Since long-term estrogen replacement therapy can reduce the risk of heart disease by 35 percent and hip fractures by 25 percent, postmenopausal women prone to these disorders should consider hormone treatments, advises the American College of Physicians.
These benefits, however, must be balanced against the risk of developing cancers of the breast, endometrium and uterus from long-term hormone treatments, said the college`s guidelines.
The guidelines only covered long-term therapy lasting 10 to 15 years to prevent disease and prolong life, and did not cover short-term therapy of one to five years for treating such menopausal symptoms as hot flashes and vaginal dryness.
”A woman should understand the probable risks and benefits of hormone therapy, decide how valuable she considers each of the potential effects of therapy and participate with her physician in deciding whether to take preventive hormone therapy,” said the 77,000-member college.
GOLF SHOES MAY GO HIGH-TECH Just as technological advances in the design of golf clubs and balls has helped improve the game of many players, improvements in golf shoes could have a similar effect, according to two Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineers.
”Traditionally the golf shoe has been designed for fashion rather than performance,” said Marc Tamres. In the past they were simply dress shoes studded with spikes, he said.
Using high-tech equipment to measure the shifting pressures on the feet during a swing, Tamres and Gerald Koenig found that the left and right shoes should be designed differently to accommodate a variety of stresses.
With shoes that are specifically designed to be stiff in some areas and elastic in others, a player could quickly tell when his swing did not feel comfortable and correct his movement, they said.
NEW WAY FOUND TO READ GENE CODE QUICKLY Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists have developed a new way to read the chemical letters of the genetic code that could greatly speed up the Genome project to decipher all 100,000 human genes.
An estimated 3 billion letters make up the genetic code.
Called ”primer walking,” the new method should be at least 10 times as fast as current DNA reading techniques at less than one-tenth the cost, Jan Kieleczawa, John Dunn and F. William Studier reported in the journal Science. X-RAYS OF TOMORROW SHOULD BE FAR SAFER The next generation of digital X-ray equipment may cut patient radiation exposure by 75 percent, researchers at Northwestern University report.
Using mathematical formulas to remove graininess from images and correct for random fluctuation of X-ray beams, Northwestern scientists can instruct computers to make high quality images with less X-ray information.
Aggelos Katsaggelos, a North western electrical engineer and computer scientist, said the technique could be applied to any computer-driven digital X-ray equipment and has immediate application for procedures such as angiography that require prolonged X-ray exposure to image vessels in a patient`s heart.
Katsaggelos and co-researcher Alan V. Sahakian have worked with Evanston Hospital for three years to refine their processing techniques. The research has been sponsored in part by Siemens, the German electronics company that manufactures imaging equipment.
COMPUTER SNOW JOB TURNS UP A SURPRISE Imagine throwing a snowball against a garage door and finding that the snow went into the door rather than scattering across its surface.
That`s analagous to the surprising result scientists at Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University have gotten from computer modeling of growing thin films of gold on a silver base. Instead of depositing a layer on top of the silver, the gold forms under a layer of silver.
Actual experiments in making such films done at Rutgers University and IBM`s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Cal., support this theoretical finding. The collaborating physicists say they hope to find applications of this phenomenon in production of integrated circuits and other
microtechnologies.
`911` STUDY SHOWS RAPES INCREASE AFTER SUNDOWN A study of ”911” police calls in a major Midwestern metropolitan area found that domestic violence and rape tend to occur after sundown, a pattern that could help law enforcement agencies combat these crimes, according to an Indiana University researcher.
Although it is difficult to affect weekly routines and impossible to alter the weather, law enforcement agencies can alter their manpower deployment based on patterns of light and darkness, said Ellen G. Cohn, a visiting assistant professor in criminal justice.
Domestic violence may be somewhat easier to predict than rape since it is also linked to hot temperatures, school closings, weekends and holidays, she said.
IN TREATING AIDS, EXPERIENCE COUNTS AIDS patients treated at hospitals inexperienced in treating the immunity-destroying disease have more than twice the death rate of similar patients in hospitals experienced in treating AIDS, a Boston City Hospital study has found.
The study involved 151 female and 149 male patients at 40 hospitals and monitored their in-hospital and 30-day death rates. The death rate for women was 26.8 percent at low-experience hospitals and 10.8 percent at high-experience hospitals.
For men the rate was 17.7 at the inexperienced hospitals and 9.3 at the experienced ones.
”The better outcomes in high-experience hospitals do not appear to be the result of more intensive use of resources as measured by admission to the ICU, length of stay, or cost,” Dr. Valerie E. Stone reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
NURSING HOME ILLS TRACED TO POOR CARE Undernutrition, bedsores and loss of activity among nursing home residents could be dramatically decreased with better care, said Dr. Daniel Rudman of the Medical College of Wisconsin and associate chief of staff for extended care at the Milaukee VA.
Rudman`s study of three VA nursing homes in the Great Lakes region found that some of the homes had twice the rate of bedsores and undernutrition, although all had the same type of patients.
”Caregivers and administrators could make use of this new assessment tool to further monitor the quality of care for all their nursing home residents, and thereby achieve better outcomes with regard to undernutrition, bedsores, and functional level of activities of daily living,” Rudman reported in the journal Hospital and Community Psychiatry.
INJECTED MUSCLE CELLS FIND THEIR WAY HOME Muscle cells have a previously unsuspected homing capability. When injected into blood vessels these cells find their way to muscles in the body where they fuse and become part of the muscles.
This is what happens in rat experiments and researchers are cautiously optimistic that it could open the door to reversing the muscle deterioration of patients with muscular dystrophy.
If duplicated in humans the new technique could replace less effective methods of injecting muscle cells directly into muscles, Dr. Robert H. Brown of the Massachusetts General Hospital reported in the journal Neurology.
