Regular exercise before and after a cancer diagnosis significantly improves odds of survival, a new study finds.

Among more than 5 800 US patients with a range of early- to late-stage cancers, those who exercised three or four times a week before and after their diagnosis had a 40% lower risk of death than inactive patients, researchers reported.

Much lower risk of death

But survival gains were strong even for patients who began exercising only after their cancer diagnosis.

“Patients who reported never doing any type of exercise until they were faced with a cancer diagnosis cut their risk of death by 25–28% compared to those who remained inactive,” said first author Rikki Cannioto. She’s an assistant professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.

Patients who exercised once or twice a week also had a much lower risk of death than inactive patients, suggesting that any amount of regular, weekly activity is better than no activity, according to the researchers.

Study participants had blood or head and neck cancers, as well as breast, prostate, lung, colon, kidney, oesophageal, bladder, ovarian, endometrial, pancreatic, liver or stomach cancers. Others had sarcoma or cervical, thyroid, testicular, brain or skin cancers.

Encouraging finding

The strongest link between exercise and reduced risk of death was seen with eight types: breast, colon, prostate, ovarian, bladder, endometrial, oesophageal and skin cancer, the research team said.

The results “solidify the importance of the message that when it comes to exercise, some weekly activity is better than inactivity,” Cannioto said in a Roswell news release.

The finding that low-to-moderate weekly exercise is associated with improved survival is particularly encouraging, Cannioto said, given that cancer patients and survivors can be overwhelmed by the current recommendations of at least 30 minutes of daily moderate-to-intense physical activity.

The study was published recently in the journal Cancer Causes & Control.

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Doctors who specialise in female pelvic medicine say lawsuits by four states, including Washington and California, over products used to treat pelvic floor disorders and incontinence might scare patients away from the best treatment options – or maybe even push the products off the market.

Sixty-three Washington surgeons signed a letter to state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, arguing his consumer-protection lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and its Ethicon Inc subsidiary is off-base.

No deception

The lawsuit says the companies failed to disclose risks associated with the products, but in their letter the doctors said they were never deceived and that the case is based on a misconception about how they assess dangers posed by medical procedures.

“We have served on national and regional medical societies in women’s health,” wrote Dr Jeffrey Clemons, a pelvic reconstructive surgeon in Tacoma. “It is astonishing to us that the AG is proceeding with this lawsuit without first availing themselves of the significant experience and expertise of this group.”

Doctors in California are drafting a similar letter to Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and the president of the American Urogynecologic Society, which represents 1 900 medical professionals, has issued a statement expressing some of the same concerns.

Clemons and two other doctors who signed the Washington letter have been retained by defence counsel as consultants in the case, but Clemons said he wrote it without payment or assistance from Johnson & Johnson.

At issue is “transvaginal mesh” – plastic mesh products that are implanted to correct a variety of pelvic floor disorders.

They came on the US market in the late 1990s to treat stress urinary incontinence – a condition triggered by physical activity like coughing, sneezing or running that is common and sometimes debilitating in women after childbirth. The treatment involves using a thin mesh strip, called a “mid-urethral sling”, to support the urethra, the tube that carries urine away from the bladder.

Serious complications

The products were so successful – one of the most significant advances in women’s health in recent decades, the physicians said – that companies began developing similar mesh products to treat another condition, called pelvic organ prolapse.

In such cases, pelvic organs such as the uterus and bladder drop from their normal position due to muscle weakening. A sheet of mesh can be used to support the pelvic floor.

However, treating pelvic organ prolapse with mesh proved problematic after those products were introduced in 2004. They were more likely to bring serious complications, including permanent incontinence, severe discomfort and an inability to have sex.

The US Food and Drug Administration issued warnings in 2008 and 2011, and companies pulled most of the transvaginal mesh products for organ prolapse from the market.

Tens of thousands of women have filed liability claims against Johnson & Johnson and other companies, with some saying they knew nothing about the potential complications.

The doctors say Washington’s lawsuit conflates the acceptable risks of using pelvic mesh to treat incontinence with the less tolerable risks of using it for pelvic organ prolapse. They’re worried it could force mid-urethral slings off the market, though the attorney general’s office says that’s not the goal.

Misrepresentation of risks

Washington, California, Kentucky and Mississippi are pursuing lawsuits that claim Johnson & Johnson deceived doctors and patients, and that the surgeries ruined some women’s quality of life. They say product marketing brochures and instruction pamphlets should have contained much more detail about the risks.

The company updated its instruction pamphlets in 2015 – effectively admitting the earlier versions were inadequate, Washington state says.

“The purpose of our lawsuit is to require Johnson & Johnson to disclose to doctors and patients the serious risks associated with surgical mesh,” Ferguson said in an emailed statement. “Johnson & Johnson knew about these risks for years and misrepresented them for more than a decade, even as it sold thousands of these devices in Washington.”

Washington’s lawsuit seeks fines for each alleged violation of the state’s Consumer Protection Act, an amount that could easily run into the millions. The attorney general’s office also wants to bar Ethicon from representing that its surgical mesh is superior to traditional treatments, such as repair using the patient’s tissue, and it says a key question is whether the pamphlets could have deceived the least sophisticated surgeons, not the most sophisticated.

In their letter last month, the surgeons insist they were never misled – nor could they have been, because they don’t rely on a company’s marketing materials or instruction pamphlets to divine the risks of medical devices.

Instead, the letter said, they rely on their education, journals, conferences, textbooks and other unbiased sources, and they counsel their patients accordingly.

The ‘gold standard’

In declarations filed in King County Superior Court, some said Ethicon paid for them to undergo training that fully explored the devices’ risks, and others said they learned about the uses and risks from those specially trained doctors.

Clemons and the other surgeons do not dispute that some women have suffered complications from the use of mesh to treat incontinence, but they say any surgery has risks, and the risks of that procedure are well within accepted norms. Millions of women worldwide have been treated with mid-urethral slings.

The letter cited a recent large study of the English National Health Service database that found complications prompted the removal of mesh slings in just 1.4% of patients within the first year after surgery, 2.7% within five years and 3.3% within nine years.

In fact, Clemons said, the mid-urethral sling has become the “gold standard” among surgical options for stress urinary incontinence because it offers better outcomes than other types of surgery, can be performed on heavier patients who otherwise would be ineligible for surgery, and requires less cutting and recovery time.

The Washington Attorney General’s Office said in a court filing the fact that doctors obtain also risk information elsewhere does not excuse the companies from ensuring their instructional pamphlets are “truthful and complete”.

The office agreed that many women have had positive outcomes with the devices and said it does not seek to restrict access to them.

‘Unsafe material’

Nevertheless, the state is relying on an expert witness, Dr Bruce A. Rosenzweig, a gynaecologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who insisted in a deposition that polypropylene mesh is an “unsafe material to be placed permanently in the female pelvis”. That position is contrary to the scientific literature, according to the surgeons’ letter.

Clemons is a retired Army colonel who spent a decade as the chief of urogynaecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery at Madigan Army Medical Center. He serves on the board of the American Urogynecologic Society and has performed about 1 250 mid-urethral sling surgeries; he used to cut his own mesh slings before Ethicon’s came on the market.

After filing the lawsuit, the Washington Attorney General’s Office tried to recruit him as an expert witness, he said. Although he is a fan of Ferguson’s Democratic politics – Clemons donated $550 to his re-election campaign last month – he declined.

“I’m not anti-Bob Ferguson at all,” Clemons said. “I just disagree with him on this.”

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More than a third of women and a quarter of men think they got it wrong, research suggests.

Antarctica experienced a sixfold increase in yearly ice mass loss between 1979 and 2017, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University additionally found that the accelerated melting caused global sea levels to rise more than half an inch during that time.

Supermassive black holes weigh millions to billions times more than our sun and lie at the center of most galaxies. A supermassive black hole several million times the mass of the sun is situated in the heart of our very own Milky Way.

A robot created by Washington State University scientists could help elderly people with dementia and other limitations live independently in their own homes.

Millennials struggling with depression aren’t being helped by their use of Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, a new study reports.

College students who meet the criteria for major depressive disorder tend to use social media more often and are more heavily addicted to social media, researchers found.

Flattering portrayals

They’re also more likely to use social media in ways that exacerbate or highlight their depression, the study said.

For example, depressed young adults are more likely to compare themselves on social media to people who appear better off than them, said first author Anthony Robinson. He’s a research assistant in the psychology department at Texas State University.

