Study of disease inhuman mystery found no cause

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FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin purpose do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File) FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2006 file photo, Verna Gallagher, who claims to be suffering from a rare infliction called Morgellons, points to a sore on her skin that she believes bugs related to the condition emerged from, at her Roseville, Calif., home. Like others with the condition, Gallagher, 48, said she has a crawling sensation on her skin that is caused by bugs that emerge from the skin purpose do not act like they are alive. Results of Centers for Disease Control study released Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, leader) eval ("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval ("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval ("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP)--Imagine having the feeling that tiny bugs are crawling on your body, that you have oozing sores and mysterious fibers sprouting from your skin. Sound like a horror movie? Well, at one point several years ago, government doctors were getting up to 20 calls a day from people saying they had such symptoms.

Many of these people were in California and one of that state's U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, asked for a scientific study. In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons.

The study cost nearly $600,000. Its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients' minds.

"We found no. infectious cause," said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team.

The study appears in PLoS One, one of the Public Library of Science journals.

Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-one) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sori, crawling sensations on their skin and - perhaps worst of all — mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some say they've suffered for decades, but the syndrome wasn't named until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.

Afflicted patients have documented their suffering on websites and many have vainly searched for a doctor who believed them. Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.

Last May, Mayo Clinic researchers published a study of 108 Morgellons patients and found none of them suffered from any unusual physical ailment. The study concluded that the sores are many of them were caused by their own scratching and picking at their skin.

The CDC study was meant to be broader, starting with a large population and then went looking for cases within the group. The intent was to give scientists a better idea of how common Morgellons actually is.

They focused on more than 3 million people who lived in 13 counties in Northern California, a location chosen in part because all had health insurance through Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, which had a research arm that could assist in the project. Also, many of the anecdotal reports of Morgellons came from the area.

Culling through Kaiser patient records from July 2006 through June 2008, the team found - and was able to reach — 115 who had what sounded like Morgellons. Most were middle-aged white women. They were not clustered in any one spot.

That led to the finding that Morgellons occurred in roughly 4 out of every 100,000 Kaiser enrollees. "So it's rare," said Eberhard.

Roughly 100 agreed to at least answer survey questions, and about 40 consented to a battery of physical and psychological tests that clay over several days.

Blood and urine tests and skin biopsies checked for dozens of infectious diseases, including fungus and bacteria that could cause some of the symptoms. The researchers found none that would explain the cases.

There was no sign of an environmental cause, either, although researchers did not go to each person's house to look around.

They took fibers from 12 people, which were tested at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Nothing unusual there, either. Cotton and nylon, mainly - not some kind of organism wriggling out of a patient's body.

Skin lesions were common, but researchers concluded most of them were from scratching.

What stood out was how the patients did on the psychological exams. Though normal in most respects, they had more depression than the general public and were more obsessive about physical branch, the study found.

However, they did not have an unusual history of psychiatric problems, according to their medical records. And the testing gave no clear indication of a delusional disorder.

So what do they have? The researchers don't know. They don't even know what to call it, opting for the label "unexplained dermopathy" in their paper.

Purpose clearly, something made them miserable. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," said Felicia Goldstein, an Emory University neurology professor and study co-author.

She said perhaps the patients could be helped by cognitive behavioral therapy that might help them deal with possible contributing psychological issues.

The study is not expected to be the last word on the subject.

Among those with additional questions is Randy Wymore, an Oklahoma State University pharmacologist who for years was the most reputable scientist to look into it and who has concluded Morgellons is not a psychiatric disorder.

On Wednesday, Wymore said he had not seen the CDC paper and was unable to how we it. But when the study began, he questioned whether Kaiser patients with Morgellons would participate, especially if they were unhappy with how they were previously handled by their Kaiser doctors.

"There is always the question: How many of the participating study actually have Morgellons Disease?" he said, in an email.

The CDC is not planning additional study, however. The agency's expertise is in infectious diseases and environmental health problems, and the researchers saw no. evidence of that.

"We're not mental health experts," one CDC spokeswoman said.

___

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PLoS One: http://www.plosone.org/home.action

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Study: Many women can skip frequent bone scans

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ATLANTA (AP) — New research could mean millions of older women can skip frequent screening tests for osteoporosis: If an initial bone scan shows no big problems, many can safely wait 15 years to have another one, the study suggests.

Government advisers and leading doctor groups urge osteoporosis screening, but no one has known how often that should happen. The findings offer the best information to date on that question, experts said.

"This is landmark, in the sense that it could allow us to move on to more precise guidelines," said Dr. Heidi Nelson, a researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University who is an expert on the topic.

At issues are bone mineral density tests, which usually are done through X-rays and cost around $250. It takes about 10 minutes and involves less radiation than what's emitted during a chest X-ray. Medicare pays for testing every two years.

The new study feeds concerns that the tests are done too often, at least for some women.

"It's an expenditure of time, it's exposure to radiation, and it's cost. And there's no reason to expose yourself to any risks if there's going to be no benefit," explained Dr. Virginia Moyer, who heads the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government panel that issues testing guidelines.

The test measures how thick bones are in certain spots, usually focusing on the hip and lower spine. Doctors use it to gain early warning of osteoporosis, a bone-thinning disease that can be staved off with better diet and exercise and treated with bone-building drugs. Nearly half of all women older than 50 will break a bone because of osteoporosis, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.

The government task force recommends that all women over 65 get a scan. The panel also recommends testing for younger postmenopausal women who seem at higher risk for fractures. But the task force has not said how often follow-up tests should be done, just that a couple years between tests are needed.

There are no immediate plans to update the task force's advice for osteoporosis screenings, but the new study will be an important consideration when the panel acts again, Moyer said.

The new, government-funded research involves nearly 5,000 women aged 67 years and older in a national health study that began in the 1980s. None had osteoporosis at the outset.

The researchers looked at how the women did on bone density tests, and watched for who got osteoporosis and when. They were followed for 15 years.

Based on that, the researchers concluded that women with a healthy initial test could wait as long as 15 years before getting a second screening. But women deemed at moderate risk should get tested about every five years. And women at high risk should get tested more often, perhaps even annually.

The research, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, was led by Dr. Margaret Gourlay of the University of North Carolina. She worries that her findings might be misinterpreted and cause some women to wait longer than they should for their next test. She cited earlier research suggesting not enough women get the recommended initial scan.

The 15-year interval applies only to postmenopausal women judged to be at low risk for osteoporosis from the first screening, she noted, and perhaps fewer than half of U.S. women over 65 fall into that category.

But she said even for those women, other risk factors have to be considered: smoking, slim build, prior broken bones and taking medication that has an eroding effect on bones.

She also noted that osteoporosis becomes a greater risk in the oldest patients, so a woman with a moderate risk who is 85 or older might be better off getting tested every three years instead of every five.

___

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New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

Osteoporosis information: http://www.bones.nih.gov

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Largest Study on Cell Phones and Cancer Finds No Link

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Danish researchers can offer some reassurance if you're concerned about your cell phone: Don't worry. Your device is probably safe.

The biggest study ever to examine the possible connection between cell phones and cancer found no evidence of any link, suggesting that billions of people who are rarely more than a few inches from their phones have no special health concerns.

The Danish study of more than 350,000 people concluded there was no difference in cancer rates between people who had used a cell phone for about a decade and those who did not.

