low.

Some 4.7 per cent of the babies born at 39 weeks had special needs, compared with 4.4 of those who went to term. But she added: ‘It is important from a public health point of view as so many infants are born pre-term. ‘A third of deliveries take place at 37 to 39 weeks. Across the country, that is an awful lot of extra cases of special educational needs due to slightly early deliveries.’ She advises mothers-to-be due to have a caesarean to thoroughly discuss the pros and cons with their doctor.

Although the operation can be a lifesaver, it carries well-documented risks for mother and child. Babies born by C-section are more than twice as likely to die in their first month as those born naturally.

In addition, the mother is more likely to need intensive care, is at higher risk of blood clots and infections, and may find it harder to bond with their newborn.

An editorial accompanying the research report concludes: ‘These findings have important implications for the timing of elective delivery. They suggest that deliveries should ideally wait until 40 weeks of gestation, because even a baby born at 39 weeks – the normal timing for elective deliveries these days – has an increased risk of special educational needs compared with a baby born a week later.’

But Professor Andrew Shennan, an obstetrician at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, said the risks of leaving elective C-sections to 40 weeks should be studied.

The professor, who is also a spokesman for the baby charity Tommy’s, said: ‘The relationship between early birth and later problems in life, such as special educational needs, is well established. ‘The earlier the birth, the greater the risk, but as later pre-term births are far more common, they still provide a significant proportion of all individuals with problems.

‘However the cause of early birth may contribute to the risk, for example, a baby who’s already sick may need to be delivered early to give it a chance of survival.

‘We do not know if changing the date of delivery in elective cases would reduce risk, as there are other risks to the mother and baby in doing this. More research is required.’

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said that waiting until 40 weeks to perform an elective C-section also carried risks, and therefore was unlikely to be better for the baby overall.

But the study’s findings do mean doctors should wait until 39 weeks, if possible.

RCOG spokesman Professor James Walker, a consultant obstetrician at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, said: ‘There are still some places where people are not doing it at 39 weeks. Although that is what we recommend, it doesn’t mean that everybody is doing it. ‘This emphasises the need for waiting as long as safely possible.’

SOURCE





Gout drug 'could treat angina'

It can also give you bigger tits so whether you are male or female may be a consideration

Researchers discovered angina patients who were given the drug allopurinol were able to exercise longer and harder before they experienced chest pain. Angina is a very common disease that causes patients to have a narrowing of their coronary arteries, which are the blood vessels that supply the heart with oxygen.

When patients exercise the arteries can become blocked, starving them of oxygen. This then causes sufferers to experience chest pain and in serious cases heart attacks.

But a team of doctors at the University of Dundee found the gout drug allopurinol appeared to protect the heart against oxygen deficiency. Professor of cardiovascular medicine at the university, Dr Allan Struthers, said he hoped his teams findings would now help increase the quality of life for angina sufferers.

"What we found will surprise most people, is that a drug that is used to treat gout is able to make people with angina walk a lot further before they get chest pain. Thats because it appears to protect the heart against oxygen deficiency", he said.

Angina affects 6.6 per cent of adult males and 5.6 per cent of adult females in Scotland. Of this number, one in three experience chest pain at least once a week.

The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation, looked at 65 patients with chronic angina from the Tayside area.

They were asked to exercise on a treadmill while hooked up to an ECG monitor. Measurements were made of the point at which the subjects got chest pain, and the point at which the monitors picked up ST depression, a sign that the heart is beginning to be starved of oxygen.

The patients were then randomised to a period of treatment with allopurinol and a period of treatment with a placebo. This showed that patients were able to walk 25 per cent further before experiencing chest pain and before showing signs of coronary oxygen deprivation when receiving allopurinol.

Professor Struthers said the research, published in the latest edition of The Lancet, explained a larger scale study was needed to determine the full potential of prescribing allopurinol to angina suffers, but said could even help to protect against heart attacks in the future. He said: "Allopurinol has been on the market for about 40 years and so its a cheap drug, one that is obviously very well tolerated with very few side-effects.

"What we have shown is that it has another property completely different to gout-prevention, which hadnt really been suspected before. "There are wider implications that we havent studied yet, but it may well protect the heart in other situations. This might include protecting against heart attacks, but we cant say that for certain at this stage."

Source



8 June, 2010

Children with regular sleep patterns 'smarter at school'

The usual naive rubbish. All they have shown is that well-organized middle class parents have smarter kids

Children who go to bed at the same time every night do better academically, a conference is to hear. Researchers found that children who had a regular bedtime performed better at languages, reading and maths than those who went to bed at different times.

Scientists at SRI International, an independent American research institute based in California, found the earlier a child went to bed, the better they performed at school.

The study of 8000 children who were aged four concluded those who had less than the recommended 11 hours of sleep each night fell behind in their studies.

