Month: July 2013

Maybe we don’t need any more health studies. Maybe we just need to follow mom’s advice: “Eat your vegetables. Go outside and play. Don’t skip breakfast.” A new study of nearly 27,000 men found that those who regularly ate breakfast had a 27% lower risk of heart attack over the 16-year period of the study. The study also found bad news for late-night eaters. Those men had a 55% higher risk of heart disease. They also weighed more, were more likely to have high blood pressure and higher cholesterol, and they were more likely to have diabetes. The study was from the Harvard School of Public Health and reported by the AP.

Stopping your cholesterol-lowering drugs may increase your risk of Parkinson’s disease, a new study suggests. The study involved 43,810 people in Taiwan who were taking statins and did not have Parkinson’s disease when the study began. Researchers used pharmacy records to verify statin use. People who stopped taking certain statins had a 58% higher risk of Parkinson’s disease than those who continued taking their statin medicine. Only statins such as simvastatin and atorvastatin were associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease. These are “fat soluble.” They tend to deposit in fat-containing tissues and are thought to get into brain tissue more easily than other statins. People who took water-soluble statins, such as pravastatin and rosuvastatin, did not have a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease compared to those who stopped the drug.

Falling TVs have always been a danger to young children. Almost every house in the US has at least one TV. More than half of all households have three or more TVs. A new study looked at TV-related injuries in children between 1990 and 2011. During that 22-year period, about 381,000 children under age 18 were treated in emergency rooms for TV-related injuries. That’s an average of about 17,000 children a year. Or about one child every 30 minutes. The most common injury was from a TV falling on a child (53%). Two out of three children were under age five. Injuries to the head or neck were most common, followed by injuries to the legs. The information came from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. The study appeared in the Journal Pediatrics.

A vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV) may help prevent mouth and throat cancers, a new study suggests. Infection with HPV infection causes most cervical cancers. The HVP vaccine is known to help prevent cervical cancer. HPV infection is also a risk factor for oral cancers. Researchers randomly divided 7,466 women ages 18 to 25 into 2 groups. One group got the HPV vaccine, Cervarix. The other group got the hepatitis A vaccine. The study lasted 4 years; 5,840 women completed the study. Researchers took samples of cells from the women’s throats at the beginning and end of the study. Only one woman who was vaccinated had infected cells at the end of the study. Fifteen of the women who were not vaccinated were infected with HPV. The study was published in the journal PLOS. HealthDay wrote about it June 19.