Job strain increases obesity riskNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Being stressed out at work can make you fat, a new study suggests.The more job strain men and women reported, the more likely they were to become obese, Dr. Eric J. Brunner of the Royal Free and University College London Medical School and colleagues found. Higher stress levels were also tied to excess fat around the middle, which is particularly harmful for health.

Chronic stress has been linked to heart disease and the metabolic syndrome, a constellation of symptoms including excess belly fat that increases the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, Brunner and his team note. They hypothesized that job stress might make people more likely to develop obesity during adulthood as well.

To investigate, they followed 6,895 men and 3,413 women for 19 years. All were 35 to 55 years old at the study’s outset.

Participants reported levels of job strain, defined as having heavy demands, little decision-making power, and little social support, at several points during the study. Men and women who reported job strain on at least three occasions were 73 percent more likely to become obese than those who never said they were stressed on the job.

They were also 61 percent more likely to develop central obesity, defined as a waist circumference greater than 102 cm (40 inches) for men or 88 cm (35 inches) for women.

Those who reported job strain on one occasion were at 17 percent increased risk of obesity and central obesity, while those who reported stress on two occasions were at 24 percent increased risk of obesity and 41 percent increased risk of central obesity. Adjusting for factors that could be related to both job strain and obesity, such as socioeconomic status and cigarette smoking, reduced the relationship by only a small amount.Short walk may curb the urge to light upNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Just five to ten minutes of exercise can significantly cut cravings for cigarettes among people trying to kick the habit, UK researchers report.“Relatively small doses of exercise should be recommended as an aid to managing cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms,” Dr. Adrian H. Taylor of the University of Exeter and colleagues conclude.

While exercise has been suggested as a strategy for helping smokers quit, the focus has largely been on using workouts to help prevent weight gain, Taylor’s team notes in the journal Addiction. To better understand the potential benefits of exercise on smoking cessation, the researchers reviewed 14 studies on how exercise affects smoking behaviour, cravings and withdrawal.

Twelve of the studies compared exercise to a passive “control” condition, and all found that a bout of physical activity reduced cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms compared to staying inactive.

In several studies, exercise cut craving as much as — or even more than — chewing nicotine gum. Exercise also as much as tripled the time it took for people to reach for their next cigarette.

Effects were seen for vigourous bouts of exercise lasting for up to 40 minutes, but even less intense 15-minute sessions — and even five minutes of isometrics — had a significant effect, the researchers found.

It’s not likely that distraction alone was responsible for exercise’s effects, given the fact that cravings were lowered for 50 minutes after an exercise session, Taylor and colleagues note. More plausibly, they add, exercise may fight the urge to smoke by reducing stress and boosting mood.

“Bouts of exercise may be one strategy for reducing cigarette consumption, thereby lowering health risks for those unwilling or unable to quit and reducing the risk of progressing to regular smoking,” the authors write.Death risk is high soon after arrhythmiaNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — People who are diagnosed for the first-time with a dangerous heart rhythm disturbance called atrial fibrillation have a significantly greater early risk of dying compared with those without this condition, Minnesota-based researchers report.Atrial fibrillation is a condition in which the heart’s upper chambers quiver instead of beating regularly. This arrhythmia increases the risk of stroke, heart failure, cognitive impairment and death.

Atrial fibrillation is a growing public health problem, but little is known about the overall mortality trends of these patients after diagnosis, Dr. Teresa S. M. Tsang and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, point out. To investigate further, they studied 4,618 Minnesota residents who had first atrial fibrillation confirmed between 1980 and 2000. The average age of the patients was 73 years.

A total of 3,085 subjects died during roughly five years of follow up. Tsang’s group found that mortality was high shortly after diagnosis. Compared with controls without atrial fibrillation, those with atrial fibrillation had a greater than nine-fold increased hazard of death within the first four months after diagnosis. However, after four months, the risk fell significantly.

The researchers found several factors strongly associated with death in atrial fibrillation patients including faster heart rate at diagnosis, being thin, history of chronic kidney disease, and malignancy.Breast cancer therapy gentler on the heartNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Modern radiation therapy for early breast cancer seems to be much less toxic to the heart than older radiation regimens, according to a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor study.A “critical component” of therapy, radiation therapy reduces the risk of breast cancer recurrence and improves survival after breast-conserving surgery in women with early breast cancer, the study team notes in the journal Cancer.

“However, older techniques of radiation therapy resulted in substantial radiation doses to the heart, particularly in patients with left-sided breast cancer,” UM oncologist and first author Dr. Reshma Jagsi told Reuters Health. These regimens were found to raise the risk of heart disease. But the impact on the heart of more modern radiation regimens is less well known.

“We wished to examine whether women treated with radiation after breast-conserving surgery for early-stage breast cancer at our institution in the 1980s and 1990s had an increased risk of coronary artery disease,” Jagsi said.

The team found, based on the records of more than 800 women, that the rates of heart attack and heart disease that required treatment were very low; in fact, the rates were significantly lower than the rates that would normally be expected in women without breast cancer.

“We did find a slight increase in the risk of heart attacks in patients treated to the left side of the chest compared to those treated to the right side,” Jagsi said. “However, the absolute risk was extremely low.”More TB drugs gain quality rating(Bloomberg) — Four more generic tuberculosis drugs made by a supplier in India have gained the World Health Organisation’s approval for quality, the agency said today.The drugs, manufactured by closely held Macleods Pharmaceuticals based in Andheri, Mumbai, treat patients with resistant strains that doctors’ first treatment choices can’t kill, said Lembit Rago, coordinator of the WHO programme for assuring the quality and safety of medicines. International treatment groups had discovered flaws in the drugs, and asked WHO, based in Geneva, to offer inspections to their manufacturers in developing countries. Macleods is the first to gain WHO approval to make the drugs, which are needed to treat strains that affect almost 1 million people with resistant forms of the lung disease.

“This is still a killer disease in many countries,” Rago said in a telephone interview. “If you use poor quality drugs, you will have many more problems with resistance.”

Curing TB usually requires six to nine months of treatment with one of two drugs called isoniazid and rifampin. Patients who don’t get the entire course of treatment, or receive low-quality pills, can breed drug-resistant strains that require stronger drugs with more toxic side effects. Those second-line treatments include cycloserine, ethambutol and pyrazinamide, a combination of ethambutol and isoniazid. Chocolate helps circulation for obesity(Bloomberg) — Here’s a win-win situation: Eating unsweetened chocolate may help your heart.Dark chocolate is rich in flavonoids, plant pigments which work as antioxidants when eaten. The study found that eating unsweetened chocolate increased artery elasticity, a measure of heart health, by 2.4 percent. The improvement among those eating cocoa with sugar was only 1.5 percent, while those on a placebo had a 0.8 percent decrease in function.

Thirty-nine overweight and obese subjects were told to fast for eight to twelve hours, and then eat the cocoa first thing in the morning. While the finding suggested a link with good heart health, the researchers said larger trials are needed before any clinical recommendations are made.

“This is a small sample, but it definitely looks promising,” said lead researcher Valentine Njike, of the Yale Prevention Research Center. “To the best of my recollection no study has ever used sugar-free cocoa. We’re the first.”