HRT can sap hearing
Add another item to the list of ailments linked to midlife hormone-replacement therapy: hearing loss.
Researchers have confirmed previous findings that postmenopausal women taking progestin as part of hormone-replacement therapy experienced greater hearing loss than women taking estrogen alone or no hormones at all.
“When a woman goes to her doctor to decide whether she wants to take HRT, this should really be another negative on that list,” said Robert D. Frisina, senior author of the study and associate chair of otolaryngology at the University of Rochester Medical School. “If the woman had some hearing loss to begin with, she might want to be more careful.”
Walk off the fatty meal
So you’ve just polished off a meal high in fat, and now you’re feeling guilty? Wait an hour or two, then get a little exercise, and you can reverse the potential damage to your arteries, a new study suggests.
And you don’t even have to head to the gym for that exercise. “We’re talking about a walk, we’re not talking about changing your clothes and sweating,” said Janet P. Wallace, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University and lead investigator for the study. People in the study walked for 45 minutes.
The study, coincidentally, follows another study published last month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in which researchers found that eating just one piece of carrot cake high in saturated fat and drinking a milkshake can reduce the body’s ability to protect itself against heart disease.
The fat in the cake and shake, it seems, reduces the ability of the body’s “good” cholesterol to do its job protecting the inner lining of the arteries from inflammatory substances that promote vessel-clogging plaque.
Aspirin constrains prostate
Older men who regularly take aspirin or a similar painkiller may help keep prostate enlargement at bay, a new study finds.
The common condition, benign prostatic hyperplasia, typically affects one of every four men ages 40 to 50 and almost half of those over 70, experts say. Enlarged prostate can lead to frequent urination and other bothersome effects.
However, men who regularly took a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug “had a reduction of 50 percent in enlargement and a 35 percent reduction in moderate to severe urinary problems,” said Jenny St. Sauver, a Mayo Clinic epidemiologist who led the study, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
It didn’t matter which NSAID a man was taking, though 80 percent of the men in the study were taking daily aspirin.
