Curbing bad habits can stop 37M premature deaths: study

PARIS - Curbing smoking and drinking, salt intake, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and obesity can prevent more than 37 million premature deaths by 2025, according to an analysis published on Saturday.

If globally-adopted targets for reducing these risk factors are met, the risk of dying prematurely from heart or lung disease, stroke, cancer or diabetes will fall by 22 percent in men and 19 percent for women in 2025, compared with 2010, a team of researchers wrote in The Lancet medical journal.

"Worldwide, this improvement is equivalent to delaying or preventing at least 16 million deaths in people aged 30-70 years and 21 million in those aged 70 years or older over 15 years," they said.

The targets are to reduce tobacco use by 30 percent, alcohol consumption by 10 percent, salt intake by 30 percent, high blood pressure by 25 percent, and to halt the rise in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

A more ambitious 50-percent reduction in smoking by 2025 would reduce the risk by more than 24 percent in men and by 20 percent in women, wrote the team.

They used national population data and epidemiological models for their calculations.

"Most of the benefits will be seen in low-income and middle-income countries where as many as 31 million deaths could be prevented," said co-author Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London.

Not reaching the targets would result in 38.8 million premature deaths in 2025 alone -- 10.5 million more than in 2010, the team said.

Premature mortality is defined for the purposes of the study as the probability of dying between the ages of 30 and 70.

The United Nations is targeting a 25-percent reduction in premature death from non-communicable diseases from 2010 to 2025.

This group of diseases is caused in large part by unhealthy lifestyles, including tobacco use, physical inactivity, the harmful use of alcohol and unhealthy diets.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Vitamin C supplements tied to men's kidney stones

NEW YORK - Men who take vitamin C supplements are at higher-than-average risk of developing kidney stones, a new study from Sweden suggests.

The findings don't prove the vitamin itself triggers stones to form. But researchers said that because there are no clear benefits tied to taking high-dose vitamin C, people who have had stones in the past might want to think before taking extra supplements.

"I don't think I would hold this up and say, ‘You shouldn't take vitamin C, and here's the evidence,'" said Dr. Brian Matlaga, a urologist who studies kidney stones at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

But, "When you talk to patients, a lot of times you'll find patients are taking non-prescribed medications, like vitamin supplements… and there may not be great evidence that there's an actual health benefit associated with these," he told Reuters Health.

The new finding "suggests that stone formers who take regular vitamin C may actually place themselves at increased risk," said Matlaga, who wasn't involved in the study.

Researchers led by Laura Thomas of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm used data from a large study of middle-aged and elderly Swedish men who answered a series of questions on their diet and lifestyle, then were tracked for an average of 11 years.

The current analysis included 907 of those men who said they took regular vitamin C tablets and more than 22,000 who didn't use any nutritional supplements.

Of the vitamin C users, 3.4% developed kidney stones for the first time during the study, compared to 1.8% of non-supplement users. Men who took vitamin C supplements at least once a day had the highest risk of kidney stones, researchers reported Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

"It has long been suspected that high doses of vitamin C may increase the risk of kidney stones as some of the vitamin C absorbed by the body is excreted in urine as oxalate - one of the key components of kidney stones," Thomas told Reuters Health by email.

Stones are made up of tiny crystals, which can be formed by calcium combining with oxalate. They usually pass on their own, but can cause severe pain in the process. Larger stones occasionally require surgery.

Men are more likely to form stones than women.

‘An important part of a healthy diet'

The findings don't mean people shouldn't get plenty of vitamin C through fruits and vegetables, researchers said. The antioxidant is important for bone and muscle health - and severe deficiency can cause scurvy.

"Vitamin C is an important part of a healthy diet," Thomas said. "Any effect of vitamin C on kidney stone risk is likely to depend both on the dose and on the combination of nutrients with which it is ingested."

Swedish supplements, like those the study participants would have taken, typically contain about 1,000 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C per tablet, she noted. Most vitamin C supplements sold in the US contain either 500 or 1,000 mg.

