Levitra Vs Sildenafil

Low intelligence in young males has been linked to a much higher risk that they’ll commit suicide, at least compared to their most intelligent counterparts, researchers say.

The analysis, based on the lives of 1.1 million Swedish men, doesn’t prove that low intelligence causes suicide. Instead, it only suggests there’s a connection.

Still, researchers have previously found evidence that level of intelligence plays a role in attempted suicide, the study authors noted in the report published online  in the BMJ.

In the new study, Finn Rasmussen, a professor in the department of public health sciences at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues examined records of men born between 1950 and 1976. The men all underwent physical and mental exams and were followed for 24 years.

Of the men, 17,736 — 1.6 percent — were admitted to hospitals because they attempted suicide. After adjusting the data to take into account the men’s ages and socioeconomic status, the researchers found that those with the lowest IQs were almost nine times more likely to have tried to kill themselves than those with the highest IQs.

“Given the novelty of these findings, further research is needed to provide a deeper understanding, which will inform public health strategies and may lead to a reduction in future attempted and subsequently completed suicides,” the study authors concluded.

Eating lots of animal protein appears to increase women’s risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to a new study from France.

“Our results may help better understand the role of diet in IBD risk,” Dr. Franck Carbonnel of the Center Hospitalier Universitaire de Bicetre in Paris and his team write in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. “If confirmed, they can lead to protective strategies, especially in families at risk of IBD, and possibly to advice for preventing relapse.”

Inflammatory bowel disease is a collective term for diseases characterized by severe inflammation in the digestive system such as ulcerative colitis, which typically only affects the colon, and Crohn’s disease, which can attack the entire digestive tract. IBD, which affects about one in 500 people, has become much more common since World War II, Carbonnel and his colleagues note. The reasons behind the increase are still unclear.

To investigate whether diet might be a factor, the researchers followed more than 67,000 women participating in a long-term study of risk factors for cancer and other common illnesses. The women were 40 to 65 years old when they enrolled in the study.

During follow-up, which averaged about 10 years, just 77 of the women developed inflammatory bowel disease. Ninety percent of women in the current study were eating more than the recommended dietary allowance of protein.

Women who consumed the most protein were at more than triple the risk of being diagnosed with IBD, the researchers found; animal protein accounted for most of the risk. Risk was specifically associated with high intake of meat and fish, but not with dairy products or eggs.

While experts have long suspected that diet might play a role in inflammatory bowel disease, Carbonnel and his colleagues note, the only links identified previously were with eating a lot of fats and certain kinds of sugars. Those studies were more prone to error than forward-looking or prospective studies like the current investigation. There have also been several studies linking vitamin D deficiency to IBD.

Another recent prospective study found that a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids decreased inflammatory bowel disease risk, while eating lots of omega-6 fatty acids increased it, Carbonnel noted in an interview with Reuters Health. Omega-3s are found in fish oil, flax seed oil, and a few other sources; omega-6s, which Westerners tend to eat much more of, are found in several types of vegetable and nut oils.

Meat could contribute to inflammatory bowel disease risk because digestion of animal protein produces many potentially toxic “end products,” such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, the researchers note. Also, Carbonnel pointed out, a high-protein diet could alter the mix of bacteria that live in the colon.

“These findings have to be confirmed in other populations, particularly in men and younger subjects,” the researcher said, adding that if they are confirmed, the next step would be to conduct a trial comparing the effects of restricted versus unrestricted animal protein on inflammatory bowel disease risk.

Given the large amount of protein women in the study were eating, he added, a restricted diet wouldn’t involve radically reducing protein intake, but instead sticking to the recommended amount.

SOURCE: http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ajg201019 2a.html American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Migraine sufferers appear to have more trouble ignoring visual distractions than other people, a new study suggests.

Researchers asked migraine sufferers to pick out a small disk of light when it was presented with and without visual noise — an effect similar to the black-and-white snow on an off-air television.

