Health bulletin

Defibrillator shocks late in hospitals

Nearly a third of patients with misfiring or quivering hearts in U.S. hospitals do not get the life-saving defibrillator shocks they need within the critical first two minutes of cardiac arrest, a study said.

The study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, which also ran an editorial indicating a person might be better off suffering cardiac arrest in a casino than a hospital.

Researchers from 369 hospitals in the National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation found that being black or having a cardiac arrest outside of regular weekday working hours also significantly delayed the time it took for hospital workers to shock the heart.

Thirty-four percent of those studied lived to be discharged from the hospital. But in an editorial, Leslie Saxon of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles said that the survival rate is disappointingly less than the 50 percent rate among people who collapse in an airport, casino or some other location where automated external defibrillators are readily available.

There are about 750,000 cardiac arrest cases in the United States a year and two-thirds of those occur in hospitals. The American Heart Association recommends that stopped hearts be shocked within two minutes.

Test screens for head, neck cancer

A simple mouth rinse may provide a new way to screen for head and neck cancers in people at high risk for these diseases, researchers said.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore are developing a saliva test -- inexpensive, easy to perform and painless -- that could spot diseases like mouth and throat cancer in heavy smokers, heavy drinkers and others at high risk.

There currently is no screening test for head and neck cancers. If found early, these cancers are often curable.

The study appears in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Minorities get less pain relief

Black and Hispanic patients in pain are less likely than whites to get powerful painkillers from U.S. hospital emergency departments, but the reasons may go beyond sheer racial bias, researchers said.

In a look at 375,000 emergency room visits over 13 years, a study found 31 percent of whites in pain received opioid drugs -- a broad class of narcotic painkillers dispensed only by prescription -- compared to 23 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Hispanics.

The study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Sun may guard against lymphoma

Recreational sun exposure could help prevent a type of blood cancer involving the lymph nodes called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to pooled data from 10 studies.

"These results … could be taken to suggest that if sun exposure does protect against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma it is an intermittent pattern of sun exposure that is the most protective," Dr. Anne Kricker of the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia and colleagues note in the International Journal of Cancer.

Elderly may benefit from L-carnitine

The dietary supplement L-carnitine can lessen fatigue and boost mental function in very old people, Italian researchers report.

Study participants given L-carnitine also experienced significant increases in muscle mass and reductions in fat mass, Dr. Mariano Malaguarnera and colleagues from the University of Catania report in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Hot flashes worse for heavier women

Contrary to expectations, the higher a woman's percentage of body fat at menopause, the more likely she is to experience symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats, a new study shows.

Such so-called "vasomotor symptoms" had previously been thought to be less common in heavier women at menopause, because body fat can convert male hormones into estrogen, Dr. Rebecca C. Thurston of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and colleagues note. Fatter women would therefore have a reserve source of estrogen that could shield them from these symptoms.

However, mounting evidence suggests heavier women actually experience more vasomotor symptoms with menopause, researchers report in the American Journal of Epidemiology. It's possible that the extra fat makes it harder for the body to dissipate heat, researchers said.