Cell phones change the brain
Cell phones appear to have a measurable physical impact on parts of your brain, new Italian research contends. Reporting in the August issue of the Annals of Neurology, the authors suggest that this could help if you suffer from migraines or other neurological disorders or hurt if you have epilepsy or a brain disease.
Either way, the researchers and other experts caution, much more research needs to be done.
The researchers, from Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome, found that the electromagnetic field (EMF) emitted by cell phones can cause some cells in the brain’s cortex adjacent to the side of phone use to become excited, while others become inhibited.
E. Roy John, director of New York University Medical Center’s Brain Research Laboratories, said, “Using a cell phone is not innocuous. It has an effect on your brain. Whether that’s good or bad, we don’t yet know, but it’s definitely having an effect.”
Millions of AIDS years regained
During the last 17 years, successive generations of AIDS drugs have restored 3 million years of life to HIV-positive Americans and prevented an estimated 2,900 infants from becoming infected, a new study finds.
The numbers, the first calculations of their kind, highlight both the successes and failures of AIDS treatment, said study co-author A. David Paltiel, an associate professor of public health at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
On the one hand, he said, 3 million extra years of life is impressive. Considering the billions of dollars that have been spent on research, the research proves that “it’s really worth it,” Paltiel said. But the number could have been much higher if drugs were more widely available and more people were aware they were HIV-positive, Paltiel said.
Obesity may hinder cancer zap
Obese men with prostate cancer may be less likely to benefit from radiation therapy than men who aren’t overweight. The finding could help doctors determine which patients, particularly overweight ones, need more aggressive treatment.
“Prostate cancer for most men is quiet. It’s a cancer with a good outcome,” said study lead author Sara Strom, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “Basically, what you would like in prostate cancer is to identify men who have more chances of having a bad outcome, so you can do something different with them,” she said.
But another expert cautioned restraint when interpreting the findings, which appear in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Cancer.
“Not many of the patients in the study were obese, so you can’t make a very strong case for this paper, even though it’s possible it’s true,” said Dr. Murugesan Manoharan of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Eighteen percent of the men in the group were mildly obese, and 5 percent were moderately to severely obese. Moderately and severely obese men had a 99 percent greater risk of higher levels of prostate-specific antigen, a protein linked to the presence of prostate cancer. The obese men also had a 70 percent greater risk of tumor recurrence or metastasis.
