Health Discoveries

By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2003-07-10 15:30:02

July/August 2003

Women Get More Bad News About Hormone Therapy

Findings from a major study are bad news for older women hoping that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would protect them against Alzheimer's.

Women taking combined estrogen and progestin "had twice the rate of dementia as those women taking placebo pills," Judith A. Salerno, M.D., deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, told the AARP Bulletin.

The five-year study tracked 4,500 women ages 65 to 79 with no dementia. Half of them took hormones, and half took placebos. Forty women on HRT and 21 on placebos were later diagnosed with dementia.

The results apply only to women who begin taking HRT at age 65 or later. They do "not tell us specifically about the risks and benefits for younger women," Salerno says.

A woman considering the use of HRT, she says, should discuss her concerns and personal history with her physician. HRT increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and breast cancer in addition to dementia in older women.

The study, reported in the May 28 Journal of the American Medical Association, is part of the federally funded Women's Health Initiative.

Getting Older, Getting Nicer

People seem to become nicer as they age. That's what an Internet survey of more than 132,000 adults, ages 21 to 60, discovered. "Agreeableness," defined as being warm, generous and helpful, showed the biggest improvement after age 30 in men and women.

Chronic or frequent worrying declined sharply with age in women but held steady in men.

"People really do get better at some things with age and experience," psychologist and researcher Sanjay Srivastava of Stanford University told the Bulletin. The findings appeared in the May Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Rethinking the Atkins Diet

Obese people on high-fat diets—like the wildly popular but often derided Atkins program—lose more weight faster at first than those on low-fat diets, but differences between the two groups even out within a year.

These findings emerged from a University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study of 63 obese men and women either on a low-fat diet or on the Atkins diet, which is high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates.

An editorial in the May 22 New England Journal of Medicine, which reported on the research, said a larger, longer-term study is needed to understand the health effects of high-fat, low-carbohydrate weight-loss programs.

June 2003

New Study Indicates Mammograms Lower Breast Cancer Death Rate

While the death rate from breast cancer has fallen over the last decade, the role mammograms play in saving lives has been a matter of voluminous research—and heated debate.

In the newest and, to date, largest mammogram study, with 210,000 Swedish women ages 20 to 69, death rates were found to have dropped significantly after the screenings were introduced in 1978.

"Screening works—it reduces death from breast cancer," Stephen W. Duffy of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London told reporters. He and a team of scientists from Sweden, Britain, Taiwan and the United States reported their findings in the April 26 Lancet.

In 2001 Danish investigators created a stir by reporting that previous studies favoring mammograms for healthy women were flawed and did not show that screening saves lives.

While researchers debate whether treatment or early detection does most to lower the breast cancer death rate, the American Cancer Society and other health groups suggest women over 40 have mammography every year or two.

It's All in the Tea Leaves

When it comes to resisting disease, tea drinkers may be on to something.

That's what Harvard Medical School researchers found when participants in their study who previously were not tea drinkers consumed 20 ounces of black tea daily for two weeks. Compared with coffee-drinking participants, the tea sippers had higher levels of T cells, which produce interferon, a protein that fights certain diseases. It's the substance L-theanine, found in black, green, oolong and pekoe teas, that appears to boost T-cell levels.

Arati B. Kamath reported on the study in the April 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

New Device Slow-Releases Medication That Keeps Arteries Unblocked

A revolutionary new device could dramatically improve the outlook for people with coronary artery disease.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new stent—a tiny mesh tube used to keep arteries open—that slowly releases the drug sirolimus to prevent the arteries from narrowing again after angioplasty.

Some 800,000 angioplasty procedures—clearing blockages with a catheter threaded into the artery—are performed each year in America. In 15 to 30 percent of patients the arteries clog again, a condition called restenosis.

In a study with more than 1,000 patients, the drug-coated stents reduced the restenosis rate by almost two-thirds.

May 2003

Drug Slows Alzheimer's in Its Advanced Stages

If approved for use in the United States, the drug memantine would be the first to slow the progression of advanced Alzheimer's disease.