Without the visual noise, people with migraine were able to pick out the light disk as well as migraine-free people. But the migraine sufferers (migraineurs) did significantly worse when the visual noise was added, the study found. The visual noise had the most impact on those who experience visual auras before a migraine.

“Our visual environment is generally very busy and full of objects, many of which are important at some times but not at others. Normally, we can attend effortlessly to those items of interest and often do not even notice others,” lead researcher Doreen Wagner, of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, said in a news release. “Migraineurs may be at a disadvantage when searching for details, especially in cluttered environments.”

A current theory about migraines suggests that nerve cells in the brains of migraine sufferers are excitable, and exposure to certain triggers causes whole clusters of brain cells to become overactive, resulting in a migraine.

“We believe that the [visual] noise on the display overexcites the nerve cells in the brain of the migraineurs. This in turn makes it harder for a migraineur to see the disk,” Wagner said.

The findings may prove useful for migraine sufferers, the researchers said.

“It might be helpful to avoid such ‘noisy’ environments which may impair their performance, scenes overloaded with visual distracters,” Wagner said. These might include computer screens and learning tools which have a lot of visual information on them, she said.

The study appears in the April issue of the journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.

Women who were thin as young girls are at increased risk for breast cancer as they age compared to women who were larger in girlhood, a new study finds.

Researchers examined the link between childhood body size and tumor characteristics in over 2,800 Swedish breast cancer patients and a control group of more than 3,100 women without breast cancer.

“Our main finding was that a large body type at age seven years was associated with a decreased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer,” said study author Jingmei Li in a press release.

Although a large body type in girls is strongly associated with other known risk factors for breast cancer, such as early menstruation, a high adult BMI and breast density, Li said, a large body type at age seven “remained a significant protective factor after adjustment for these other issues.”

“It appears counterintuitive that a large body size during childhood can reduce breast cancer risk, because a large birth weight and a high adult BMI have been shown to otherwise elevate breast cancer risk. There remain unanswered questions on mechanisms driving this protective effect,” Li said.

The findings may offer a new way to help determine a woman’s breast cancer risk.

“Given the strength of the associations, and the ease of retrieval of information on childhood shape from old photographs, childhood body size is potentially useful for building breast cancer risk or prognosis models,” Li and colleagues concluded.

The study appears in the journal Breast Cancer Research.

When white and black cancer patients receive similar care at specialized cancer centers, there is no significant difference in cancer death rates, a U.S. study has found.

The finding suggests that where patients receive care may partly account for previous findings of racial disparities in cancer deaths, the study authors say in the March 22 online edition of Cancer.

In the study, researchers from Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., analyzed the medical records of more than 200,000 Medicare recipients treated for cancer between 1998 and 2003. The team focused on one- and three-year death rates for white and black patients with lung, breast, colorectal and prostate cancer.

Across all care settings, compared with white patients, black patients were 13 percent more likely to have died of cancer or other causes at one year, and 23 percent more likely to have died at three years, the study found.

However, when comparing only patients who received care at U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) cancer centers, the risk of death at one and three years was about the same for blacks and whites. Black patients treated at NCI cancer centers had lower death rates than those treated elsewhere.

“We have known for some time that African-Americans die in greater numbers from cancer than Caucasians. The question is, why? This research shows that where patients are treated can influence those outcomes significantly,” study leader Tracy Onega said in a news release from the American Cancer Society.

“The next step is to understand the components of treatment location that most dramatically affect differences in care, and ultimately outcomes, for all cancer patients,” Onega added.

SOURCE: American Cancer Society.

A cheap acne drug that’s been used for decades appears to target infected immune-system cells in which HIV lies dormant before coming back to life and spreading infection, researchers have found.

The authors of a new study say the antibiotic drug, minocycline, sold under names such as Minocin, could add to the HIV-fighting powers of existing AIDS drug regimens.

“The big challenge clinicians deal with now in this country when treating HIV patients is keeping the virus locked in a dormant state,” Janice Clements, professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a news release. While existing drugs are “really effective in keeping down active replication, minocycline is another arm of defense against the virus,” she added.

