Researcher Vibrations help slim abdomen
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:50:57 GMTPORTLAND, Maine - A Maine researcher says standing on a vibrating platform for 15 minutes a day could help people achieve washboard abs.
Clifford Rosen from The Jackson Laboratory and Maine Medical Center Research Institute says his study put mice on a vibrating platform for 15 minutes a day for 15 weeks.
He says the mice developed 27 percent fewer abdominal fat cells and saw other benefits, including reduced triglycerides in the liver.
The mice didn't lose weight but Rosen says it appears that the vibrations changed fat distribution in a beneficial way. The study by Rosen and his research partners was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com
Government may waste anthrax vaccine
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:45:23 GMTBy EILEEN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The government stands to waste $100 million a year if two federal agencies cannot agree to coordinate the use of a vaccine for the deadly anthrax bacterial disease.
The departments of Defense and Health and Human Services each purchase the anthrax vaccine, BioThrax. But much of the vaccine purchased for HHS goes unused, according to government investigators.
Currently the Strategic National Stockpile has more than 520,000 doses of the vaccine — worth $12 million — that have already expired, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by The Associated Press before its release at a hearing Tuesday before the Senate homeland security committee.
GAO said the two departments should create a single inventory system for these drugs so they are not wasted. The Defense Department gives BioThrax to personnel who will deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Korean peninsula, according to the report.
The national stockpile is kept in secret storage facilities around the country. As of June, the stockpile had about 10 million doses of the vaccine — all of which will expire if not used.
"It just seems like a common-sense solution to a problem that otherwise is going to cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Tuesday. Collins is the top Republican on the committee.
The departments say legal issues stand in the way of a vaccine-sharing agreement, and say the GAO overestimated the amount of money lost as a result.
Responding to the report, an HHS official said such an agreement could save $25 million a year rather than $100 million. Another obstacle to such an agreement is that the Pentagon does not use nearly as many vaccines as HHS buys for its stockpile, said David G. Jarrett, the defense department's medical director at the office of the special assistant for chemical and biological defense and chemical demilitarization programs.
"It should also be noted that DoD cannot distribute expiring stocks at the last minute," Jarrett wrote in his response to the report.
In September and October 2001, anthrax exposures in the U.S. killed five people and injured 22. The federal government accelerated its program to develop more successful vaccines, but that program continues to run into problems. Investigators have not determined who is responsible for the attacks.
"This keeps me and a lot of other people up at night," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., said Tuesday. Lieberman chairs the Senate committee and said this would be the first of many reports on anthrax and bioterrorism. "The ease of bringing biological agents into the country or actually procuring them here and then the propensity they have to multiply and spread has devastating consequences."
The vaccine's shelf life is currently three years, according to manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions Inc. In September the company signed a three-year contract with HHS to provide 18.75 million doses of the anthrax vaccine for the national stockpile.
HHS plans to use the expired anthrax vaccines even though that goes against Food and Drug Administration guidelines, according to the report. But in its response to the report, HHS said it would destroy the expired drugs.
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More women getting double mastectomies
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:39:12 GMTBy LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - More women who have cancer in only one breast are getting both breasts removed, says research that found the trend more than doubled in just six years. It's still a rare option: Most breast cancer in this country is treated by lumpectomy, removing just the tumor while saving the breast.
But the new study suggests 4.5 percent of breast cancer surgery in 2003 involved women getting cancerous and healthy breasts simultaneously removed, a 150 percent increase from 1998 — with no sign that the trend was slowing.
Young women are most likely to choose the aggressive operation, researchers report Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The concern is whether they're choosing in the heat of the moment — breast cancer surgery often is within two weeks of diagnosis — or with good understanding of its pros and cons.
"Are these realistic decisions or not?" asks Dr. Todd Tuttle, cancer surgery chief at the University of Minnesota, who led the study after more women sought the option in his own hospital.
"I'm afraid that women believe having their opposite breast removed is somehow going to improve their breast cancer survival. In fact, it probably will not affect their survival," he said.
The initial tumor already may have sent out seeds of spread to key organs, Tuttle explained.
But removing the remaining healthy breast does greatly lower, although not eliminate, chances of a new cancer developing on the opposite side.
Don't underestimate the peace of mind that brings, said Trisha Stotler Meyer of Vienna, Va., who had her breasts removed three weeks ago.
"Doctors are not up at night crying" in fear of their next mammogram, said Meyer, 37, who went back for a double mastectomy after her initial cancer surgery. "I don't want to have to deal with the stress."
Meyer is far from alone.
In a single day last week, Dr. Shawna Willey of Georgetown University's Lombardi Cancer Center had two patients seek the operation.
One needed her entire cancerous breast removed, and immediately asked to have the healthy one removed, too. Another woman had recently undergone a lumpectomy and was sick from chemotherapy — and returned to ask that both breasts be fully removed.
"Her perception is, 'If I have my breasts taken off, I never have to do this again,'" said Willey, who asked the woman to see a counselor and finish chemo before deciding.
"I can understand that point of view," she added. "But I always tell them, it's not a guarantee."
The American Cancer Society estimates 178,480 U.S. women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. About 40,460 will die of it.
Some women at high risk, because of notorious breast cancer genes or family history, choose preventive mastectomies before cancer ever strikes.
Tuttle's study is the first national look at how many women choose to remove both a diseased and healthy breast together.
He used a government cancer registry that covers 16 regions, a representative sample of the U.S. population, to track more than 150,000 breast cancer surgeries between 1998 and 2003.