Last year, a separate large study found no clear connection between cell phones and cancer. But it showed a hint of a possible association between very heavy phone use and glioma, a rare but often deadly form of brain tumor. However, the numbers of heavy users was not sufficient to make the case.

That study of more than 14,000 people in multiple countries, in addition to animal experiments, led the International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify electromagnetic energy from cell phones as "possibly carcinogenic," adding it to a list that also includes things such as coffee and gasoline engine exhaust.

But that designation does not mean the phones necessarily pose a risk. Cell phones do not emit the same kind of radiation as that used in some medical tests or found in other sources such as radon in soil.

MORE: WHO Says Cell Phone Radiation is 'Possibly Carcinogenic.' Now What?

Two U.S. agencies — the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission — have found no evidence that cell phones are linked to cancer.

Yet fears of a link persist, despite the fact that cancer rates have not risen since cell phones were introduced.

In the latest research, published online Thursday in the journal BMJ, researchers updated a previous study examining 358,403 cell phone users aged 30 and over in Denmark from 1990 to 2007. They found cell phone users did not have a higher cancer risk compared with those without cell phones.

Cancer rates in people who used cell phones for about 10 years were similar to rates in people without a cell phone. Cell phone users were also no more likely to get a tumor in the part of the brain closest to where phones are usually held against the head. The study was paid for by the government's Danish Strategic Research Council.

"Our study provides little evidence for a causal association, but we cannot rule out a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users," said Patrizia Frei, of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the paper's authors.

"This is encouraging news, but it doesn't mean we're at the end of the road," said Hazel Nunn, head of Health Evidence and Information at Cancer Research U.K., which was not linked to the study.

About three-quarters of the world's population, more than 5 billion people, use a cell phone. That makes it difficult for scientists to compare cancer incidence in people who use the devices versus those who do not.

MORE: Cell Phones: How Precautionary Should Our Principles Be?

Others disputed the Danish study's findings. The advocacy group MobileWise, which believes cell phones pose a health risk, said the study wasn't long enough to consider the long-term risk, since brain tumors can take decades to develop.

In an accompanying editorial in BMJ, Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting of Sweden's Karolinska Institute wrote that one of the study's strengths was its use of objective data from cell phone records. Previous studies have been criticized for relying on people to recall their cell phone habits from decades earlier.

In about 30 other studies done in Europe, New Zealand and the U.S., patients with brain tumors have not reported using their cell phones more often than unaffected people.

The editorial writers pointed out that research on cell phones and cancer was not sparked by any evidence of a connection, but from concerns that something about the relationship between radio frequency fields and human physiology had been "overlooked or misunderstood." Research into the safety of cell phones is now "extensive," they wrote.

Nunn said studies with longer-term data were still needed and that there was little information on children's exposure to cell phones.

LIST: 5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Cell Phone Radiation Exposure

There was no biological evidence for how cell phones might cause cancer, unlike, for example, the proof that tobacco is carcinogenic, she added.

Cell phones send signals to nearby towers via radio waves, a form of energy similar to microwaves. But the radiation produced by cell phones cannot directly damage DNA and is different from stronger types of radiation like X-rays or ultraviolet light. At very high levels, radio frequency waves from cell phones can heat up body tissue, but that is not believed to damage human cells.

Nunn said people should not change their cell phone habits based on the current evidence, except perhaps for limiting their kids' use of the devices.

"There are a lot more worrying things in the world than mobile phones," she said.

—By MARIA CHENG

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Hope for new AIDS protection seen in mouse study

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NEW YORK (AP) — As scientists struggle to find a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, a study in mice suggests hope for a new approach — one that doctors now want to test in people.

The treated mice in the study appeared to have 100 percent protection against HIV. That doesn't mean the strategy will work in people. But several experts were impressed.

"This is a very important paper (about) a very creative idea," says the government's AIDS chief, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He didn't take part in the research.

The new study involved injecting mice with a protective gene, an idea that's been tested against HIV infection in animals for a decade.

In the nearly 30 years since HIV was identified, scientists haven't been able to find a vaccine that is broadly effective. One boost came in 2009, when a large study in Thailand showed that an experimental vaccine protected about a third of recipients against infection. That's not good enough for general use, but researchers are now trying to improve it.

Researchers reported the new results in mice online Wednesday in the journal Nature. They hope to test the approach in people in a couple of years. Another research team reported similar success in monkeys in 2009 and hopes to start human tests even sooner.

A traditional vaccine works by masquerading as a germ, training the body's immune system to build specific defenses in case the real germ shows up. Those defenses are generally antibodies, which are proteins in the blood that have just the right shape to grab onto parts of an invading virus. Once that happens, the virus can't establish a lasting infection and is cleared from the body.

Scientists have identified antibodies that neutralize a wide range of HIV strains, but they've had trouble getting people's immune systems to create those antibodies with a vaccine.

The gene-injection goal is straightforward. Rather than trying to train a person's immune system to devise effective antibodies, why not just give a person genes for those proteins? The genes can slip into cells in muscle or some other tissue and make them pump out lots of the antibodies.

The mouse work is reported by David Baltimore and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.

Ordinary mice don't get infected with HIV, which attacks the immune system. So the research used mice that carried human immune system cells.

Baltimore's team used a harmless virus to carry an antibody gene and injected it once into a leg muscle. The researchers found that the mice made high levels of the antibody for more than a year. The results suggest lifetime protection for a mouse, Baltimore said, although "we simply don't know what will happen in people."

Even when the mice were injected with very high doses of HIV, they didn't show the loss of certain blood cells that results from HIV infection. Baltimore said researchers couldn't completely rule out the possibility of infection, but that their tests found no evidence of it. He said a few hundred mice appeared to be protected.

The work was funded by the federal government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Baltimore said his lab has filed for patents.

"I think it's great," said Dr. Philip R. Johnson of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who reported similar results in monkeys in 2009. "It provides additional evidence this is a concept that's worth moving forward."

Johnson said he has discussed doing a human trial with federal regulators and is preparing an application for permission to go ahead. If all goes well, a preliminary experiment to test the safety of the approach might begin in about a year, he said. Baltimore said his group is also planning human experiments that he hopes will start in the next couple years.

Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned that mouse results don't always pan out in human studies. He also said both the gene approach and standard vaccines should be pursued because it's not clear which will work better.

"We're still in the discovery stage of both of them," he said.

Dr. Harris Goldstein, director of the Einstein-Montefiore Center for AIDS Research in New York, who has done similar research in mice, called Baltimore's result a significant advance if it works in humans because it shows a single injection produces high levels of antibodies for a long time.

It might lead not only to preventing infection, but also a treatment for infected people, he said. If it allowed people with HIV to stop or reduce their medications even for temporary periods, they could avoid the inconvenience and side effects of the drugs, he said.

___

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Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

___

Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://twitter.com/malcolmritter .

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Study: H1N1 Can Be Deadly Even for Healthy Kids

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Flu prevention is important for everyone, but here's another reason to make sure to get vaccinated: in a study of childhood flu deaths from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers found that otherwise healthy kids can succumb to the virus, particularly if they've already got an increasingly common bacterial infection.

The infection, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), sent previously healthy kids to the hospital and increased their risk of death from flu to eight times that of MRSA-free children, according to research published Monday in Pediatrics. MRSA, which is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, can cause skin infections, invade surgical wounds and wreak havoc internally.

"There's more risk for MRSA to become invasive in the presence of flu or other viruses," said lead researcher Dr. Adrienne Randolph of the Division of Critical Care Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston in a statement. "These deaths in co-infected children are a warning sign."

