Weight loss surgery revs sexual function in men

Morbidly obese men who lost two-thirds of excess weight regained prowes

Sexual dysfunction that commonly occurs in morbidly obese men improves after weight loss surgery, according to a new study.

"Sexual dysfunction should be considered one of the numerous potentially reversible complications of obesity," the study team concludes.

Dr. Ramsey M. Dallal, from Albert Einstein Healthcare Network, Philadelphia, and colleagues measured the degree to which 97 morbidly obese men suffered from sexual dysfunction and then analyzed the change in sexual function after substantial weight loss following gastric bypass surgery.

Before surgery, the morbidly obese men had significantly lower sexual function relative to that of a previously published reference control group of men before surgery, the investigators report.

After losing an average of two-thirds of their excess weight, men experienced significant improvements in sexual function, with the amount of weight loss predicting the degree of improvement.

"We estimate that a man who is morbidly obese has the same degree of sexual dysfunction as a nonobese man about 20 years older," the investigators report. "Sexual function improves substantially after gastric bypass surgery to a level that reaches or approaches age-based norms."

"Sexual function is an important aspect to quality of life and is now well documented to be a reversible condition," Dallal explained.

"We are interested in examining sexual function in females, as well as understanding the mechanism of obesity-related sexual dysfunction," Dallal added.

Taking B vitamins may prevent vision loss

Supplements reduced macular degeneration risk

Taking B vitamins can prevent a common type of vision loss in older women, according to the first rigorous study of its kind. It's a slight redemption for vitamin supplements, which have suffered recent blows from research finding them powerless at preventing disease.

Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people 65 and older, with nearly 2 million Americans in the advanced stage of the condition. It causes a layer of the eye to deteriorate, blurring the center of the field of vision and making it difficult to recognize faces, read and drive. There's no cure, but treatment, including laser therapy in some cases, can slow it down.

"Other than avoiding cigarette smoking, this is the first suggestion from a randomized trial of a possible way to reduce early stage AMD," said William Christen of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who led the research. He said the findings should apply to men as well.

The women in the study who took a combination of B vitamins — B-6, folic acid and B-12 — reduced their risk of macular degeneration by more than one-third after seven years compared to women taking dummy pills.

The study, involving more than 5,000 women ages 40 and older at risk for cardiovascular disease, appears in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

Allen Taylor, director of the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research at Tufts University in Boston, said the study was strong because patients were assigned at random and followed for a long time. But because the findings were teased out of a larger experiment for heart disease, there wasn't strict categorization of the type and severity of the eye disease, said Taylor, who does similar research but was not involved in the new study.

Among women taking the B vitamins there were 55 cases of AMD. In the placebo group, there were 82 cases. More serious cases, causing significant vision loss, totaled 26 in women taking B vitamins and 44 in those taking dummy pills.

There were too few cases of the most advanced AMD to make claims about vitamins' potential benefits, Christen said.

B vitamins lower homocysteine, a blood substance once thought to raise heart disease risk, but the nutrients weren't helpful for that in the larger study on cardiovascular disease.

The eye's small blood vessels may respond better to B vitamins' effect on homocysteine than the body's large vessels, Christen said.

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It's too soon to recommend B vitamins to people who want to prevent age-related vision loss, he said. But people who already have the disease should talk to their doctors about over-the-counter eye-protecting supplements, including vitamins C and E and zinc, which prior studies have shown slow the disease.

Christen and others recommended food sources of B vitamins and folic acid such as meat, poultry, fortified cereals, beans, nuts, leafy vegetables, spinach and peas.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Vitamins and placebos were provided by chemical maker BASF Corp., which did not participate in the study otherwise. Some of the researchers reported past funding from pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement makers.

Deadly lag: Why tracking outbreak took months

States’ voluntary reporting system may have delayed salmonella detection

	Highly magnified Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria, shown here, are the source of an ongoing outbreak of food poisoning linked to peanut products. Not all states are required to submit specimens for the precise DNA fingerprints that detect illnesses and lead to food recalls. View related photos

Detecting illnesses linked to the nation’s ongoing salmonella outbreak might have gone faster, health officials say, except for a hodgepodge of state laws and practices that delay precise identification of the potentially deadly bug.

Only about two-thirds of states require laboratories to submit salmonella specimens that contain the DNA fingerprints that confirm an outbreak. In the rest, it's merely voluntary, an msnbc.com survey showed.

Some states test every salmonella sample they collect using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, or PFGE, while others check only some. In Wisconsin and Texas, for instance, only about half are screened.

The result? Outbreaks like the current one can go undetected, delaying warnings about illnesses and recalls of poisonous foods. People became ill from eating tainted peanut products as far back as Sept. 1, but it was November before the outbreak was detected and early January before it hit the public health radar.

“It’s that whole idea of finding needles in haystacks,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director for foodborne illnesses at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We would like virtually all of the salmonella to be tested if we can.”

More information might have raised alarms earlier, Tauxe said, about the unusual Salmonella Typhimurium types linked to tainted peanut products that have sickened at least 655 people in 44 states and Canada, contributed to nine deaths and forced national recalls of more than 2,200 peanut products.

Mandatory testing urged

Food safety advocates have lobbied for years to require mandatory PFGE testing to detect the growing number of national outbreaks caused by foods ranging from spinach and peppers to peanut products.

“Having less than 100 percent compliance lowers the sensitivity of outbreak detection,” said John Besser, clinical lab manager for the Minnesota Department of Health. “The current system was designed to test local events such as the church potluck. The way you make the system better is by getting salmonella isolates tested.”

But states with voluntary programs say cooperative laboratory arrangements keep them on top of salmonella surveillance and that strained budgets and limited staffing force them to make hard choices. The same staffers who work on salmonella often are also monitoring HIV infections and tuberculosis, for instance.

Diet rich in calcium tied to lower cancer rate

Study of half a million men and women shows calcium may protect cells

A study in nearly half a million older men and women bolsters evidence that diets rich in calcium may help protect against some cancers.

The benefits were mostly associated with foods high in calcium, rather than calcium tablets.

Previous studies have produced conflicting results. The new research involved food questionnaires from participants and a follow-up check of records for cancer cases during the subsequent seven years. This research method is less rigorous than some previous but smaller studies.

But because of its huge size — 492,810 people and more than 50,000 cancers — the new study presents powerful evidence favoring the idea that calcium may somehow keep cells from becoming cancerous, said University of North Carolina nutrition expert John Anderson, who was not involved in the study.

The study was run jointly by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. The results appear in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.

National Cancer Institute researcher Yikyung Park, the study's lead author, called the results strong but said more studies are needed to confirm the findings.

Duke University nutrition researcher Denise Snyder said the results support the idea that food rather than supplements is the best source for nutrients.

Participants were AARP members aged 50 to 71 who began the study in the mid-1990s. A total of 36,965 men and 16,605 women were later diagnosed with cancer. There were more than 10 different kinds of cancer, the most common being prostate, breast, lung and colorectal.

Compared with people who got little calcium, those who consumed the most had the lowest chances of getting colon cancer. Those in that highest category got on average 1,530 milligrams a day among men and 1,881 milligrams daily among women. The recommended amount for older people is 1,200 milligrams, and getting much more than that didn't result in any greater protection. Adults can get that amount from four cups of milk or calcium-fortified orange juice.

Men who got the most calcium from food were about 30 percent less likely to get cancer of the esophagus, about 20 percent less likely to get head and neck cancer and 16 percent less likely to get colon cancer, when compared to men who got low amounts of calcium.

Among women, those who got the most food-based calcium were 28 percent less likely to get colon cancer than low-calcium women.