HEALTH TRENDS

Girls who drink alcohol at higher risk for breast cancer

A new research has found that young women who drank alcohol between their first menstruation and first pregnancy were at increased risk for breast cancer and proliferative benign breast disease.

Drinking between menarche and first pregnancy was associated with an 11 per cent increased risk for breast cancer and a 16 per cent increased risk for benign breast disease for each 10 gram-per-day of alcohol consumed, according to Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, and colleagues of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, United States.

Alcohol consumption after first pregnancy was associated with a nine per cent increased risk of breast cancer, though this risk was not significant, the researchers wrote online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

"Reducing alcohol consumption during this period may be an effective prevention strategy for breast cancer," they concluded.

Limitations of the study included reliability of recalled drinking habits at younger ages, population attributable risks, and the small number of hyperplasia cases without atypia.

Men with erection problems more likely to have inflamed gums

Men in their 30s who had inflamed gums caused by severe periodontal disease were three times more likely to suffer from erection problems, according to a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Turkish researchers compared 80 men aged 30 to 40 with erectile dysfunction with a control group of 82 men without erection problems. This showed that 53 per cent of the men with erectile dysfunction had inflamed gums compared with 23 per cent in the control group.

When the results were adjusted for other factors, such as age, body mass index, household income and education level, the men with severe periodontal disease were 3.29 times more likely to suffer from erection problems than men with healthy gums.

"Erectile dysfunction is a major public health problem that affects the quality of life of some 150 million men, and their partners, worldwide," noted lead author Dr Faith Oguz from Inonu University in Malatya, Turkey.

"Physical factors cause nearly two-thirds of cases, mainly because of problems with the blood vessels, with psychological issues like emotional stress and depression accounting for the remainder.

"Chronic periodontitis (CP) is a group of infectious diseases caused predominantly by bacteria that most commonly occur with inflammation of the gums.

"Many studies have reported that CP may induce systemic vascular diseases, such as coronary heart disease, which have been linked with erection problems."

He added, "To our knowledge, erectile dysfunction and CP in humans are caused by similar risk factors, such as ageing, smoking, diabetes mellitus and coronary artery disease.

"The result of our study supports the theory that CP is present more often in patients with erectile dysfunction than those without and should be considered as a factor by clinicians treating men with erection problems."

Poverty reduces brainpower

The mental strain and energy it takes to constantly worry about one's state of poverty greatly diminish a person's brainpower, leaving them little capacity to focus on other areas of life, reveals a recent international study.

Poor people could be losing up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points, which could lead to mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial problems, the researchers noted.

"Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin," said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.

In a series of experiments, researchers from Harvard, Princeton and other universities in North America and from Britain's University of Warwick found that pressing financial worries had an immediate impact on poor people's ability to perform well in cognitive and logic tests.

Far from signalling that poor people are stupid, the results suggest those living on a tight budget have their effective brainpower, or what the researchers called 'mental bandwidth', dramatically limited by the stress of making ends meet.

On average, someone weighed down by money woes showed a drop in cognitive function in one part of the study that was comparable to a 13-point dip in IQ, and similar to the performance deficit expected from someone who has missed a whole night's sleep.

"Previous views of poverty have blamed (it) on personal failings, on an environment that is not conducive to success," said Jiaying Zhao, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. "We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function."

Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, who worked on the research team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions.

Daily activity can curb excess weight gain in pregnant women

Gaining too much weight during pregnancy increases a woman's risk for complications such as pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine) and for obesity after delivery. It also increases the baby's risk for childhood obesity.

The fix: pregnant women need to get enough physical activity throughout the day to prevent excess weight gain, a new study is saying. This will also help to reduce her back pain, insomnia and boost energy levels.

"We were able to show that pregnant women spend 75 per cent of the time they are awake in sedentary behaviours," Christina Campbell, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition at Iowa State University, said in a university news release.

"Many of these women met physical-activity guidelines, but just because you meet the guidelines doesn't necessarily mean you're a non-sedentary person."

Campbell and her colleagues monitored activity levels and the number of calories burned by pregnant women. A woman who went for a brisk 30-minute walk burned about three times the number of calories as when she was at rest.

But the amount of physical activity throughout the day had more impact. For example, a woman who didn't have a specific workout session but was active all day - such as a waitress or a mother who has young children and is always on the move - would get more exercise and burn more calories overall than a woman who had an exercise session but was otherwise inactive during the day.

"Maybe it means that you make a conscious effort, if you have a desk job, to get up every hour and make a loop around your building for five minutes," Campbell said. "Or maybe you walk to work or make an effort to park farther away or take the stairs. Really, just those simple little things that we've been saying all along, but instead, we find so many ways to cut corners on being active."