শনিবার, ১৬ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Health roundup - The Orange County Register

Come on: What are you really doing with that hair anyway? It's just sitting there, or getting in the way. Or worse still, it's falling out, a bit at a time as the years go by.

May as well give in to reality and gravity by shaving your dome for the annual St. Baldrick's fund-raising drive for pediatric cancer research.

Colby Lynch, 9, gets an "old man cut" during the 2011 St. Baldrick's Foundation head-shaving event in RSM. His mother Christie is at right.

MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The event began nationally in 2000 and spread to more than 1,300 locations last year. The effort at Tesoro High School in Rancho Santa Margarita has raised about $440,000 total. This will be the seventh year of the event at the school.

The head-shaving begins at noon Sunday, St. Patrick's Day, at the school, 1 Tesoro Creek Road.

There's another event today at Karl Strauss Brewing Co. (901A South Coast Drive, Costa Mesa) at 4 p.m., Wednesday at Career Academy of Beauty (12471 Valley View St., Garden Grove) at 2 p.m., and March 28 at Carr Intermediate School (2120 W. Edinger Ave., Santa Ana) at 8:30 a.m.

For more information, visit stbaldricks.org.

Aspirin might lower melanoma risk

We all know regular aspirin use lowers the risk of a heart attack or stroke. And some studies have indicated it can lower the risk of breast, colon and other cancers.

The over-the-counter drug's ability to reduce inflammation might also be the secret to a previously unknown benefit ? lowering the risk of melanoma, the most deadly skin cancer.

Researchers at Stanford analyzed data from nearly 60,000 white women whose data was included in the federally funded Women's Health Initiative. Information on the women, age 50 to 79 when the study began, was collected for an average of 12 years.

The longer the women took aspirin, the greater the reduction in risk: Those who had taken it twice weekly for 1-4 years had an 11 percent risk reduction; those who took it regularly for at least five years had a 30 percent risk reduction.

Dr. Jean Tang of Stanford University Medical School was the senior author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Cancer. She thinks aspirin's ability to reduce inflammation is the key to controlling the growth of cancerous cells.

However, the study found no similar benefits from taking other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, like ibuprofen.

The reason might be that aspirin and NSAIDs bind with cox-1 and cox-2 enzymes, reducing inflammation, says Dr. Homayoon Sanati, oncologist at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley. But aspirin blocks the enzymes permanently. The other anti-inflammatories "bind to the enzyme, block it, and then it gets dislodged, so it's a temporary inhibition," Sanati said.

One flaw of the study is that the information was self-reported by study subjects, and thus there's no firm evidence that aspirin prevents melanoma. Researchers can only make that association, based on the data.

Considering the side effects of regular aspirin use, which can include bleeding in the stomach, it's wise to check with your doctor before begin taking the drug.

A breast-feeding benefit questioned

The conventional wisdom is that breast-feeding, among all its benefits for babies, keeps them from becoming overweight. At least until they're old enough to discover fast food. Then they're on their own.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that children whose mothers had coaching to improve duration and exclusivity of breast-feeding didn't avoid becoming overweight by age 12 more than kids who didn't have the intervention.

The data were collected in 31 maternity hospitals in Belarus. At age 1, 19.7 percent of the babies whose mother got more education on breast-feeding were still nursing, compared with 11.4 percent among the control group.

Breast-feeding has many more benefits than obesity prevention, including a better-developed immune system to ward off infections, as well as potentially higher cognitive development.

"Although breast-feeding is unlikely to stem the current obesity epidemic, its other advantages are amply sufficient to justify continued public health efforts to promote, protect and support it," the authors wrote.

Foursquare is watching you eat

The social media site (and app) Foursquare has built a list of the healthiest, and unhealthiest, cities in America, based on the places where users check in.

The company analyzed more than 3 billion check-ins and found that people in Boulder, Colo., went to "healthy venues" more often than any other city. Users in Manchester, N.H., must have gotten religion on healthy living overnight, because that city landed at No. 3 on the healthy list, only a year after showing up in the bottom 10.

The No. 2 healthy city over the past year was San Jose. The top three worst cities are Myrtle Beach, S.C.; Montgomery, Ala.; and Atlantic City, N.J.

What constitutes a "healthy venue?" Foursquare lists several, including juice bars, salad shops, yoga studios and gyms. An unhealthy check-in, presumably, might be to a tobacco shop, a rib joint or a Dunkin' Donuts. Although one might also presume that attendees to those types of establishments might be less inclined to broadcast it to the world.

Contact the writer: lhall@ocregister.com or 714-796-2221


Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/aspirin-499748-breast-study.html

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