What You Need To Know News

Wonder what the kids are up to?

Casual, unprotected sex with multiple partners, a Montreal researcher said Tuesday after releasing results of national survey of Canadian youth.

Unsafe sex combined with “an astonishing” lack of knowledge of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is threatening Canadian teenagers’ health, warned pediatrician Jean-Yves Frappier, head of the adolescent division at Sainte Justine Hospital and the Canadian Association for Adolescent Health.

About two out of three teens surveyed, or 68 per cent, had oral sex, but many don’t know that syphilis and gonorrhea infections can be transmitted via oral sex.

About a third of Canadian teens surveyed online say they are sexually active, the association’s survey showed.

About 25 per cent of sexually active teens between the ages of 14 and 17 did not use condoms the last time they had sex, even though 16 per cent knew their partner was not monogamous.

About two out of three, or 68 per cent, had oral sex, but many don’t know that syphilis and gonorrhea infections can be transmitted via oral sex.

“They don’t know some of the most common sexually transmitted diseases and their consequences,” Frappier said. “(About) 25 per cent think it can be contracted by sitting on the toilet seat or swimming in a pool.”

Half the teens didn’t know that the human papilloma virus can lead to cervical cancer.

Such ignorance, health officials warn, plus unprotected sex with multiple partners, is contributing to a hike in STIs.

“Kids have sex, that’s not new. But there’s been an increase in the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in the last five years,” Frappier said.

About five per cent of sexually active teens say they have been infected with STIs.

On average, teens report having had three partners since starting sex and 38 per cent of them engage in casual sex.

“It’s not with a partner, it’s with a friend,” said Franziska Baltzer, director of the adolescent clinic at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, who was also involved in the study.

“One young man told me that it’s called ‘recreational’ sex,” Baltzer said.

But in a surprise finding, researchers said that more than half the teens identified their parents as their most significant source of information about sex and sexual behaviour, she said.

“There’s a problem of communication because most parents think their children’s role models are their friends and movie or sports icons,” she said.

But some parents were as unaware of STIs and sexual health as their children. Baltzer said: “There’s an important lack of information.”

Channing Rodman, in charge of developing new sex education programs for Head &Hands, a community-based organization, said teens aren’t engaging in “reckless behaviour.”

Many high school girls go on birth control pills and forgo the condom; then they move on to the next “loving and trusting” partner, then to the next, Rodman said.

“But because there is an atmosphere of trust, they won’t get tested for STIs,” she said. “You have unprotected sex with multiple partners, which is the highest risk sex you can have.

“That concerns us. We have a free, drop-in medical clinic twice a week and we’re seeing a trend of rising STIs.”

Nearly 1,200 teens between 14 and 17-years-old and 1,100 mothers were interviewed online by Ipsos-Reid last fall. The survey results are considered accurate within 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Source: http://www.canada.com/

A discovery by Queen’s biologists and their students sheds new light on the genetic roots of obesity – a condition that is increasing dramatically in North America and has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

The new findings may also help to unlock the mystery of how our nervous systems control obesity.

Professors William Bendena and Ian Chin-Sang teamed up to work with tiny, transparent worms that have similar neurotransmitters as humans. (Neurotransmitters are chemicals that transmit nerve impulses) The researchers discovered that when a specific nerve receptor is deleted, the worms lose interest in foraging for food, become slow-moving and accumulate fat at a much higher rate than normal, non-modified, worms.

“Although there is a wealth of scientific data currently being collected regarding classic brain neurotransmitters, it’s still uncertain how neuron connections may be either stimulatory or inhibitory in various organisms,” notes Dr. Bendena. “Our breakthrough came when Dr. Chin-Sang localized the worm’s receptor to one specific connecting nerve cell.”

The worms that had their receptor deleted showed no difference in behaviour from other, non-altered worms – until placed directly on food. Then they stopped their normal foraging behaviour, dramatically slowing their movements, and gained fat more quickly than worms with their receptors intact.

When extra copies of the receptor were added to the mutant worms, they became hyperactive and traveled large distances away from their food.

Drs. Bendena and Chin-Sang conclude that this type of receptor is an inhibitory switch within one connecting cell, and that worms defective in the receptor will gain fat. “Such clearly affected behaviour and physiological changes have never been seen nor understood until this discovery,” says Dr. Bendena. “We hope that this will provide a basis for further research to unlock the mystery of the long-awaited nervous system connection to obesity.”