The institute’s research, the largest of its kind, is due to be presented on Monday at a sleep conference hosted by the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

"Getting parents to set bedtime routines can be an important way to make a significant impact on children's emergent literacy and language skills,” said Dr Erika Gaylor, an early childhood policy researcher who led the study. "Paediatricians can easily promote regular bedtimes with parents and children, behaviours, which in turn lead to healthy sleep."

The researchers completed the developmental assessment on four year-old children. It also included analysis taken from on information on bedtimes that were conducted with parent during phone interviews when their child was nine months old and again when their child was four.

The findings found that having a regular bedtime was the most consistent predictor of positive developmental outcomes.

Scores for receptive and expressive language, phonological awareness, literacy and early math abilities were higher in children whose parents reported having rules about what time their child goes to bed.

Children who had an earlier bedtime also had a predictive of higher scores for most developmental measures.

Dr Gaylor said the data also disclosed that many children were not getting the recommended amount of sleep, which may have negative consequences for their development and school achievement.

She recommended parents set an appropriate time for their child to go to bed so they received sufficient levels of sleep. Parents, she added, should also interact with their child at bedtime using routines such as reading books or telling stories.

A previous study, published in Sleep Medicine in August last year, also emphasised the importance of an early bedtime and consistent bedtime routine for children. It reported that children with a bedtime after 9pm took longer to fall asleep and had a shorter total sleep time.

Children without a consistent bedtime routine also were reported to obtain less sleep.

Source





Advances reported on two cancers

But you have to be either "the right patient" or risk dying from the treatment

Using two opposite strategies, scientists say they have made significant progress in taming two of the most intractable types of cancer. One approach, highly focused on specific types of tumors, shrank them significantly in 57 percent of patients with a lung cancer marked by a specific genetic abnormality.

Even though the clinical trial was small (just 82 people, with no control group), the results were considered so striking for such sick patients that the study will be featured today at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. "This is a phenomenal example of finding the right patient and the right drug very early on," said Dr. Pasi A. Janne of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was involved in the trial.

The other strategy is a potentially universal treatment for all types of cancer that works by releasing a brake on the body's immune system, letting the immune system attack the cancer more vigorously. In a study of patients who had advanced melanoma, those who got an experimental drug lived a median of about 10 months, compared with 6.4 months for those in a control group.

Bristol-Myers Squibb, which sponsored the trial, is planning to apply for regulatory approval to sell the drug, ipilimumab.

The lung cancer drug, by contrast, blocks an aberrant protein called ALK that is found in only about 5 percent of non-small-cell lung tumors. But in patients whose tumors have this aberration, the drug seems to work wonders. Not only did the tumors shrink in 57 percent of the 82 patients, they remained stable in 30 percent more.

Pfizer, which sponsored the study, has started a more definitive trial aimed at winning approval of the drug, crizotinib.

There are caveats. The effects of crizotinib can eventually wear off, though 72 percent of the patients in the trial were free of cancer progression for six months.

As for the melanoma drug, because it removes checks on the immune system, 10 percent to 15 percent of patients who took it in the study suffered severe side effects that had to be treated with immune-damping steroids. Seven patients out of 540 who got ipilimumab died from these immune effects, according to a report of the study published online yesterday by The New England Journal of Medicine.

SOURCE



7 June, 2010

Some Sunscreens Speed Up Skin Cancer

I can't trace the research behind this note in a popular newspaper but it seems worth a mention

The Environmental Working Group advises checking for ingredients such as Vitamin A and its derivatives such as retinol and retinyl palmitate, which a study said can speed up skin cancer.

The study said to also check for oxybenzone, which can penetrate the skin and enter the blood stream. "We now have some evidence in laboratory conditions that they may actually potentiate cancer in lab animals," said Adrian Guevara, a dermatologist with Sun City Dermatology.

Guevara is quick to point out that no human studies have been done, so he believes sunscreen is still a must. "We have a very clear benefit for using sunscreen, it's going to reduce the risk that you get any sort of skin cancer," Guevara told KFOX. "Those clear benefits out weigh any unknown theoretical risk of the current sets of sunscreens."

He said what's much more dangerous is that few people use sunscreen correctly. "Use more than you think you should use. They say a shot glass to cover your exposed skin. That's a whole lot more than anybody uses," he said.

SOURCE





Ovarian cancer drug Avastin could extend life by four to six months

A promising drug used in the treatment of bowel, breast and lung cancer could also help to extend the lives of women with advanced ovarian tumours, a landmark study suggests. Results released at a major cancer conference in the United States indicate that taking bevacizumab (Avastin), in combination with standard chemotherapy, can offer women an extra four to six months of life without their disease getting worse.

The drug is the first promising treatment for ovarian cancer — considered a “silent killer” as it is difficult to diagnose and treat — for almost 20 years. Ovarian cancer is the fifth-most common cancer in women, with 6,800 new cases each year in Britain and 4,300 deaths. Survival rates are above 70 per cent if it is caught early, but only about one in three is diagnosed in the early stages.

