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Red Meat Links to Higher Risk of Breast Cancer
Exercise and keeping a healthy weight are two things that doctors say might help women lower their risk of breast cancer.
Mothers may reduce their risk if they breastfeed for at least four months. For older women, hormone replacement therapy can lower the risk of some other diseases. But it has been found to increase the risk of breast cancer. So women should consider their choices carefully. The same may be said for diet.
New findings show that younger women who eat a lot of red meat have higher rates of breast cancers called hormone-receptor positive. The growth is fed by the levels of estrogen or another hormone, progesterone, in the body.
Researchers at Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, reported the findings as part of a health study of nurses. The researchers followed the health of more than 90,000 women from 1991 to 2003. Those who ate the most red meat ate more than one and one-half servings a day. A serving was defined as roughly 84 grams. Those who ate the least red meat ate less than three servings a week. This is what the study found about breast cancers that were hormone receptor-positive: The women who ate the most red meat were almost two times as likely to get them as the women who ate the least of it.
Eunyoung Cho, the lead author of the report, says more research is needed to know the reason for the link. But in the past, researchers have suggested that three things may play a part. One is the way meat is cooked or processed. Another is the use of growth hormones in cows. And the third is the kind of iron in red meat. The study appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
And now we have more to tell you about our subject -- resveratrol. We discussed a study in the United States that found that large amounts of this plant compound helped fat mice live longer. The mice were fed much more resveratrol than people could get from red wine, one of the foods that contains it.
Now, scientists in France say resveratrol also improves muscle performance -- again, at least in mice. They were able to run two times as far in laboratory treadmill tests4 as mice normally could. The study at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biologys appeared in the journal Cell.Breastfeeding helps women prevent the development of breast cancer to a certain degree. Right Wrong Not mentioned
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Aspirin -- a New Miracle Drug
1. Using aspirin, an over-the-counter pill on sale in every supermarket without a prescription, to treat serious circulatory disease may seem almost like quackery. But today doctors recognize this drug as a potent compound as important as antibiotics, digitalis and other miracle drugs.
2. In its natural form as willow bark and leaves, this remarkable remedy dates back to Hippocrates2. In 1829 the chemical in the willow tree that can relieve pain and reduce fever was discovered to be salicin. By 1899 the Bayer Company in Germany had marketed a variant, acetylsalicylic acid, under the name of aspirin.
3. Since then, aspirin and compounds containing aspirin have been taken by tens of millions of arthritis patients. As a pain killer aspirin is, according to one study, more effective than all other analgesics and narcotics available for oral use. It also acts on4the body’s thermostat, turning down fever.
4. But some of its powers remained unsuspected until recently. In 1950 the late Dr. Craven wrote to a small western medical journal about 400 overweight, sedentary male patients to whom he had given one or two aspirin tablets a day. None had had a heart attack. He enlarged his group to 8,000 and in 1956 reported: “Not a single case of detectable coronary or cerebral thrombosis “and “no major stroke“ had occurred in patients who had taken one or two tablets daily for from one to ten years. But his observations were largely ignored.
5. Then Dr. Vane proved that aspirin turned off the body’s prostaglandins hormonelike chemicals that can be secreted by every cell. Some potent prostaglandins are harmful compounds that create fever, pain and arthritis. One of them stimulates platelets in the blood to begin forming clots inside arteries. Aspirin blocks this dangerous effect.
6. Vane’s finding caused some researchers to recall Craven’s 1956 observations, which now had a possible scientific explanation. Numerous studies were begun to find out whether aspirin could indeed inhibit heart attacks and stroke.
7. In 1972, ten US medical institutions began two “double-blind“ trials of 303 patients who suffered from transient ischemic attacks (TIAs). Four aspirin tablets a day were given to 153 patients, while placebo tablets were given to 150. Neither patients nor doctors knew which was which. After six months, the patients on aspirin had experienced much fewer TIAs, and fewer strokes and deaths from strokes than the “controls“. The results were so conclusive that aspirin has been used for this purpose widely.A. Confirmation of the New Effect
B. Pain-relieving and Fever-reducing Effects of Aspirin
C. The Ignored Significant Observations
D. The Origin of AspirinE An
Explanation of Craven’s Observations
F Further Findings of Dr. Vane
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Egypt Felled by Famine
Even ancient Egypt’s mighty pyramid builders were powerless in the face of the famine that helped bring down their civilisation around 2180 BC. Now evidence gleaned from mud deposited by the River Nile suggests that a shift in climate thousands of kilometres to the south was ultimately to blame -- and the same or worse could happen today.
The ancient Egyptians depended on the Nile’s annual floods to irrigate their crops. But any change in climate that pushed the African monsoons southwards out of Ethiopia would have diminished these floods.
Dwindling rains in the Ethiopian highlands would have meant fewer plants to stablise the soil. When rain did fall it would have washed large amounts of soil into the Blue Nile and into Egypt, along with sediment from the White Nile4.
