Soda drinks may make children more aggressive and distracted

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Main Category: Nutrition / Diet
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 18 Aug 2013 - 2:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Soda drinks may make children more aggressive and distracted

Soft drinks may cause young children to become aggressive and develop attention problems, according to a study published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Researchers from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the University of Vermont and Harvard School of Public Health, studied around 3,000 children aged 5.

All children were enrolled in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study - a cohort study that follows mothers and children from 20 large cities in the US.

The researchers asked the mothers of the children to report their child's soft drink consumption. Their child's behavior in the 2 months prior to the study was reported through a "Child Behavior Checklist."

Just over 40% of the children consumed a minimum of one serving of soft drinks a day, while 4% consumed four or more soft drinks a day.

The study results found that any level of soft drink consumption was linked to higher levels of aggressive behavior, as well as more attention and withdrawal problems.

Compared with children who did not consume any soft drinks, those who had four or more soft drinks a day were over twice as likely to:

Researchers claim that soda drinks increase aggressive behavior in children Destroy other people's belongingsPhysically attack others, andGet into fights.

Dr. Shakira Suglia, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, says: "We found that the child's aggressive behavior score increased with every increase in soft drinks servings per day."

The study authors say there has been a lot of research on the effects of soft drinks in adults.

Medical News Today reported a 2007 study that suggested drinking more than one soft drink a day was linked to heart disease.

A study this year from Imperial College London in the UK found a link between drinking one can of soda a day and a higher risk of diabetes.

But the current researchers say the relationship between soft drinks and child behavior has not been closely evaluated until now.

They note that although their study has been unable to identify exactly why soft drinks can cause these behaviors in children, they recommend that limiting or abolishing a child's soft drink consumption could combat this issue.

In spite of this research, it is not all bad press for soft drinks. A recent study from the University of Washington found that a substance in caramelized sugar and cola had some effects in mice against Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Written by Honor Whiteman

Copyright: Medical News Today
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Soft drinks and behavioral problems in young children Elsevier Health Sciences, published online 16 August 2013.

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posted by Jim H. on 18 Aug 2013 at 7:58 am

Soda pop displaces calcium consumption via milk drinking and therefore calcium levels. Higher calcium levels can provide some protection from lead toxicity, which is associated with aggression, attention deficit, anxiety disorders, depression, dementia, tremor, muscle and joint pain, stomach pain, poor coordination, kidney damage, eye damage, and a panoply of other medical, development, learning and behavioral problems. The U.S. homicide rate dropped by half since the 1990s when lead was banned from gasoline.

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posted by Samantha R on 18 Aug 2013 at 2:33 am

My opinion as a canadian, soft drinks must stay because some children are fond of drinking it it will be hard if they will stop it!!!

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'Soda drinks may make children more aggressive and distracted'

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Low-grade prostate cancers may not become aggressive with time - adds support for "watch and wait" approach

Main Category: Prostate / Prostate Cancer
Also Included In: Men's Health
Article Date: 15 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Low-grade prostate cancers may not become aggressive with time - adds support for "watch and wait" approach

Prostate cancer aggressiveness may be established when the tumor is formed and not alter with time, according to a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Researchers found that after the introduction of widespread prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening, the proportion of patients diagnosed with advanced-stage cancers dropped by more than six-fold in 22 years, but the proportion diagnosed with high Gleason grade cancers did not change substantially. This suggests that low-grade prostate cancers do not progress to higher grade over time.

Cancer stage refers to the extent or spread of the disease, and cancer grade, called Gleason grade for prostate cancer, refers to the aggressiveness of the disease.

"We were able to look at finely stratified time periods to capture pre-PSA, early-PSA, and late-PSA eras within one study. Over time, because of PSA screening, men have been more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer at an earlier stage, before the disease has had an opportunity to grow and spread. If Gleason grade also progressed over time, we would expect a similar decrease in high Gleason grade disease over time," said Kathryn Penney, Sc.D., instructor in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and associate epidemiologist at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass. "We were surprised by just how constant the incidence of high-grade disease has been over time."

This study adds more evidence to the argument that patients who are diagnosed with low-grade prostate cancers can opt for an active surveillance, or "watch and wait" approach instead of getting treated right away.

Penney and colleagues used data from 420 participants recruited to the Physicians' Health Study and 787 participants recruited to the ongoing Health Professionals Follow-up Study. All participants were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1982 and 2004, and treated with surgery. The researchers reanalyzed prostate tissue collected from these patients to assess Gleason grade.

The researchers divided the data into four time periods based on when the participants received a diagnosis and treatment: 1982-1993, 1993-1996, 1996-2000, and 2000-2004, to represent the pre-PSA and PSA eras. They found that the number of participants who had undergone PSA screening increased from 42 percent in 1994 to 81 percent in 2000.

They also found that the number of late-stage cancers decreased from 19.9 percent in the 1982-1993 group to just 3 percent in the 2000-2004 group, reflecting an 85 percent drop in stage at diagnosis. However, there was only a moderate decrease in high Gleason grade cancers, from 25.3 percent in the 1982-1993 group to 17.6 percent in the 2000-2004 group, reflecting a 30 percent drop.

With further analyses, the researchers found that the moderate drop in high Gleason grade cancers was not because progression to more aggressive disease was prevented through screening, but because of an increased diagnosis of low-grade disease that would not have been detected without PSA screening.

"Radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy, the usual treatments for prostate cancer, can have negative side effects such as impotence and incontinence; choosing active surveillance could prevent this decline in quality of life," said Penney. "Men with low-grade disease at diagnosis should seriously consider talking with their doctors about active surveillance."

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Drugs that clog 'waste disposal' may treat aggressive breast cancers

Main Category: Breast Cancer
Article Date: 14 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT
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Drugs that clog 'waste disposal' may treat aggressive breast cancers

In a new paper in Cancer Cell, a team led by Judy Lieberman, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital's Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine reports "triple-negative" breast cancers may be vulnerable to drugs that attack the proteasome. This cellular structure acts as the cell's waste disposal, breaking down damaged or unneeded proteins.

These cancers, which lack the three major therapeutic markers for breast cancer - the estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptors - are very aggressive and difficult to treat. They mostly affect younger women and have the worst prognosis of all breast cancers.

By selectively turning genes off throughout the genomes of triple-negative tumor cells in vitro, Lieberman's team found that these cells absolutely require active proteasomes in order to live. When turned off, the cells die.

These data suggest that triple-negative breast cancers may respond to treatment with drugs similar to bortezomib (Velcade®), a proteasome inhibitor that revolutionized the care of patients with the blood cancer multiple myeloma.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our breast cancer section for the latest news on this subject.

The study was supported by the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program, the National Cancer Institute (grant number R01CA146445) and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

A Genome-wide siRNA Screen Identifies Proteasome Addiction as a Vulnerability of Basal-like Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Cells

Cancer Cell, Volume 24, Issue 2, 182-196, 12 August 2013. 10.1016/j.ccr.2013.07.008

Boston Children's Hospital

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