Salty snacks mean more sodas for kids
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:22:57 GMTBy JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press Writer
DALLAS - Kids who load up on salty meals and snacks get thirsty, and too often they turn to calorie-filled sodas. So maybe cutting back on the salt is a good way to cut the calories. That's the idea coming from a British study published Wednesday in an American Heart Association journal.
Salt is "a hidden factor in the obesity epidemic," said Graham MacGregor, a co-author of the study by researchers at St. George's University of London.
And researchers say all that salt isn't coming from the salt shaker: About 80 percent comes from manufactured food.
"Most people think that sodium comes from the salt shaker. The salt shaker contributes less than 10 to 15 percent," said Dr. Myron Weinberger, a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.
"Fast foods, for example, are just loaded with sodium. Processed foods are all very high in sodium," said Weinberger, who wrote an editorial related to the study published in the online journal Hypertension.
Not only could less salt translate to fewer soft drinks and therefore fewer calories, but a modest reduction in salt has already been shown to lower blood pressure, which increases the risk of later-in-life heart attack and stroke, researchers say.
Also, several studies have shown a link between sugary soft drinks and obesity in children.
Reducing salt in manufactured foods can be done gradually, without the public even noticing, said Dr. Feng He, lead author of the study and cardiovascular research fellow at St. George's. She said a 10 to 20 percent reduction in salt isn't even detectable.
"It's important for the food industry to make a reduction," she said.
The study suggested that cutting in half the amount of salt British children consume — a decrease of about half a teaspoon a day — would lead to an average reduction of about 18 ounces of sugar-sweetened soft drinks per week.
The study was based on diet data from Great Britain's National Diet and Nutrition Survey. Researchers looked at 1,688 British boys and girls — ages 4 to 18 — over a seven-day period in 1997.
They noted that the amount of salt eaten might be underestimated in the study because it didn't include salt added during cooking or at the table. The researchers also found that more than half the fluids drunk by the children were soft drinks, and more than half of those were sugar-sweetened.
MacGregor, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at St. George's, says the study results should apply to kids in the U.S. as well.
The United Kingdom began a government-led campaign to cut salt consumption in 1996 and researchers say more recent studies show that salt intake has already decreased.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is taking public comment until March 28 on a consumer group's proposal to restrict the amount of salt in processed foods, among other options. And the American Medical Association has urged the government to require strong labeling of high-salt foods because if salt's connection to high blood pressure and heart problems.
Experts note that it will take more than cutting salt to get overweight kids in shape: healthy eating and exercise are needed as well.
"It's another piece of the puzzle," said Dr. Pamela Sayger Cava, pediatric cardiologist at the Herma Heart Center at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. "The kids have to be active. They have to have more water, less soda. They have to eat less fast food."
MacGregor said that parents should look at food labels. And they should make sure children eat more fresh fruits and vegetables without adding salt, which stimulates the brain to want more fluid.
"Thirst is one of the most basic instincts. When you get thirsty, you have to drink," MacGregor said.
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On the Net:
American Heart Association: http://www.americanheart.org
More ammo against withdrawn surgery drug
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:22:29 GMTBy MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA - Heart surgery patients were more likely to die if given the anti-bleeding drug Trasylol, two more U.S. studies have found, renewing the claims that the drug is dangerous. Bayer AG stopped selling the drug last fall, after a Canadian study was halted because of deaths among patients taking Trasylol.
But the new research reignited controversy over Trasylol, which was on the market for 14 years and used by doctors to treat hundreds of thousands of heart bypass patients each year.
Bayer funded one of the two new studies, and had the preliminary results before a September 2006 federal hearing on the drug's safety — but did not present them.
The company issued a statement this week saying both the new studies are flawed. But the spokesman for a consumer advocacy group said the studies are convincing confirmation of the drug's dangers.
"I just don't know how much further evidence you need," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen's Health Research Group.
The new studies are being published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Trasylol, known generically as aprotinin, was used in heart bypass surgeries to control bleeding. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1993 after studies showed its clotting powers clearly reduced the need for blood transfusions, and it became a top choice for surgeons.