MORE: CDC: 115 Kids Died of Flu Last Season, Most Weren't Vaccinated

The flu virus suppresses even robust immune systems, making the body more vulnerable to infection. And in children, who typically withstand exposure to massive quantities of bacteria, a dip in immunity may be the difference between a manageable bacterial colony and an invasive bacterial disease.

Randolph and her team examined the medical records of 838 children whose average age was 6; they were all admitted to intensive-care units with H1N1 flu virus during the 2009-2010 flu pandemic. Of the 75 children who died, most had at least one preexisting condition such as asthma or weakened immune systems that further compromised their ability to fight the flu. But researchers were particularly curious what contributed to the critical illnesses faced by the 251 children who were considered otherwise healthy.

They found that MRSA and its more common cousin, S. aureus, was to blame: it upped the risk of death for previously healthy kids who contracted H1N1, which is alarming because MRSA infections — though rare — are on the rise. A recent study found that more than 2% of all 2008 pediatric hospital admissions were due to MRSA — up from only .2% in 1999.

MORE: 1 in 10 Parents Skip or Delay Vaccines

"There's a nice message here about vaccines: that even otherwise healthy children are still at risk, and they are at risk of death,” Dr. Lisa Saiman, a professor of clinical pediatrics at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “These findings provide further support for the recent recommendations by the C.D.C. to immunize all eligible people."

Everyone older than 6 months should get vaccinated, recommends the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (this year's seasonal vaccine also guards against 2009 H1N1, which hasn't mutated significantly since then). Roll up your sleeve — no excuses.

Meredith Melnick is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeredithCM. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Study: Whites More Likely to Abuse Drugs Than Blacks

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Black youth are arrested for drug crimes at a rate ten times higher than that of whites. But new research shows that young African Americans are actually less likely to use drugs and less likely to develop substance use disorders, compared to whites, Native Americans, Hispanics and people of mixed race.

“Our goal is to alert people to the burden of drug problems and also to how some of our concern about who has these problems may not be true,” says Dr. Dan Blazer, senior author of the study and a professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “There's a perception among many individuals that African Americans as a group — regardless of socioeconomic status — tend to abuse or use drugs at higher rate and this [does not support] that."

Using data from 72,561 youth interviewed for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, researchers found that 37% of those aged between 12 and 17 had used alcohol or other drugs at least once in the past year. Nearly 8% met criteria for a substance use disorder — either the less severe “substance abuse” diagnosis or the more problematic “substance dependence,” which is more commonly known as addiction.

The study, which was published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, controlled for variables like socioeconomic status because rates of severe drug problems tend to be greater amongst the poor. Despite this, Native American youth fared worst, with 15% having a substance use disorder, compared to 9.2% for people of mixed racial heritage, 9.0% for whites, 7.7% for Hispanics, 5% for African Americans and 3.5% for Asians and Pacific Islanders.

It is not known why rates for Native Americans were so elevated, but the category of substance use disorders does include alcoholism, a disorder for which this group is known to be at high risk.  Marijuana and prescription opioid problems also occurred at higher rates in Native Americans.

MORE: How to Find the Best Drug Treatment for Teens: A Guide for Parents

The authors considered abuse and dependence together rather than separating them because the next edition of psychiatry's diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, will combine them into one diagnosis, with different levels of severity.

“It's really difficult when you look at the data to actually separate out abuse and dependence,” says Blazer, while acknowledging that merging the categories could pose different problems.

For example, a large proportion of youth with drug problems recover without treatment. While rates of substance use disorders tend to be around 8% in the teen years, these rates dip to less than 2% for those over 26; the number of people who've gotten better far exceeds that which could have possibly attended treatment or even self-help groups.

That poses a problem: addiction treatment centers tend to focus on getting youth to acknowledge that they have a chronic, relapsing disease, but this — in combination with surrounding youth with peers who are also in trouble — could create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

MORE: Does Teen Rehab Cure Addiction or Create It?

“Labeling can be problematic,” says Blazer, “but also, treating these individuals is not easy. Most programs have modest success at best and with ongoing use over time the ability to actually reverse [the disorder] declines. Therefore, by identifying these individuals early and intervening early, they have a much better chance.”

That is, of course, if the treatment is effective and doesn't use tactics that can backfire. “I would hope we get a little more enlightened in the way we treat adolescents,” Blazer says, explaining that treatment must be culturally sensitive if it is to help all types of youth resolve drug problems.

MORE: The Authentic Self: How Do You Know If You're 'Really' Racist or Sexist?

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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Study: Living in poor neighborhood can hurt health

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Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Vickie Webb poses for a photograph at her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb checks her blood pressure in her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb stands in the door way of her apartment after checking her blood pressure in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds)eval("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP) — Back in the 1990s, the federal government tried an unusual social experiment: It offered thousands of poor women in big-city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods.

A decade later, the women who relocated had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity — differences that are being hailed as compelling evidence that where you live can determine your health.

The experiment was initially aimed at researching whether moving impoverished families to more prosperous areas could improve employment or schooling. But according to a study released Wednesday, the most interesting effect may have been on the women's physical condition.

About 16 percent of the women who moved had diabetes, compared with about 20 percent of women who stayed in public housing. And about 14 percent of those who left the projects were extremely obese, compared with nearly 18 percent of the other women.

The small-but-significant differences offered some of the strongest support yet for the idea that where you live can significantly affect your overall health, especially if your home is in a low-income area with few safe places to exercise, limited food options and meager medical services.

"This study proves that concentrated poverty is not only bad policy, it's bad for your health," Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But no one believes the deficit-plagued federal government is going to expand the program and start moving low-income women to better neighborhoods en masse.

"It's not enough to simply move families into different neighborhoods," Donovan said. Instead, new ways must be found to help families "break the cycle of poverty that can quite literally make them sick." He did not mention specific proposals.

Public health experts have long thought that living in poor neighborhoods could ruin a person's health, but this study put the idea to a rigorous test.

Here's how it worked: Women believed to be about the same in most respects were randomly assigned to one group or another and then followed through time, in a model customarily seen in pharmaceutical studies. That makes it more scientifically rigorous than most research linking health problems to a social environment.

The study's good design "provides a basis to infer cause and effect" between poverty and bad health, said Dr. Robert Califf, a noted Duke University cardiologist who is leading a massive study on neighborhoods and health outcomes.

The research was led by Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor of public policy. It was published in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The experiment started as a $70 million HUD project in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It morphed into a health study after a variety of other government agencies and private foundations pitched in with an additional $17 million more.

"In terms of scale, it's not soon or ever to be repeated," said Dr. Robert Whitaker, a Temple University pediatrician who was a study co-author.

The study involved women living in public housing in neighborhoods where 40 percent or more of residents were poor — areas like many of those on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bronx in New York City. The women all had children and were considered heads of households.

From 1994 to 1998, nearly 1,800 of them were offered vouchers to subsidize private housing, but the vouchers were only good in higher-income neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of the people were considered poor. They were required to live there at least a year.

The rest of the women were divided into two groups. One group got vouchers they could use in any neighborhood. The other women did not receive vouchers, with the expectation that they would stay put.

Ten years later, women in the study were weighed and gave a blood sample to check for diabetes.

