Death rates for all cancer types fell by 2 percent a year from 2001 to 2006 among men and 1.5 percent per year from 2002 to 2006 in women.  The reduced death rate from cancer was due a decline in smoking, better treatment and earlier detection.

New cases of colorectal cancer fell 3 percent a year in men and 2.2 percent a year for women from 1998 to 2006, while lung cancer rates have fallen in men by 1.8 percent each year since 1991 and finally started leveling off among women.  Cancer remains one iof the primary illnesses impacting Americans according to the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance.

The drops in mortality rates have meant that nearly 800,000 people who would have died prematurely from cancer over the past 20 years did not. 

The overall U.S. death rate from cancer in 2007 was 178.4 per 100,000 people, a 1.3 percent drop from 2006, when the rate was 180.7 per 100,000.

Mortality rates have decreased by 21 percent among men and by 12 percent among women, due primarily to declines in smoking, better treatments, and earlier detection of cancer.  Lung cancer remains the No. 1 cancer killer of both men and women in the United States. Breast cancer comes in No. 2 for women, prostate cancer is the second most common killer of men, and colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death for both sexes.

Experts now suggest that vitamin E may help prevent cognitive deterioration in elderly people. This is the conclusion reached in a Swedish study published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

According to the lead scientist, vitamin E is a family of eight natural components, but most studies related to Alzheimer’s disease investigate only one of these components, ±-tocopherol.  The scientists hypothesized that all the vitamin E family members could be important in protecting against AD. 

“Important findings,” declared Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance as over two thirds of all dementia cases occur in people over 75 years of age.  The study suggests a protective effect of vitamin E against AD in individuals aged 80 and over.

The study was conducted at the Aging Research Center (ARC) in Stockholm, Sweden. All participants were aged 80+ years and were dementia-free at the beginning of the study (baseline). After 6-years of follow-up, 57 AD cases were identified.

The blood levels of all eight natural vitamin E components were measured at the beginning of the study. Subjects with higher blood levels (highest tertile) were compared with subjects who had lower blood levels (lowest tertile) to verify whether these two groups developed dementia at different rates. 

The study found that subjects with higher blood levels of all the vitamin E family forms had a reduced risk of developing AD, compared to subjects with lower levels. After adjusting for various confounders, the risk was reduced by 45-54%, depending on the vitamin E component.

A person with at least three of these five risk factors is considered to have metabolic syndrome: excess abdominal fat, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar according to the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance which tracks health conditions impacting the aging American public.

According to a research abstract presented at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies participants who reported a habitual daily sleep duration of eight hours or more including naps were 15 percent more likely to have metabolic syndrome. 

This relationship remained unchanged after full adjustment for potential confounders such as demographics, lifestyle and sleep habits, and metabolic markers. Removing participants with potential ill health from the analysis slightly attenuated the observed association. Although participants who reported a short sleep duration of less than six hours were 14 percent more likely to have metabolic syndrome in the initial analysis, this association disappeared after controlling for potential confounders.

Researchers noted that the most surprising aspect of the study was that long sleep – and not short sleep – was related to the presence of the metabolic syndrom.

The study involved over 29,000 adults, making it the largest study to assess the relationship between sleep duration and the presence of metabolic syndrome. Participants were 50 years of age or older. Total sleep duration was reported by questionnaire.

We can recommend that long sleepers reduce the amount of overall sleep they achieve, which may in turn have beneficial effects on their health one medical expert noted. Programs can be developed to modify sleep in an attempt to reduce the health burden on elderly populations, who are already at higher risk of disease.

According to scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, these spines receive an important class of synapses that are involved with the process of learning. The discovery provides the medical community with a new therapeutic target to help prevent this loss of function.

“Millions of aging seniors suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Jesse Slome, director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance.  These conditions account for the longest and most costly causes for long term health care.

When a person ages they lose certain spines the researchers noted.  We did not know which ones and how their loss impacted cognition.  The new study shows which spines are lost and what their impact is on brain function, giving us a foundation to research treatment interventions to protect against age-related cognitive decline.

The research team studied six young adult and nine older rhesus monkeys as they participated in a delayed response test. The monkeys watched as food was baited and hidden, and then a screen was put in front of them so they could no longer see the location of the hidden reward.

At the beginning of the test, the screen was raised immediately and the monkeys were able to find the food reward right away. The subject’s memory was tested by increasing the time that the reward was blocked from view to test if the monkeys retained where the reward was placed over longer intervals of time. Aged monkeys performed significantly worse on the tests than young monkeys, especially as the time intervals increased.