The first new study looked at more than 10,000 patients who had bypass surgeries at Duke University Medical Center from 1996 through 2005.
It found that 6.4 percent of patients who were given Trasylol died within 30 days of the surgery, a rate nearly 2 1/2 times higher than patients who got another drug or who received no treatment for excessive bleeding. At one year after surgery, almost 16 percent of Trasylol patients had died — again, roughly 2 1/2 times higher than the other two patient groups.
But it's not clear why the people who took Trasylol died at a higher rate, said Dr. Andrew Shaw of Duke, the study's lead author.
The second study — the one funded by Bayer — looked at more than 78,000 patients nationwide in a period from Jan. 1, 2003 to March 31, 2006.
After adjusting for other factors, the researchers found the risk of death after surgery was 64 percent higher in the Trasylol group than in those taking a comparison drug.
The results did not change substantially from when they were first presented to company officials at Bayer in early September 2006, said Dr. Sebastian Schneeweiss of Harvard Medical School, the study's lead author. Bayer had the results before an FDA advisory committee meeting on the drug.
At that meeting, the FDA panel discussed a different study based on hospital records of thousands of patients, which found that those given Trasylol had higher rates of death and kidney failure that required dialysis. The study suggested as many as 2,000 patients a year died as a result of taking the drug.
At the time, some scientists had said the research was flawed and the deaths may have been caused by other factors. The committee voted to keep the drug on the market. Bayer officials said they did not discuss the Schneeweiss study with the committee because it was preliminary and they had questions about how it was done.
The more rigorous Canadian study compared Trasylol with two other drugs, and was halted last year when preliminary results suggested a higher risk of death with the Bayer drug.
The FDA requested the drug be pulled rather than wait for more definitive results from the Canadian study. Those results still have not been released.
Federal health officials should pursue criminal charges against Bayer for withholding information from its own study from the FDA panel in 2006, Wolfe said.
Bayer officials still say they believe Trasylol's benefits outweigh its risks when used properly. The company said it's waiting for the final results of the Canadian study before deciding whether to permanently suspend the drug's sales.
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On The Net:
New England Journal: http://nejm.org
Study shows where new diseases may arise
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:22:18 GMTBy MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
NEW YORK - New infectious diseases have been appearing more often, says a study that suggests "hot spots" where the next new germs are most likely to appear. "We need to be out there in the hot spot regions looking for the next HIV," said study co-author Peter Daszak.
Daszak, the executive director of the New York-based Consortium for Conservation Medicine at Wildlife Trust, and other researchers present their analysis in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Experts called it the most thoroughly documented report yet to show a past increase in new infectious diseases and to predict where they might appear next.
To designate the hot spots, researchers found 335 appearances of new disease between 1940 and 2004, and then analyzed social and environmental factors that appeared to promote them. Most disease events involved germs new to humans, but researchers also counted illnesses from established germs that had become drug-resistant, moved into a new region or had become much more common.
Decade-by-decade, such incidents grew steadily from 25 in the 1940s to 98 in the 1990s, except for a spike of 103 during the 1980s.
Some proposed future hot spots were for illnesses that emerge from wildlife, as the AIDS virus HIV did from chimpanzees.
The researchers said the highest risk areas are in parts of east Asia, Central America and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, western Europe and some population centers of North America. That's because the historical analysis had found the risk of such diseases goes up with factors like high population density and diversity of wildlife, the researchers said.
Peter Cowen, of North Carolina State University, who didn't participate in the study, called the hot spot analysis "a good guesstimate."
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On the Net:
Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature
Consortium for Conservation Medicine: http://www.conservationmedicine.org/
Google to store patients health records
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 06:30:21 GMTBy MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer
SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.
The pilot project to be announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service, which won't be open to the general public.
Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password that's also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.
Google views its expansion into health records management as a logical extension because its search engine already processes millions of requests from people trying to find about more information about an injury, illness or recommended treatment.
But the health venture also will provide more fodder for privacy watchdogs who believe Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computers log their search requests and store their e-mail discussions.
