Five-day Limit for Post-sex Pill

A recently licensed type of emergency contraception may offer women protection from pregnancy even when taken five days after sex.

Scottish researchers found that ulipristel acetate worked well after the three-day limit of the most commonly used drug, levonorgestrel.

At present ulipristel - unlike levonorgestrel - is only available with a prescription.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service welcomed the study.

Emergency contraception uses hormones to either prevent the release of an egg by the ovary in the hours after sex, or stop it implanting into the the womb.

Levonorgestrel is available from pharmacies, either with a prescription, or sold directly to over-16s.

A study by specialists working for NHS Lothian tested the effectiveness of levonorgestrel and ulipristel (which was licensed for use last year) using a sample of more than 1,600 women from the UK, Ireland and the USA.

A total of 2.6% of the levonorgestrel group became pregnant despite taking the drug, compared with 1.8% in the ulipristel group.

In a much smaller group of women who received emergency contraception more than three days after sex, there were no pregnancies among women who had taken lipristel compared with three pregnancies among those taking levonorgestrel.

The levels of side effects were roughly the same in both two drugs.

'Time window'

However, researchers said that the newer drug cannot be sold 'over-the-counter' at pharmacies because it did not yet have the established safety record of levonorgestrel.

Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service described the new type of drug as "exciting news".

She said: "It offers a longer time window for use than the traditional, emergency contraception pill.

"Different hormones are involved to the ones traditionally used in contraception, so it may be that these will prove to have other contraceptive uses in future.

"However, accessibly is key to the uptake of any time-sensitive medication and since this pill is not currently available over-the-counter and is significantly more expensive to buy than the traditional 'morning after pill', it may be that many women who could benefit from it are not able to access it."

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Low-Carb Diet Effective in Lowering Blood Pressure

A new study initiated by researchers at Veterans Affairs Medical Centre and Duke University Medical Centre, reveals that a low-carbohydrate diet is equally effective for weight loss as the weight loss drug orlistat, but in a surprising twist, a low-carbohydrate diet proved more advantageous in lowering blood pressure, as well than the weight-loss medicine.

Researcher William S. Yancy, Jr., MD, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Centre, says, “If people have high blood pressure and a weight problem, a low-carbohydrate diet might be a better option than a weight loss medication”.

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, involved 146 obese or overweight adults who were randomly segregated into two groups. Among them many were suffering from high blood pressure or diabetes.

A low-carbohydrate was imposed on the first group while the second group received the weight loss drug orlistat thrice a day.

The results revealed weight loss was similar in the two groups. The low-carb diet group lost an average of 9.5% of their body weight and the orlistat group lost an average of 8.5%. However, those in low-carbohydrate group witnessed a fall in their blood pressure, compared to only 21% of those in the orlistat group.

Researchers say weight loss itself typically produces a healthy reduction in blood pressure, but it appears that a low-carbohydrate diet has an additional blood pressure-lowering effect that merits further study.

Source: topnews.us

Sitting Too Much May Be Deadly

Here's a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly.

Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods - even if you also exercise regularly - could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place - at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or television - just the overall number of hours it occurs.

Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die.

In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences suggested that authorities rethink how they define physical activity to highlight the dangers of sitting.

While health officials have issued guidelines recommending minimum amounts of physical activity, they haven't suggested people try to limit how much time they spend in a seated position.

"After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals," Ekblom-Bak said. She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down.

Even for people who exercise, spending long stretches of time sitting at a desk is still harmful. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organisation, said people who exercise every day - but still spend a lot of time sitting - may get more benefit if that exercise were spread across the day, rather than in a single bout.

That wasn't welcome news for Aytekin Can, 31, who works at a London financial company and spends most of his days sitting in front of a computer. Several evenings a week, Can also teaches jiu jitsu, a Japanese martial art involving wrestling, and also does Thai boxing.

"I'm sure there are some detrimental effects of staying still for too long, but I hope that being active when I can helps," he said. "I wouldn't want to think the sitting could be that dangerous."

Still, in a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.

"We don't have enough evidence yet to say how much sitting is bad," said Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, who led the Canadian study. "But it seems the more you can get up and interrupt this sedentary behaviour, the better."

Figures from a US survey in 2003-04 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting, from working at their desks to sitting in cars.

Experts said more research is needed to figure out just how much sitting is dangerous, and what might be possible to offset those effects.

"People should keep exercising because that has a lot of benefits," Ekblom-Bak said. "But when they're in the office, they should try to interrupt sitting as often as possible," she said. "Don't just send your colleague an email. Walk over and talk to him. Standing up."