Most drugs are effective only in early Alzheimer's. But a recent U.S.-German study of 181 patients with moderate-to-severe forms of the brain-wasting disease over 28 weeks showed those who took memantine functioned longer without assistance than those who took a placebo.

"It's a breath of fresh air for caregivers and for patients," lead researcher Barry Reisberg, M.D., of the New York University School of Medicine, told reporters. Study results appeared in the April 3 New England Journal of Medicine.

In another Alzheimer's study, scientists found in laboratory tests that the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs ibuprofen and naproxen break up brain lesions known as plaques that are sure signs of the condition.

The over-the-counter painkillers may also prevent plaques from forming, says Jorge R. Barrio, who led the research at the University of California-Los Angeles medical school. The findings are in the March issue of Neuroscience.

Why Is Obesity Hard on Health?

You've been told for years that being fat is bad for your heart. But why is it, exactly?

One reason recently discovered in a study by the Boston University School of Medicine is that obese people have higher levels than thin people of free radicals, substances in the body that damage cells. An oversupply of free radicals, known as "oxidative stress," is thought to contribute to heart disease.

The study, with 2,828 people in the Framingham (Mass.) Heart Study, was reported in the March issue of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

Contact Lenses May Treat Eye Disease While Helping You See Better

In the beginning, contact lenses eliminated eyeglasses. Now they might eliminate drops and other medications used to treat eye disease.

That's because researchers are developing soft contact lenses with tiny embedded particles that slowly release drugs.

"Our approach will work for any kind of medication, including treatment for glaucoma, infections, dry eyes and so on," Anuj Chauhan, a chemical engineer at the University of Florida, told the AARP Bulletin.

The lenses deliver medicine directly to the eye, reducing side effects, he reported at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society. People could also use noncorrective lenses.

April 2003

Aspirin and Ibuprofen Not a Good Mix

Regularly taking anti-inflammatory ibuprofen seems to cancel out the heart-protecting benefits of aspirin.

Patients taking low daily doses of aspirin to ward off heart attack and stroke "would be prudent to avoid long-term use of ibuprofen," clinical pharmacologist Thomas M. MacDonald of Ninewells Medical School in Dundee, Scotland, told the AARP Bulletin.

MacDonald and Li Wei tracked over 7,000 adults with heart disease for eight years. Those who routinely took aspirin and ibuprofen were twice as likely to die as those who took aspirin alone or took aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Taking ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin and Nuprin) only on occasion doesn't seem to hamper aspirin's benefit. Nor do painkillers such as acetaminophen (Tylenol).

The research is reported in the Feb. 15 Lancet.

Vanishing Bandages

Researchers have developed a "natural" bandage that never needs to be removed—it simply dissolves as the wound heals.

The experimental bandage, made from the blood-clotting protein fibrinogen, stops bleeding and protects against infection. Gary Bowlin, professor of biomedical engineering, and his colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond have spun fibrinogen molecules into "nanofibers" a thousand times finer than human hair. The fibers become entangled, then are pressed into thin "mats" of gauze to cover cuts and wounds.

Bowlin says the bandages could be available in a "couple of years." He reported on the research in the Feb. 12 Nanoletters.

Just Try to Do It

Doing things to improve health and control your weight—like working out every day and passing up cheese fries and a shake for a green salad—isn't always easy.

But just trying may help you live longer. According to a report in the March 4 Annals of Internal Medicine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded after a nine-year study of 6,391 overweight and obese adults that those who diet, whether or not they lose weight, have a lower death rate than people who never diet.

Another study tracked 7,337 older men for seven years. It found that workouts that feel strenuous, even without meeting guidelines for exertion, can still protect the heart. People unable, say, to walk the recommended three to four miles an hour still benefit from walking two miles an hour.

Researcher I-Min Lee of Harvard's School of Public Health and colleagues reported the findings in the March 4 Circulation.