Prodded by the criticism, Google last year introduced a new system that purges people's search records after 18 months. In a show of its privacy commitment, Google also successfully rebuffed the U.S. Justice Department's demand to examine millions of its users' search requests in a court battle two years ago.
The Mountain View-based company hasn't specified a timetable for unveiling the health service, which has been the source of much speculation for the past two years. Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, has previously said the service would debut in 2008.
Contacted Wednesday, a Google spokesman declined to elaborate on its plans. The Associated Press learned about the pilot project from the Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit medical center founded 87 years ago.
The clinic already keeps the personal health records of more than 120,000 patients on its own online service called MyChart. Patients who transfer the information to Google would still be able to get the data quickly even if they were no longer being treated by the Cleveland Clinic.
"We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information," Mayer said in a statement supplied by the Cleveland Clinic.
The Cleveland Clinic decided to work with Google "to create a more efficient and effective national health care system," said C. Martin Harris, the medical center's chief information officer.
Google isn't the first high-tech heavyweight to set up an online filing cabinet in an effort make it easier for people to get their medical records after they change doctors or health insurance plans.
Rival Microsoft Corp. last year introduced a similar service called HealthVault, and AOL co-founder Steve Case is backing Revolution Health, which also offers online tools for managing personal health histories.
The third-party services are troublesome because they aren't covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPPA, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, which just issued a cautionary report on the topic.
Passed in 1996, HIPPA established strict standards that classify medical information as a privileged communication between a doctor and patient. Among other things, the law requires a doctor to notify a patient when subpoenaed for a medical record.
That means a patient who agrees to transfer medical records to an external health service run by Google or Microsoft could be unwittingly making it easier for the government or some other legal adversary to obtain the information, Dixon said.
If the medical records aren't protected by HIPPA, the information conceivably also could be used for marketing purposes.
Google, which runs the Internet's most lucrative ad network, typically bases its marketing messages on search requests and the content on Web pages and e-mail contained in its computers.
It's not clear how Google intends to make money from its health service. The company sometimes introduces new products without ads just to give people more reason to visit its Web site, betting the increased traffic will boost its profits in the long run.
Cut salt to keep children thin study
Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:08:59 GMTWASHINGTON - Reducing the amount of salt that children eat could provide a short-cut to keeping them slim, British researchers reported on Wednesday.
They found that children who ate less salt drank fewer sugary soft drinks and could reduce their risk of high blood pressure and obesity.
Writing in the journal Hypertension, they said this could lower rates of heart attack and stroke in later life.
"Sugar-sweetened soft drinks are a significant source of calorie intake in children," said Dr. Feng He of St. George's University of London.
"It has been shown that sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption is related to obesity in young people," He added in a statement.
"If children aged 4 to 18 years cut their salt intake by half, there would be a decrease of approximately two sugar-sweetened soft drinks per week per child, so each child would decrease calorie intake by almost 250 kilocalories per week."
One pound of body weight equals 3,500 calories.
He and colleagues analyzed data from a 1997 national survey of more than 2,000 people between 4 and 18 in Britain. More than 1,600 boys and girls had salt and fluid intake recorded in a diary, with everything they ate and drank weighed.
"We found that children eating a lower-salt diet drank less fluid," He said. "From our research, we estimated that 1 gram of salt cut from their daily diet would reduce fluid intake by 100 grams per day."
The children who ate less salt also drank fewer sugar-sweetened soft drinks, and He predicted that a 1 gram reduction in salt would reduce sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption by 27 grams a day, after factoring in age, gender, body weight and level of physical activity.
He said parents should check labels, choose low-salt food products and not add salt during cooking and at the table.
"Small reductions in the salt content of 10 percent to 20 percent cannot be detected by the human salt taste receptors," she said.
According to the American Heart Association, healthy adults should reduce their sodium intake to less than 2,300 milligrams or 2.3 grams per day. This is about 1 teaspoon of salt.
Americans and Britons consume up to 75 percent of their sodium from processed foods like tomato sauce, soups, canned foods and prepared mixes.