Bevacizumab, which works by starving tumours of their blood supply, has already emerged as a key weapon in the fight against colon, lung, breast and other cancers. The drug will be licensed as a treatment for ovarian cancer this year, but will have to be approved for routine NHS use by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which is considering the drug’s benefits for bowel and breast cancer.

For those diseases, Roche, the manufacturer, has proposed a discount to the NHS that would cap the cost of treatment at £23,100 per patient.

The latest trial of nearly 1,900 women with advanced epithelial ovarian cancer — the most common form of the disease — was funded by the National Cancer Institute in the US. Those who took bevacizumab as well as undergoing chemotherapy for 15 months had a 35 per cent higher chance of living longer, without their cancer progressing, than those who did not, researchers found.

A second clinical trial of Avastin in women with ovarian cancer is under way in Britain and due to report its findings this autumn.

The main treatment for ovarian cancer is surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible but, where disease is diagnosed late, there is a high chance that the cancer will have spread.

Although advanced cases will still be terminal in many cases, researchers said that the chance of extra months of good-quality life “offered real hope” for women in Britain, who presently receive the same chemotherapy regime as was given in the mid-1990s.

Professor Chris Poole, a consultant medical oncologist at University Hospital Coventry, said: “These results provide the most clinically significant advance in the treatment of this disease since I was appointed a consultant 16 years ago. “We know how important it is for the success of subsequent treatment that we keep ovarian cancer under control for as long as possible after initial chemotherapy. In so far as bevacizumab evidently helps us achieve this critically important objective, it offers real hope for women with this dreadful disease.”

Ovarian cancer can run in families, and more than 50 per cent of cases occur in women over 65. More than a third of women with cancer wait more than six months from first visiting their GP to receiving their diagnosis.

The five-year survival rate, at 30 per cent, is one of the lowest in the Western world. In the trial, presented yesterday at the American Society for Clinical Oncology annual conference in Chicago, disease progression was checked by either testing for levels of blood protein which provide evidence of the cancer’s growth, or through radiological scans to assess the size of the tumour.

Annwen Jones, the chief executive of the charity Target Ovarian Cancer, welcomed the results. “This means that the period that women are well and not having treatment appears to be extended. “They are better able to lead more normal lives for a longer time, spending time with their families and being well enough to do things they want to do,” she said.

SOURCE



6 June, 2010

A daily dose of nature significantly boosts feelings of vitality, researchers claim

All this rubbish tells you is that students are good at telling their professors what their professors want to hear. Where was the sampling? Where were the double-blind controls? I suppose we should be glad that there were some controls but experimenter expectation effects and social desirability responding do not appear to have been taken into account. The journal article "Vitalizing effects of being outdoors and in nature" is here. It sounds more like the record of a crusade than anything else

Spending just 20 minutes a day in the park is enough to significantly boost vitality and energy levels, researchers have found. Being outside in nature makes people feel more alive and could be important for mental and physical health, studies have shown.

A series of experiments conducted on college students in America has shown that the boost in wellbeing comes from being outside, rather than the effect of physical exercise or socialising with others.

Lead author, Richard Ryan, professor of psychology, psychiatry, and education at the University of Rochester, in New York, said: "Nature is fuel for the soul. "Often when we feel depleted we reach for a cup of coffee, but research suggests a better way to get energised is to connect with nature.

"Research has shown that people with a greater sense of vitality don't just have more energy for things they want to do, they are also more resilient to physical illnesses. One of the pathways to health may be to spend more time in natural settings."

The experiments published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology involved over 500 students.

Participants were led on a 15-minute walk through indoor hallways or along a tree-lined river path. In another, the undergraduates viewed photographic scenes of buildings or landscapes. A third experiment required students to imagine themselves in a variety of situations both active and sedentary, inside and out, and with and without others.

Two final experiments tracked participants' moods and energy levels throughout the day using diary entries. Over either four days or two weeks, students recorded their exercise, social interactions, time spent outside, and exposure to natural environments, including plants and windows.

And that sense of increased vitality exists above and beyond the energising effects of physical activity and social interaction that are often associated with our forays into the natural world, the studies show.

All the results showed the students consistently felt more energetic when they spent time in natural settings or just imagined themselves in such situations.

The most significant findings were that being outside in nature for 20 minutes a day was enough to boost feelings of vitality.

Prof Ryan added: "We have a natural connection with living things.

"Nature is something within which we flourish, so having it be more a part of our lives is critical, especially when we live and work in built environments."

He said these studies underscore the importance of having access to parks and natural surroundings and of incorporating natural elements into our buildings through windows and indoor plants.

SOURCE




Lung cancer treatment 'shrinks tumours'

Depending on your genes

An experimental therapy has shown a high response rate and helps shrink tumours in lung cancer patients with a specific form of genetic alteration, according to results of a clinical trial.

The Pfizer Inc drug crizotinib shrank tumours in lung cancer patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with a specific gene alteration of an enzyme implicated in cancer cell growth, known as anaplastic lymphoma kinase, or ALK.