The researchers determined that the older monkeys lacked the thin spines but retained the larger spines, indicating that the loss of the thin spines may be responsible for the monkeys’ inability to learn and retain information during the test. For the first time, the researchers determined that the large spines were stable, which provides a synaptic basis for the observation that expertise and skills learned early in life are often maintained into old age. 

The study is published in the June 2 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

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The neighborhoods with the highest cardiac arrest death rates tended to be poorer and less educated, with more black residents, the study authors noted in their report in the June issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

According to the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance nearly 800,000 Americans will have a first heart attack in 2010 and some 470,000 will have a recurrent attack.

The findings have national public health indications experts explain. They show that it is time to change our thinking on how and where we conduct CPR training if we are ever going to change the dismal rate of survival from cardiac arrest,” the study author said.

The researchers at the University of Michigan estimated that 15 lives could be saved in Fulton County each year if the neighborhoods with the lowest rates of CPR had the same rates as those neighborhoods with the highest.

To improve cardiac survival rates that have been stagnant for 30 years, CPR training should be more basic and available to the people who are most likely to witness someone experiencing cardiac arrest, they note.  Health care resources are extremely limited. To make improvements, we need to understand where and how best to make change.

The study, which followed more than 23,000 Dutch women for a decade, found that there was no increased risk seen among women who reported regularly long menstrual cycles (30 or more days between periods) or regularly short cycles (26 or fewer days between periods).

Despite their relatively higher risk, though, the large majority of women with irregular periods did not develop heart problems during the study period. Of the roughly 4,000 women who reported a history of irregular periods, 150 were diagnosed with coronary heart disease over the next 10 years.

Just over 17,000 study participants reported having either regular monthly periods (between 27 and 29 days) or regularly short cycles. Of those women, 530 developed coronary heart disease.

The women were 50 years old, on average, at the start of the study.

It’s known that women with a condition called polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) have higher risks of heart disease and type 2 diabetes than other women their age. In that disorder, the ovaries produce higher-than-normal amounts of male hormones and menstrual periods are irregular or completely absent.

Reserachers found no evidence that altered hormone levels explained the association between irregular periods and heart disease risk. Nor did factors such as body weight, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol account for the link.

In this study, women with irregular periods tended to have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes than those with monthly periods; however, the association was not statistically significant — meaning the finding may have occurred by chance.

Reported by the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance.

Researchers at the UCLA Stroke Center in Los Angeles identified 13 well-designed clinical trials of folic acid and stroke. Participants in all the trials had been diagnosed with conditions such as kidney and heart disease, as well as stroke.

There were 784 strokes among 20,415 participants taking folic acid, compared to 791 strokes reported among 18,590 people who did not take the supplements.

The analysis which was published in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke, settles the question about whether folic acid supplementation leads to a major reduction in stroke.  “The answer is ‘no,’” the lead researcher reports.

Still, the researchers suggest more research into folic acid and stroke, particularly for men and those in the earliest stages of heart disease. Data from both of those groups suggested there might be an effect, although researchers could not determine whether or not that was due to chance.

Those potential benefits appeared in trials carried out in countries whose food supplies were not fortified with folic acid. In the U.S., the benefits of folic acid supplementation may have already been achieved through food fortification. In an effort to reduce the birth defect spina bifida, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required the addition of folic acid to all enriched cereal-grain foods starting in 1998.

For example, a 40-year-old white male begins with a 16 percent lifetime chance of developing prostate cancer. But after taking his genes into account, the researchers put his risk at 23 percent. 

His Alzheimer’s risk, however, plummeted from 9 percent for most white men his age to 1.4 percent when genetics were considered. 

The gene scan cost about $50,000 to sequence, but the price is falling. The latest machines from companies like Illumina and Life Technologies Corp can map out a patient’s whole DNA code for as little as $5,000. 

According to the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance this could eventually be reduced to a computer algorithm.  

“I think it will come to the point where this is happening for the average guy,” a researcher noted in a telephone interview. “We think the genomic information is going to be cheap and it is going to be fast … and the analysis could be run with the click of a mouse at any time .”

Lack of health insurance slowed the speed of diagnosis among white patients, but having insurance did not lead to quicker diagnosis among insured black women.

Overall, black patients waited twice as long as white patients to begin treatment after breast cancer diagnosis. 

The findings highlight the need for improved outreach and other types of assistance for black patients.

Black women should be the focus of breast cancer screening outreach and follow-up because they experience greater delays in diagnosis and in treatment than white women, regardless of insurance status. 

Posted by the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance.