'Love Hormone' May Help Those With Anorexia.

Small, preliminary study found it lowered levels of obsession with images of food and obesity.

THURSDAY, March 13, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A small, preliminary study hints that a hormone connected to positive feelings could help ease obsessions with food and obesity in people with anorexia.
"Patients with anorexia have a range of social difficulties, which often start in their early teenage years before the onset of the illness," senior study author Janet Treasure, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, in England, said in a university news release.
"These social problems, which can result in isolation, may be important in understanding both the onset and maintenance of anorexia," Treasure said. "By using [the hormone] oxytocin as a potential treatment for anorexia, we are focusing on some of these underlying problems we see in patients."
Oxytocin is sometimes called the "love hormone." It's released during bonding activities like childbirth and sex, and researchers have linked artificial forms of it to lowering anxiety in people with autism.
In the new study, researchers gave oxytocin or a placebo, via nasal spray, to 31 patients with anorexia and 33 healthy "control" patients. They all were asked to look at sequences of images relating to different types of food, and different body shapes and weights. The researchers measured how quickly participants identified the images. If they had a tendency to focus on the negative images, they would identify them more quickly.
After taking oxytocin, the anorexic patients appeared to be less obsessed about images of food and obesity, the researchers said. The study did not, however, prove a cause-and-effect link between oxytocin and the decreased feelings of obsession.
"This is early stage research with a small number of participants, but it's hugely exciting to see the potential this treatment could have," Treasure said. "We need much larger trials on more diverse populations before we can start to make a difference in how patients are treated."
The study appears in the March 12 issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
SOURCE: King's College London, news release, March 12, 2014

HIV Transmission Between Women Rare, But Possible: CDC

THURSDAY, March 13, 2014  -- A case report of a woman who was infected with HIV during sex with another woman shows that such transmission of the virus is possible, health officials say.
The case occurred in Texas in 2012 and involved two women who were a monogamous couple for six months. One of them had HIV, and the other did not. The couple routinely did not take any protective measures during sex, and had engaged in sexual activity that resulted in the exchange of blood through abrasions.
The partner who had been HIV-free became infected. Health officials could find no other HIV risk exposures for the newly infected woman, and concluded that it was likely she was infected by her partner.
While the risk of HIV transmission between female sex partners is low, it can occur when bodily fluids such as menstrual blood and vaginal fluids come into contact with a cut, abrasion or a mucus membrane (the tissue that lines body cavities such as the mouth and vagina), according to the report authors.
The researchers said this case study emphasizes the need for all couples -- including women who have sex with women -- to take measures to prevent HIV transmission. These steps include avoiding all contact between HIV-infected blood or blood-contaminated bodily fluids and broken skin, wounds or mucus membranes.
The report is published in the March 13 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

For Oral Health, Have a Tea Party

 “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”        Henry James,
He may not have been thinking of oral cancer prevention when he wrote that, but it might be one more reason (as if any were needed) to have a daily cup.
Tea contains polyphenols that, in laboratory and clinical studies, have shown to have protective effects against lung, esophageal, and other cancers. Although numerous studies have examined the relationship between tea consumption and the risk of oral cancer, the results have been inconsistent—some have found a significant risk reduction from drinking tea while others have found no effect.
To determine whether drinking tea might keep mouths healthy, researchers in Qingdao, China, carried out a meta-analysis of 19 prospective and case-control studies of tea drinking and oral cancer conducted worldwide. Taken together, the studies included 4,675 oral cancer cases. Four of the studies found a protective effect of tea drinking against oral cancer whereas the remaining 15 did not.
RELATED: Head and Neck Cancer Resource Center

The authors of the meta-analysis pooled the data from all 19 studies and looked at the risk of cancer according to the level of tea consumption, and found positive results. Subjects who drank the most tea of any type had a 15% reduction in the risk of oral cancer compared with subjects who drank the least (relative risk [RR] = 0.853; 95% CI: 0.779-0.934).
However, not all tea is created equal. In five of the studies, the focus of research was green tea; and in three studies, it was black. Those who drank the most green tea had a significantly reduced risk of oral cancer compared with those who drank the least (RR = 0.798; 95% CI: 0.673-0.947), whereas black tea showed no such effect (RR = 0.953; 95% CI: 0.792-1.146).
The Big Picture
If drinking tea really does help prevent oral cancer, tea-drinking countries ought to have lower rates of the disease. In the United Kingdom, where mean annual tea consumption is 2.74 kg per person, the incidence of oral cancer is 10.4 per 100,000, about 25% lower than in the United States, where we drink a mere 0.33 kg of tea per person. Smoking and alcohol consumption are important risk factors for oral cancer, but in this case they seem to even out: the British smoke less than Americans but drink more—13.37 L of pure alcohol per person per year in the United Kingdom compared with 9.44 L in the United States.
The highest tea-consuming country in the world is Turkey, where they drink a whopping 6.87 kg of tea per person each year. Perhaps partly as a result, they enjoy a low rate of oral cancer—just 4.4 cases per 100,000.Contributing further to the low rate of oral cancer in Turkey may be the low rate of alcohol consumption—2.87 L per person per year.
RELATED: Surgery First Improves Oral Cancer Outcomes

Tea consumption in China is just 0.82 kg per person annually, but most of that is green tea, which may be the reason why oral cancer is relatively infrequent there—3.3 cases per 100,000 annually.
Of course, epidemiologic associations don't prove causation, but they're interesting to contemplate over a nice cup of tea. As the 19th century British writer Sydney Smith said, “I am glad I was not born before tea.”