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Your Health This Week
If you have a daily hankering for swimming, stay away from chlorinated pools. High levels of chlorine exposure from pools, showers and drinking water were linked to bladder cancer in a study of 1,200 Spanish men and women with the disease. Of course all the mercury, PCBs, dioxins and yes, antidepressants in your local waterway probably aren’t that good for you either.
Want to live longer? Just go to prison. The overall death rate of black people aged 15 to 64 living in state prison in the US was 57% less than the same age group on the outside. The result didn’t hold for whites or hispanics, which makes one question: a rousing success for inmate living quality or just another indicator of bad health among poor, black Americans?
For those of you who kicked your Atkins diet to the curb, it might be time to jump back on the bandwagon. A cross-cultural study of carbohydrate intake found that a diet rich in carbs (as in South Asia) is associated with lower levels of “good” cholesterol. Which is bad.
Pregnant women might consider stockpiling cranberry juice for any urinary tract infections, because the alternative, treatment with antibiotics during gestation, is associated with increased wheezing in babies (even better, get the stuff fortified with calcium to use when breastfeeding to make sure your teeth don’t fall out).
Fits of anger and raging hostility are associated with increased arterial blocking in high-risk women (those with some chest pain already, high cholesterol, diabetes or advancing age). Silent fuming, however, seems relatively healthy.
Older people on SSRI antidepressants have double the risk of bone fractures. Broken bones are hard to recover from after 65; elderly people are 15% more likely to die in the year after a hip fracture; 20% of previously independent people move into full time care after a broken hip; and 30% need a physical aid or helper personnel just to live a normal life. Which is pretty depressing.
Planning a nice winter escape to South Africa? Might want to avoid the rural areas in the east where the researchers have confirmed an outbreak of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), which is even worse than the already scary multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Experts fear an epidemic if patients are not confined.