According to Pfizer, around 10,000 people in the United States are affected by a lung cancer with this particular genetic mutation.

About 90 per cent of the 82 participants in the small-scale phase one clinical trial responded positively, and more than half - 57 per cent - saw their tumours shrink after eight weeks, said lead author Yung-Jue Bang, a physician at Seoul National University College of Medicine.

Researchers had only expected about 10 per cent of the patients, many of whom had already received three or more prior treatments, to respond to the treatment.

Most of the NSCLC patients were former smokers or had never smoked. The median duration of treatment was approximately six months.

Crizotinib, which is taken orally, works by inhibiting the ALK enzyme. About one in 20 lung cancer patients in the US are estimated to be diagnosed with ALK-positive NSCLC each year.

SOURCE



5 June, 2010

Air pollution 'could help to trigger heart attacks' (?)

This total rubbish got reported only because people liked its conclusions. I could say more but I think the rubric below is sufficient

The dirtier the air, the more likely people are to suffer sudden heart attacks, researchers have found.

Particulate matter - tiny specks of soot, dust, and other pollutants in the air that can be breathed deep into the lungs - has been 'consistently' linked to increases in deaths from heart disease and clogged arteries.

But studies looking at whether air pollution specifically ups the risk of heart attack or cardiac arrest have had mixed results.

Now scientists from Monash University in Melbourne have found a direct link between the increase of airborne particles and the likelihood of heart attack.

The Australian authors, led by Dr Martine Dennekamp noted that airborne particles could also trigger heart attack or even sudden death in people with no apparent symptoms of heart disease.

The team looked at more than eight thousands cases of sudden heart attack among people 35 and older that occurred in Melbourne between 2003 and 2006.

After a rise in concentration of the tiniest airborne particles (particles less than 2.5 microns across), the likelihood of heart attack rose and stayed higher than average for two days.

For every 4.26 micrograms per cubic metre increase in PM2.5 concentrations, the risk of cardiac arrest was four per cent higher than average for the next 48 hours.

None of several other pollutants the researchers measured, including larger airborne particles, affected risk. The effect was strongest for people 65 to 74 years old.

However, the study does not prove that pollution causes more cardiac arrests, as the researchers did not find out whether participants in the study also smoked or had other risk factors for heart disease.

SOURCE





Yoghurt slashes risk of children developing tooth decay 'by 22 per cent'

Data dredging in mother-report data: Strong stuff (NOT). And to cap that, the study was of 3-year-olds only. Why? How generalizable are data from baby teeth? And the effect is tiny anyway. I like yoghurt but this is no reason to buy any

Eating yoghurt regularly could slash a child's risk of developing tooth decay, according to new research. Consuming the dairy product at least four times a week reduced the chances of three-year-olds developing cavities by 22 per cent, compared to those who ate it less than once a week.

The findings, published in the Journal of Dentistry, came from a Japanese study which was investigating earlier claims that dairy foods generally could ward off dental decay in children.

But while butter, cheese and milk appeared to have no major benefit, high consumption of yoghurt did have a protective effect in young children. It's not clear why yoghurt reduces the need for fillings. But one theory is that it contains proteins that 'bind' to the surface of teeth and seals them against attack from harmful acids. This seal means the calcium and phosphate which makes up tooth enamel is not broken down over time.

The research, by experts at Fukuoka University and the University of Tokyo, supports earlier work by Australian scientists who exposed extracted teeth to yoghurt and found it kept decay at bay.

In the latest study, Japanese researchers looked at more than 2,000 children aged three and quizzed parents on their eating habits. Each child also had a dental check to assess the state of their teeth. The results showed a clear link with yoghurt but not with other popular dairy produce.

In a report on their findings the researchers said: 'High consumption of yoghurt may be associated with a lower prevalence of dental cavities in young children.'

But British Dental Health Foundation chief executive Dr Nigel Carter warned: 'It should be remembered that many yoghurts in the UK contain added sugar and it is well established that increasing the frequency of sugar containing foods and drinks leads to an increase in dental decay. 'Yoghurts are also quite thick and will tend to coat the teeth for longer which can also lead to problems. If parents wish to increase their children's yoghurt intake it is therefore important that this be confined to meal times.'

Last week, British experts warned adults who fail to brush their teeth twice a day are putting themselves at increased risk of heart disease. It's thought that inflammation in the body, including the gums, increases the likelihood of clogged arteries.

SOURCE



4 June, 2010

Burger diet raises a child's risk of asthma?

More stupidity: Epidemiological speculation piled on top of shaky self-report data. What the findings most likely show, if anything, is that middle class people are both more careful about their diet and healthier

Children who tuck into three or more burgers a week are more likely to suffer from asthma and wheezing, say researchers. But they claim the extra risk may not be caused by the meat-rich diet itself, but by a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables.

The study, which looked at 50,000 children from 20 countries, found a Mediterranean-style diet cut youngsters' risk of asthma.

