Health and Tips:Women Beware: Smoking Is More Hazardous to Your Health

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HEALTH TIP: Women Beware: Smoking Is More Hazardous to Your Health

For most people, when stress presents itself we resort to
some sort of relief. For some we turn to food, for others
it is the more dangerous choice of smoking cigarettes. It
is a well-known fact that smoking is not a healthy habit
for anyone, but a steadily growing body of research
suggests that women are considered to be more vulnerable
to the lung-damaging effects of cigarettes than men are.

A recent study, presented this week at the American
Thoracic Society’s annual meeting in San Diego, found that
women developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at
a much earlier age and after less years of smoking than
men did. Previous studies about lung cancer have also
shown that cigarette smoking is much more likely to cause
lung cancer in women than men, even though they tend to
start smoking at a later age and also smoke less.

Dr. Inga-Cecilie Soerheim, who is the co-author of the
most recent study and a research fellow at the Channing
Laboratory, which is division of Brigham and Young
Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said, “Many
people believe that their own smoking is too limited to
be harmful—that a few cigarettes a day represent a minimal
risk. But there is no such thing as a safe amount of
cigarette smoking. Our data suggest that this is
particularly true for female smokers.”

Dr. Soerheim’s research team used the data from a Norwegian
study that involved 954 current and ex-smokers that have
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is the catch-
all name for a group of diseases that cause a partial
blockage of the airways and are strongly associated with
smoking.

Among other results of the study, it found that women who
developed the pulmonary disease before the age of sixty
had a greater loss of lung function than the men in the
same age bracket. The same held true for the women who
had smoked for less than twenty years, compared with the
men with similarly low exposure to the tobacco.

Why this fact holds true is not known as of now. It could
be because women tend to have smaller lungs than men so
the smoking does more damage, Soerheim stated.

Dr. Kathy Albain, who is a medical oncologist at the Loyola
University Health System and has also studied gender
differences with lung cancer, said that there could also
be a difference in the way that women and men metabolize
the cigarette smoke, based on the genes that they inherit.
Hormones, in particular estrogen, are also being looked at
to be a possible reason for why the lung cancer acts
differently in women than it does in men, she added.

The Health eCig - The Electronic Cigarette Kit

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Certain gene defects lead to breast cancer

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - U.S. cancer researchers say they’ve
determined that defects in a specific gene might eventually
lead to breast cancer. Scientists at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill said cancer is a disease of
runaway cell proliferation. Normally, a variety of genes
coordinate to keep cell growth under control and on track,
but if a gene goes awry another can compensate to keep
cancer from developing. However, in the case of a gene
called p18, the scientists discovered its defects can over-
ride other gene’s attempts at compensation. “This gene is
an inhibitor of cell proliferation — essentially, it is
the brakes that keeps the cell from growing out of con-
trol,” Professor Yue Xiong said. “If the brakes aren’t
working, the cell will not be able to stop when it needs to
and instead will continue to grow and divide until it turns
into cancer.” The study that included Associate Professor
Charles Perou and researchers Xin-Hai Pei, Dr Feng Bai,
Matthew Smith, Jerry Usary and Cheng Fan is reported in the
journal Cancer Cell.

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Environment can improve wound healing

BOSTON - U.S. medical scientists say they’ve found environ-
mental improvements can strengthen the physiological process
of wound healing. Researchers from the Benson-Henry Institute
for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and
the Boston Shriners Hospital found giving rats living in iso-
lation the opportunity to build nests led to faster and more
complete healing of burn injuries than was seen in isolation-
reared rats without nest-building materials. The scientists
said they also found evidence that the effect was associated
with altered gene expression in stress-associated structures
in the brain. “These findings are consistent with other
animal studies that show how stress and social deprivation
reduce physical well being, but our study is novel in showing
that the detrimental effects on physical health can be
reversed by environmental stimulation” Dr. John Levine,
senior author of the paper, said. The study is reported in
the online journal PLoS One.

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Device continuously monitors cancer growth

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A Massachusetts Institute of Technology
team says it has created the first implantable device that
can continuously monitor cancer growth. Surgical removal
of a tissue sample, a procedure known as a biopsy, is now
the standard for diagnosing cancer. But biopsies only
offer a snapshot of the tumor at a single moment in time.
MIT Professor Michael Cima led the team in developing the
device that can monitor a tumor for weeks or months after
the biopsy. The scientists said the implants could one day
provide up-to-the-minute information about what a tumor is
doing — whether it is growing or shrinking, how it’s re-
sponding to treatment and whether it has metastasized or
is about to do so. “What this does is basically take the
lab and put it in the patient,” said Cima, who conducted
the experiments using a mouse model. He said the devices,
which could be implanted at the time of biopsy, could also
be tailored to monitor chemotherapy agents, allowing doc-
tors to determine whether cancer drugs are reaching the
tumors. “This is one of the tools we’re going to need if
we’re going to turn cancer from a death sentence to a
manageable disease,” Cima said. The work was described in a
paper published online last month in the journal
Biosensors & Bioelectronics.