Also on the research team, from Queen’s, are Jeff Boudreau, Tony Papanicolaou and Matt Maltby; and Stephen Tobe from University of Toronto.

Published on-line this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

There’s now another vaccine available to prevent cervical cancer.

Called Cervarix, the vaccine is said to be effective against 80% of the virus that cause cervical cancer.

But doctors cautioned that the new drug cannot replace the effectiveness of a pap smear.

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. It kills one woman, usually aged between 30 and 50, every two minutes.

47-year-old Chin Chee Choy is a cervical cancer survivor.

One in two patients die from the disease, which affects 200 women in Singapore every year.

“I discovered that I had cervical cancer in the later part of 2004. In the course of my treatment with my doctor Lisa Wong, I had my cervix removed,” said Chin.

Women now have more choices to prevent cervical cancer.

There are two vaccines that offer partial protection against the disease, which is caused by the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus or HPV.

There are over 100 identified types of HPV, of which most are harmless and show no symptoms. Approximately 40 types of HPV are spread through sexual contact, and 15 HPV are cancer-causing.

80% of cancer-causing HPV is covered by the latest vaccine Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, while Merck’s Gardasil, which was introduced here since 2006, covers 70% of such HPV as well as genital warts.

But doctors caution that vaccines alone are not enough.

They are urging women to continue going for their annual pap smear tests and practise safe sex and monogamy.

“There’s a huge family of HPV virus, with many different types,… and there are other types (not covered by the vaccine) that can also cause cervical cancer. That’s why you need to do pap smears as well, in case you get infected with the other types of virus,” said Associate Professor Lim Lean Huat, Community, Occupational and Family Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS).

Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/

Researchers have developed a new way to detect protein movements inside cells, which signal a variety of cellular changes such as those in cancer cell development. The method could help diagnose cancer in the future.

By combining two distinct techniques, the technology can examine large numbers of cells individually, a feat not previously possible, said Chang Lu, a Purdue University assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

“We really have bridged the gap between different technologies, allowing us to do science on a whole new level,” he said.

In a study published this month in Analytical Chemistry, Lu demonstrated that the technique can detect a handful of protein movements, or translocations, within entire populations of cells.

These movements are important to detect because they are involved in many disease processes, such as oncogenesis, wherein a normal cell becomes malignant, said Robert Geahlen, a study co-author and researcher in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.

“Protein translocations are involved in the activation of tumor cells,” he said. “Detecting these movements could help diagnose the type and stage of cancer in the future.”

Lu’s method uses two existing technologies: electroporation - used to determine protein location - and flow cytometry, a technique capable of rapidly examining individual cells but blind to intracellular protein locations on its own.

The Purdue technique, called “electroporative flow cytometry,” harnesses the discerning power of the first method with the speed of the second, Geahlen said.

The method involves cells being sent through tiny channels within a microchip and undergoing electroporation, wherein electrical pulses open pores in cell membranes and protein is released from inside. Then, sensors measure protein concentrations. Since a protein’s subcellular location can directly influence the amount of protein leaving the cell, as Lu and Geahlen have shown, this method is capable of indirectly determining location, Geahlen said.

If proteins are in their original position, floating freely in the cell’s interior, or cytoplasm, a large percentage of them will flow out of the cell upon electroporation, Lu said. If translocation has occurred, in which proteins migrate from the cytoplasm to tightly bind to the interior of the cell membrane, few will be able to leave.

Previous technologies detect either protein movement in a few individual cells via slow imaging techniques or take average measurements from larger groups of cells, data usually irrelevant to protein location in individual cells, Lu said.

“When looking at a few cells, you see the trees but not the forest,” he said. “When you take average measurements from large groups, you see the forest but not the trees. Our method allows us to know something about each tree in the forest.”

The technology has the potential to be scaled up significantly, Lu said. In the study, 100-200 cells were processed per second, but that rate could potentially increase to speeds typical of flow cytometry, which goes through 10,000 cells per second. Speed increases can be achieved by optimizing the technology he said.

The study examines the movement of a certain type of protein called kinases. Kinases and their translocations are important for activating and deactivating cells and sending signals to one another, Geahlen said.

