People more open about hair restoration

People who get hair restoration in 2010 are more apt discuss the work they've had done than they would have been in 2008, U.S. researchers say.

A member study conducted by the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery asked whether their patients were more likely, just as likely or less likely to discuss their hair restoration procedures with their family and friends in 2010 compared to 2008.

The survey indicates 56.4 percent of members said their patients would be more likely to discuss their hair restoration as they were in 2008. In addition, 36.2 percent of members said their patients would be just as likely to discuss and only 7.4 percent responded they would be less likely to discuss their hair restoration procedures as they were in 2008.

"Hair loss is a very common medical condition, affecting 50 percent of all men and more than 25 percent of women worldwide," Dr. Jerry E. Cooley, president of the ISHRS, says in a statement. "So, it's no surprise that more people are talking about their hair loss and not feeling embarrassed anymore to admit that they've turned to hair restoration surgery to correct it."

In the United States, 101,252 hair restoration procedures were performed in 2010, the study says.

In 2010, 85.9 percent of all hair restoration surgical patients worldwide were male and 14.1 percent of all hair restoration surgical patients worldwide were

Sperm from mice stem cells offers infertility hope

A team of scientists has reported producing viable sperm using the stem cells of mice in an experiment that researchers hope could one day lead to treating infertile men.

The Kyoto University researchers managed to induce mice stem cells into creating sperm precursors, which were transplanted into infertile male mice. The mice then produced sperm that was successfully used to fertilize eggs in a lab dish.

The offspring were healthy and fertile, according to a paper published online Thursday in the scientific journal Cell.

Members of the research team, led by Mitinori Saitou, said they believe their success may help in the development of infertility treatments in humans, although they said many hurdles remain.

"We have high hopes, but it's not that easy," Saitou told the Associated Press by telephone Friday from Kyoto, in western Japan. "There are many difficult issues ahead in applying this to humans. But it is a first step."

Experts outside the group say it's an important first step toward infertility treatment although there would be a long way.

"This is a very good experiment for thinking about treatment of infertile man but a very very long way," said Toshio Suda, developmental biology professor at Keio University.

He said the Kyoto team's findings were great work but it is not easy to prepare the mature sperm cells at present. If some hurdles are cleared, it could successfully identify "which gene is very important to prepare the sperm."

Too many women get HPV tests, study says

Doctors are testing women for human papillomavirus, or HPV, more often than guidelines recommend, suggests a new study.

Not only is that a waste of money, researchers say, it also means that women who test positive may be getting extra treatment that won't necessarily help them, but comes with a risk of complications and side effects.

Doctors use the HPV test in addition to Pap smears to screen women for signs of cervical cancer. But researchers say that in young women, a positive test gives doctors very little information, since HPV is common in women in their 20's and probably won't lead to cancer.

Still, "there's a much greater emphasis on avoiding a single cancer versus literally thousands of women being over-screened and over-treated," said Philip Castle, an HPV expert at the American Society for Clinical Pathology in Chicago, Illinois, who wrote a commentary on the new study in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

There are about 40 different kinds of sexually transmitted HPV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- and at least half of sexually active people will get HPV at some point. The virus can't be cured, but often goes away on its own without treatment.

Some types of HPV have been linked to cervical cancer in women, whereas other types cause genital warts.

HPV tests, which start at about $30 but can cost much more, look for HPV in cells taken from a swab of the cervix.

For the current study, Dr. Mona Saraiya of the CDC and her colleagues analyzed data from a national survey of doctors and clinics that used Pap tests. In total, 376 individual doctors and another 216 outpatient clinics responded to survey questions about whether and how they performed HPV testing.

Three-quarters of doctors and clinics had ordered an HPV test at least once. Of those, more than half said they used HPV testing regularly alongside Pap smears in women less than 30 years old -- a use not recommended by the American Cancer Society and other organizations.

The majority also reported using HPV tests as a follow-up to a questionable Pap smear when the tests may not have helped doctors with much more information.

Finally, almost one-third of doctors and clinics who did HPV testing used two different kinds of HPV tests, the so called "high-risk" and "low-risk" HPV tests, even though the low-risk test tells doctors nothing about cervical cancer, researchers said, because it screens for the types of HPV that don't cause cancer.

Doctors may be confused about which tests to order if they aren't keeping up with current evidence, Castle told Reuters Health. "The low-risk test really has no business being on the market at all," he added.

And with regard to testing in women less than 30, "cancer is really rare in that group," Castle said. Routine HPV testing at that age, he said, could lead to biopsies and cancer treatments that aren't really necessary -- along with a lot of stress and worry.

"There's a lot of HPV and very little disease" in women in their 20s, he said. "And the disease that's found there is generally about 10 to 15 years away from becoming invasive. There's no good justification for using" the HPV test routinely.

Castle said the findings are particularly troubling given how clear the guidelines are regarding use of the HPV test, and how united experts are about which instances call for the test and which don't.

"It's quite clear that HPV testing can be used in a very beneficial way," he said, including for routine cancer screening in older women and to clarify some types of "equivocal" Pap smears. "But misuses of it just have no place in medical practice," he said.

Saraiya said that women can do their homework -- including on the CDC website, http://www.cdc.gov/cancer -- and be aware of when they should or shouldn't get an HPV test and discuss that with their doctors.

"Doctors are all over the map right now in terms of the recommendations," she told Reuters Health.