The US Institute of Medicine recommends 90 mg per day for men - the amount in a small glass of orange juice or a cup of broccoli - and 75 mg for most women.

Matlaga said more research is needed to determine for certain whether reasonable doses of vitamin C may increase the risk of kidney stones. For now, he said people who haven't had kidney stones before shouldn't worry about any related risks tied to the vitamin.

source: abs-cbnnews.com

Could too much calcium be bad for your heart?

NEW YORK - In a new analysis from the National Institutes of Health, men who took calcium tablets were more likely to die of heart disease over more than a decade than those who didn't get extra calcium in supplement form.

"The effect of supplemental or dietary calcium on heart disease has always been a bit of an unanswered story," said Howard Sesso, a preventive medicine researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"It could be that when you take supplements, maybe you're taking doses that far exceed what you need," he added. But it's still unclear how that might raise cardiovascular risks.

The new findings are based on a study of close to 400,000 middle-aged Americans initiated in 1995 to 1996.

Study volunteers answered questions about their lifestyle, general health and diet, including use of supplements. Researchers then tracked how many of them died, and from what causes, over the next 12 years.

About half of men and more than two-thirds of women said they took calcium supplements or multivitamins containing calcium at the outset.

During the study period, almost 12,000 people - or about 3% - died of cardiovascular disease.

Qian Xiao from the National Cancer Institute and her colleagues found men who took 1,000 milligrams of calcium per day or more were 20% more likely to die of heart-related causes than those who passed on calcium supplements. That was after the researchers took into account men's age, race and weight, as well as other measures of diet and lifestyle.

However, there was no link between calcium supplements and heart disease deaths in women. And calcium from food and beverages wasn't tied to heart problems in men or women, the research team wrote Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

It's possible that calcium build-up in the arteries and veins may affect cardiovascular risks in some people, Xiao wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

No cause-effect link

But Sesso, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health he wasn't sure why, biologically, calcium supplements would be linked to a higher risk of heart problems in men but not women.

The findings don't prove a cause-and-effect link between the supplements and heart problems. It's possible there were certain differences between men who did or didn't take extra calcium that the research team couldn't measure.

"Although we observed an increased risk of death from heart disease in men who reported taking supplements containing calcium, we cannot say for sure that it was a result of using those supplements," Xiao said.

According to Sesso, the study won't change the fact that calcium supplements are typically recommended for reasons not related to heart disease - such as to prevent fracture risk in older adults who don't get enough calcium through food.

Eating a balanced diet and keeping a healthy weight are as or more important than any supplement when it comes to cardiovascular health, Sesso said.

"If you have a good diet in the first place, a supplement might not be adding all that much," he said.

source: abs-cbnnews.com

Is your cat making you crazy? Feline feces linked to suicide among women

WASHINGTON - Women infected with a parasite spread by cat feces run a higher risk of attempting suicide, suggests a study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark published in a scientific journal this week.

"We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves," said Teodor Postolache of the University of Maryland medical school, senior author of the study in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

"But we did find a predictive association between the infection and suicide attempts later in life that warrants additional studies. We plan to continue our research into this possible connection."

About one in three people in the world are believed to be infected with T. gondii, which has been linked to schizophrenia and behavior changes, but often produces no symptoms as it lurks in brain and muscle cells.

Human run the risk of infection when they clean out their cats' litter boxes, as well as by consuming unwashed vegetables, undercooked or raw meat, or water from a contaminated source.

"The study found that women infected with T. gondii were one-and-a-half times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who were not infected, and the risk seemed to rise with increasing levels of the T. gondii antibodies," a summary of the findings said.

"Previous mental illness did not appear to significantly alter these findings. The relative risk was even higher for violent suicide attempts."

The suspected perils of T. gondii featured in The Atlantic magazine in March this year when it ran a widely-read profile of Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr, who suspects the parasite of literally changing people's minds.

It headlined the article: "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy."

source: interaksyon.com