HEALTH AND WELLNESS

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research from a Singapore - U.S. team provides more evidence that sleeping too little -- or too much -- may be bad for your heart. The investigators also noted that diabetes and hypertension may contribute to this relationship.

Among 58,044 men and women 45 years of age or older without heart disease at study entry, those who slept 5 hours or less or 9 hours or more, were significantly more likely to die from cardiovascular disease over the next several years than people who logged 7 hours a night, Dr. Anoop Shankar of the West Virginia School of Medicine in Morgantown and colleagues found.

These findings back the results of other studies that have suggested how long people sleep may be a key predictor of their heart disease risk, Shankar and his team report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Most research on sleep duration and heart disease has been in Western populations, aside from three studies in Japan, the researchers note. Asian populations may have lower average body weights, different lifestyles, and different dietary exposures, compared with those in Western populations, that may affect their risk of cardiovascular disease, they add.

To investigate, the researchers looked at people participating in the Singapore Chinese Health Study. The study participants, who were ethnic Chinese living in Singapore, were enrolled between 1993 and 1998, and followed through the end of 2006. During that time, 1,416 people died of heart disease.

Thirty-three of the study participants said they got 7 hours of sleep a night. People who slept for 5 or less or 9 or more hours were more likely to have several different heart disease risk factors than those who slept for 7 hours, such as smoking and eating fewer fruits and vegetables and more fat and cholesterol.

But even after the researchers adjusted the data to account for these risk factors, they found that people who slept 5 hours or less were 57 percent more likely to die of heart disease, while people who slept 9 hours or more were at 79 percent greater risk.

Some investigators have suggested that sleeping longer may indicate underlying poor health, Shankar and his colleagues note. They attempted to address this fact by eliminating the first 4 years of follow-up from their analysis, as well as excluding people with diabetes or hypertension. In both cases the results were about the same, suggesting that sleep duration, not ill health, was behind the relationship with heart disease.

But when they included people with diabetes and hypertension in their analysis, treating these conditions as risk factors, the researchers found the link between sleep duration and heart disease mortality weakened. This suggests, they say, that diabetes and hypertension -- both of which have been tied to sleep duration as well as heart disease death risk -- may help explain the relationship between sleep duration and heart disease mortality.

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, December 15, 2008.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults might want to take an interest in their grandchildren's' video games, if early research on the brain benefits of gaming is correct.

In a study of 40 adults in their 60s and 70s, researchers found that those who learned to play a strategy-heavy video game improved their scores on a number of tests of cognitive function.

Men and women who trained in the game for about a month showed gains in tests of memory, reasoning and the ability to "multi-task."

The findings suggest that video games that keep players "on their toes" might help older adults keep their brains sharp, the researchers report in the journal Psychology and Aging.

This is the first published study to suggest as much, so it's important not to overstate the findings, said senior researcher Dr. Arthur F. Kramer, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Still, he told Reuters Health, the results are "very promising," as they suggest that strategy-based video games can enhance reasoning, memory and other cognitive abilities that often decline with age.

The study included 40 older adults who were randomly assigned to either the video-game group or a comparison group that received no training in the game. Over 1 month, the gamer group spent about 23 hours training in "Rise of Nations," an off-the-shelf video game where players seek world domination.

Ruling the world, the game group learned, requires a complex set of tasks, including military strategy, building cities, managing economies and feeding people.

Study participants who trained in the game ended up improving their scores in several areas of a battery of cognitive tests, Kramer and his colleagues found.

More research is needed to confirm and extend the findings, Kramer said. It's not clear, he noted, if other strategic games would have the same benefits, or if the effects seen in this study persist over time.

Still, the findings are in line with research suggesting that older adults can improve their cognitive health by staying both physically active and mentally active through activities such as reading, writing or other hobbies.

"Playing video games with their grandkids would also be a great idea,"

Kramer noted, "because we know that social interactions -- along with physical exercise and intellectual challenge -- also enhance the cognitive abilities of older adults."

SOURCE: Psychology and Aging, December 2008.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Lung cancer has overtaken breast cancer as the biggest killer of Australian women with cancer, as females who started smoking in the 1970s and 1980s as they gained equal rights with men are diagnosed with the deadly disease.

More than 50 Australian women lost their battle with lung cancer every week in 2005 and the number will rise to almost 65 female deaths a week in 2010, said a report released on Friday by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

As society changed in the 1970s and 1980s and women enjoyed the same freedoms as men, they took up cigarettes at a growing rate, while an anti-smoking message began to hit home for men and their smoking rate fell, said the report.

As a result, lung cancer rates are expected to grow by 0.4 per cent a year until 2010 for women and fall by 1.1 per cent for men, it said.

"In the past the tobacco industry targeted female smokers with advertising suggesting that smoking is glamorous or fashionable," said Kylie Lindorff, policy manager at the government's anti-smoking unit Quit.

"Unfortunately, these active campaigns to recruit female smokers are now translating into higher lung cancer deaths," Lindorff said in a statement.

"There is a lag of several decades between when someone starts smoking and the development of lung cancer, so given that women's smoking rates peaked in the late 1970s, we don't expect to see falls in the number of lung cancer deaths in women for some time," she said.

In 2005, for the first time, there were more than 100,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed in Australia and the number is projected to grow by more than 3,000 extra cases a year in 2006-2010, mainly due to Australia's aging population.

There were 44,356 women diagnosed with cancer in 2005.

Breast cancer was the most common form of the disease for women, accounting for about a quarter of diagnoses, but the death rate from breast cancer has fallen due to a national breast screening program.