Some questions women might want to consider and ask their physicians, Saraiya said, include: "What is the test they're going to be giving to me for screening? Is it a Pap test, an HPV test, or both?"

And for young women: "I've heard I do not need an HPV test for screening under age 30 -- why are you giving it to me?"

"The whole field of HPV and cervical cancer is a fast-changing field. For a clinician to be keeping up with the literature, especially outside of the OB/GYN field, is quite difficult," she said.

"A well informed patient does go a long way."

X-rays provide nano views

A new lens-less microscope that harnesses X-rays is able to see details at the scale of a single nanometer and could help usher in an era of smaller computer hard disks that hold more memory, researchers report in a new study.

The technique is also scalable, and as X-ray sources are improved, the technique should allow researchers to resolve down to the subatomic scale, Oleg Shpyrko, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, told me today.

The X-ray microscope uses a computer algorithm to generate the images. It does this by converting the diffraction patterns produced by the X-rays bouncing off the nanoscale structures into resolvable images.

While various other microscopes, such as atomic force microscopes, can see at the nanoscale, they are only able to see through thin samples. "The advantage of X-rays is they can see through materials," Shpyrko said.

The technique, for the first time, also allows scientists to see magnetic structure at the nanoscale level without the aid of a lens. This is important because it enables researchers to more easily manipulate the sample being studied, he noted.

The computer algorithm that serves as the lens is similar to the technology that sharpened the Hubble Space Telescope's initially blurred images before its mirrors were repaired in space. A similar concept is employed by astronomers who use adaptive optics to remove distortion from their images.

To test the microscope, Shpryko and colleagues made a layered film composed of the magnetic elements gadolinium and iron that are being considered for the development of higher capacity, smaller, and faster computer memory and disk drives.

When combined, these materials self assemble into a series of magnetic stripes that look akin to the repeating swirls of the ridges in fingerprints. Being able to see these patterns will enable researchers to make and see smaller and smaller fingerprint patterns, known as magnetic domains, which will allow more data to be stored in a smaller space within a material, according to the researchers.

"We want to be able to make materials in a controlled fashion to build magnetic devices for data storage or, in biology or chemistry, to be able to manipulate matter at nanoscale," Shpryko said in a news release. "And in order to do that, we have to be able to see at the nanoscale. This technique allows you to do that."

Currently, the technology is "still somewhat a conceptual proof of principle," Shpryko told me, but given advances in technology, he can envision a future when the microscope technique finds uses in chemistry and biology, for example imaging cells and viruses with a spatial resolution higher than that available with visible light.

Women smokers have more heart risk than men

Women who smoke cigarettes are more likely to develop heart disease than men, says new research released on Wednesday.

After reviewing data on 2.4 million people and 44,000 cardiac events, the article's authors found female smokers have a 25 percent greater risk for coronary heart disease than males who smoke cigarettes.

The researchers, published in The Lancet medical journal, also found the difference in risk for male and female smokers increased by two percent for every year they smoke.

"It hasn't been widely recognized that there had been this sex difference," said Rachel Huxley of the University of Minnesota, the article's lead author, in an interview.

The findings could be attributed to physical differences between men and women, or differences in smoking habits, according to the study.

"For example, there are some data that indicate women will absorb more of the harmful agents in a cigarette compared to men," said Huxley. "Women may inhale more smoke or they may smoke more intensively."

Huxley said her next step is to complete a similar study to examine if the same finding can be applied to other complications related to smoking, such as strokes.

A fifth of the world's 1.1 billion smokers are women and an analysis released in March said millions of women in developing countries risked disease and death as their rising economic and political status leads them to smoke more.

Spirits increase acute pancreatitis risk

Consuming one drink of hard liquor can increase the risk of an acute attack of pancreatitis, researchers in Sweden say.

However, the study published online in the British Journal of Surgery, found wine and beer do not appear to have the same effect.

Lead author Dr. Omid Sadr-Azodi of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and colleagues tracked 84,601 people from ages 46-84 from the general population in Vastmanland and Uppsala for a median of 10 years.

During the study period 513 developed acute pancreatitis.

"Our study revealed a steady increase between each measure of spirits a person drank on one occasion and the risk of having an acute attack of pancreatitis, starting at just under 10 percent for one drink," Sadr-Azodi says in a statement. "For example, drinking five standard Swedish measures of a drink on a single occasion increased the risk of an acute episode by 52 percent and the risk then continued to increase at that rate for every five additional units consumed. But drinking more than five glasses of wine or five beers on one occasion did not increase the risk."

Laughing may be bad for the lungs

Having a sense of humor has health benefits but the actual act of laughing can reduce lung function, at least in the short term, U.S. researchers suggest.

The researchers evaluated humor and laughter in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Participants who exhibited a greater sense of humor were more likely than others to report fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, and better quality of life -- and tended to report that they had experienced fewer respiratory illnesses in the month before the study.

However, the study published in the journal Heart & Lung, finds patients who watched a 30-minute comedy video and laughed during the viewing had lower pulmonary function afterward than did patients who watched a home-repair video that did not prompt laughter.

"This study shows that humor is really more complex than people make it out to be," senior author Charles Emery, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, says in a statement. "Yes, humor definitely has benefits, but the behaviors associated with humor in fact may not be good for all people all the time -- which is a useful thing to know."

COPD is a chronic, progressive disorder characterized by difficulty breathing, and especially in expelling air from the lungs.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/08/05/Laughing-may-be-bad-for-the-lungs/UPI-50731312523318/#ixzz1UBD6yEPo