Entries for October 2008

Some 35,000 men who participated in a major prostate cancer prevention trial are in the process of getting this disheartening—yet not entirely surprising—letter in the mail from the National Cancer Institute. The message: Vitamin E and selenium, long buzzed about for their supposed prostate cancer-fighting properties, have flopped. Flopped hard.

Officials announced this week that they had accumulated enough data to conclude that taking vitamin E or selenium, or even both together, does not prevent prostate cancer. In fact, vitamin E may even slightly increase the risk. Leaders of the trial, called the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial, were also concerned to find that slightly more cases of diabetes arose among men who took selenium. And though officials emphasized to reporters that the increased number of prostate cancer and diabetes cases may have been a coincidence, they aren't taking any chances. That's why participants are being told to stop taking the supplements.

While many websites sell drugs online illegally, one company called KwikMed offers consumers the option of buying certain medications—the erectile dysfunction drugs Cialis, Viagra, Levitra; the hair loss drug Propecia; and the smoking cessation—without ever seeing a doctor face to face. Though KwikMed hopes to offer additional drugs in the future, these five drugs are the only ones that have been approved by regulators to date. And it's all perfectly legal, the company says—though quite unusual. The arrangement that KwikMed has reached with the Utah Legislature allows the company's doctors to offer valid prescriptions through cyberspace; other states require that patients see a doctor in person, KwikMed says, before they can receive a prescription. Still, even if you don't live in Utah, you can probably order KwikMed's drugs. The company has received mail order licenses from many other states, and it has shipped medications to 46 states so far. A preliminary study of KwikMed (led by an independent researcher but including a company employee as a coauthor), published recently in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, shows the system is just as safe as having in-the-flesh primary physicians examine patients and prescribe erectile drugs.

Since I've written before about men's propensity for taking risks and have spent a fair amount of time poring over government statistics that show which types of accidents are most lethal for men, I thought I'd pretty much considered all the bizarre ways we end up offing ourselves.

Then I ran across this release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about car surfing. Yup, you read that right: car surfing, which the CDC defines as a "thrill-seeking activity that involves riding on the exterior of a moving motor vehicle while it is being driven by another person." Men were the victims of car surfing accidents in 70 percent of the cases. The feds, apparently, got the idea of looking into the phenomenon of car surfing after watching clips like this one on video sharing sites.

While doctors once steered people with type 1 diabetes away from vigorous exercise, the development of new monitoring and insulin delivery technology has prompted them to change their tune. "The sky is the limit. From an athletic perspective, there's no type of exercise a person shouldn't do, as long as they're willing to monitor and manage their diabetes," say Larry Deeb, past president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association. Previously, doctors warned that sudden uncontrolled dips in blood sugar levels that often accompany intense exercise could cause fainting, seizures, and even comas.

It isn't clear whether circumcision protects gay men from infection with the HIV/AIDS virus as it does heterosexual men, a study released this week says. Previous research has shown that circumcision lowers rates of AIDS infection by some 50 to 60 percent among heterosexuals. So there's nothing from this research that men—gay or straight—can or should act upon at this point. The science simply isn't reliable enough at this point to say, for example, whether uncircumcised men would benefit from running off and getting the procedure.

But here's what we do know about gay men and HIV in the United States:

• 53 percent of all new HIV/AIDS cases involve gay men, according to the CDC.

• 71 percent of all new HIV/AIDS cases in male adults and adolescents involve gay men.

• New cases of HIV are increasing faster among gay and bisexual men than other demographic groups, particularly among gay black men.

• Practicing safe sex offers protection.

A recent survey of men with diabetes revealed an interesting tidbit of information: Men may not be as irresponsible and cavalier as they sometimes seem when it comes to their health—it's just that we need a little extra info to understand how to be healthy.

In the survey conducted by the American Diabetes Association, a mere 30 percent of men with diabetes who responded claimed to know "a lot" about their condition and only 25 percent reported eating nutritious meals. Ouch. Yet—and this is the important part—60 percent felt that more information could help them better manage the disease. And 65 percent said having more information would mean they would have useful conversations with caregivers about the condition.

Are environmentally ubiquitous chemicals called phthalates, which leach from certain types of plastics, making the penises of baby boys smaller or hampering their testicles from descending into the scrotum? That’s the concern raised by a new paper published this month in the journal Environmental Research.

The study, the latest in an ongoing salvo against the chemicals by University of Rochester researcher Shanna Swan, is an extension of preliminary results that she published in 2005. That earlier paper—and the newer one—make the case that prenatal exposure to low doses of phthalates muck with several aspects of human male genital development, including the distance between the anus and the genitals at birth. Swan’s critics have railed against her research, which has received loads of media attention over the years despite being what they call scare science. The new paper seems to be flying largely under the radar, except for the coverage of it in this USA Today article.

In May, I published an article about phthalates and a sidebar that explained how--if you’re so inclined--you can try to avoid these extraordinarily widespread chemicals.