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Patellofemoral pain (PFP) occurs when the thigh bone rubs against the back of the knee cap. Typically, pain doesn’t occur when someone with PFP first starts a run. But once the pain begins, it gets increasingly worse. The pain disappears almost immediately after the person stops running.

This study included five runners with PFP who did hip-strengthening exercises twice a week for six weeks and a control group of four runners. The hip-strengthening exercises lasted for 30 to 45 minutes and involved single-leg squats and exercises with a resistance band. These exercises can be done at home.

The exercise program reduced and, in some cases, eliminated knee pain, according to the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researchers.

The study was to be presented Friday at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Baltimore.

Previous studies have found an association between PFP in women and weak hips. This is the first study to test a possible treatment for PFP, Tracy Dierks, assistant professor in the department of physical therapy, said in a university news release.

SOURCE: Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, news release.

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.

Many women take hormone therapy to treat menopausal symptoms, but some studies have linked the treatment to an increased risk for stroke.

For the new study, researchers reviewed a British database of medical records from 1987 and 2006, focusing on 15,710 cases in which a woman between the ages of 50 and 79 had a stroke. They compared the women with 59,958 other women.

Women who used low-dose patches were at no greater risk for stroke than were women who didn’t use patches, the study found, but use of high-dose patches upped the odds of stroke by 88 percent. Taking hormone therapy orally, meanwhile, increased the risk by 25 to 30 percent, compared with the risk for women who didn’t take hormone replacement in pill form. Dosage and formulation — whether the oral therapy was estrogen alone or in combination with progesterone — were found to have no bearing on the results.

Taking hormone replacement pills for less than a year did not boost risk for stroke, according to the study, but the risk rose by 35 percent for women who took the pills for longer than a year.

The study authors cautioned that their research alone doesn’t definitively prove that patches are healthier than pills.

The findings were published online in BMJ.

“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.

The findings, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that familiarity can breed dislike when it comes to reduced-calorie foods. They may also offer some insight into the common dilemma of “yo-yo” dieting, the researchers say.

For the study, researchers had 36 adults eat either a full-calorie spaghetti Bolognese for lunch five days in a row, or a reduced-calorie version of the same. The full-calorie prepackaged product contained 567 calories, while the diet brand contained 374 calories.

At each meal, the participants rated how well they liked the food after their first forkful, as well as whether they expected the meal to be filling and satisfying.

Overall, the researchers found, diners’ had a similar liking for both meals on the first day. But thereafter, appreciation for the diet version declined, with participants’ ratings declining by about 30 percent, on average.

In contrast, ratings for the full-calorie meal held steady over the five-day study.

The findings suggest that people’s taste for diet brands may decline as they become more familiar with them, according to senior researcher Jeffrey N. Brunstrom, of the University of Bristol in the UK.

However, there are many variables that could affect any one person’s willingness to stick with reduced-calorie products. Brunstrom and his colleagues found that while the diet pasta’s likeability took a dip, diners’ expectations as far as having their hunger satisfied remained steady.

“We found little evidence that people started to expect that the food would be less filling,” Brunstrom told Reuters Health in an email, adding that “this is good news for weight-loss foods.”

However, he noted, it’s unclear if those positive expectations would hold over weeks or months. In general, larger and longer-term studies are needed to better understand how people’s affinity for reduced-calorie foods shifts over time, according to the researcher.

Brunstrom and his colleagues also point out that their study focused on the palatability of a reduced-calorie main course, and not the lower-calorie snack foods so common on grocery store shelves. People’s taste for those products, the researchers note, may be better maintained.

An interesting question, according to Brunstrom, is whether changes in consumers’ taste for reduced-calorie products help explain why so many people find it hard to stick with a particular diet.

“Perhaps this is why people engage in ‘yo-yo’ dieting,” he speculated, adding that such on-again/off-again dieting is considered particularly unhealthy.

One of the co-researchers on the study is an employee of food manufacturer Nestle, which funded the work.

SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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.

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.

The study “sends a signal worthy of observation,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego and editor of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. The report is published in the April issue of the journal.

Goldstein noted that, in his practice, he sees patients “several times a week” who say that their sexual performance declined after they started taking a statin.

But an American epidemiologist who did a similar study said the Italian results could be interpreted as saying that statin use reduces the incidence of erectile dysfunction.

That study, of men in Olmsted County, Minn., found a low incidence of impotence in men taking the drugs, with longer use associated with lower incidence. Men who took statins for nine years were 64 percent less likely to develop erectile dysfunction in that study than those who didn’t, said study co-author Jennifer St. Sauver, an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic.

The apparently contradictory results could be explained by the different populations in the two studies, St. Sauver said. The Minnesota study included men in the general population, while the Italian study looked only at men being treated for erectile dysfunction.

Thirty percent of the Minnesota men were taking statins. Only 7 percent of the 3,484 men in the Italian study were taking the drugs. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that about 16 percent of U.S. adults use statins. The lower percentage in the Italian study could indicate that statins reduce the need to seek treatment for erectile dysfunction, St. Sauver said.

The Italian study also didn’t have a control group of men without sexual problems, she said, so to establish any cause-effect relationship “you would have to take a group of men without erectile dysfunction and see how many are taking statins,” St. Sauver said.

Men who take statins and have sexual problems shouldn’t stop taking the drug, Goldstein said. “They should see a doctor for a blood test,” he said. “If testosterone is low, they should not stop taking statins but should start testosterone treatment.”

The Italian study is important because “it is the first to bring up this message in a large number of men,” Goldstein added.

One U.S. study, reported in 2007 by the New England Research Institutes, did find lower levels of testosterone in a general population of men taking statins. But detailed analysis of the data found that the reduced levels could be explained by other factors, such as obesity and diabetes, rather than statin use.

That study was done because of reports that statins might lower the risk of prostate cancer by reducing testosterone levels. No such protective effect was found.

Several scattered studies have found a relationship between statin use and lower levels of male hormones. But definitive evidence about such a relationship would require a carefully controlled study, Goldstein said.

SOURCES: Irwin Goldstein, M.D., director, sexual medicine, Alvarado Hospital, San Diego; Jennifer St. Sauver, Ph.D., Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.

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.