Link between anxiety, death from cancer found in men

Men over 40 years of age who are plagued with the omnipresence of generalized anxiety disorder are more than twice as likely to die of cancer than are men who do not have the mental affliction, new research finds. But for women who suffer from severe anxiety, the research found no increased risk of cancer death.

That finding, presented last week at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology’s Congress in Vienna, emerges from the largest study to explore a link between anxiety and cancer. It tracked 15,938 Britons over the age of 40 for 15 years. Even after researchers took account of factors that boost the risk of cancer, men with a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder were 2.15 times as likely to die of cancer than were those with no such diagnosis.

The authors of the new research acknowledge that the findings do not reveal how cancer and anxiety are related and do not show that anxiety causes cancer. Study calls time on the five-second rule A new study published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology calls out the fabled five-second rule — whereby if food falls to the ground, you have a five-second window to pick it up for the snack to remain clean enough to eat — saying it does not hold up under intelligent, or basically any, scrutiny.

“The five-second rule is a significant oversimplification of what actually happens when bacteria transfer from a surface to food,” Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University biologist and an author of the research, said in a statement. “Bacteria can contaminate instantaneously.”

The Rutgers researchers dropped watermelon cubes, Haribo strawberry gummies, plain white bread and buttered bread onto various surfaces from a height of about five inches. Those surfaces were slathered with Enterobacter aerogenes, a bacteria similar in food-clinging ability to salmonella.

They left the food on the surfaces for intervals varying from less than a second to five, 30 and 300 seconds.

Although time was a factor — the longer a food touched a surface the more bacteria it had — what was far more relevant was the composition of food or surface. For women, yesterday’s stress beats today’s breakfast New research on women, stress and diet shows that even when women greeted a new day with a “better-foryou” fast-food breakfast, that meal’s expected health-promoting qualities were washed away by the carry-over effects of yesterday’s stresses.

For women who reported experiencing no stress on the day before they showed up to participate in a study, eating a breakfast formulated with healthy fats paid handsome dividend: Compared with women who got a breakfast larded with saturated fat, after eating, these women saw no jump in several markers of inflammation. But suffering a day of stresses — financial worries, a child’s health scare — erased the difference between women who got healthy fats and those who got fats more commonly linked to heart disease.

Those findings were reported last week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Untreatable gonorrhea feared to be on the rise U.S. health officials have identified a cluster of gonorrhea infections that show sharply increased resistance to the last effective treatment available for the country’s second most commonly reported infectious disease.

The findings from a cluster of Hawaii cases, presented last week at a conference on prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, represent the first cluster of cases in the U.S. that have shown such decreased susceptibility to the double-antibiotic combination used when other drugs have failed. If the bacteria continue to develop resistance, that end-of-theline therapy ultimately will fail, and an estimated 800,000 Americans a year could face untreatable gonorrhea and the serious health problems it causes, health officials said.