Parents were asked about their children's eating habits and whether they had ever suffered from asthma or wheezing. Those who ate a diet rich in fruit were less likely to complain of wheezing in both rich and poor countries, says a report in the journal Thorax.

Eating three or more burgers a week was linked to a higher risk, especially in rich countries. However, a diet generally high in meat did not increase the risk, which led the researchers to conclude that other lifestyle factors could be involved.

Asthma rates in the UK have doubled in the last 20 years, at the same time as consumption of processed food has soared.

Dr Gabriele Nagel of Ulm University, Germany, said: 'Fruit and vegetables contain antioxidants and other biologically active factors which may contribute to the favourable effect of fruit consumption in asthma.' [The usual unfounded garbage]

SOURCE





Statins: Distinguishing statistical significance from clinical significance

In the past post I was talking about the difference between statistical and clinical significance and how many reported studies have apparently mixed up the two. Now here's a nice case where people seem to be aware of the difference. The article is also interesting in its own right. It deals with AstraZeneca's cholesterol lowering statin drug Crestor being approved by the FDA as a preventive measure for heart attacks and stroke. If this works out Crestor could be a real cash cow for the company since its patent does not expire till 2016 (unlike Lipitor which is going to hit Pfizer hard next year).

The problem seems to be that prescription of the drug would be based on high levels not of cholesterol but of a protein named C-Reactive Protein whose high levels are supposed to constitute an inflammatory marker for high cholesterol. The CRP-inflammation-cholesterol connection is widely believed to hold but there is no consensus in the medical community about the exact causative link (many factors can lead to high CRP levels).

The more important recent issue seems to be a study published in The Lancet which indicates a 9% increased risk of Type 2 diabetes associated with Crestor. As usual the question is whether these risks outweigh the benefits. The Crestor trial was typical of heart disease trials and involved a large population of 18,000 subjects. As the article notes, statistical significance in the reduction of heart attacks in this population does not necessarily translate to clinical significance:

Critics said the claim of cutting heart disease risk in half — repeated in news reports nationwide — may have misled some doctors and consumers because the patients were so healthy that they had little risk to begin with.

The rate of heart attacks, for example, was 0.37 percent, or 68 patients out of 8,901 who took a sugar pill. Among the Crestor patients it was 0.17 percent, or 31 patients. That 55 percent relative difference between the two groups translates to only 0.2 percentage points in absolute terms — or 2 people out of 1,000.

Stated another way, 500 people would need to be treated with Crestor for a year to avoid one usually survivable heart attack. Stroke numbers were similar.

“That’s statistically significant but not clinically significant,” said Dr. Steven W. Seiden, a cardiologist in Rockville Centre, N.Y., who is one of many practicing cardiologists closely following the issue. At $3.50 a pill, the cost of prescribing Crestor to 500 people for a year would be $638,000 to prevent one heart attack.

Is it worth it? AstraZeneca and the F.D.A. have concluded it is. Others disagree.

“The benefit is vanishingly small,” Dr. Seiden said. “It just turns a lot of healthy people into patients and commits them to a lifetime of medication.”

To some this may seem indeed like a drug of the affluent. Only time will tell.

SOURCE



3 June, 2010

The false reasoning never stops: "Having a degree could help you fight dementia"

Just another demonstration that smart people usually have more robust health

Better educated people have more resistance to dementia, research shows. Scientists found that the symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, were reduced in people who had undertaken higher education.

The extra time spent poring over books preparing for exams had a physical benefit when they became older, researchers say.

Previous studies had shown that higher education had offered some protection against symptoms in the later stages of disease. 'We wanted to investigate how education affected the disease in the early stages of dementia, known as mild cognitive impairment,' said Dr Sindre Rolstad, a Swedish psychologist.

By analysing patients' spinal fluid, researchers at the University of Gothenburg were able to examine whether there were signs of dementia in the brain.

Dr Rolstad said: 'Highly educated patients with mild cognitive impairment who went on to develop dementia over the next two years had more signs of disease in their spinal fluid than those with intermediate and low levels of education. Despite having more disease in the brain, the highly educated patients showed the same symptoms of the disease as their less well educated counterparts.

'This means that patients with higher levels of education tolerate more disease in the brain.'

With this knowledge, doctors may be able to speed up the diagnosis of dementia in 'smart people' who were often mistreated because they did not show as many classical symptoms.

The researchers also studied patients with mild cognitive impairment who did not go on to develop dementia over the next two years. 'We found that the highly educated patients who did not develop dementia during the study showed signs of better nerve function than those with lower levels of education.'

Dr Rolstad said: 'This finding means that the highly educated not only tolerate more disease in the brain but also sustain less nerve damage during the early stages of the disease.'

The results indicate that a higher reserve capacity delays the symptoms of dementia and the progress of the disease.