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Many diabetes drugs in development

RALEIGH, N.C. - A new report says there are a record number
of diabetes medications being developed in the United States,
either in clinical trials or awaiting approval. The report,
prepared by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers
of America, reports U.S. pharmaceutical research and biotech-
nology companies are testing a record 183 new diabetes med-
icines. The report was released Tuesday during a Raleigh,
N.C., news conference “We released this report in North
Carolina because of the alarming rise in the number of new
cases of diabetes in the state,” PhRMA Senior Vice President
Ken Johnson said. “Diabetes is a major health problem in
North Carolina, where an estimated 600,000 people suffer
from the disease.” He said, nationwide, diabetes affects
more than 30 million people — about 8 percent of the U.S.
population — with new cases increasing more than 90 percent
among adults during the last 10 years. Diabetes is a chronic
disease in which the body does not produce or properly use
insulin, a hormone needed to convert sugar, starches and
other food into energy. The cause of diabetes has not been
determined.

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Meningococcal bacteria mechanism is found

NOTTINGHAM, England - British medical scientists say they
have discovered how meningococcal bacteria break through the
body’s natural defense system to attack the brain. University
of Nottingham researchers said their discovery could lead to
better treatment and vaccines. The scientists said it can
take just hours after symptoms appear for someone to die from
bacterial meningitis, which in childhood is nearly exclu-
sively caused by the respiratory tract pathogens Strepto-
coccus pneumoniae, Neisseria meningitidis and Haemophilus
influenzae. The mechanism used by those lethal bacteria to
break through the blood brain barrier has been unknown. But
a team led by Professor Dlawer Ala’Aldeen discovered all
three pathogens target the same receptor on human cerebro-
vascular endothelial cells — the specialized filtering
system that protects the brain from disease — enabling the
organisms to cross the blood-brain barrier. That finding
suggests disruption or modulation of the interaction of
bacterial adhesins with the receptor might offer broad pro-
tection against bacterial meningitis and provide a thera-
peutic target for the prevention and treatment of the
disease. The research, conducted in collaboration with St. -
Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the United States,
appears in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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HHS Awards .79 Billion to Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program

In an effort to assist people living with HIV/AIDS with
health care and medicinal access in the United States, the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently
announced that .79 billion will be awarded in the form of
grants through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. This
distribution of funds came within days of May 18th, which
was National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day.

The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program is overseen by the Health
Resources and Services Administration within the HHS and
was established in honor of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager
who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion in the 1980s
and fought discrimination—not to mention his right to
continue attending school—while trying to educate people
about the disease through a national publicity tour before
his 1990 death at the age of 18. Though Congressional
legislation established the program in 1996 to help those
with HIV/AIDS in emergency situations where health services
and funding are lacking, it officially took his name in 2006.

The purpose of the program is to provide HIV-related health
services in communities where the need exists due to
insufficient health care coverage or other resources, which
it does for more than 529,000 people each year. While the
focus is on primary medical care and support, the federally-
funded program also assists with training and research to
improve care for patients. In memory of a boy who fought
discrimination, the Ryan White Program is dedicated to
educating the masses about the disease and finding ways to
ease, and eventually end through a cure, the suffering of
AIDS patients.

Split into parts, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program is set up
to serve specific needs and to allow grants to be awarded
with each particular focus in mind. Of the most recent HHS
grant, the majority of it—.16 billion–will be given to
Part B, which concentrates on states and territories in
need of assistance. Specifically, 0 million of this
amount has been set aside for a subsection of Part B,
which is the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP).

Part A, which focuses on metropolitan areas most severely
hit by HIV/AIDS cases, will receive 0 million, and though
this does not include the Minority AIDS Initiative,
additional funds will be distributed there in August 2009.
And the remainder of million of the grant will go to
Part C, which is dedicated to early intervention services
for those being treated for AIDS on an outpatient basis.
Nonprofit services and community health centers will receive
the funds to help patients who are lacking in insurance
coverage or otherwise affordable treatment.

In total, three-fourths of the .79 billion will be spend
on medical services and related tasks like nutrition therapy,
while the remainder of the money will be dedicated to support
services like respite care in order to keep patients in their
homes and alongside family and friends, as well as transport-
ation and linguistic assistance.

Jeffrey S. Crowley, director of the White House Office of
National AIDS Policy, commented, “These grants will provide
state-of-the-art treatment for people currently in care and
critical services to newly diagnosed individuals who are
being brought into care. The care and services these grants
will support can help Americans living with HIV/AIDS to live
longer, healthier lives.”

The most recent funding of the program comes at a time of
financial crisis in America, and while many are suffering
economic hardships, those with diseases like HIV/AIDS find
themselves in situations where medical care and services
become difficult to afford. In order to honor Ryan White,
the program receives federal funding in the hopes that
victims of the disease can live easier and worry less as
research for assistance and a cure continue.

womens health
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