The women who moved to richer areas had the lowest rates of extreme obesity and diabetes. The difference suggests that moving to a better neighborhood could help at least 1 in 25 women. Or, in other terms, a person's risk of diabetes or extreme obesity dropped by about 20 percent by moving to a higher-income neighborhood.

(However, even the women who moved were not exactly models of health. About 14 percent of them were extremely obese, which is twice the national average for women.)

The study has some notable flaws.

Because it did not start out looking at health, the women's medical condition and weight were not checked at the outset. The researchers believe the women in the different groups were about the same, because they matched up on more than 50 other indicators, such as age, race, employment and education. But that is an assumption.

Also, only about half the women offered a chance to move to a more prosperous zip code did so. And many who did move left after a year.

What's more, the study was not designed to answer what it is about more affluent neighborhoods that would cause someone to be healthier. But the authors listed four theories:

— The availability of healthier food is worse in lower-income neighborhoods.

— Opportunities for physical exercise are scarcer, and fear of crime can make people afraid to jog or play in parks.

— There may be fewer doctors' offices and other medical services.

— The long-term stress of living in such an environment may alter the hormones that control weight.

Some of those theories were supported by some women who live in the kind of situation targeted in the study.

Vickie Webb lived in the projects in Durham, N.C., for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood.

"There was too much violence, too much going on in the 'hood. It wasn't safe," said Webb, who was not part of the study.

Annie Ricks, who lives with her 14-year-old son and two grandchildren in a public housing unit on Chicago's South Side, was not involved in the study either. But she said efforts like the HUD experiment should be expanded.

Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements. But Ricks lost her child-care job after the move, and says her new neighborhood is worse.

At her old building, Ricks could walk across the street to a supermarket. In her new neighborhood, without a car, she has to take public transportation to get groceries or go to the doctor, and Ricks says there's more crime.

"I feel like it would be a blessing" to be able to move to a wealthier area, she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Aspirin slashes hereditary cancer risk in UK study

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By Ben Hirschler

LONDON | Fri Oct 28, 2011 2:32am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Taking two aspirin a day for two years reduces the long-term risk of bowel cancer in people with a family history of the disease by around 60 percent, according to a British study published Friday.

The finding could also have implications for the wider population, though more research is needed to determine an ideal dose for different groups of people.

In recent years there has been an intense debate about the merits of routinely taking aspirin, which increases the risk of stomach ulcers and internal bleeding, but also protects against heart problems.

John Burn of Newcastle University believes his study -- the first randomized controlled trial into the effect of aspirin on cancer outcomes -- is a key piece of evidence validating the case for aspirin.

Previous research into cancer and aspirin, a cheap drug originally developed by Bayer more than a century ago, has been based on less robust observational studies.

Burn's study looked at people with Lynch syndrome, a genetic condition predisposing them to a range of cancers. It affects at least one in 1,000 people and around half of them develop cancer, mainly in the bowel and womb.

His data suggests that for every 10,000 cancers prevented, there could be 1,000 extra ulcers due to aspirin.

"There's a trade-off. If we could get by on a smaller dose, then we could potentially avoid a lot of those ulcers," Burn told a news conference.

For the general population, taking low-dose aspirin might be a more sensible option, and a major new multi-dose trial should shed more light on this in the next few years, he added.

DELAYED EFFECT

Burn and colleagues studied 861 people with Lynch syndrome, who began a two-year course of either 600 milligrams a day of aspirin or a placebo between 1999 and 2005.

An initial analysis in 2007 found no difference in cancer rates between the groups. But it turned out the effect was delayed and in 2010 there was a clear divergence, with 19 new bowel cancers among those on aspirin and 34 in the placebo arm.

What is more, among those patients who stuck to the full two-year regimen of pill-taking -- some 60 percent of the total -- the effects were more pronounced, and strongly statistically significant, with a 63 percent reduction in bowel cancer cases from 23 in the placebo group versus 10 in the aspirin group.

"What we have finally shown is that aspirin has a major preventative effect on cancer but this doesn't become apparent until years later," Burn said.

How exactly aspirin provides protection is unclear, but Burn said the delayed effect suggested aspirin may hit faulty stem cells before they mutate into pre-cancerous cells.

The study, which was published online by the Lancet medical journal and part-funded by Bayer, also found some evidence of a reduction in other solid cancers linked to Lynch syndrome.

"This is a really important study showing that aspirin can significantly reduce the risk of bowel and other cancers in patients genetically at high risk of developing cancer," said Chris Paraskeva of the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the research.

In a commentary in the Lancet, Andrew Chan of Harvard Medical and Scott Lippman of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said the findings were "compelling" and arguably supported more general recommendations to consider aspirin for preventing bowel cancer, based on individual patients' risks.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Will Waterman)

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It's never too late to lose weight, study hints

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By Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK | Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:16pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teens who are overweight or obese have higher chances of dying from heart disease down the line, but that extra risk virtually vanishes if they shed the spare pounds as adults.

That's according to a new study that tracked almost 19,000 men starting at age 18 -- when all of them were Harvard University undergrads -- for more than half a century on average.

"We have lots of data showing that if you are obese in middle age, it increases your risk of dying," said I-Min Lee from Harvard Medical School in Boston, who worked on the study.

"What we have less data on is, what if you're heavy when you're younger? How does that impact your health later on?"

The findings, Lee said, show that it's important to keep extra weight off in the first place -- but if young adults are overweight, they can lower their future heart risks by slimming down.

The data came from Harvard students who had a routine medical exam, which included measurements of height and weight, when they started college between 1916 and 1950.

In the 1960's, researchers followed up with 18,995 of the men and again asked about their height and weight, as well as other lifestyle habits and medical issues that could affect their risk of heart disease. At the time of those second surveys, the men were 46 years old on average.

For the current study, a new group of researchers collected participants' death certificates and determined that over 56 years from their first medical exams, about 11 percent of the men died from heart disease.

It turned out that being heavy at both the early and mid-life health checks increased the risk of ultimately dying from heart disease.

Obese young men had almost double the risk of their slimmer peers for heart disease death. Compared to normal-weight Harvard alumni, middle-aged men were 25 percent more likely to die of heart disease if they were overweight and 60 percent more likely if they were obese.

Those links held up when Lee and her colleagues took into account men's other heart disease risks, including high blood pressure, smoking and lack of physical activity.

However, the extra heart risk that came with being overweight and obese early in life disappeared in men who were no longer heavy at their follow-up health assessment, the researchers reported this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Often, "obese young adults become obese middle-aged adults," Lee told Reuters Health.

"However, if you're able to lose that weight, once you get to normal weight in middle age... the excess risk you had as a youngster goes away."

Even people who are heavy in their 50s and 60s can ease their future heart risks by losing weight, Lee added.

Stephen Kritchevsky, who has studied weight loss in older adults at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, agreed.

"The number of years being fat isn't as important as being overweight at middle age," he told Reuters Health. "At least through middle age, regardless of your life history, it is likely to be helpful to your health to try to lose weight."

Lee's team noted that the findings might not apply to women, since they weren't included in the study. Another limitation is that the study didn't distinguish where on their bodies different men carried their fat, which may affect the risk of heart disease.

Still, Kritchevsky, who wasn't involved in the new study, said the findings are "good news" for both the young and old.

"For younger overweight people, it suggests that if you address that, it will pay off," he concluded. For that group, "it's not too early to address it, and for middle-aged people, it's not too late."

SOURCE: bit.ly/tmd85w Archives of Internal Medicine, online October 24, 2011.

