Below Zero

ZERO TO 20

Sleep position for preemies questioned

The lung volumes of premature infants is higher when they are place on their stomachs rather than their backs, a UK study indicates. Researchers from King’s College Hospital, London, write in the Archives of Disease in Childhood that this, however, doesn’t seem to improve the concentration of oxygen in their circulation much, at least when they are not in respiratory distress. Lung volumes were found to be higher in the prone position in the study. So was oxygen concentration, but the effect was small and significant only in the oxygen-dependent infants. The researchers recommend that infants who are not dependent on oxygen should be nursed supine on the neonatal unit.

20 TO 50

Men and women may need different heart treatments

In their hearts, it seems, men and women really are different. The same invasive treatments for acute heart problems that can save lives in men may actually harm women, although reasons for this are unclear, researchers from University Hospital, Linkoping, Sweden, have told the European Society of Cardiology. A small-scale analysis involving 184 women patients found eights deaths among those receiving aggressive treatment, compared to just one death after a year in a group given more conservative care. One clear difference was that major bleedings were more frequent in the early invasive group and the researchers said it was possible that women had a higher bleeding tendency, making invasive procedures more dangerous.

50 AND ABOVE

Asian men more likely to survive prostate cancer

In a study of prostate cancer patients in California, most Asian men with the disease were found to survive longer than their white counterparts. The exception was men from South Asia; their survival rate was worse than that of white men. Researchers from the California Cancer Registry in Sacramento reported that the study involved an analysis of data for 108,076 whites and 8,840 Asians. The overall 10-year prostate cancer-specific death rate was 11.9 per cent. The report, published in Cancer, however mentioned that there was much variation across the Asian groups, all the way from an 8 per cent risk of death over 10 years in Japanese men to a 16 per cent risk in South Asian men.