Health Buzz: Heart Disease Plus ED Equals Trouble for Men

March 16, 2010 RSS Feed Print

Heart Disease Plus ED Equals Trouble for Men

A new study found that erectile dysfunction in men with heart disease might signify a higher risk of death, Reuters reports. Of the 1,519 men with heart disease in the study, more than half reported having ED. And men with ED were twice as likely to die of heart disease; their chance of having a heart attack also doubled, the researchers found. Impotence can be a sign of early atherosclerosis, said lead author Michael Bohm of the University of Saarland in Germany, Reuters reports. Men with impotence also need screening for heart disease, not just ED treatments, he said. The results are published in the journal Circulation.

[Read 27 Erectile Dysfunction Treatments You Can Do Without and 10 Ways Your Health Might Sink Your Sex Life.]

Autism Genetic Test Doesn't Answer Most Parents' Questions

From the headlines, you'd think that the new genetic test for autism described in the journal Pediatrics will give parents of children with autism the answers they so desperately seek. Not so, alas. Although this test identifies more children who have genetic abnormalities associated with autism, it doesn't nail down the cause of about 90 percent of autism cases, U.S. News contributor Nancy Shute writes.

Right now, children suspected of having autism are tested for genetic abnormalities with two tests: the G-banded karyotype, which looks for abnormalities in the chromosomes, and fragile X testing, which looks for a specific variation on the X chromosome. Those two tests find genetic abnormalities in up to 5 percent of children with autism. In the new study, researchers used a newer test, chromosomal microarray analysis, to identify variations in much smaller chunks of DNA. That test turned up genetic abnormalities in about 7 percent of people with autism spectrum disorders, compared with about 2 percent of people tested with the karyotype method. The researchers, affiliated with institutions that are part of the Autism Consortium of Boston, point to that 5 percentage-point difference and argue that the newer genetic test should be used widely in diagnosing children with autism. Read more.

[Read 4 Promising Autism Treatments, From Vitamin B12 to Alzheimer's Drug Namenda and What the Autism Gene Finding Means for Parents.]

Knee Replacements: Are You Too Young, Too Old, Too Fat, or Too Active?

Getting a new knee because the original has worn out and may have become painfully arthritic is an increasingly common surgery in America. First-time knee replacement surgeries rose 63 percent between 1997 and 2004, according to a 2008 paper in Arthritis Care & Research. If that clip keeps up, some 1.4 million such surgeries will be performed in 2015, U.S. News's Sarah Baldauf reports.

Findings coming out of the 2010 American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting this month are shedding helpful light on knee replacements, including how active one can be with an artificial knee, how young or how old one should be to undergo the surgery, and the varying benefits to be gained.

When patients and their doctors decide whether to proceed with a knee replacement, "it's always a quality-of-life issue," says Mark Figgie, chief of the Surgical Arthritis Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Osteoarthritis, which causes the cartilage in joints to wear away, is the usual culprit when knee pain has made walking painful. Even sleeping can be very uncomfortable—sometimes unbearably so—because a day's worth of moving around has inflamed the joint. Read more.

[Photo Gallery: 8 Ways to Protect Your Knees.] [Read Can You Avoid Arthritis Knee Pain by Building Thigh Muscles? and 6 Alternatives to Arthroscopic Knee Surgery.]

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