People who post to Facebook or Instagram take pains to portray themselves in a flattering light, Robinson said.

“If people are making comparisons based on this inflated image that’s being presented, it can cause feelings of inferiority,” Robinson said.

Depressed young adults were also more likely to be bothered if tagged in an unflattering picture, less likely to post pictures of themselves with other people, and more likely to self-censor what they posted to avoid the judgment of others, results showed.

Major depressive disorder

For the study, Robinson and his colleagues asked 504 undergraduates at Texas State to complete an online survey. The survey assessed their social media use and asked a variety of psychological questions.

Those with symptoms of depression reported behaviours like excessive sleeping, feelings of hopelessness and guilt, or a loss of pleasure in activities they used to enjoy, Robinson said.

About 16% of the students met the criteria for major depressive disorder, which Robinson said was an “extremely high” proportion.

Major depressive disorder affects nearly 7% of Americans 18 and older in any given year, according to the US National Institute of Mental Health. Young adults 18 to 25 are the age group most likely to have had a major depressive episode in 2016, around 11%.

The no-holds-barred, say-anything-without-consequences nature of social media could contribute to people feeling bad about themselves, Robinson said.

“If you’re spending more time on these platforms and you’re being trolled or cyberbullied, it’s going to have a negative effect on your psychological well-being,” Robinson said.

Only social contact

But because this was an observational study, the researchers can’t say in what direction the association between depression and social media works, noted Joseph McGuire, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. He was not involved with the study.

“Is it that people who tend to be on social media more then start to feel depressed, or is it that the people who are more depressed are more withdrawn and this is their only social contact?” McGuire asked.

“If I spend two hours a day, am I more likely to be a little bit down or depressed compared with someone who is only on 20 minutes a day? Or do I never go out because I’m depressed, but I still want that social contact, so I log on to social media?” he continued.

Another new study backs up these findings. Researchers found that people are more aware of their own physical ailments if they tend to use Facebook a lot and frequently compare themselves to people apparently better off than themselves, according to findings in the January issue of the journal Heliyon.

Counselling centres

College students who are feeling depressed should assess their own social media use, and either cut back or try to change their online behaviours if they are using the technology in ways linked to depression, Robinson said.

It wouldn’t hurt at all if they also sought counselling, McGuire said.

“There’s a lot of counselling centres available at academic centres. There’s that support there, and it’s intended to help kids who are struggling,” McGuire said. “Reaching out to a professional, even if you don’t think you have a problem, then you can at least start to have that dialogue.”

The new study was published in the Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research.

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Landscape painter Denise De Batista is considering legal action against lens manufacturer Oculentis

A simple potty stool under your feet might help cure constipation, researchers say.

“These toilet stools became popular through things like viral videos and social media, but there was really no medical evidence to show whether or not they are effective,” said researcher Dr Peter Stanich. He is an assistant professor of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Ohio State University.

Difficulty emptying bowels

“This study shows that these simple devices may help symptoms like constipation, bloating and incomplete emptiness, and can help people have more comfortable and effective bowel movements,” he said in a university news release.

The study included 52 participants, average age 29, and 40% were women. Even though the study participants were healthy, 44% said they strained during a bowel movement and one-third said they had difficulty completely emptying their bowels.

After four weeks of using a toilet stool, 71% of the participants had faster bowel movements and 90% reported less straining, according to the study published online recently in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology.

“Importantly, at the conclusion of the study, two-thirds of participants said they would continue to use a toilet stool,” Stanich said.

A toilet stool under the feet improves body position while having a bowel movement. The body is meant to be in a squatting position, but sitting on a toilet causes a bend in the rectum that makes it more difficult to have complete bowel movements, Stanich explained.

Difficult to talk about

Bowel movement problems can cause bloating, constipation and haemorrhoids, and lead to serious health problems such as damage to the pelvic floor and hernias. One in six Americans experiences constipation.

“I would encourage everyone with bowel problems, constipation or diarrhoea to make sure they discuss it with their doctor. Not only can your doctor likely help you feel better, but it may head off more serious disease down the road,” Stanich said.

Rachel Shepherd is a physical therapist at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, who specialises in treating pelvic floor disorders. “Bowel movements are difficult to talk about, and not a lot of people want to bring up their constipation,” she said.