SOURCE





Feeling wired? Don’t blame the coffee

This is a little surprising but, without having a close look at the methodology, I can't see any problems with the inferences drawn. It is generally true that addicts to anything get to the point where they need their fix just to feel normal

The stimulatory effects of a strong cup of coffee in the morning may be nothing more than an illusion. People who routinely use caffeinated drinks to kick-start their day derive no actual benefit in terms of increased alertness, compared with those given a decaffinated variety in a recent study. Instead, they may feel better simply because they are correcting the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal, researchers say.

The study, published online today in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, reports that frequent drinkers of coffee and other caffeinated drinks develop a tolerance to both the stimulatory effects of caffeine and side-effects of increased anxiety.

Tests on 379 individuals who abstained from caffeine for 16 hours before being given either caffeine in pill form or a placebo showed little difference in computer tests designed to gauge their alertness level.

While frequent consumers reported feeling alerted by a cup of coffee that contained about 70-100mg of caffeine, recent studies suggest that this is merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal.

Approximately half of the participants in the latest study said that they drank low or no amounts of caffeine — less than 40mg a day, or the amount contained in a can of cola. The other volunteers reported drinking more than that. All were asked to rate their personal levels of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after being given either the caffeine — as 100mg late morning, and 150mg 90 minutes later — or the placebo pills.

They were also asked to carry out a series of computer tasks to test for their levels of memory, attentiveness and vigilance.

Peter Rogers, who led the study at the University of Bristol, said that caffeine consumption was associated with increased anxiety and raised blood pressure, but did not improve test results.

“Our study shows that we don’t gain an advantage from consuming caffeine — although we feel alerted by it, this is caffeine just bringing us back to normal,” he said. “On the other hand, while caffeine can increase anxiety, tolerance means that for most caffeine consumers this effect is negligible.”

SOURCE



2 June, 2010

Foods advertised on television 'sugary and fatty but not nutritious'

This is complete rubbish. Nobody has ever shown that sugar is bad for you but it HAS been shown that the amount of fruit and vegetables you eat is irrelevant to health. The report below is, in other words, based on discredited assumptions

I think the general public are more open-minded than scientists are. Scientists get hold of some pet theory and cling to it like grim death -- evidence regardless. I certainly noted that in my own iconoclastic research career and it is certainly obvious in the global warming "debate". Sad that medical scientists seem to be at least as bad, though

Following a diet based on food advertised on television would leave people consuming 25 times more sugar and 20 times more fat than is healthy, research shows.

Prime time programmes include commercials for single meals that have more than three times the recommended daily servings for sugars, the study disclosed.

Researchers found that a 2,000-calorie diet consisting entirely of advertised foods would contain less than half of the recommended servings of vegetables, dairy, and fruits.

But the amount of sugar and fat contained in meals promoted on television is so great that eating just one meal provides up to three times the recommended daily servings.

The research, which is based on an analysis of adverts on US television, has been published in the June issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Michael Mink, Assistant Professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, Georgia, who led the study, said: "The results of this study suggest the foods advertised on television tend to oversupply nutrients associated with chronic illness and undersupply nutrients that help protect against illness."

Researchers analysed 84 hours of prime time and 12 hours of Saturday morning broadcast television over a 28-day period in 2004.

SOURCE





Is getting angry good for you?

Yes and no. The measures of benefit below are very rough and it could give you a heart attack

Losing your temper could actually good for you, researchers have found, because letting off steam can lesson the effects of stress. The findings appear to back up the common psychological theory that venting emotions is better for mental health than keeping them locked up.

Expressing anger increases blood flow to a part of the brain thought to be involved in feelings of happiness, the research found.

Scientists were interested in what happens to the human body when we are enraged. To test responses they gathered 30 men in a laboratory and slowly increased their anger levels. The volunteers were all given a list of written statements, asked to read each one silently and then recall a situation in which they felt that way.

The sentences escalated gradually from “today is no different from any other day” to “I am consumed with hatred”. The men's’ heart rate, blood pressure and levels of two stress hormones, testosterone and cortisol, were all measured, and their brains scanned, at the start and the end of the experiment.

The findings, published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour, show that the left hemisphere of the brain became more stimulated when the men were angry. Dr Neus Herrero, from the University of Valencia in Spain, who led the study, said that the left frontal region of the brain is commonly thought to be involved in experiencing positive emotions, while the right is more related to negative emotions. [Good God! What a rough measure. There are many differences in hemispherical function]

Inducing anger generated profound changes in the human body which controlled the heart and hormones, he said. "In addition, changes in cerebral activity also occur, especially in the frontal and temporal lobes," he added.

However, the study also found that getting angry could have serious negative effects on the body. The heart rates and blood pressure levels of the volunteers all increased when they were angry.

And although cortisol levels fell, testosterone levels increased, the study shows.

SOURCE



1 June, 2010

Pregnant? Forget housework, it could harm your new baby (?)