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Study Asks Who's Funnier, Men or Women?

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(Updated) If men are funnier than women, then it's not by much — and mostly just to other men. Such is the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, who judged comic wit by asking students to write original captions for New Yorker cartoons.

Setting aside the fact that writing New Yorker cartoon captions is notoriously difficult, even for people who do funny for a living, and setting aside the question of whether caption-writing is really the best barometer of "funny" in the natural world, researchers asked 32 undergrads, split evenly between males and females, to come up with captions for 20 cartoons in 45 minutes and "to be as funny as possible."

The 640 resulting captions were then judged in a series of knockout contests. For each cartoon, the captions were randomly paired up and pitted against each other (the writers were kept anonymous), with readers — 34 male and 47 female students — choosing the funnier of each successive pair. Round 1 included 32 captions, whittled down to 16 survivors; Round 2 shrank that pool to eight, and so on. The further each caption advanced, the higher its score, earning 1 point for each round.

Overall, the study found, men's captions did better than women's, by a nose, scoring just 0.11 points higher — a margin that was "just at the edge of detectability," as co-author Nicholas Christenfeld, a UCSD professor of psychology, noted. That slight advantage was due largely to the fact that men found other men's humor funnier than women did. On average, male raters gave male writers' jokes 0.16 more points, while female raters gave only 0.06 points more to male-written captions.

Wrote Inga Kiderra, a director of communications at UCSD, in a particularly delightful press release for the university:

"Sad for the guys," Christenfeld said, "who think that by being funny they will impress the ladies, but really just impress other men who want to impress the ladies."

Interestingly, in a second, related experiment, the researchers found that when presented with the 100 funniest and least funny captions from the first experiment, readers not only tended to remember the funnier jokes better, but also, upon being asked to guess the gender of the writers, more often misattributed the funny captions to guys and the unfunny ones to women. That was true for both the male and female readers.

What's more, when the study's original caption writers were asked to predict their own performance, the men's self-confidence far exceeded the women's; men predicted their captions would score 2.3 on average, while women gave themselves a more modest 1.5. Based on those numbers, it appears that men's confidence also outstripped their actual competence, the authors concluded.

So, why does the men-are-funnier stereotype persist? It may just be a matter of cultural exposure, says lead author, Laura Mickes, a postdoctoral researcher in UCSD's psychology department: "We go around observing women laughing at men, men laughing at men, men as comedians, men asserting that they are funnier, and, most likely, men trying harder — none of which requires them to actually be more capable of producing humor."

Mickes summed up the findings this way to ABC News: "There is some shred of truth to the received wisdom about men being funnier, but it does not come close to explaining how much funnier they think they are."

That, I chuckled at.

The new paper, currently in press, is slated to be published online this week by the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Update [2:25 p.m.]: This post has been updated with a comment from the study's lead author, Laura Mickes.

Sora Song is the editor of TIME Healthland. Find her on Twitter at @sora_song. You can also continue the discussion on Healthland's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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Study links neighborhood to obesity risk

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Research has linked obesity to neighborhood features such as the number of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants.Rates of diabetes and severe obesity are about one-fifth lower in the women who movedFactors could contribute to better health in low-poverty areas, including healthy foodsJust 16% of the women who moved to low-poverty areas had diabetes

(Health.com) -- When federal housing officials created a program in the mid-1990s to help single-mother households in poor neighborhoods relocate to low-poverty areas, they weren't merely interested in providing access to better homes, jobs, and schools. They also wanted to study how the families who moved out changed over time compared to those who stayed put.

After more than a decade, moving from high- to low-poverty areas seems to have had little impact on economic measures such as employment and income. But researchers have discovered an interesting side effect of the program: In a new follow-up study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, they report that rates of diabetes and severe obesity are about one-fifth lower in the women who moved than in those who did not.

The apparent improvements in health associated with low-poverty areas are comparable to the typical outcomes seen with programs that encourage healthy eating or exercise, or that provide medications to people with diabetes, says Jens Ludwig, Ph.D., the lead author of the study and a professor of social service administration, law, and public policy at the University of Chicago.

"For this program, health improvements were not the primary goal," Ludwig says. "But the fact that we're seeing effects in the ballpark of what you'd get with very direct, targeted interventions designed for weight loss, for example, [is] pretty striking."

Health.com: 11 ways to save money on healthy food

Several factors could contribute to better health in low-poverty areas, including greater access to healthy foods, a safer environment more conducive to outdoor exercise, and lower levels of psychological stress, Ludwig says. The move "changed a bunch of things at one time for these families, so it's hard to tease out exactly what made a big difference for them," he says. "But all of these things seem like plausible explanations."

Troy Blanchard, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, who studies health and obesity in poor rural areas, says the findings draw attention to an often-ignored aspect of the obesity and diabetes epidemics.

"Oftentimes, research really focuses on people's decisions, and what they do wrong, and how they are at fault, essentially, for being obese or having a disease or a poor diet," says Blanchard, who was not involved in the study. "This provides evidence that it's not just the individual's decisions, but...also the environment -- the neighborhood -- that really does matter."

Health.com: 10 states that consume too much fast food

The idea that neighborhoods can have an impact on health is not new. Studies on this topic date back to the 1700s, Ludwig points out, and more recently a growing body of research has linked obesity and other health problems to neighborhood features such as the number of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. But this is the first time researchers have been able to compare moving out of a neighborhood with staying behind, in the same way that new drugs are compared with placebos in clinical trials.

The relocation program, known as Moving to Opportunity, began in 1994 when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development partnered with local housing authorities to recruit low-income families living in public housing in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

The families who volunteered for the program were sorted into three groups via random lottery: Some received vouchers that enabled them to move into areas with a low poverty rate (below 10%) at the same rent they were paying in public housing, some received vouchers that could be used anywhere, and some -- the control group -- received no new vouchers or assistance.

Years later, between 2008 and 2010, Ludwig and his colleagues followed up with 3,186 women who participated in the program. The researchers calculated each woman's body mass index, or BMI (a simple ratio of height to weight), and collected blood samples, which they tested for a type of protein that indicates average long-term levels of blood sugar.

Health.com: 10 signs and symptoms of type 2 diabetes

Of the women who stayed in their original neighborhoods, 20% had blood-sugar levels consistent with diabetes and 18% had a BMI of at least 40 (the unofficial cutoff point for morbid obesity). These rates were not measurably different among the women who received unrestricted vouchers. By contrast, just 16% of the women who moved to low-poverty areas had diabetes and just 14% were morbidly obese.

"We went in wondering to what degree a real randomized experiment would confirm -- or not confirm -- what a lot of people already believed," Ludwig says. "The most surprising thing was not that it did confirm the belief, but the significant size of the effect."

The study doesn't claim that moving from a high- to low-poverty area guarantees weight loss or protection from diabetes. The health measures used in the study weren't recorded before 2008, so the researchers weren't able to track how moving affected the health of individuals over time. In addition, all of the Moving to Opportunity participants were volunteers, raising the possibility that they differ in key ways from the average public housing resident. (The volunteers were more likely than their neighbors to be concerned about crime, for instance.)

Despite the study's limitations, Ludwig and his colleagues conclude that public health programs that target obesity and diabetes in high-poverty neighborhoods "could generate substantial social benefits." This message is important for policymakers and community organizers, but also for individuals living in these neighborhoods, Blanchard says.

