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   More SEX = Better Health

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  Bone Density-Breast Cancer

  Pain Free Mammogram

  Mammogram Video
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Sex Builds Better Health Eight Great Ways

When you have S-E-X on your mind, chances are H-E-A-L-T-H is the last thing you're thinking about - but the two actually go hand-in-glove! Sex promotes both our physical and psychological health, according to experts, and here are eight ways it helps:

1) Sex Busts Stress. Scottish researchers studied the sexual activity of 24 women and 22 men, then put them in stressful situations such as public speaking. The subjects who had intercourse withstood stress better than those who either abstained from sex or engaged in other sexual activities.

2) Sex Burns Calories. Sex burns up 85 calories in 30 minutes, and 40 half-hour sessions will burn about 3500 calories, which is enough to lose a pound.

3) Sex Builds Cardiovascular Health. English researchers found fear of a stroke during sex is groundless. They followed 900 men for 20 years and found no connection. On the other hand, they found that the men who had sex at least twice a week reduced their risk of a heart attack by half compared to men who had it less than once a month.

4) Sex Builds Immunity. Having sex several times a week has been linked with raising levels of the antibody immunoglobulin A (IgA), which helps ward off colds, according to researchers at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

5) Sex Builds Bonds. Sex raises the level of the hormone oxytocin, known popularly as the "love hormone," which results in building trust and strengthening bonds. The more contact - including hugs - the higher the level.

6) Sex Lowers Pain. As the love hormone oxytocin builds, endorphins rise, which results in lowering of pain. If aches and pains are better after sex, it's because of oxytocin levels.

7) Sex Lowers Risk of Prostate Cancer. Frequent ejaculations in young men may lower the risk of prostate cancer in later years. Australian researchers studied men with and without prostate cancer, and found frequent ejaculations in men in their 20s offered protection, but found no such link for men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

8) Sex Promotes Sleep. Both men and women need adequate sleep, which in turn promotes healthy weight and blood pressure.

And when you need help, there is always Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra

Bone Density Helps Predict Breast Cancer Risk

Measuring a woman's bone mineral density can provide additional information that may help more accurately determine a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. That is the conclusion of a new study published in the September 1, 2008 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study's results suggest that incorporating bone mineral density tests with current risk assessments might significantly improve physicians' ability to predict breast cancer risk in older, postmenopausal women.

Bone mineral density testing is done to diagnose osteoporosis and help assess the risk of fractures. Low bone mineral density is linked to higher risk of fractures, while normal density is linked to lower risk of fractures. It is possible that over a woman's lifetime, hormonal and other factors that lead to higher bone mineral density can also lead to higher risk of breast cancer. Studies have found an association between higher bone mineral density and higher breast cancer risk, and bone mineral density tests have been proposed as a potential addition to breast cancer risk models. This study, supported by Eli Lilly & Company, is the first to investigate the relationships among bone mineral density, traditional breast cancer risk assessment tool results, and breast cancer incidence among the same group of postmenopausal women.

To investigate these relationships, Dr. Zhao Chen of the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and her colleagues studied approximately 10,000 post-menopausal women (average age 63) taking part in the Women's Health Initiative, a study conducted in 40 clinical centers throughout the United States and supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers assessed the women's initial bone mineral density level as well as their score on the Gail risk model, a well known and commonly used tool that estimates five year and lifetime risk of invasive breast cancer for women 35 years of age or older. They then followed the women for an average of approximately 8 years, noting which women developed breast cancer.

As expected, the study found that women with a high Gail score had a 35 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer compared to women with a lower Gail score. But the study also found a 25 percent increase in the risk of developing the disease with each unit increase in total hip bone mineral density t-score. While the two scores were independent of each other, women who had the highest scores on both assessments had a much higher risk in breast cancer.

The findings suggest that adding bone mineral density to currently used risk assessment tools may significantly improve the prediction of breast cancer risk. The findings do not change the use of bone mineral density testing to diagnose osteoporosis or the need to treat osteoporosis in order to reduce the risk of fractures.

Pain Free Mammograms

Radiologists have devised a better way to perform a mammogram, called digital tomosynthesis. An X-ray tube moves in an arc around the breast, capturing several images. The information is then sent to a computer, which produces clear, highly focused 3-dimensional images of the breast. Digital tomosynthesis is a new kind of breast imaging that is anticipated to replace regular mammography because it makes breast cancers easier to find in dense breast tissue, and makes the procedure much more comfortable. The technique is currently being reviewed by the FDA and should be commercialized within the year. It is easy to implement in any centers that currently provide mammography, with no necessary extra training for technicians to interpret results.

HOW IT WORKS: In digital tomosynthesis, the breast is positioned the same way as with a conventional mammogram, but only a little pressure is applied -- just enough to keep the breast in a stable position during the procedure. An X-ray tube moves in an arc around the breast while several images (11) are taken in seven seconds. The information is then sent to a computer and assembled to produce clear, highly focused 3D images throughout the breast. Breast cancer is denser than most healthy nearby breast tissue, and will appear on the image as irregular white areas. With conventional mammography, the breast is pulled away from the body, compressed, and held between two glass plates to ensure that the whole breast is viewed. Two X-rays of each breast are taken from different angles, top to bottom and side to side. Mammography is a good imaging technique, but it has some limitations. It is uncomfortable for women, making some reluctant to get the test regularly. It also causes overlapping of the breast tissue, which can hide a cancer. Mammography also only provides a limited number of views.