Source: www.smh.com.au

7 Steps for a Healthy Heart

The American Heart Association has, for the first time, identified seven health factors and lifestyle behaviors its research indicates are necessary to keep your ticker in good shape.

“Life’s Simple 7” categorizes cardiovascular health as Poor, Intermediate, or Ideal in each of seven areas.

Published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, the AHA says ideal cardiovascular health for adults is defined by these health measures:

1. Never smoked or quit more than a year ago.
2. A healthy body mass index (BMI), an estimate of body fat determined by a formula using weight and height.
3. Physical activity, and the more the better. The new measure says at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise is necessary for ideal health, or 75 minutes weekly of vigorous physical activity.
4. Blood pressure below 120/80.
5. Fasting blood glucose less than 100 milligrams/deciliter, a fasting measure of blood sugar level.
6. Total cholesterol of less than 200 milligrams/deciliter.
7. Eating a healthy diet. Four to five of the key components of a healthy diet are followed. For a 2,000-calorie diet, these include:
   
   • At least 4.5 cups of fruits and vegetables per day
   • At least two 3.5 oz. servings of fish per week, preferably oily fish
   • At least three 1-ounce servings of fiber-rich whole grains per day
   • Limiting sodium to less than 1,500 milligrams a day
   • Drinking no more than 36 ounces weekly of sugar-sweetened beverages

The AHA hopes the seven factors could improve the cardiovascular health of Americans by 20% by the year 2020, and also reduce deaths from cardiovascular-related diseases and strokes by 20%.

Source: www.webmd.com

Chronic sleep loss, sleep debt dangerous

Humans spend about one-third of their lives asleep, so it's no wonder that we often try to cheat the system by rising early and going to bed late.

Many people think they can make up a sleep debt with one or two good nights of rest on the weekend, but new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital suggests this is impossible.

Scientists studied healthy volunteers in a sleep lab for three weeks. The participants kept a schedule that was similar to an on-call doctor - 33 hours awake, followed by 10 hours of sleep.

On average, this translates to less than six hours of sleep per night. They found that volunteers' reaction times improved after they had a chance to sleep - but this improvement steadily wore off over the course of the day.

In the late hours, people's chronic sleep loss caught up with them and caused them to make more errors.

Researchers say the resulting sleep debt creates a dangerous situation for late-night drivers or those who work overnights in a hospital.

Source: www.wkowtv.com

First gene 'linked to aggressive prostate cancer found'

Scientists have discovered the first gene linked to the aggressive form of prostate cancer, raising hope that doctors will someday be able to predict how the disease will progress.

The cancer is often either slow-growing or aggressive, which has led the two types of the disease to be dubbed the ‘tiger’ and the ‘pussycat’.

The difference can be crucial as many prostate cancer treatments carry with them the risk of serious side-effects, including incontinence and impotence.

However, at the moment there is no way to predict which type a patient will suffer.

Although carrying the newly identified gene does not in itself guarantee that a patients’ cancer will be aggressive, the breakthrough raises hopes that doctors could someday discover a number of genes that would allow them to predict the diseases’ progress accurately.

Dr Jianfeng Xu, from Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, who led the study, said: "This finding addresses one of the most important clinical questions of prostate cancer – the ability at an early stage to distinguish between aggressive and slow-growing disease.

"Although the genetic marker currently has limited clinical utility, we believe it has the potential to one day be used in combination with other genetic markers to predict which men have aggressive prostate cancer at a stage when the disease is still curable."

If identified, men who carry the genes could be encouraged to attend screening at a young age, he and his team believe.

More than 35,000 men a year in Britain develop prostate cancer and around one in three go on to die from the disease.

However, many men have such a slow growing form of the disease that they will in all likelihood die from something else before they ever suffer symptoms of their cancer, posing a treatment dilemma for doctors.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked at the genetic make-up of 4,849 men with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and 12,205 with a slow-growing form of the disease.

Researchers discovered a genetic defect which makes carriers up to 25 per cent more likely to develop the aggressive form.

Dr Helen Rippon, from The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: “Distinguishing between aggressive and slow growing forms of prostate cancer is probably the most significant challenge facing research into the disease today.

“However, this marker is not informative enough on its own to form the basis of a new, more reliable test – up to 30 per cent of men with a less aggressive cancer also carry it.

“Nevertheless, this study raises hopes that a panel of several genetic markers might one day be established that together can determine a man’s risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer.”

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk