Pools may injure young lungs
If taking your infant to swim class seems like a fun way of bonding with baby, you might want to think twice.
A small European study has found that infants who were regularly exposed to the chlorinated air of indoor swimming pools were more at risk for developing asthma than were infants who didn’t swim indoors.
“Our data suggest that infant swimming practice in chlorinated indoor swimming pools is associated with airway changes that, along with other factors, seem to predispose children to the development of asthma and recurrent bronchitis,” wrote the Belgian researchers.
The researchers found that children who went swimming indoors as infants were 50 percent more likely to report wheezing, almost four times as likely to experience chest tightness, and had more than double the risk of experiencing shortness of breath, compared with the children who hadn’t been regular swimmers as infants.
Vanishing stent a success
A stent that biodegrades and vanishes from an artery in a matter of months has successfully passed a major test in humans, German researchers report.
The device, made of magnesium, is one of many different biodegradable stents that together represent the future of these artery-opening devices, said Dr. Raimund Erbel, professor of medicine at the West German Heart Center in Essen. Stents are tiny, implanted mesh tubes that prop open failing arteries.
More human testing, however, means it will take years to get such stents into routine use.
Researchers warn of ‘sleepsex’
Reports of sexual behavior while asleep have become so common that experts have released a classification system that allows doctors to better document cases of “sleepsex.”
People who engage in sleepsex “don’t remember what they do, and it’s their bed partners who tell them. They’re mortified, and the partner complains they’re being assaulted or molested,” said Dr. Carlos Schenck, a sleep researcher who was lead author on the report. “Now they’ll realize this is a sleep-related disorder.”
Schenck, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, explained that “anything that people do during the daytime, we’re realizing they can do during sleep, all the instinctual or basic behaviors.”
Steroids an illicit body-shaper
Teen girls who admit using anabolic steroids are less likely to be athletes and more likely to have other health-harming behaviors, researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University report. A national survey showed that 5.3 percent of teen girls admitted to using or having used anabolic steroids, which are synthetic substances related to male sex hormones and are illegal without a prescription.
“In 7th grade, over 7 percent admitted steroid use,” said lead researcher Dr. Linn Goldberg, adding that girls involved in team sports were less likely to use steroids. “These are body-shaping drugs,” he said. “They take it to get more lean body mass. Some take them for protection — to get stronger.”