"It shows that being active in your community and working to make safer, healthier environments can really affect the health of the people who live there," he says. "Not everyone can move out of their neighborhood, but maybe there's a chance to improve what's there."

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

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Sanofi says Lemtrada helps MS patients in study

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PARIS | Sat Oct 22, 2011 3:15am EDT

PARIS (Reuters) - French drugmaker Sanofi said on Saturday that its experimental multiple sclerosis drug Lemtrada worked better than an older drug sold by competitor Merck KGaA at keeping patients free from relapses.

New data from a late-stage trial showed that 78 percent of patients treated with Lemtrada remained relapse-free for two years, compared with 59 percent using Rebif, an older multiple sclerosis drug sold by Germany's Merck.

Lemtrada is a key experimental product at Sanofi's Genzyme unit. The fortunes of the drug are closely watched by holders of Genzyme Contingent Value Rights certificates issued to shareholders as part of the U.S. company's takeover deal.

CVRs represent an extra fee holders will receive if Lemtrada hits certain targets or when Genzyme meets other milestones.

The commercial potential of the drug, already sold under the brand name Campath as a leukemia treatment, was a key bone of contention between Sanofi and Genzyme during takeover talks.

Multiple sclerosis, which affects 2.5 million people worldwide, is a chronic and progressive disease that attacks the central nervous system.

Previously published data from the same late-stage study were mixed. Although Lemtrada was found more effective than Rebif at preventing relapses, it did not prevent the disease from becoming disabling, as it had in earlier trials.

The results of the latest late-stage trial showed that side-effects, including respiratory and urinary tract infections, were mild to moderate, Sanofi said.

Serious adverse events were similar between Lemtrada and Rebif, Sanofi said, with 18.4 percent of patients on Lemtrada suffering from side effects that included autoimmune disorders compared to 14.4 percent in patients taking Rebif.

The drug's prospects should become clearer once the results of another late-stage trial are published by year-end. The study is comparing Lemtrada with Rebif in multiple sclerosis patients who have relapsed while on therapy.

Sanofi plans to submit Lemtrada for U.S. and European Union marketing approval in the first quarter of 2012. The drug, if approved, will face competition from Novartis's Gilenya.

(Reporting By Elena Berton; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

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Largest study on cellphones, cancer finds no link

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LONDON (AP) — Danish researchers can offer some reassurance if you're concerned about your cellphone: Don't worry. Your device is probably safe.

The biggest study ever to examine the possible connection between cellphones and cancer found no evidence of any link, suggesting that billions of people who are rarely more than a few inches from their phones have no special health concerns.

The Danish study of more than 350,000 people concluded there was no difference in cancer rates between people who had used a cellphone for about a decade and those who did not.

Last year, a separate large study found no clear connection between cellphones and cancer. But it showed a hint of a possible association between very heavy phone use and glioma, a rare but often deadly form of brain tumor. However, the numbers of heavy users was not sufficient to make the case.

That study of more than 14,000 people in multiple countries, in addition to animal experiments, led the International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify electromagnetic energy from cellphones as "possibly carcinogenic," adding it to a list that also includes things such as coffee and gasoline engine exhaust.

But that designation does not mean the phones necessarily pose a risk. Cellphones do not emit the same kind of radiation as that used in some medical tests or found in other sources such as radon in soil.

Two U.S. agencies — the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission — have found no evidence that cellphones are linked to cancer.

Yet fears of a link persist, despite the fact that cancer rates have not risen since cellphones were introduced.

In the latest research, published online Thursday in the journal BMJ, researchers updated a previous study examining 358,403 cellphone users aged 30 and over in Denmark from 1990 to 2007. They found cellphone users did not have a higher cancer risk compared with those without cellphones.

Cancer rates in people who used cellphones for about 10 years were similar to rates in people without a cellphone. Cellphone users were also no more likely to get a tumor in the part of the brain closest to where phones are usually held against the head. The study was paid for by the government's Danish Strategic Research Council.

"Our study provides little evidence for a causal association, but we cannot rule out a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users," said Patrizia Frei, of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the paper's authors.

"This is encouraging news, but it doesn't mean we're at the end of the road," said Hazel Nunn, head of Health Evidence and Information at Cancer Research U.K., which was not linked to the study.

About three-quarters of the world's population, more than 5 billion people, use a cellphone. That makes it difficult for scientists to compare cancer incidence in people who use the devices versus those who do not.

Others disputed the Danish study's findings. The advocacy group MobileWise, which believes cellphones pose a health risk, said the study wasn't long enough to consider the long-term risk, since brain tumors can take decades to develop.

In an accompanying editorial in BMJ, Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting of Sweden's Karolinska Institute wrote that one of the study's strengths was its use of objective data from cellphone records. Previous studies have been criticized for relying on people to recall their cellphone habits from decades earlier.

In about 30 other studies done in Europe, New Zealand and the U.S., patients with brain tumors have not reported using their cellphones more often than unaffected people.

The editorial writers pointed out that research on cellphones and cancer was not sparked by any evidence of a connection, but from concerns that something about the relationship between radio frequency fields and human physiology had been "overlooked or misunderstood." Research into the safety of cellphones is now "extensive," they wrote.

Nunn said studies with longer-term data were still needed and that there was little information on children's exposure to cellphones.

There was no biological evidence for how cellphones might cause cancer, unlike, for example, the proof that tobacco is carcinogenic, she added.

Cellphones send signals to nearby towers via radio waves, a form of energy similar to microwaves. But the radiation produced by cellphones cannot directly damage DNA and is different from stronger types of radiation like X-rays or ultraviolet light. At very high levels, radio frequency waves from cellphones can heat up body tissue, but that is not believed to damage human cells.

Nunn said people should not change their cellphone habits based on the current evidence, except perhaps for limiting their kids' use of the devices.

"There are a lot more worrying things in the world than mobile phones," she said.

___

Online:

Journal: www.bmj.com

IARC: www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208(underscore)e.pdf

FDA advice: http://tinyurl.com/29e8qzr

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Why the Latest Study on Cell Phone Use and Brain Cancer Won't Be the Last Word

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Proving a negative in science is really, really hard — and that may well be the task that researchers trying to evaluate the potentially carcinogenic effects of cell phone use may have before them.

PHOTOS: See a Photographic History of Cell Phones

To wit: in a new study published in the BMJ, European researchers — looking at more than 300,000 Danes who had used cell phones — concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that using a cell phone increased the chance of developing a brain tumor. That was true even for people who had used cell phones for more than a decade, and the BMJ study is the biggest so far to look at cell phone radiation and cancer. As the study authors themselves wrote in the conclusion:

In this update of a large nationwide cohort study of mobile phone use, there were no increased risks of tumours of the central nervous system, providing little evidence for a causal association.

Case closed, right? That all depends on your perspective. Other researchers and activists were quick to criticize the study, arguing that it was still not broad enough to fully exonerate cell phones. Devra Davis, an expert in the environmental causes of illness and the president of the Environmental Health Trust, said in a statement:

From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use. In order for any study of a relatively rare disease like brain tumors to find a change in risk, millions must be followed for decades.

Indeed, that's what makes it so hard to design a study that can give us a definitive answer on the potential risks — if any — posed by cell phones. Brain tumors are extremely rare and strike for mostly unknown reasons, and they can take decades to develop. Cell phones have only been used heavily for the past decade or so, which means that enough time may not have yet passed for the potential impacts of cell phone use to show up in brain cancer statistics.