“There are many important kinases, enzymes and other proteins that become activated by translocation to the plasma membrane, and we’ve shown that we can detect one type of translocation,” he said. “It’s a first step.”

Lu has filed a provisional patent for the technique and said that he could see it being used in a clinical setting in five to 10 years.

Study co-authors include graduate students Jun Wang, Leela Paris, Hsiang-Yu Wang, and postdoctoral researcher Ning Bao.

Lu and Geahlen received funding from Purdue and the National Cancer Institute for the study. Lu plans to further develop the technology in the future.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Work-place stress is an inevitable fact of life, and so Eastern New Mexico University’s counciling and career services department made it the subject of their first Lunch ‘n Learn workshop of the semester Tuesday morning.

“I hope that (participants) walk away with some actual techniques to cope with stress better,” said Susan Larsen, ENMU’s director of counciling and career services.

Source: http://www.pntonline.com/

According to the workshop, stress is the ‘wear and tear’ our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment. There is good stress, which compels us to action, and bad stress which can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger and depression and it can also lead to health conditions like headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

Larsen has been at ENMU for four years, but she has been speaking out about the effects of stress and offering helpful stress management techniques for more than 15 years.

“I hope they get a little bit of fun,” Larsen said. “Because fun helps you to renew your sense of humor and helps you to go back and handle your stress better.”

Kathie Rolston is a secretary at ENMU’s health and physical education department and said the workshop helped her.

“(The workshop) was fantastic. It gives a lot of good ideas for how to deal with stress,” Rolston said. “(Our stress has to deal with) students not finding their classes and deadlines, stuff like that.”

“We can’t eliminate it, stress is a fact of life,” Larsen said. “But we can help people to manage it.”

Bonnie Sink is an office coordinator at ENMU.

“Our phone is probably our biggest stressor up there and (also) working with vendors,” Sink said. “You know, you learn a lot of quick tips and if you just answer the phone with a smile you’d be surprised how you can diffuse (problems).”

In the past, the committee has conducted similar workshops on topics like time management, organization, dealing with difficult people and customer service.

“It helps make our jobs easier and to give better service to students and people who interact with Eastern,” Larsen said. “Stress also has a lot to do with study habits and test anxiety,” Larsen said. “If we can help (students) to manage their stress and test anxiety than we can help them do better in school.”

The Green Party is calling on the Government to regulate the sunbed industry following research suggesting they double cancer risk for younger users.

The Greens last year waged a campaign to regulate the tanning industry due to skin cancer risk, but Health Minister Pete Hodgson has said there are no plans to regulate.

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

In November, a Green Party survey of sunbed operations in the Wellington region found that most were flouting industry standards.

Green MP Sue Kedgley yesterday said a Queensland Institute of Medical Research report, which analysed 21 previous studies, found people who used sunbeds for the first time under the age of 35 doubled their risk of getting melanoma. The risk for under 35-year-olds was 98 per cent higher.

Ms Kedgley said the report provided compelling evidence for tighter controls, including a ban on under 18-year-olds using sunbeds.

“The sunbed industry is experiencing rapid growth in New Zealand. A significant proportion of users are adolescent and female and are oblivious to the risks they are exposing themselves to.

“Voluntary standards which prohibit people under 18 and people with fair skin from using sunbeds must be legally enforced.”

Ms Kedgley said over a thousand New Zealanders were diagnosed with melanoma each year and hundreds died from it.

In August the New Zealand Cancer Council said it wanted the Government to follow Australian moves to replace voluntary rules on salon sunbed use with laws to restrict access by teenagers.

Australian regulators intend to put the limit at 16 with 17- to 18-year-olds requiring parental permission.

France has banned sunbed salons for under 18-year-olds and several European countries have limits on the amount of exposure for all ages.

If you are 60 and older — and are overweight — yet you exercise and are considered to be physically fit, you are going to live longer than your thin, yet unfit, 60 and older friends.

That is the conclusion reached by Steven Blair, Professor, University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health. The Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study, concluded that overweight and obese seniors who were physically fit are found to outlive those who are not fit. Overweight seniors also outlive thin seniors, according to the study results.

“Cardio-respiratory fitness is a strong determinate of mortality in older men and women,” said lead researcher Blair. “Older individuals need to be concerned about their fitness level,” continued Blair, “there is perhaps too much focus on body weight and fitness is only an afterthought.”