Tuttle calculated that lumpectomies accounted for almost 60 percent of those surgeries in 2003. Lumpectomies have gradually increased since they were proven just as effective as breast removal for early cancer in 1991.
The surprise: Single mastectomies remain the No. 2 option but are dropping — while double mastectomies, although uncommon, were on the rise for every stage of cancer. Even women who qualify for anti-hormone drugs that greatly protect the remaining breast were as likely to choose removal as women with harder-to-treat tumors.
Why? Tuttle is planning a new study to tell, and to see if candidates are warned about such risks as infection that increase with the bigger surgery.
Meyer, the Virginia woman, had time to fully consider the option. She was diagnosed with cancer in January 2005, shortly after her son's birth. At first, she was content with a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. But she didn't qualify for protective anti-hormone drugs. And then in March, Meyer found a lump in her healthy breast. It wasn't cancer but a cyst that would wax and wane, making for tense checkups.
"It really freaked me out," Meyer said. "It was at that moment that my breasts became like tonsils. I don't need them anymore. They're gone."
Georgetown's Willey says better reconstructive surgery is partly spurring the trend. Still, she often encourages women to wait to remove the second breast, as lining up reconstruction sometimes dangerously delays treating the cancer.
"When I was younger ... I really tried to argue with patients and talk them out of it," Willey said. Now, if they've weighed the options, she doesn't.
"I can't recall a single patient who tells me they regret that decision."
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On the Net:
American Society of Clinical Oncology consumer info: http://www.plwc.org/CancerAdvances
Obesity ads too soft on fat critics say
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:36:41 GMTBy MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA - Drunks swimming in gin, smokers in body bags and dopers living with their parents deep into adulthood. Those are among the public service ads shown in the past. But the government's new batch of obesity spots declines even to show a fat person, let alone wag a finger for gluttony or sloth.
No one is advocating public service announcements that ridicule fat people; experts say such spots would do more harm than good. But critics complain that the three new spots premiering this month are a wimpy attack on the costly and deadly explosion of obesity in America.
"It's so namby-pamby I think people will shrug it off," said Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based advocacy organization.
The three new spots are the latest in a series created by the Ad Council and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which try to tackle the nation's obesity problem with ads that encourage healthy snacking and taking the stairs.
Creators of the "Small Steps" campaign, funded by the government at more than $1.5 million a year, cite survey data for 467 adults which showed those who saw the ads did more walking and adopted some other healthy habits than those who didn't see the ads.
But critics say such a survey is hardly proof of success, and the nation's fat problem is clearly getting worse — more than one in three U.S. children are overweight or obese, and two in three adults are.
"I think 'Small Steps' is a euphemism for small vision," said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders.
The "Small Steps" campaign began in 2004. It was created for free by McCann Erickson New York, the ad agency that created the MasterCard "Priceless" campaign. Six TV spots have aired so far, all professionally produced and humorous, highlighting tips to healthier living.
This month, three more spots joined the rotation, along with a multimedia campaign focusing on exercise. The new anti-obesity TV spots show trim or slightly pudgy people noticing blobs of fat on a hotel room floor or in a theater. They comment that someone must have lost it by eating healthy snacks.
The spots' creators say they learned in focus groups that many people are intimidated — hopeless, even — about the sustained changes needed to slim down.
"So many people, when they think about losing weight, see it as a Sisyphean task — 'I have to lose weight but I can't fit it into my busy schedule,'" said Peggy Conlon, president of the Ad Council.
The ads offer easily achievable tips that empower people to make positive changes, she added.
The ads targeting smoking aren't as tame. A recent one by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene shows smokers' decayed and tumored bodies.
Young viewers pay more attention to ads that evoke feelings of personal loss, sadness, anger, disgust or fear, according to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kids also tend to remember such ads longer.
That drama is lacking in the obesity spots — for example, none have offered a surgeon's view of fat, or dramatized a death from Type 2 diabetes, or shown a person complaining about how a fat neighbor's medical bills are costing taxpayers.
In the past, the vegan advocacy group, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has taken a somewhat confrontational approach.
In 2005, the group put out a spot in which doctors yank a pizza and jumbo-sized soda away from an intently eating fat boy and toss him an apple. They put out another in which the same doctors haul away fatty foods from a restaurant called Chubby's.
The group has no data on whether the ads are working, but the government ads "don't address the obesity problem in a vivid enough way to get people's attention," said Patrick Sullivan, the group's communications director.
That raises a second complaint with the government's campaign: It sidesteps what some feel are the real causes of the obesity epidemic, the abundance of cheap and large portions of sugary and high-calorie foods.
"The U.S. government doesn't have the guts to go after junk food producers," Jacobson said.
Tied in with the "Small Steps" campaign, the Ad Council and federal health department are part of the "Coalition for Healthy Children," whose members include Coca Cola, PepsiCo, the Hershey Co. and the National Confectioners Association. Critics say the partnership suggests a conflict of interest that might dissuade efforts to discourage soft drinks or candy bars.
Food and soda companies did not alter what was said in spots, said Ellyn Fisher, an Ad Council spokeswoman. The content was shaped by advertising research, which concluded the spots were humorous and motivating, she said.
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On the Net:
Small Steps campaign: http://www.smallstep.gov
Center for Science in the Public Interest: http://www.cspinet.org/
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:
http://www.pcrm.org/news/psas/tv.html