“But if there’s something as simple as changing the position by adding a stool, then that’s an easy fix that anyone can add in,” she suggested.

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Drug users suffering an opioid overdose might soon have access to an unusual lifeline – a smartphone app.

University of Washington researchers have developed an app that can detect when a person’s breathing becomes dangerously slows or stops.

Potentially lifesaving monitor

The Second Chance app accurately detected opioid overdose symptoms more than nine times out of 10 in experimental tests, which took place at a facility in Vancouver, Canada, where addicts can legally bring illicit drugs and inject them under medical supervision.

The app’s developers are applying for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to market the phone software as a potentially lifesaving monitor for people taking opioids, said researcher Shyamnath Gollakota. He is an associate professor with the University of Washington School of Computer Science and Engineering in Seattle.

“Given the importance of the problem and the number of people dying, we are hoping to get fast-track status with the FDA so we can get this as soon as possible to the market,” Gollakota said. He estimated that the app could be available within a year if its approval is fast-tracked.

More than 70 000 drug overdose deaths occurred in 2017, the most recent year for which stats are available, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids were involved in 47 600 of those deaths, or nearly 68%.

An opioid overdose kills a person by slowing and eventually stopping their breathing, explained senior researcher Dr Jacob Sunshine, an anaesthesiologist with the University of Washington Medical Center.

Inaudible sound waves

Opioid overdoses can be reversed by the drug naloxone, but “unfortunately this isn’t happening enough, and that’s resulted in people dying in extremely large numbers,” Sunshine said. “More than 115 people a day are dying from opioid overdose in the US.”

To help detect an overdose, the research team developed an app that essentially turns a smartphone into an active sonar system, said lead researcher Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, a Ph.D. candidate with the University of Washington’s School of Computer Science and Engineering.

The phone continuously transmits inaudible sound waves. “These signals get reflected off the human body, specifically the chest,” Nandakumar said. “When the person is breathing, their chest motion is captured by these reflections and recorded in the microphone. You can monitor the breathing motion of a person just using the smartphone.”

To test the app, the researchers partnered with the Insite supervised injection facility, the first legal supervised narcotics consumption site in North America. At the centre, drug users are allowed to inject street drugs in the presence of nurses and staff trained in overdose intervention.

The team recruited 94 opioid users at Insite to test the app, with the smartphone placed on a table within a meter of the participants.

Simulated drug overdose

During testing, 47 users experienced a dangerously low breathing rate of seven or fewer breaths per minute, 49 stopped breathing for a significant period of time, and two had a drug overdose that required medical treatment.

About 90% of the time, the app correctly identified breathing problems that foreshadow overdoses, the researchers reported.

Further testing the app, researchers asked 20 additional volunteers to actually undergo a “simulated” drug overdose. These simulated events took place in an operating room at the UW Medical Center, and involved healthy participants previously scheduled to undergo elective surgery.

Consenting patients received anaesthetics that led to 30 seconds of slow or stopped breathing. The smartphone was placed on a surgical stand about a metre away from the patient.

The app correctly predicted 19 out of 20 simulated overdoses. In the case of the single failure, the patient’s breathing rate was just above the threshold at which an alarm would sound, the researchers noted.

The idea is that the app would sound an alarm if it detects slowed or stopped breathing in an opioid user, the study authors explained. The person would need to reach over and let the app know that they are OK.

Very early conceptual model

“If they fail to interact with it, then it would contact either a loved one who has naloxone or emergency services,” to get the person the lifesaving treatment they need, Nandakumar said.

Although the technology is promising, it still needs more testing before it’s ready for widespread use, said Fred Muench, president and CEO of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.

Muench noted that the settings in which the app was tested were all very tightly controlled.

“The main problem with mobile apps and technology is when you test it in a controlled setting, the majority of the time it does not generalise to the real world,” Muench said.

For example, how well would the app work if a person’s phone is in their pocket, which is where most folks keep theirs, he asked.

“This is a very early conceptual model that has the opportunity for growth and the opportunity to make an impact years down the line,” Muench said. “I wouldn’t be willing to endorse anything until it was tested in the real world,” possibly in people who naturally suffer from sleep apnoea or breathing disorders.

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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