28 November, 2012

Soft drinks can give you prostate cancer!

Men who drink fizzy drinks are not just ruining their teeth but could also be at risk of aggressive prostate cancer, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday. A Swedish study has found just one soft drink a day could increase the risk of developing more serious forms of the cancer by 40 percent. Experts at Lund University also found those who ate a carbohydrate diet heavy in rice and pasta increased their risk of getting milder forms of prostate cancer, which often required no treatment, by 31 percent.

And eating lots of sugary breakfast cereals raised the incidence of milder forms of the cancer to 38 percent. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men after lung disease. The study examined more than 8,000 men aged between 45 and73 for an average of 15 years.

Source: http://healyh.india.com

28.11.2012

How general health check ups can do more harm than good

General health checks do not reduce the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease or cancer, a new study has found.

They do, however, increase the number of new diagnoses, the researchers said.

Health checks were defined as screening for more than one disease or risk factor in more than one organ system offered to a general population unselected for disease or risk factors.

Authors from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark carried out a review of a total of 14 trials that looked at systematic health checks. The studies had between 1 and 22 years of follow-up.

Nine of the 14 trials had data on mortality and included 182,880 participants, 11,940 of whom died during the study period. 76,403 were invited to health checks and the remainder were not.

All participants were over 18 years old and the study excluded trials specifically targeting older people or trials that only enrolled people aged 65 or over.

Despite some variation regarding the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer, no evidence was found for a reduction of either total mortality, cardiovascular mortality, or cancer mortality.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that health checks did more harm than good as it led to more diagnoses and more medical treatment for hypertension.

The lack of beneficial effects suggests over-diagnosis and overtreatment, the researchers said.

In conclusion, the results do not support the use of general health checks aimed at the general population.

The researchers say that further research should "be directed at the individual components of health checks e.g. screening for cardiovascular risk factors, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, or kidney disease".

Source: www.dnaindia.com

28.11.2012

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure

Woodberry, George