Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 2, 1994 TAG: 9408180048
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune and Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Writing in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, Dr. Stefan Willich of Harvard University reports on a five-year study of German workers in the town of Augsburg that shows the increased incidence of heart attacks on Monday mornings.
Among non-workers such as retired people, there was no similar finding. This leads scientists to speculate that heart attacks are related to stresses of coming out of a weekend's leisure to meet the demands of one's job.
While researchers have found links between behaviors like smoking, high-fat diets and heart disease, they're still looking for factors that actually trigger heart attacks.
``It's important to determine which physiologic factors are responsible for turning external stress into a higher risk of heart attack,'' Willich said.
``It may be possible to identify people at increased risk of heart attack based on their differences in certain physiologic settings.''
Device screens old `hot' papers
A specialized radiation detector that looks like a waffle iron has been developed at Argonne National Laboratory to enable researchers to check historic documents for nuclear contamination.
Argonne scientists have been using the device to check notebooks from the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the world's first nuclear weapons.
``We have used the `waffle iron' to screen technical notebooks from the Manhattan Project in storage at the National Archives facility in Chicago,'' said George Mosho, an Argonne health physicist. ``Argonne technicians surveyed 1,504 notebooks and about 20,000 pages of other archival records.''
About one-third of the notebooks were found to be slightly contaminated and won't be available to the general public, with uncontaminated duplicates available in their place.
Vitamins reduce risk of cataracts
Even though recent study results have cast doubts upon the ability of anti-oxidant vitamin supplements such as vitamins C and E to prevent some forms of cancer, studies continue to find value in vitamin supplementation for other purposes.
A study by Harvard researchers published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that among nearly 18,000 physicians, those who took multiple vitamins were less likely to suffer from cataracts than those who didn't take any vitamins.
The researchers concluded that it was the multiple vitamin supplementation that provided some cataract risk reduction although no reduction was seen in those who only took anti-oxidant vitamins.
Booze, drugs don't raise sex drive
The popular notion of plying women with liquor to stimulate their interest in having sex may not be accurate, at least for teens, research from the University of Buffalo suggests. Psychologists there questioned nearly 1,700 teens about their dating habits, sexual practices and use of alcohol or drugs. They found that sexual encounters were quite low when neither teen used any substance and most frequent when the boy did and the girl didn't. Sexual activity when only the girl used alcohol or drugs occurred even less often than when neither boy nor girl used such substances.
Pills work well for Lyme disease
Lyme disease, the tick-transmitted infection that has serious consequences in some people, may be treated just as effectively and with much less expense by taking pills as by getting shots, researchers report.
A study published in Neurology by Swedish physicians found similar success among patients treated orally and those treated intravenously.
The big difference was that those getting the oral treatment paid about $50 while the intravenous treatments could run as high as $2,500. The study, which included only 54 patients, is preliminary and must be confirmed with a larger follow-up, researchers said.
Drug effective on scalp psoriasis
Doctors who have always found it nearly impossible to provide patients relief from scalp psoriasis may find encouragement from results presented at the Sixth International Psoriasis Symposium in Chicago recently. Dermatologists from Brown and Harvard universities as well as the University of California at Los Angeles reported that a drug already available for treating eczema, Derma-Smoothe/FS topical oil, is also effective in treating scalp psoriasis.
`Seeds' reduce prostate side effects
A study released this week suggests that implanting radioactive ``seeds'' in men with early prostate cancer is not only as effective as surgery, but it also carries fewer side effects.
Nationwide, prostate cancer is rising rapidly, with 200,000 new cases expected this year, and 38,000 deaths.
Until recently, men undergoing the standard surgery for the cancer faced sobering problems: a third may be incontinent after the operation and more than 80 percent may have trouble maintaining an erection.
In the new study of 298 men, Dr. John Blasko, director of the Northwest Tumor Institute in Seattle, found 91 percent of those treated with radioactive seeds were free of cancer five years later - results comparable to surgery. And they had much less incontinence and impotence. Similar results were obtained in a second study of 187 men with advanced cancer who received the seeds plus external beam radiation therapy.
- Associated Press
Genetic marker may aid prognosis
Researchers from Finland and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore have found a new marker that may help determine which patients with colon cancer will benefit from postsurgical drugs and radiation therapy, and which may not.
Reporting in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that in patients with intermediate stage colon cancer, tumors that have not spread to the lymph nodes, loss of part of chromosome 18 is a strong indicator of a worse prognosis, perhaps because genes that suppress tumor growth lie in this chromosomal region.
Among 135 patients studied, those who still had both copies of the entire chromosome 18 had a 93 percent five-year survival rate, while those who had lost the long ``arm'' of the chromosome had only a 54 percent survival rate.
The new marker is the latest genetic alterations to be linked with colon cancer. Dr. Margaret Tempero, professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and coauthor of a journal editorial about the study, warned in a telephone interview that it is too soon to tell if the new marker will change treatment.
by CNB