TUESDAY, Feb. 9 (HealthDay News) — The lifestyle habits you bring into pregnancy can have lasting effects on your baby’s health, new research shows.
A Dutch study found that women who smoked, had high blood pressure or low folic acid levels in early pregnancy had babies that were smaller in the first trimester of pregnancy and had a higher risk of complications later. Read More
TUESDAY, Feb. 9 (HealthDay News) — People with active inflammatory bowel disease are much more likely to develop blood clots than people without the condition, a new study suggests.
And that may make preventive drug treatment necessary, it adds.
The study, done in the United Kingdom, compared data on 13,756 people who had inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) with 71,672 people who did not have it. None of the people were hospitalized. Between November 1987 and July 2001, 304 people developed a blood clot (venous thromboembolism). Read More
TUESDAY, Feb. 9 (HealthDay News) — After Medicare sweetened payments for simple office-based endoscopic procedures, doctors in one New York City practice performed many more in-office bladder biopsies, but the volume of hospital procedures stayed roughly the same, a new study finds.
So, instead of saving money, Medicare expenditures rose 50 percent after the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) increased physician reimbursement for those outpatient procedures, researchers report in the March 1 issue of the journal Cancer. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Women with breast cancer who take both tamoxifen and the antidepressant Paxil may increase their risk of dying because Paxil reduces tamoxifen’s effectiveness, Canadian researchers report.
“Paxil can deprive women of the benefit of tamoxifen, especially when it is used in combination with tamoxifen for a long time,” said lead researcher Dr. David Juurlink, division head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Beer may help keep bones strong because it’s a rich source of dietary silicon, which contributes to bone mineral density, a new study reports.
But the amount of silicon apparently varies by the type of beer.
“The factors in brewing that influence silicon levels in beer have not been extensively studied,” study author Charles Bamforth, a professor in the food science and technology department at the University of California, Davis, said in a news release from the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. The study is published in the journal’s February issue. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Financial pressure puts low- and medium-income women at particularly high risk for anxiety and depression after being diagnosed with the noninvasive breast cancer ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a U.S. study has found.
The study included 487 women with newly diagnosed DCIS who completed questionnaires about their financial, mental and physical health at the start of the study and again nine months after diagnosis. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Older moms are more likely to have a child with autism than women who give birth at a younger age, new research shows.
Researchers from University of California, Davis, looked at records for the nearly 5 million births in California between 1990 and 1999, a decade in which autism incidence increased 600 percent statewide.
A woman’s risk of having a child diagnosed with autism rose by 18 percent for each five-year increment in her age, according to the study. That means that a woman who gave birth at age 40 or older had a more than 50 percent greater chance of having a child with autism than a woman who gave birth between 25 and 29, and a 77 percent greater chance of having an autistic child than a woman who gave birth before the age of 25. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Eating a Mediterranean-style diet — one rich in olive oil, whole grains, fish and fruit — may protect aging brains from damage linked to cognitive problems, a new study finds
Other studies have already found that such diets also lower risks for depression, cancer, heart disease and premature death.
The latest study was led by Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center, New York City, and involved 712 men and women averaging 80 years of age. All of the participants had no history of stroke and received MRIs to look for brain infarcts — tissues that have died because of reduced or cut-off blood supply. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Tobacco smoke residue found on indoor surfaces — so-called “third-hand smoke” — can interact with airborne compounds to form new, potentially cancer-causing substances, research suggests.
Details about the potential role such third-hand smoke might play and what health concerns it might create remain unclear, however, awaiting further study. Read More
MONDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — People who down two or more soft drinks a week may have double the risk of developing deadly pancreatic cancer, compared to non-soda drinkers, new research suggests.
But the overall number of people developing the malignancy remains low, with the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimating 42,470 new cases last year.
“Soft drinks are linked with a higher risk of pancreatic cancer,” said Noel Mueller, lead author of a study appearing in the February issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. “We can’t speculate too much on the mechanism because this is an observational study, but the increased risk may be working through effects of the hormone insulin.” Read More
