Health bulletin

New birth control method to prevent pregnancy and STIs

Condoms are currently the only form of birth control that can prevent unplanned pregnancies and some STIs - maybe not for long. Researchers are working on an easier and longer-lasting method for women: A new 90-day dual-protection intravaginal ring (IVR) was presented at the 2013 meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

Researchers at the company CONRAD created this IVR, which simultaneously secretes two drugs for up to three months: levonogestrel (an ingredient commonly used in contraceptives) and tenofovir (the only microbicide antiretroviral that's been clinically shown to reduce the risk of HIV and herpes - at least when it's been used in a gel form).

As of the AAPS convention, researchers have only tested these IVRs on rabbits and sheep - clinical trials on women won't take place until early this year. However, their early animal tests have been promising.

While you can't ask your doctor for an Rx quite yet, CONRAD researchers believe this device could help women adhere to their birth control plans and protect them from contracting certain STIs without really having to think about it, says Annette Larkin, a company spokesperson.

Today's elderly may be mentally sharper than yesterday's

Elderly people today might be more mentally nimble than their counterparts were a decade or two ago, according to a new European study.

Researchers found people who were in their 80s when they took thinking and memory tests in the late 2000s performed similarly to others who were tested more than 10 years earlier while in their 70s.

General health in old age is probably improving for most people, said Dallas Anderson, who studies dementia at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, and was not involved in the new study.

"People are better educated than they used to be, their economic well-being may be better compared to previous groups. All these various factors working together lead to an improved situation," he said.

For their study, researchers tested the thinking and memory skills of 204 elderly French men and women selected from the memory clinic of a Paris hospital between 1991 and 1997. They compared their test scores to those from 177 similar people tested at the same clinic in 2008 and 2009.

People under age 80 performed better on the cognitive tests than older participants during both study periods, researchers led by Jocelyne de Rotrou from Hpital Broca in Paris wrote in PLOS One.

The 2000s group as a whole also did better than the 1990s group. Participants tested more recently scored an average 83.2 out of a possible 100 on the exams, compared to 73.5 for their earlier counterparts.

The differences were consistent across almost every component of the tests, including how well people remembered stories and pictures and their ability to separate objects into different categories.