"The distressing part about it is that whereas there is less you can do about preventing breast cancer, lung cancer is entirely preventable by controlling smoking," said Cancer Council of Australia chief executive Ian Olver.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A weight loss intervention directed at parents of overweight children may be as effective as interventions directed at both parents and children, study findings suggest.

Over 10 months, children younger than 11 years fared better in the parent-only program, while older children lost more weight through the family-based program, report Dr. David M. Janicke, of the University of Florida in Gainesville, and colleagues.

"Parents exert an enormous influence on their children," Janicke told Reuters Health. Providing a means for parents to help children adopt healthier lifestyles "is critical to helping improve health and weight status in children," he said.

In this study, Janicke and colleagues compared a family-based and a parent-only weight loss program, versus no intervention, in 93 overweight and obese children, 8 to 14 years old, and their parents, the researchers report in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

About one third of the participants followed the family-based or the parent-only sessions offered through the Cooperative Extension Service offices serving the four rural counties in which each family lived. The remaining parents and children remained on a wait list and served as a comparison (control) group.

The Cooperative Extension Service provides nutrition, gardening, livestock, and farming information and programs in partnership with land-grant universities and the United States Department of Agriculture. Offices exist in virtually every county in the U.S., and therefore "offer a unique and ideal venue for delivery of weight management interventions for children in underserved or rural communities," said Janicke.

The family-based intervention provided separate parent and children directed encouragement to decrease high-fat and high-sugar foods, increase vegetable and fruit intake, and increase pedometer-tallied physical activity. The parent-only sessions focused on similar goals parents could set for their children.

After 10 months, children from the intervention groups lost a similar amounts of weight and lost more weight than did the control group. Children younger than 11 years had about a 50 percent greater decrease in weight with the parent-only intervention, while children 11 years and older showed the same with the family-based intervention.

Janicke's team suggests longer-duration investigations in larger groups of parents and children using similar "real-world settings."

SOURCE: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, December 2008.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The Montana Meth Project's (MMP) anti-drug ads have been getting plenty of media attention and government funding. There's only one problem; they may not be reducing meth use among the state's teens, and could even be making the drug more acceptable, according to a researcher who has conducted an analysis of the project's own survey data and press releases.

Meth use among Montana's teens was steadily declining since 1999, well before the program's 2005 introduction, and most of the state's youth already had a very negative view of meth use before MMP's launch, David Erceg-Hurn, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Western Australia in Crawley, told Reuters Health.

The MMP's motto is "Not even once," and its goal is to prevent first-time use of methamphetamine among young people. The program runs ads on TV, the Web, billboards, newspapers and the radio that graphically present potential consequences of meth use, such as a young addict breaking into his family's home to get money for drugs, or a young girl being "pimped out" by her boyfriend for meth.

Erceg-Hum said he decided to investigate MMP's claims of success because studies have shown that using scare tactics to change people's behavior isn't all that effective, and may even backfire. He examined several surveys conducted or commissioned by the project: one done in August 2005, before the MMP's campaign launched the following month; another conducted six months after the program's launch, in March 2006; one national and one state survey from 2007; and a Montana state survey from 2008.

According to Erceg-Hum, the MMP emphasizes favorable findings while obscuring negative ones. For example, the MMP often points to figures from the Montana Youth Risk Behavior Study that show a 45 percent drop in meth use among teens between 2005 and 2007-from 8.3 percent to 4.6 percent, or a 3.7 percent reduction in real terms. "The Meth Project highlights the 45 percent relative drop when promoting themselves to politicians and the media, because it sounds much more impressive than the 3.7 percent absolute drop," the researcher said via e-mail.

"They also fail to mention that similar absolute drops in meth use occurred in the years prior to the introduction of the ad campaign. For example, meth use fell by 3.3 percent between 2001 and 2003. You don't hear about this, because it makes the impact of the ad campaign sound much less impressive."

The researcher also notes that MMP's own surveys found that the percentage of teens that saw "no risk" from using meth once or twice rose from 3 percent before the campaign's introduction to 8 percent 6 months later. The same increase was seen in the percentage that saw "no risk" to regular meth use.

These findings and other less complementary numbers didn't appear in the program's press release or the executive summary describing the surveys, he added, but were included in appendices presenting statistical analyses of responses to each of the survey questions. The 2007 and 2008 surveys did not include this type of information at all.

There is evidence that graphic campaigns can actually have the opposite of their intended effect, according to Erceg-Hum. Such ads could produce something called "psychological reactance" among young people, he explained, or basically rebellion against what they see as an attempt to control their behavior.

"A considerable body of research since the 1950s has shown that forceful attempts to control people's behavior can result in psychological reactance, and unwanted "boomerang" effects," the researcher said. Be added, such ads can scare kids so much that they try to cope with the anxiety by telling themselves that meth isn't really so bad.

"Previous research indicates that to avoid this response, the ads have to not only scare teenagers, but also provide them with practical information about how to reduce or avoid meth use, and therefore reduce any scary risks to their health. Unfortunately, the Meth Project's ads don't provide this information."

But Geoff Feinberg of GFK Roper Public Affairs & Media in New York City, which conducted the MMP's 2007 and 2008 surveys, argues that they do indeed provide strong "circumstantial evidence" that the campaign is turning the state's youth off on methamphetamine. "We're finding that almost all or a majority of teens and young adults and parents have seen these ads," Feinberg told Reuters Health. "They say that these ads are conveying to them that you can't try meth even once."

Peg Shea, the executive director of MMP, agrees. "We have taken that drug on in the state and things are happening in the state," Shea said. "We're a large part of it. We're not the only part of it."

SOURCE: Prevention Science, December 2008.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.