The Blue Nile mud has a different isotope signature from that of the White Nile. So by analysing isotope differences in mud deposited in the Nile Delta, Michael Krom of Leeds University worked out what proportion of sediment came from each branch of the river.
Krom reasons that during periods of drought, the amount of the Blue Nile mud in the river’ would be relatively high. He found that one of these periods, from 4,500 to 4,200 years ago, immediately predates the fall of the Egypt’s Old Kingdom.
The weakened waters would have been catastrophic for the Egyptians. “Changes that affect food supply don’t have to be very large to have a ripple effect in societies,“ says Bill Ryan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
Similar events today could be even more devastating, says team member Daniel Stanley, a geoarchaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “Anything humans do to shift the climate belts would have an even worse effect along the Nile system today because the populations have increased dramatically.“Why does the author mention “pyramid builders“? Because they once worked miracles. Because they were well-built. Because they were actually very weak. Because even they were unable to rescue their civilisation.
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After-birth Depression Blamed for Woman’s Suicide
A new mother apparently suffering from postpartum mental illness fell to her death from a narrow 12th-floor ledge of a Chicago hotel, eluding the lunging grasp of firemen called to help.
The Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday that the mother of a 3-month-old daughter, Melanie Stokes, 41, was said to be suffering from3 a severe form of after-birth depression called postpartum psychosis, an extremely rare biological response to rapidly changing hormonal levels that can result in4 hallucinations, delusions, severe insomnia and a drastic departure from reality.
“That was a monster in my daughter’s brain,“ said Stokes’ mother, Carol Blocker. “The medicine took no effect at all, while her grief was so strong that nothing could make up for it. I’m just glad she didn’t take her daughter with her.“
Virtually all new mothers get postpartum blues, also called the “baby blues“, which are brief episodes of irritability, moodiness and weepiness. About 20 per cent of birthing women experience postpartum depression, which can be triggered by hormonal changes, sleeplessness and the’ pressures of being a new mother. It is often temporary and highly treatable.
But The Tribune said what scientists suspect Stokes was battling, postpartum psychosis, is even more extreme and is considered a psychiatric emergency. During postpartum psychosis -- a very real disorder that affects less than 1 percent of women, according to the National Institute of Mental Health-- a mother .might hear voices, have visions, feel extremely agitated and be at risk of harming the child or herself.
Often the consequences are tragic. In 1987, Sheryl Masip of California told a judge that postpartum psychosis made her drive a Volvo over her 6-week-old son. Latrena Pixley of Washington, D. C. o, said the disorder was why she smothered her 6-week-old daughter in 1992. And last year, Judy Kirby, a 31-year-old Indianapolis mother allegedly suffering from postpartum psychosis, sped into oncoming traffic and plowed into a minivan, killing seven youngsters, including three of her own.Which of the following is NOT a symptom of postpartum psychosis? Visions. Delusions. Inflamed breast. Serious sleeplessness.
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Controlling the Growing TB Crisis in China
China needs to take urgent action to address a “vicious cycle“ of poverty and tuberculosis (TB) affecting a considerable number of Chinese people, especially in underdeveloped areas, the World Health Organization said on Monday.
The Chinese government needs to take “immediate necessary action“ to control the spread of TB, which is “threatening the future of its 1.3 billion people“, WHO said in a report released at the start of a three-day meeting to discuss TB in the Western Pacific region.
Poor living conditions and health care in rural China mean the TB infection rate is nearly three times higher than in urban areas, the report said. There are some factors that make the rural TB burden heavier such as insufficient funds for local health programs and increased charges for medical care, it said.
“This has uniformly produced a negative impact on TB diagnosis and treatment, especially in areas without specific funding targeted towards TB-related services,“ it said. The report, which is meant to foreshadow the seriousness of the TB crisis in China, suggests that China adopt a two-year program to control the disease.
The government should fund free TB drugs and diagnosis, health promotion and training, and supervised treatment programs at all levels, it said. “TB control should be considered as a key development issue and poverty reduction strategy,“ WHO Western Pacific regional director Dr. Shigeru Omi said at the opening of the meeting in Beijing.
A World Bank-funded project in 13 of China’s 31 provinces produced “astonishing“ results, reducing the incidence of TB by 38 per cent in less than 10 years, WHO said. “This tremendous achievement tells us that the regional target of reducing the prevalence of TB by half in 10 years, though ambitious, is achievable,“ Omi said.
But TB “remains a relentless killer in the Western Pacific region“, claiming around 1,000 lives daily in the region -- more than half of them in China, a WHO press statement said. “The worsening burden of TB has resulted in a great human tragedy and has had a profound impact on economic development in several countries in the region,“ the statement said.At present in China the TB infection rate in rural areas is three times as high as that in urban areas. in rural areas is nearly four times as high as that in urban areas. in urban areas is two times lower than that in rural areas. in urban areas is four times lower than that in rural areas.