MORE: 5 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Cell Phone Exposure

At the same time, cell phones have become virtually ubiquitous. There are more than 5 billion cell phone subscriptions in the world, which means it's becoming nearly impossible for scientists to find a control group that hasn't used mobile phones.

Perhaps it's not surprising then that the results of research into cell phones have been so confusing and contradictory. Less than six months ago the International Agency for Research on Cancer called cell phones "possibly carcinogenic," the first official statement that mobiles could indeed pose some danger. (Earlier assessments by the World Health Organization and national public health agencies had mostly concluded that cell phones were safe.) But "possibly carcinogenic" is a long way from definitely cancer-causing — coffee and pickles, among other common things, are also classified as "possibly carcinogenic."

The multiyear, multinational Interphone study, which was supposed to lay the question to rest, mostly exonerated cell phones when the results were released last year, but that research was so muddled that it was hard for either side to make heads or tails of it.

MORE: 1 in 6 Cell Phones Contaminated with Fecal Matter, Says Study

The reality is that where you stand on cell phone risks likely has a lot more to do with your individual biases than it has to do with hard science. Skeptics of the cell phone-cancer connection point to the fact that mobile handsets emit very low levels of nonionizing radiation — too weak to damage DNA, which is the way that X-rays and other stronger forms of radiation can cause cancer.

But believers in the connection note that the radiation may impact cells in another way, and that there has yet to be a well-designed, long-term study that accurately tracks how we use cell phones today — which is to say, nearly all the time.

If you're suspicious of cell phones, however, it's going to be nearly impossible to create a study that would answer all of your fears. After all, it's difficult to prove a negative, especially given how long it takes brain tumors to form. The good thing is that you don't need to stop using cell phones if you're worried; there are simple steps, including the use of a wired handset, that can greatly reduce your exposure to any radiation. That's a better bet than waiting for scientists and activists to answer the question for good.

Bryan Walsh is a senior writer at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @bryanrwalsh. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME

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Pro divers are less headache-prone: study

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By Andrew M. Seaman

NEW YORK | Fri Oct 21, 2011 4:13pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite concerns that water pressure and other stresses might promote headaches, professional scuba divers may actually get fewer of the painful attacks, overall, than other healthy people, say Italian researchers.

Published in the journal Headache, their study compared the number of "cephalalgia attacks" -- headaches of all kinds -- experienced by 201 male professional divers and a control group of healthy men who didn't dive. The divers were about 30 percent less prone than controls to get headaches in general, and when they did, the divers got fewer headaches per month.

Though the study's findings are limited by a small sample size, its lead author Dr. Roberto Di Fabio, a neurologist, thinks the results will help determine how diving affects professional divers.

Di Fabio speculated that the divers' overall health could be one reason they experience fewer headaches. Or, he said, the diving itself may offer some protection.

"Exercise would be useful to make our brain less sensible to stress and avoid that even slight stimuli could trigger migraine crises," Di Fabio told Reuters Health in an email. "Therefore, diving as well as other aerobic sports could help in reducing the number of attacks of migraine."

Doctors have wondered whether the physical and mental stresses of diving might promote headaches or exacerbate the tendency of people who have migraines, for instance, to get more attacks.

High underwater pressure puts a person in danger while diving. Failing to ascend or descend properly can cause injury to vital organs as the gases within them compress or decompress. Improper diving techniques can also cause gas bubbles to form in the bloodstream -- a condition known as the bends.

Divers are also known to display certain structural changes in their brain matter, and may regularly get tiny clots in the brain's blood vessels as a result of the physical stresses of diving.

To find out whether such effects lead to headaches, Di Fabio's team recruited 201 divers working for the Italian Fire and Rescue Department and a set of healthy men, matched to the divers in age, who had never dived. Both groups underwent neurological exams, then for one year they logged the details of their tension headaches and episodes of migraine with or without aura.

During the study period, 22 percent of the control group experienced headaches compared to 16 percent of the professional divers. Moreover, the divers who did get headaches had fewer of them per month than the controls.

The number of subjects who got migraines in both groups was low -- 4.5 percent of the divers and eight percent of the controls. Tension headaches were a little more common -- ten percent of divers got them, compared to 13.5 percent of the controls.

Di Fabio told Reuters Health that the findings cannot be generalized to a wider population, such as recreational divers.

"Recreational divers are more difficult to study, because the number of dives are less easily recordable," Di Fabio said.

Also, recreational divers may add other variables to a study.

"The emotional stress that you associate with diving is something you would see more with a recreational diver than a professional population," said Dr. Herbert Newton, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Ohio State University Medical Center and a dive medical consultant.

"Professional divers are trained pretty well about the kind of things that you need to look for," said Newton. "Recreational divers know a little about that but it's not nearly as extensive."

Regardless of experience level, Newton said divers should get out of the water if they get a headache.

"If you go under water and you start developing a symptom of a migraine or headache, it would be safer to abort the dive and take care of the headache on the boat or on land," said Newton.

SOURCE: bit.ly/ne5ahF Headache, online September 10, 2011.

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Mobile phones don't hike cancer risk: Danish study

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A man speaks on his mobile phone while standing on a boat on the River Thames with Canary Wharf and the financial district of London seen in the background.

Credit: Reuters/Toby Melville

LONDON | Fri Oct 21, 2011 3:06am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile phones do not increase the risk of cancer, according to a large study involving more than 350,000 people by Danish researchers published Friday.

The results, released on the British Medical Journal's website, chime with a series of other studies that have reached similar conclusions.

Scientists from the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen looked at people aged at least 30 who subscribed to mobile phone contracts and compared their rates of brain tumors with non-subscribers between 1990 and 2007.

Outside experts said the large scale of the trial was impressive.

"This paper supports most other reports which do not find any detrimental effects of phone use under normal exposures," said Malcolm Sperrin, director of Medical Physics at Britain's Royal Berkshire Hospital and Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.

At the end of May, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer decided cellphone use should be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," putting then in the same category as lead, chloroform and coffee.

But just over a month later the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection's committee on epidemiology said the scientific evidence increasingly pointed away from a link between mobile phone use and brain tumors.

The number of mobile phones has risen hugely since the early 1980s, with nearly 5 billion handsets in use today, prompting lengthy debate about their potential link to the main types of brain tumor, glioma and meningioma.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Largest study on cellphones, cancer finds no link

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LONDON (AP) — Danish researchers can offer some reassurance if you're concerned about your cellphone: Don't worry. Your device is probably safe.

The biggest study ever to examine the possible connection between cellphones and cancer found no evidence of any link, suggesting that billions of people who are rarely more than a few inches from their phones have no special health concerns.

The Danish study of more than 350,000 people concluded there was no difference in cancer rates between people who had used a cellphone for about a decade and those who did not.

Last year, a separate large study found no clear connection between cellphones and cancer. But it showed a hint of a possible association between very heavy phone use and glioma, a rare but often deadly form of brain tumor. However, the numbers of heavy users was not sufficient to make the case.

That study of more than 14,000 people in multiple countries, in addition to animal experiments, led the International Agency for Research on Cancer to classify electromagnetic energy from cellphones as "possibly carcinogenic," adding it to a list that also includes things such as coffee and gasoline engine exhaust.

But that designation does not mean the phones necessarily pose a risk. Cellphones do not emit the same kind of radiation as that used in some medical tests or found in other sources such as radon in soil.