March 2003

What You Don't Know About Strokes Can Hurt You

The people at the highest risk for stroke—men, individuals age 75 or older and African Americans—know the least about warning signs or factors that raise the chances of stroke.

Women, for instance, were 71 percent more likely than men to know at least one warning sign.

The findings come from telephone interviews researchers from the University of Cincinnati conducted with 2,173 men and women.

Warnings for stroke tend to appear suddenly. They include numbness or weakness in the face or limbs, often on one side of the body; trouble speaking; trouble seeing; dizziness; confusion; loss of coordination; and headache.

Risk factors for stroke include high blood pressure, smoking, heart disease, previous stroke, heavy alcohol use, high cholesterol and diabetes.

Alexander Schneider, M.D., and his colleagues reported on the study in the Jan. 15 Journal of the American Medical Association.

High Cholesterol Levels May Play a Role in Alzheimer's

New research is confirming a link between high cholesterol and Alzheimer's disease.

In studies conducted in Greece, Italy and Switzerland, researchers found that people with a particular form of the gene CYP46 are twice as likely to develop the disease. The variant gene fails to break down cholesterol in the brain.

Individuals are 10 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's if they have the CYP46 variant as well as a variant of the protein APOE. The APOE variant disrupts the normal movement of cholesterol through the body.

Lead author Andreas Papassotiropoulos, M.D., of the University of Zurich reported on the study in the January Archives of Neurology.

They Just Eat More and More and More

Trend spotters say food portions have become huge—and may partly explain why 60 percent of Americans are overweight.

"The more food in front of them, the more they ate," nutritionist Barbara J. Rolls says of participants in food portion tests at Penn State University.

This normally held true for all age groups, Rolls says. "Men and women, normal weight and overweight individuals—all responded to larger portion size by eating more." They did not report feeling any fuller after eating more.

Rolls served macaroni and cheese in portions ranging from 2 1/2 cups to 5 cups. Most of the 51 participants ate nearly a third more of the larger portions than the smaller ones.

Eat a lot of vegetables, fruits and clear soups, Rolls says, to leave less room for high-calorie foods.

February 2003

Being Fat Raises the Risk of Stroke

Fat people are twice as likely to have a stroke as thin people.

That's what researchers found after tracking changes in the body mass index (BMI) of some 21,000 healthy male physicians over 13 years and learning that stroke risk rose 6 percent with each gain of 6 to 7 pounds.

The BMI, which measures weight in relation to height, is widely used to determine if an individual's weight is healthy. [See AARPmagazine.org's BMI calculator.]

Lead researcher Tobias Kurth, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston told the AARP Bulletin that the findings reflect the results of an earlier study that tracked 116,000 female nurses for 16 years.

The new study appeared in the Dec. 9/23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Diuretics—the Best First Line of Defense in Combating High Blood Pressure

People with high blood pressure may want to reconsider using diuretics—plain old water pills—as the first line of defense against hypertension instead of newer, more expensive medications.

In a landmark study, more than 33,000 Americans and Canadians, ages 55 and older, with high blood pressure readings of 140/90 or more, were each given one of three different medications and were tracked over almost five years. The drugs included a calcium channel blocker, an ACE inhibitor and a thiazide diuretic. The diuretics cost less than 10 cents a day.

One in four adult Americans, including more than half of those over 60, has hypertension, a chief risk factor for heart failure and stroke.

The trial showed "diuretics are the best choice to treat hypertension and to reduce the risk of its complications," says Claude Lenfant, M.D., director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which supported the study in 623 centers across America and Canada. It was reported in the Dec. 18 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Special Ingredient in Chocolate May Stop Hacking Coughs

British researchers have learned that theobromine, a chemical found in chocolate, is more effective at stopping coughs than the codeine in many cough remedies.

But you'd have to eat up to 25 candy bars to get the dose used in a study at London's Heart and Lung Institute. The researchers told the British Thoracic Society in December that they're continuing to test theobromine, so there's hope for the future—without the chocolate.