Energy drinks have been popular for years, and the market keeps expanding. Some people drink them like they would soda — during breakfast, lunch, dinner and as snacks. But there is such a thing as too much energy. A study published today in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence delivers a stern warning about the possibility of caffeine intoxication from energy drinks.
“The caffeine content of energy drinks varies over a 10-fold range, with some containing the equivalent of 14 cans of Coca-Cola, yet the caffeine amounts are unlabeled and few include warnings about potential health risks of caffeine intoxication,” said one of the study’s authors, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
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HONG KONG – Infants who have been given the common pain reliever paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, may have a higher risk of developing asthma and eczema by the time they are 6 or 7, a large study covering children in 31 countries has found.
The findings were published in the journal Lancet together with two other studies, which found that runny noses and wheezing early on in life may be strong predictors of asthma.
In the first study, researchers pored through data provided by parents of more than 205,000 children and found acetaminophen use in the first year of life was associated with a 46 percent higher risk of asthma by the time the children were 6 or 7 compared to those never exposed to the drug.
BEIJING – The number of children in China sickened by dairy products tainted with the banned industrial chemical melamine has jumped to nearly 53,000, the government said Sunday as it vowed to crack down on those responsible for one of China’s worst food safety scandals in years.
More than 80 percent of the 12,892 children hospitalized in recent weeks were 2 years old or younger, the Health Ministry said in a statement posted on its Web site late Sunday. Four children have died and 104 of the hospitalized children are in serious condition.
Another 39,965 children received outpatient treatment at hospitals and were considered “basically recovered,” the ministry said.
Attention male cellphone users of reproductive age: Take that phone out of your pocket. Information published today suggests that the radio-frequency energy released by cellphones decreases sperm quality in men.
Last year, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic released a study showing that men who used their cellphones for more than four hours a day had significantly lower sperm quality than men who used their phones for less time. That study, however, did not reveal what might be causing this association. The new study by the same research group, published online today in Fertility & Sterility, took sperm samples from 32 men and divided the samples into two parts for a test group and a control group. The test group specimens were placed an inch from a 850 MHz cellphone that was in talk mode. Measurements taken after the one-hour exposure showed that the sperm exposed to the cellphone contained higher levels of harmful free radicals and a decreased amount of protective antioxidants compared with the unexposed sperm. These factors caused a decline in the sperm’s function and motility and in the overall health of the sperm. However, there was no significant difference in damage to the DNA of the exposed cells.
The first large-scale human study of a chemical used to make plastic baby bottles, aluminum can linings and myriad other common products found double the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver problems in people with the highest concentrations in their urine, British researchers reported Tuesday.
The findings confirm earlier results obtained in animals, increasing pressure on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to limit use of the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA.
The compound is the primary ingredient of polycarbonate plastics, which are found in a wide variety of modern goods, including DVDs, reusable food storage containers, drinking bottles and eyeglass lenses.
The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it was halting importation of 28 drugs made by the giant Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories because of manufacturing deficiencies at two of the company’s plants.
Douglas Throckmorton, a physician with the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said there was “no evidence of harm to consumers” from drugs made at the Dewas and Paonta Sahib plants, both in India. He called the import ban “a preventive action.”
(Bloomberg) — Apathy toward the pandemic risk posed by bird flu is one of the greatest threats to public health and may undermine efforts to improve disease detection and control systems in developing countries, a World Health Organization official said.
Health authorities have been monitoring the H5N1 strain of avian influenza for more than a decade for any sign that it is becoming as contagious as seasonal flu. While millions of birds have been infected, fewer than 400 people are reported to have contracted the illness, including 36 this year.
A vitamin found in meat, fish and milk may help stave off memory loss in old age, a study has suggested.
Older people with lower than average vitamin B12 levels were more than six times more likely to experience brain shrinkage, researchers concluded.
The University of Oxford study, published in the journal Neurology, tested the 107 apparently healthy volunteers over a five-year period.
Some studies suggest two out of five people are deficient in the vitamin.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Men who gain weight during adulthood – even those who are not considered to be overweight based on their body mass index – are at increased risk of colon cancer, according to data from the prospective Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
Nearly one third of all colon cancers diagnosed over an 18-year period were attributed to a BMI greater than 22.5, Dr. Lau Caspar Thygesen and fellow researchers report in the International Journal of Cancer for September.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Men who have never smoked are more likely to die from lung cancer than women nonsmokers, researchers reported on Monday.
They found that male nonsmokers were about 25 percent more likely to die from lung cancer than women nonsmokers even though they developed the disease at similar rates.
Men who had never smoked had a 1.1 percent risk of dying from lung cancer, compared to 0.8 percent for the women, the study found. This compares to about 22 percent among men who smoke and 12 percent of women who smoke.