Clements said minocycline targets immune cells known as T cells and makes it harder for them to reproduce. That, in turn, makes it harder for HIV to spread and eventually cause AIDS.

“This drug strikes a good balance and is ideal for HIV because it targets very specific aspects of immune activation,” Gregory Szeto, a graduate student who works at the Retrovirus Laboratory at Hopkins, said in the news release.

The study findings have been released online in advance of publication in the April 15 print issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins Medicine.

A targeted heat treatment appears to alleviate bothersome and sometimes painful plantar warts, researchers from China have found.

Plantar warts are skin growths on the soles of the feet caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), which enters the body through tiny cuts and breaks in the skin. Plantar warts often develop beneath pressure points in the feet, such as the heels or balls of the feet.

Plantar warts can spread if not treated by over-the-counter or doctor-prescribed medications or salves, or by medical freezing, laser, or surgery. However, such treatments vary in their cure or pain-reducing capabilities.

Dr. Xing-Hua Gao, at No. 1 Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, and colleagues have found success treating plantar warts using a patented infrared heat-producing device, which heats warts to 44 degrees Centigrade (111 degrees Fahrenheit) without touching patients’ skin.

This approach, called local hyperthermia, cured plantar wart infections in nearly 54 percent of those treated, and reduced wart-related walking pain in 80 percent of the patients who initially had such pain, Gao’s team reports.

Local hyperthermia above 43 degrees Centigrade causes cell death, the researchers note in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Local hyperthermia at 39 to 48 degrees Centigrade (about 102 to 118 degrees Fahrenheit) has been used to treat some cancerous tumors.

Gao’s team noted previous plantar wart cures using their device at about 45 degrees Centigrade (under 114 degrees Fahrenheit) among patients aware of their treatment.

In their current study, they kept 54 patients “blinded” to their treatment by telling them a red spot would or would not induce heat at their most painful or largest plantar wart.

Twenty-eight patients had one plantar wart held at 44 degrees Centigrade (111 degrees Fahrenheit) on average for 30 minutes. The researchers earlier identified this temperature as bearable without intolerable burning. Treatments ran on 3 consecutive days with follow up on 2 more days 2 weeks later. Another 26 patients of similar age and plantar wart infections had sham treatments.

After 3 months, 15 of the 28 heat-treated patients (nearly 54 percent) had no remaining sign of the treated wart, compared to only 3 of the 26 sham-treated patients (less than 12 percent). Twelve heat-treated individuals with initial pain reported decreased pain while walking, compared to only 2 sham-treated individuals.

If this approach proves effective in further studies, it “might be generally available in two or three years,” Gao noted in an email to Reuters Health.

SOURCE: The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Infertile women face an increased risk for sexual dysfunction, a new study reports.

Stanford University researchers compared a group of infertile women, who averaged about 36 years old, with a group of fertile women, who averaged about 33 years old. Their weight and years of education were similar. The average length of infertility was 3.4 years, and 45 percent had been through in-vitro fertilization.

Scores on the Female Sexual Function Index showed that 40 percent of the infertile women were at risk for sexual dysfunction, compared with 25 percent of the others. Infertile women had significantly lower scores on desire and arousal, reported less frequent intercourse and masturbation and had lower scores for sex life satisfaction.

The findings were published online recently in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

“Stress is a significant contributing factor in female sexual dysfunction, and infertility can be a major cause of stress,” Dr. William Gibbons, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said in a news release from the society. “More research is needed on the many ways infertility can affect patients’ sexual functioning as well as to look for the effects of stress on the infertility process itself.”

SOURCE: American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Regular coffee drinking appears to reduce the risk of stroke, a new study indicates.

The study of 23,000 men and women who were followed for an average of 12 years found that “self-reported coffee consumption was inversely related to stroke risk,” said study leader Yangmei Li, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge in England.

Li was to present the findings Thursday at American Stroke Association’s annual stroke conference, in San Antonio.

Overall, people who reported any intake of coffee had a 27 percent lower risk of stroke than those who said they never drank java, the researchers reported. Drinking more coffee was not associated with a greater reduction in stroke risk.

