Household sprays linked to asthma
Using household cleaning sprays and spray air fresheners just once a week can increase your risk of developing asthma by 50 percent, new research suggests.
Though the products may just be a trigger rather than a cause, the European team involved in the study believes that spray cleaners can cause asthma, because the people in this study did not have asthma or asthma symptoms at the start.
“Cleaning sprays, especially air fresheners, furniture cleaners and glass cleaners, had a particularly strong effect,” said the study’s lead author, Jan-Paul Zock, a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology at the Municipal Institute of Medical Research in Barcelona, Spain.
The most important thing consumers need to know, Zock cautioned, is that “cleaning sprays — for sale in all supermarkets — are not harmless, and their use may involve serious health risks.”
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Initial colonoscopy the biggest lifesaver
A first-time colonoscopy to remove precancerous polyps plays a bigger role in reducing the risk of dying from colon cancer than do follow-up screenings years later, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that patients who forgo follow-up colonoscopies in the decade after the initial procedure will still reap the benefits sown by a first removal of polyps, called a polypectomy.
Post-polypectomy colonoscopies do, however, become more important in protecting against death from colon cancer as patients enter their second decade after the first colonoscopy, the study authors said.
“The initial colonoscopy has a major impact — a huge, huge effect — on reducing colon cancer deaths,” said study lead author Ann G. Zauber, an associate attending biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s department of epidemiology and biostatistics in New York City.
“The risk for dying from colon cancer drops 90 percent after the initial colonoscopy,” she said. “And in the first 10 years, 90 percent of that reduction is due to that first procedure.”
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Doctors are born with drug-industry roots
More than half of department chairs at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals have financial ties with the drug industry, a new study finds. These institutional relationships seemed to be just as widespread as those of individual physicians or scientists with industry.
“There is not a single aspect of medicine in which the drug companies do not have substantial and deep relationships, affecting not only doctors-in-training, resident physicians, researchers, physicians-in-practice, the people who review drugs for the federal government and the people who review studies,” said lead researcher Eric Campbell, associate professor at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The study, the first to examine the extent of these institutional relationships, is published in the Oct. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