The usual epidemiological rubbish. Women who did more housework give birth earlier. But who were those mothers? Working class mothers? If so it could be simply the usual class effect -- of poorer people having more health problems

It is the perfect excuse for mothers-to-be to unplug the vacuum and abandon the washing up – housework could be bad for baby. Research suggests the 'boring and repetitive' nature of household chores raises the odds of giving birth prematurely. Exercise, however, is good for both mother and unborn child.

Researchers asked almost 12,000 new mothers how much they had exercised during pregnancy – including housework. The women were also asked about their jobs, the weight of their babies and whether they were born early.

And the information showed that mentally unstimulating work, including doing jobs around the house day-in day-out, increased the chances of giving birth at least three weeks early by up to 25 per cent. Although it isn't clear why, researchers think it may be that boring tasks increase levels of stress hormones involved in triggering labour.

The study, published in the journal Perinatal Epidemiology, also threw up some other interesting results. For instance, women who work night shifts seem to have slightly heavier babies. Again it isn't clear why, but may simply be that those who work through pregnancy are healthier in general.

The research also showed sedentary lifestyles raised the odds of having an underweight baby, while strenuous exercise did no harm to either mother or baby.

Researcher Hajo Wildschut, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said: 'Pregnancy is not a disease. 'In fact, most women who are pregnant are healthy and most of them are being delivered of perfectly healthy babies.

'Women who are healthy and do not have pregnancy complications should not restrict their activities in order to achieve a better pregnancy outcome. 'They may safely continue their normal daily physical activities, including strenuous activities like jogging, squash and weight training even until late in pregnancy.'

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says that in most cases exercise in pregnancy is safe. Mothers-to-be are advised to avoid contact sports, cycling, ice-skating and horse-riding.

Spokesman Patrick O'Brien, a consultant obstetrician, said: 'The advice is pretty sensible stuff. Exercise is good in pregnancy, it keeps you aerobically fit, it keeps your weight under control, it probably reduces the chances of difficulties and it makes it easier to deal with the birth and afterwards.'

Asked whether mothers-to-be should leave the housework to someone else, he said: 'I wonder if the corollary is true: if you're overdue and want to bring on labour, maybe you should get the ironing out!'

SOURCE





Oncimmune develop simple blood test for early detection of cancer

Sounds a bit optimistic but one hopes it really does work

A simple blood test that can detect a cancer before a tumour has taken shape has been developed by British scientists. Due to be introduced in Britain by early next year, it is described as offering a “paradigm shift” in cancer diagnosis.

The test is the first to identify accurately the signals sent out by a person’s immune system as a cancer germinates. Research suggests that such signals can be detected up to five years before a tumour is spotted, priming doctors to intervene at the earliest moment when a solid cancer appears.

Scientists described the test, devised initially for lung cancer, as a means of tackling the country’s poor record of early diagnosis and disease survival. Detection of lung, pancreas and gullet cancers is often so late that it acts as little more than confirmation of imminent death.

Physical symptoms — the most common trigger for treatment — often will not appear until two thirds of the way through the cancer’s development. In the case of lung disease, the tumour can already be the size of a tennis ball. Even the earliest screening detection is only picking up the cancer after more than 20 cell divisions, while death normally comes after about 40.

The new test, developed after 15 years of research by clinicians in Nottingham, and in Kansas, is to be introduced in America later this month. Initially it will help screen smokers at high risk of lung cancer, alongside conventional screening.

The technology, developed by scientists at the University of Nottingham though a spin-out company called Oncimmune, works by identifying how the immune system responds to the first molecular signs of cancer development. Research has shown that cancers involve irregular cells producing small amounts of protein material called antigens. These prompt the immune system to react, producing large amounts of autoantibodies.

By tracking this activity, and identifying which combination of antigens signals the presence of a particular cancer, scientists have been able to create a reproducible test which simply requires 10ml of blood from a patient.

Professor John Robertson, a breast cancer specialist who led the research, said that it proved that accurate identification of autoantibodies caused by antigens, and the cancer they represented, could be transformed into a simple test. Work is under way on a breast cancer blood test. He said that the technology should improve significantly the detection of 90 per cent of solid cancers.

“The earliest cancer we have seen is a cancer that has been screen detected, and yet biologically that’s late in the road of cancer development,” he said.

“We are starting to understand carcinogenesis in a way that we have never seen before — seeing which proteins are going wrong, and how the immune system responds. It’s as if your body is shouting ‘I’ve got cancer’ way before a tumour can be detected.”

Research has involved more than 8,000 individuals in Britain and America. Presentations on the technology are due to be made at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago next week.

Respiratory specialists and family doctors in the US have been piloting the test, which costs £300, on smokers. In many cases it either confirmed suspicions of a cancer, or prompted surgical intervention on a cancerous nodule previously thought to be benign.

Geoffrey Hamilton-Fairley, executive chairman of Oncimmune, said that the test, known as EarlyCDT-Lung, would be available from early 2011 in Britain. Initially it will be supplied to private healthcare groups — at a cost similar to the US rate.

