Health briefs
Clash over vitamin's anti-cancer claims
A consumer advocacy group says it will file a lawsuit against Bayer HealthCare, maker of One-A-Day vitamins, if the manufacturer continues to promote its men's formula as a cancer preventive. Ads for the vitamins say a key ingredient, the antioxidant known as selenium, helps ward off prostate cancer in men. But in a recent government-funded study, scientists found no evidence that selenium protects against prostate cancer. In October, researchers ended the study of 35,000 men when it became clear that selenium did not stop the cancer from developing. On June 18, Bayer said that its claims about its vitamins have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In May, Canadian researchers announced that three nutrients - vitamin E, selenium, and soy - do not seem to prevent prostate cancer. Do vitamins and supplements work as weapons in fending off chronic and age-related disease? The answer may depend on which supplement you're taking.
Check up on your medical tests
A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 7 percent of abnormal medical test results aren't reported to patients. That can lead to dangerous assumptions if a doctor tells a patient not to expect a call unless there's an abnormality. Although the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality tells doctors to inform patients of all test results, including reassuring ones, nearly one third of the practices surveyed in the study didn't do so. "You can't assume that no news is good news," stresses study author Lawrence Casalino, an associate professor of public health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Practices that use "no news is good news" policies and have no good system in place for managing test results - like having the physician sign off on all results - are more likely to neglect to inform patients about negative results, Kotz writes. What should you do? Call for any and all test results. Ask your doctor's office to call you either way to tell you the result of a test. And find out when you should expect to hear. If you don't hear by that time, make the call yourself. Switch doctors if your phone calls aren't returned. If it takes your doctor three days to get back to you, it could be a sign that the office is not well managed. If that's the case, there's a good chance your test results could be ignored or misplaced. Don't assume electronic medical records safeguard against missed results. Medical practices relying on paper records were no more likely to miss abnormal test results than those with electronic medical records. Interestingly, those with a mixture of both had the worst score cards. Casalino says that's probably because they're in a transitional state of changing their procedures, allowing results to more easily fall through the cracks.
Another reason to get your rest
Researchers report that middle-aged adults who missed an average one hour of sleep each night over a 5-year period had a 37-percent increased risk of high blood pressure. The study from the University of Chicago followed 578 adults. Of the group, just 1 percent got the recommended 8 hours or more of sleep a night. A December study found that longer sleep duration for people in their 30s and 40s may decrease the risk of coronary artery calcification, a predictor of atherosclerosis and heart disease. That study showed just one extra hour each night lowered by an estimated 33 percent the odds of having calcification in blood vessels. According to the study authors, getting that extra hour brings a benefit, in cardiovascular terms, similar to that of lowering systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) by 17 points.