Two U.S. agencies — the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission — have found no evidence that cellphones are linked to cancer.

Yet fears of a link persist, despite the fact that cancer rates have not risen since cellphones were introduced.

In the latest research, published online Thursday in the journal BMJ, researchers updated a previous study examining 358,403 cellphone users aged 30 and over in Denmark from 1990 to 2007. They found cellphone users did not have a higher cancer risk compared with those without cellphones.

Cancer rates in people who used cellphones for about 10 years were similar to rates in people without a cellphone. Cellphone users were also no more likely to get a tumor in the part of the brain closest to where phones are usually held against the head. The study was paid for by the government's Danish Strategic Research Council.

"Our study provides little evidence for a causal association, but we cannot rule out a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users," said Patrizia Frei, of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the paper's authors.

"This is encouraging news, but it doesn't mean we're at the end of the road," said Hazel Nunn, head of Health Evidence and Information at Cancer Research U.K., which was not linked to the study.

About three-quarters of the world's population, more than 5 billion people, use a cellphone. That makes it difficult for scientists to compare cancer incidence in people who use the devices versus those who do not.

Others disputed the Danish study's findings. The advocacy group MobileWise, which believes cellphones pose a health risk, said the study wasn't long enough to consider the long-term risk, since brain tumors can take decades to develop.

In an accompanying editorial in BMJ, Anders Ahlbom and Maria Feychting of Sweden's Karolinska Institute wrote that one of the study's strengths was its use of objective data from cellphone records. Previous studies have been criticized for relying on people to recall their cellphone habits from decades earlier.

In about 30 other studies done in Europe, New Zealand and the U.S., patients with brain tumors have not reported using their cellphones more often than unaffected people.

The editorial writers pointed out that research on cellphones and cancer was not sparked by any evidence of a connection, but from concerns that something about the relationship between radio frequency fields and human physiology had been "overlooked or misunderstood." Research into the safety of cellphones is now "extensive," they wrote.

Nunn said studies with longer-term data were still needed and that there was little information on children's exposure to cellphones.

There was no biological evidence for how cellphones might cause cancer, unlike, for example, the proof that tobacco is carcinogenic, she added.

Cellphones send signals to nearby towers via radio waves, a form of energy similar to microwaves. But the radiation produced by cellphones cannot directly damage DNA and is different from stronger types of radiation like X-rays or ultraviolet light. At very high levels, radio frequency waves from cellphones can heat up body tissue, but that is not believed to damage human cells.

Nunn said people should not change their cellphone habits based on the current evidence, except perhaps for limiting their kids' use of the devices.

"There are a lot more worrying things in the world than mobile phones," she said.

___

Online:

Journal: www.bmj.com

IARC: www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208(underscore)e.pdf

FDA advice: http://tinyurl.com/29e8qzr

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Study: Living in poor neighborhood can hurt health

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Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Vickie Webb poses for a photograph at her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb checks her blood pressure in her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb stands in the door way of her apartment after checking her blood pressure in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds)eval("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP) — Back in the 1990s, the federal government tried an unusual social experiment: It offered thousands of poor women in big-city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods.

A decade later, the women who relocated had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity — differences that are being hailed as compelling evidence that where you live can determine your health.

The experiment was initially aimed at researching whether moving impoverished families to more prosperous areas could improve employment or schooling. But according to a study released Wednesday, the most interesting effect may have been on the women's physical condition.

About 16 percent of the women who moved had diabetes, compared with about 20 percent of women who stayed in public housing. And about 14 percent of those who left the projects were extremely obese, compared with nearly 18 percent of the other women.

The small-but-significant differences offered some of the strongest support yet for the idea that where you live can significantly affect your overall health, especially if your home is in a low-income area with few safe places to exercise, limited food options and meager medical services.

"This study proves that concentrated poverty is not only bad policy, it's bad for your health," Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But no one believes the deficit-plagued federal government is going to expand the program and start moving low-income women to better neighborhoods en masse.

"It's not enough to simply move families into different neighborhoods," Donovan said. Instead, new ways must be found to help families "break the cycle of poverty that can quite literally make them sick." He did not mention specific proposals.

Public health experts have long thought that living in poor neighborhoods could ruin a person's health, but this study put the idea to a rigorous test.

Here's how it worked: Women believed to be about the same in most respects were randomly assigned to one group or another and then followed through time, in a model customarily seen in pharmaceutical studies. That makes it more scientifically rigorous than most research linking health problems to a social environment.

The study's good design "provides a basis to infer cause and effect" between poverty and bad health, said Dr. Robert Califf, a noted Duke University cardiologist who is leading a massive study on neighborhoods and health outcomes.

The research was led by Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor of public policy. It was published in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The experiment started as a $70 million HUD project in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It morphed into a health study after a variety of other government agencies and private foundations pitched in with an additional $17 million more.

"In terms of scale, it's not soon or ever to be repeated," said Dr. Robert Whitaker, a Temple University pediatrician who was a study co-author.

The study involved women living in public housing in neighborhoods where 40 percent or more of residents were poor — areas like many of those on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bronx in New York City. The women all had children and were considered heads of households.

From 1994 to 1998, nearly 1,800 of them were offered vouchers to subsidize private housing, but the vouchers were only good in higher-income neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of the people were considered poor. They were required to live there at least a year.

The rest of the women were divided into two groups. One group got vouchers they could use in any neighborhood. The other women did not receive vouchers, with the expectation that they would stay put.

Ten years later, women in the study were weighed and gave a blood sample to check for diabetes.

The women who moved to richer areas had the lowest rates of extreme obesity and diabetes. The difference suggests that moving to a better neighborhood could help at least 1 in 25 women. Or, in other terms, a person's risk of diabetes or extreme obesity dropped by about 20 percent by moving to a higher-income neighborhood.

(However, even the women who moved were not exactly models of health. About 14 percent of them were extremely obese, which is twice the national average for women.)

The study has some notable flaws.

Because it did not start out looking at health, the women's medical condition and weight were not checked at the outset. The researchers believe the women in the different groups were about the same, because they matched up on more than 50 other indicators, such as age, race, employment and education. But that is an assumption.

Also, only about half the women offered a chance to move to a more prosperous zip code did so. And many who did move left after a year.

What's more, the study was not designed to answer what it is about more affluent neighborhoods that would cause someone to be healthier. But the authors listed four theories:

— The availability of healthier food is worse in lower-income neighborhoods.

— Opportunities for physical exercise are scarcer, and fear of crime can make people afraid to jog or play in parks.

— There may be fewer doctors' offices and other medical services.

— The long-term stress of living in such an environment may alter the hormones that control weight.

Some of those theories were supported by some women who live in the kind of situation targeted in the study.

Vickie Webb lived in the projects in Durham, N.C., for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood.

"There was too much violence, too much going on in the 'hood. It wasn't safe," said Webb, who was not part of the study.

Annie Ricks, who lives with her 14-year-old son and two grandchildren in a public housing unit on Chicago's South Side, was not involved in the study either. But she said efforts like the HUD experiment should be expanded.

Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements. But Ricks lost her child-care job after the move, and says her new neighborhood is worse.

At her old building, Ricks could walk across the street to a supermarket. In her new neighborhood, without a car, she has to take public transportation to get groceries or go to the doctor, and Ricks says there's more crime.

"I feel like it would be a blessing" to be able to move to a wealthier area, she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.

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