Meetings have already been held with Professor Sir Mike Richards, the national clinical director for cancer, who described the test as “a very exciting concept” with the potential to improve Britain’s poor cancer survival rates. Professor Richards said that it would require large-scale randomised trials to prove its benefits across patient populations for use on the NHS.

“Now that the test is shortly to become available [privately] we have to think about doing a wider programme to show that it can save the lives, as we hope it might.”

SOURCE






SITE MOTTO: "Epidemiology is mostly bunk"

Where it is not bunk is when it shows that some treatment or influence has no effect on lifespan or disease incidence. It is as convincing as disproof as it is unconvincing as proof. Think about it. As Einstein said: No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Epidemiological studies are useful for hypothesis-generating or for hypothesis-testing of theories already examined in experimental work but they do not enable causative inferences by themselves


The standard of reasoning that one commonly finds in epidemiological journal articles is akin to the following false syllogism:
Chairs have legs
You have legs
So therefore you are a chair


Even if we concede that getting fat shortens your life, what right has anybody got to question someone's decision to accept that tradeoff for themselves? Such a decision could be just one version of the old idea that it is best to have a short life but a merry one. Even the Bible is supportive of that thinking. See Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22: 13. To deny the right to make such a personal decision is plainly Fascistic.


"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact" -- Charles Darwin


"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases", said Moliere. That may no longer be true but there is still a lot of false medical "wisdom" around that does harm to various degrees. And showing its falsity is rarely the problem. The problem is getting people -- medical researchers in particular -- to abandon their preconceptions


Bertrand Russell could have been talking about today's conventional dietary "wisdom" when he said: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”


Eating lots of fruit and vegetables is NOT beneficial


"Obesity" is 77% genetic. So trying to make fatties slim is punishing them for the way they were born. That sort of thing is furiously condemned in relation to homosexuals so why is it OK for fatties?


****************

Some more problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

11). A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

12. Fascism: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

*********************


More on salt (See point 5 above): Salt is a major source of iodine, which is why salt is normally "iodized" by official decree. Cutting back salt consumption runs the risk of iodine deficiency, with its huge adverse health impacts -- goiter, mental retardation etc. GIVE YOUR BABY PLENTY OF SALTY FOODS -- unless you want to turn it into a cretin


Trans fats: For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.


The "antioxidant" religion: The experimental evidence is that antioxidants SHORTEN your life, if anything. Studies here and here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance. That they are of benefit is a great theory but it is one that has been coshed by reality plenty of times.


The medical consensus is often wrong. The best known wrongheaded medical orthodoxy is that stomach ulcers could not be caused by bacteria because the stomach is so acidic. Disproof of that view first appeared in 1875 (Yes. 1875) but the falsity of the view was not widely recognized until 1990. Only heroic efforts finally overturned the consensus and led to a cure for stomach ulcers. See here and here and here.


NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".


Huge ($400 million) clinical trial shows that a low fat diet is useless . See also here and here


Dieticians are just modern-day witch-doctors. There is no undergirding for their usual recommendations in double-blind studies.


The fragility of current medical wisdom: Would you believe that even Old Testament wisdom can sometimes trump medical wisdom? Note this quote: "Spiess discussed Swedish research on cardiac patients that compared Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions to patients with similar disease progression during open-heart surgery. The research found those who refused transfusions had noticeably better survival rates.


Relying on the popular wisdom can certainly hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."


Since many of my posts here make severe criticisms of medical research, I should perhaps point out that I am also a severe critic of much research in my own field of psychology. See here and here


This is NOT an "alternative medicine" site. Perhaps the only (weak) excuse for the poorly substantiated claims that often appear in the medical literature is the even poorer level of substantiation offered in the "alternative" literature.


I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills. Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are. If (say) 3 individuals in a thousand in a control group had some sort of an adverse outcome versus 4 out of a thousand in a group undergoing some treatment, the difference will be published in the medical literature with great excitement and intimations of its importance. In fact, of course, such small differences are almost certainly random noise and are in any rational calculus unimportant. And statistical significance is little help in determining the importance of a finding. Statistical significance simply tells you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size. But a statistically significant difference could have been due to any number of other randomly-present factors.


Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: below:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.


The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could have been speaking of the prevailing health "wisdom" of today when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."


The Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Second Edition says (p. 384): "the threshold for concluding that an agent was more likely than not the cause of an individual's disease is a relative risk greater than 2.0." Very few of the studies criticized on this blog meet that criterion.


Improbable events do happen at random -- as mathematician John Brignell notes rather tartly:
"Consider, instead, my experiences in the village pub swindle. It is based on the weekly bonus ball in the National Lottery. It so happens that my birth date is 13, so that is the number I always choose. With a few occasional absences abroad I have paid my pound every week for a year and a half, but have never won. Some of my neighbours win frequently; one in three consecutive weeks. Furthermore, I always put in a pound for my wife for her birth date, which is 11. She has never won either. The probability of neither of these numbers coming up in that period is less than 5%, which for an epidemiologist is significant enough to publish a paper.