The study looked at the relationship between body fat, fitness and longevity in 2,603 men and women aged 60 and older who took part in the study. During 12 years of follow-up, 450 people died. The people who died were older, had lower fitness levels and had more cardiovascular risk factors.

Among overweight people in the study, 23 percent were classified as unfit, as were 53 percent of obese people, Blair said. “You really can’t tell if a person is fit by looking at them,” he said.

People who were fit were more than 50 percent less likely to die than unfit people, regardless of weight, meaning overweight but fit people tended to outlive leaner people who were not in good shape. And fit seniors were less likely to have the risk factors which are cardiovascular disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, the study concluded.

To get fit and stay fit, Blair recommends 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least five days a week. “You don’t even have to do the 30 minutes all at once. Three 10-minute walks a day five days a week will get you out of this unfit category and get you at least moderately fit,” he said.

“Numerous studies have provided evidence that physical fitness is associated with lower mortality risk,” stated Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Furthermore, while having increased body-mass index indicating obesity is associated with excess risk of mortality, this relationship is significantly attenuated in individuals who exercise and demonstrate good fitness.

“Being physically fit essentially neutralized the excess mortality risk associated with obesity whereas being unfit was independently associated with excess deaths regardless of body mass or other measures of adiposity (body fat),” stated Fonarow.

Source: http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/

Exercise programs can help ease arthritis symptoms, says a U.S. study that evaluated the effects of an Arthritis Foundation regimen.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study included 346 people, average age 70, with self-reported arthritis. Some were assigned to a group that followed the Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program, formerly called People with Arthritis Can Exercise (PACE), consisting of basic and advanced exercise classes twice a week for an hour a week for eight weeks. Others were put in a control group that did not take part in the exercise program.

After eight weeks, people in the exercise group showed significant improvements in pain, fatigue and managing arthritis. The pain and fatigue improvements were still evident six months after completing the exercise program.

The Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program emphasizes range-of-motion and low-resistance exercises, but the researchers found that people who completed the program also had increased strength in their upper and lower extremities. This suggested that strength training — a minor component of the program — is effective.

People in the exercise program did not show any increase in exercise endurance.

The study was published in the January issue ofArthritis Care & Research.

“Our findings indicate that the basic 8-week PACE (Arthritis Foundation Exercise) Program is a safe program for sedentary older individuals with arthritis to start exercising without exacerbating their symptoms,” the researchers concluded.

Further studies should be conducted to determine if offering the program more than twice a week and for longer periods offers additional benefits, they added.

Source: ww.washingtonpost.com

Cigarette smoking dramatically increases the risk that a woman who has undergone radiation treatment for breast cancer will develop lung cancer later on, a new study shows.

Radiation after mastectomy may be considered for some high-risk breast cancer patients, Dr. Elizabeth L. Kaufman and colleagues from Columbia University in New York City point out in their report. However, radiation can cause many complications, including increasing the likelihood that a patient will develop lung cancer 10 or more years after treatment, they add.

An earlier, small study by Kaufman and her team had suggested that cigarette smoking could boost this risk even more. To investigate further, she and her colleagues looked at breast cancer patients included in the Connecticut Tumor Registry who had been diagnosed with the disease between 1965 and 1989. They compared 113 women who had developed lung cancer 10 or more years after their breast cancer diagnosis with 364 women who did not.

Non-smoking women who had undergone radiation were no more likely than those who hadn’t had radiation therapy to develop lung cancer, the researchers found. However, women who smoked but didn’t have radiation therapy were nearly six times as likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than non-smokers who didn’t have radiation, while women who smoked and did undergo radiation therapy were at nearly 19-fold greater risk.

Combined smoking and radiation therapy increased the risk that a woman would develop cancer in the lung on the same side of the body as her affected breast nearly 38-fold, while the risk of developing cancer in the opposite lung was more than 10-fold greater.

The findings suggest, the researchers say, that women who have smoked and undergone radiation therapy for breast cancer should undergo screening for lung cancer using a scanning technique called spiral computed tomography.

Furthermore, doctors should consider a patient’s smoking history when discussing her breast cancer treatment options, they add, especially if radiation may offer only a “marginal” survival advantage.

Source: www.reuters.com