health 35

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a term used to describe two conditions that involve inflammation of the gut: ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease . People of any age can get IBD, but it's usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 40. Previous studies have identified higher rates of cancer among patients with IBD than the general population, but these studies have lacked the population size or follow-up to assess trends in lifetime risks in childhood onset IBD. So a team of international researchers set out to assess the risk of cancer in patients with childhood onset inflammatory bowel disease in childhood and adulthood. They compared 9,405 people living in Sweden who were diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease before they were 18 years of age with 92,870 healthy individuals (reference individuals) matched for sex, age, birth year, and place of residence. They analysed risk of cancer before 18th birthday, 25th birthday, and throughout the study period (19...

In higher income countries, raising tobacco taxes could increase revenues that could be spend on prevention and control programs, while in lower income countries tax revenues may be negatively affected, researchers at Overseas Chinese University, Taiwan suggest. Dr Christian Schafferer, a co-author of the study said: "Our findings could assists policy makers in adopting effective measures to reduce nicotine consumption in Europe. We show that the implementation of MPOWER measures, which were proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2008 and include increases in tobacco tax and support for quitters, has positive effects on reducing tobacco consumption in all countries and we encourage health authorities to increase efforts to implement these measures. However, since individual countries are differently affected by these measures, they should adopt different policies to fight nicotine use. For example, in high-income countries, where taxation is less effective than in...

Worldwide, asthma and COPD affect hundreds of thousands of people and they are commonly treated with steroid inhalers to reduce symptoms and improve lung function. However, the new study suggests that these inhalers also increase t he risk of lung infections caused by nontuberculous mycobacteria, which are notoriously difficult to treat and resistant to a number of common antibiotics. The research was led by Dr Sarah Brode, Assistant Professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, Canada and a staff respirologist at the University Health Network and West Park Healthcare Centre. She explained: "These infections are not particularly common but they are chronic and difficult to treat, and are associated with an increased risk of death. Treatment typically requires at least three antibiotics given for longer than a year and this can still fail to tackle the infection." The study included 417,494 people with COPD o r asthma aged 66 and older, who had all been prescrib...