“This association was consistent in subgroup analyses stratified by sex, age, social class, educational level, smoking status, alcohol drinking, tea drinking, physical activity, plasma vitamin C and diabetes status,” Li said.

And the reduced risk was “irrespective of the type of coffee consumed, caffeinated, decaffeinated, instant or ground,” Li said.

Daniel Lackland, a professor of epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina and a spokesman for the American Stroke Association, said the new research isn’t groundbreaking, but it does confirm previous findings.

“This is consistent with other studies that have looked at coffee drinking,” Lackland said. But, he added, “nobody really knows the mechanism.”

Studies have shown that coffee consumption is associated with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes — a major risk factor for stroke — and also with a reduced risk of heart disease, Lackland said. But those studies generally have not been carried out with rigorous methods, he said.

“Typically, they rely on self-reports, how much coffee you say you drink,” Lackland said. “But what might be two cups for me might be an entirely different two cups for you.”

So, there are no official suggestions that people drink coffee to lower their risk of stroke, Lackland said. “There has been no study designed to produce the kind of evidence needed to make recommendations,” he said.

SOURCES: Daniel Lackland, Ph.D., professor, epidemiology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston; presentation, American Stroke Association stroke conference, San Antonio
HealthDay

The antidepressant bupropion may hold promise for improving symptoms in younger women diagnosed with so-called hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a small study suggests.

The disorder, called HSDD for short, is diagnosed when a person has a persistently low interest in sex, and that disinterest is causing personal distress or relationship problems.

In the new study, Iranian researchers found that bupropion sustained-release (Wellbutrin SR) generally boosted sex drive among 116 women with HSDD who took the drug for 12 weeks. Compared with 116 women given an inactive placebo, their scores on a standard measure of sexual function were twice as high, according to findings published in the medical journal BJU International.

In some cases, low sex drive is related to underlying health conditions, like depression, or to side effects from some medications, like high blood pressure drugs or some antidepressants.

HSDD, however, refers to low sex drive that is not better accounted for by depression or other mental health disorders, and not caused by a medical condition or drug side effect.

As it stands, there is no treatment for HSDD that is widely accepted by women, according to the researchers on the new study, led by Dr. Mohammad Reza Safarinejad of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran.

In Europe, a testosterone patch called Intrinsa is approved for treating HSDD in postmenopausal women. It is not approved in the U.S.

In an email, Safarinejad noted that studies have shown bupropion SR to improve sexual function in women who are having sexual side effects from using other antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

Decreased libido is a potential side effect of SSRIs, which include drugs like sertraline (Zoloft), paroxetine (Paxil) and fluoxetine (Prozac). Bupropion has a different mechanism of action from SSRIs, targeting the nervous system chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine rather than serotonin.

For the current study, Safarinejad and colleagues randomly assigned 232 women between the ages of 20 and 40 to take either bupropion SR or a placebo every day for 12 weeks. All of the women had been diagnosed with HSDD and were free of depression or other major health problems.

The study received no drug industry funding, Safarinejad said.

At the outset, both groups of women had similar scores on a standard questionnaire gauging sexual function — just under 16, on average. The average score for healthy women with a regular partner is 33.6, Safarinejad said.

After 12 weeks, that score improved to 33.9 among women in the antidepressant group, versus 16.9 in the placebo group.

The most common side effects linked to bupropion included headache (affecting 9 percent of the group), insomnia and dry mouth (each affecting 7 percent), and nausea and muscle aches (each affecting 6 percent).

While the findings suggest that bupropion improves low sex drive, this is the first study to test the antidepressant in premenopausal women with HSDD.

“Further studies are needed to better elucidate the role of bupropion in HSDD,” Safarinejad noted.

Exactly why bupropion might improve sexual function is unclear. One theory attributes the effects to enhanced dopamine and norepinephrine activity; research suggests that dopamine is a key player in the brain’s “pleasure center,” being released in response to “rewards” like food and sex.

SOURCE: BJU International.