Tobacco giant Philip Morris paid for and then adjusted a medical review that ultimately played down the link between smoking and sudden infant death syndrome, claims a report in the March issue of Pediatrics.
Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the review was commissioned by Philip Morris and published in a respected journal, Paediatric Perinatal Epidemiology, in 2001. In it, scientists concluded that smoking during pregnancy can endanger the unborn child, but then they cast doubt on a published scientific finding that secondhand smoke increases the risk of SIDS.
Study authors traced versions of the paper from the original to what was published. The documentation came from internal memos and reports made public as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement reached in 1998 between the tobacco industry and a number of states. The first draft concluded that both prenatal and postnatal effects of smoking are independent risk factors for SIDS, according to study author Stanton Glantz. The final version concluded that postnatal secondhand smoke effects are “less well-established” than prenatal smoking effects. The changes were made, Glantz said, after comments from Philip Morris officials.
Philip Morris said the study author had been free to publish whatever he wished, despite the company’s comments on the manuscript.
New knees, new pounds
Patients tend to gain weight after knee- or hip-replacement surgery, researchers found.
Researchers at the Joint Replacement Institute at Orthopedic Hospital in Los Angeles presented the findings at the recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in Washington, D.C. The team recorded changes in body weight after successful joint-replacement surgery in 34 men and 66 women, ages 23 to 82. They followed the patients at least one year after the surgery and found that, far from losing weight, the patients gained an average of almost 3 pounds.
Kids undervaccinated
More than one in three U.S. children are undervaccinated for more than six months during the first two years of life, a new study finds. The delays put children at risk for diseases such as measles, mumps and chickenpox.
Children in the United States are supposed to receive about 15 to 20 vaccinations during the first 24 months of life, all of them delivered on a complicated schedule involving specific age recommendations and often multiple doses at different time intervals.
The study findings appear in the March 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
For the study, Elizabeth Luman, an epidemiologist with the National Immunization Program in Atlanta, and her colleagues looked at data on 14,810 children ages 24 months to 35 months. Overall, children were undervaccinated–meaning they were late in getting a vaccine or hadn’t received the full dose–an average of 126 days for all vaccines during the first 24 months of life. About one-third (34 percent) were undervaccinated for less than one month, 29 percent for one to six months and 37 percent for more than six months.