PAIN FREE MAMMOGRAM VIDEO
 

Older People May Need Less Sleep

Along with all the other changes that come with age, healthy older people also lose some capacity for sleep, according to a new report published online on July 24th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. When asked to stay in bed for 16 hours in the dark each day for several days, younger people get an average of 9 hours of shuteye compared to 7.5 for older people, the researchers report.

"The most parsimonious explanation for our results is that older people need less sleep," said Elizabeth Klerman of Brigham and Women's Hospital & Harvard Medical School. "It's also possible that they sleep less even when given the opportunity for more sleep because of age-related changes in the ability to fall asleep and remain asleep," she added, noting that the new results apply only to healthy individuals taking no medication and having no medical conditions or sleep disorders.

The study also found that most healthy people and young people in particular, don't get as much sleep as they need.

The idea that sleep changes markedly across the life span isn't new. In fact, insomnia is a common complaint among older people. But whether age-related changes in sleep were due to changes in social factors, circadian rhythms, or shifts in an internal "set point" for sleep need or the ability to sleep had remained unresolved.

In the new study, Klerman and her colleague Derk-Jan Dijk, of the University of Surrey in the UK, set out to compare the capacity for sleep in young people (between the ages of 18 and 32) compared to older people (age 60 to 72) under conditions that controlled for circadian rhythms by allowing the chance to sleep during both the night and the day and by controlling individual choices in sleep opportunities.

"While humans can sometimes override the homeostatic set point and not sleep when tired, there is no evidence that they can sleep when they are not tired," Klerman explained.

Given the same amount of time in bed, older people take longer to fall asleep and sleep for less time than younger people do, they found. When required to remain in bed for 16 hours a day, older people slept 1.5 hours less on average than younger people, they showed. That age-related decline in sleep included an even split between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is associated with dreaming, and non-REM sleep, they found.

Most younger subjects slept for many more hours during the study than their usual self-selected sleep times. Given the evidence that insufficient sleep is associated with increased risk of accidents, errors, and metabolic changes similar to diabetes, Klerman emphasized that younger people should sleep more.

HIV Cocktail Adds 13 Years to AIDS Patients

Cocktails of HIV drugs help patients live an average of 13 years longer — if they are lucky enough to get them.

A person who started taking the drugs at age 20 could, on average, expect to live another 43 years, the researchers report in the Lancet medical journal.

The Lancet medical journal looked at several studies of patients living in the United States, Canada and several European countries who received drug combinations known as highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART.

Robert Hogg of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver, Canada and colleagues looked at 43,000 patients in 14 different studies.

"Between 1996-99 and 2003-05, there was a gain in life expectancy for those at age 20 years of about 13 years; similar gains in life expectancy in those aged 35 years were also seen," they wrote.

"A person starting combination therapy can expect to live about 43 years at 20 years of age, about two-thirds as long as the general population in these countries." Average life expectancy for a 20-year-old without HIV in those countries would be 80, they said.

Patients treated later on in their infections and those infected via injected drug use did not live as long as those treated early, the researchers found.

The AIDS virus infects an estimated 33 million people globally and has killed about 25 million since the pandemic started in the 1980s.

There is no vaccine and no cure but the drugs can suppress the virus and allow patients to lead a near-normal life. Without treatment, the virus destroys the immune system, leaving patients susceptible to infections and cancer.

More than 20 drugs are now on the market and can be combined in various ways to control the virus, although it usually mutates eventually and patients must switch to different regimens to keep it under control.

Drug companies have come up with combination pills to make it easier to stay on therapy.

Reuters
 

Meditation Slows AIDS Progression

Meditation may slow the worsening of AIDS in just a few weeks, perhaps by affecting the immune system, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

If the findings are borne out in larger studies, it could offer a cheap and pleasant way to help people battle the incurable and often fatal condition, the team at the University of California Los Angeles said.

They tested a stress-lowering program called mindfulness meditation, defined as practicing an open and receptive awareness of the present moment, avoiding thinking of the past or worrying about the future.

The more often the volunteers meditated, the higher their CD4 T-cell counts — a standard measure of how well the immune system is fighting the AIDS virus. The CD4 counts were measured before and after the two-month program.

"This study provides the first indication that mindfulness meditation stress-management training can have a direct impact on slowing HIV disease progression," David Creswell, who led the study, said in a statement.

His team tested 67 HIV-positive adults from the Los Angeles area, 48 of whom did some or all of the meditation. Most were likely to have highly stressful lives, Creswell said.

"The average participant in the study was male, African American, homosexual, unemployed and not on ARV (antiretroviral) medication," they wrote in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

The meditation classes included eight weekly two-hour sessions, a day-long retreat and daily home practice. "The people that were in this class really responded and just really enjoyed the program," Creswell said.

"The mindfulness program is a group-based and low-cost treatment, and if this initial finding is replicated in larger samples, it's possible that such training can be used as a powerful complementary treatment for HIV disease, alongside medications," he added.

"One of the main side-effects of this particular treatment was an increase in their quality of life," Creswell said.

Reuters

Special Notes:

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