Longevity rising for educated
Life expectancy in the United States is rising, but only among people with more than 12 years of education, a new study finds.
Those with more than 12 years of education — more than a high school diploma — can expect to live to 82; for those with 12 or fewer years of education, life expectancy is 75.
“If you look in recent decades, you will find that life expectancy has been increasing, which is good, but when you split this out by better-educated groups, the life expectancy gained is really occurring much more so in the better-educated groups,” said lead researcher Ellen Meara, an assistant professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School.
The answer may lie with tobacco.
About one-fifth of the difference in mortality between the groups can be accounted for by smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer and emphysema, Meara said.
But the disparity in life expectancy is not only a function of education, Meara said. “Those with less education are likely to have lower income,” she said. “They’re likely to live in areas that have their own health threats, either through crime or poor housing conditions. In addition, they may have worse access to health insurance coverage.”
A sign of baseball doom
Sometimes it doesn’t take three strikes to get out in baseball. A new study found that just one injury severe enough to require surgery kept more than half of those injured players from returning to the same or higher level of play.
For players who have made it to the major or minor leagues in professional baseball, the news was even more dismal: Just 18 percent made it back to the same level or higher, according to the study.
“The demands of professional baseball are not insignificant. Not everybody gets back to 100 percent after an injury,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Steven B. Cohen, assistant team physician for the Philadelphia Phillies and director of sports medicine research at the Rothman Institute in Philadelphia.
Stomach cancer and chemo
Chemotherapy after surgery does not improve survival in patients with non-metastatic stomach cancer, says an Italian study.
Currently, surgery is the only treatment that can potentially cure the localized gastric cancer, according to background information in the study.
Some recent research has suggested, however, that a chemotherapy combination of cisplatin, epirubicin, 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin (PELF) improves outcomes in people with metastatic gastric cancer.
In this study, researchers tested the PELF combination in patients with localized gastric cancer. Some of the 258 patients in the study were treated with surgery only, while others had surgery and chemotherapy.
At a median follow-up of 72.8 months, there was no statistical difference between the two groups in terms of disease-free survival or overall survival. The survival rate was 47 percent in the surgery/chemotherapy group and 45.3 percent in the surgery group.
