One more worry over HRT
The universe of possible health risks associated with hormone therapy just got bigger. New research suggests that prolonged use of hormone therapy in postmenopausal women increases the risk of developing ovarian cancer.
The risk needs confirmation in other studies and also needs to be weighed against other factors, the researchers cautioned.
“We’ve seen a growing body of evidence linking unopposed estrogen and estrogen-plus-progestin to an increased risk of ovarian cancer,” said study author James Lacey Jr., an epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute.
The authors of the study found that, among a group of almost 100,000 women aged 50 to 71, those with a hysterectomy who used estrogen alone for a decade or more had almost double the risk of ovarian cancer than those who received no HRT.
Women who had not undergone a hysterectomy and who used estrogen plus progestin in sequence or continuously for five or more years also had a higher risk, compared with women who used no HRT.
Get a leg up on arthritis
Weight training and cardiovascular exercise may be just the ticket for patients who are preparing for knee- or hip-replacement surgery, a new study suggests.
Those patients who took part in one-hour exercise regimens just three times a week were 73 percent less likely to be discharged to a rehabilitation center after their surgery, researchers found.
Only 12 of 36 patients who took part in the exercise had to enter the rehab centers compared with 23 of 43 patients who didn’t exercise, said study author Daniel Rooks, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Although the study is small, Rooks said, “The benefits of exercise before surgery are very clear. The more you can do for yourself physically before surgery, the better off you are.”
A mother lode of health info
It could someday be like Googling for a cure.
A group of U.S. scientists says it has successfully tested a prototype “connectivity map,” a computer program that uses unique genetic patterns as “search words” to link up specific illnesses with the drugs that might treat them.
The achievement already has yielded intriguing insights into cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, says a team reporting in the Sept. 29 issue of Science.
Someday researchers around the world could use this genetic search engine to speed drug discovery and gain a broader understanding of disease, the study authors said.
“It’s an electronic library; it helps you understand what genes are present in disease and how those genes can be affected by various `perturbations’–medications or other substances,” explained Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society.
Lichtenfeld was not involved in the project, which was done by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Using the publicly available, online map, scientists worldwide may soon be able to bypass tedious, time-consuming work in the lab and quickly ascertain whether a candidate drug works against a specific illness and how.
