What the scientists are saying…
Shocking rise in type 2 diabetes The number of children and young people requiring specialist treatment for type 2 diabetes – which is strongly associated with obesity – has risen 40% in only three years. Health experts described the finding as a “disaster”, and warned that children with the condition can expect to have years knocked off their lives. “Their chances of getting serious complications will be far greater than an adult with type 2, because they will have had that diabetes for several more decades,” Professor Naveed Sattar, of the University of Glasgow, told The Independent. “They will be more obese to begin with, their sugar control is worsening faster, and we don’t tend to give them statins at a young age to protect their hearts – we don’t want to give statins to kids. It’s a disaster for society, the children and their families, and the medical profession.” In the NHS, £1 in every £10 is already spent tackling diabetes, a figure that now seems sure to rise as the current generation ages. The first UK case of childhood type 2 diabetes was diagnosed in 2000; by 2013-14, there were 507 people under 25 requiring specialist treatment for the condition in England and Wales; by 2016-17, there were 715. Of them, 269 were aged ten to 14, and 11 were between five and nine. Three-quarters of the 715 diabetics were obese. It recently emerged that 22,000 children in England and Wales were this year classed as “severely obese” in their final year of primary school.
Hope for new cancer treatment A new treatment for advanced ovarian and lung cancers has had promising first results, reports The Guardian. A phase-one trial by British scientists involved 65 patients with either high-grade serous ovarian cancer or squamous non-small cell lung cancer, for whom standard treatments had failed. When they were treated with the targeted drug vistusertib and paclitaxel chemotherapy, their cancers stopped growing for nearly six months, on average, and in half the ovarian cancer cases and a third of the lung cancer cases, the tumours shrank by at least 30%.
How to slash the risk of dementia French researchers have identified seven healthy habits that can dramatically reduce a person’s risk of dementia, reports The Times. Each habit cuts the risk by an extra 10% – and individuals are advised to amass as many of them as possible. Previous research has indicated that staying slim and exercising from middle age protects the brain; for the new study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, a team looked at data on 6,626 people over 65 to analyse the combined effects of these factors, plus: drinking moderately; not smoking; eating plenty of fish, fruit and vegetables; and keeping blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure under control. They found that the more of these healthy habits a person followed, the consistently lower their risk of dementia. “For each additional optimal factor you have a 10% lower risk,” said the study leader, Dr Cécilia Samieri, of the University of Bordeaux. Her research did not examine how long people had kept up these habits, and though longer was likely to be better, she said that her results showed “it’s never too late”.
Don’t flush away your contacts A new plastic menace has been identified: contact lenses. It seems that a sizeable minority of wearers flush disposable lenses down the loo when they take them out at night. Too small to be filtered out in the sewage system, they’re likely to end up in the sea, where they may pose a threat to marine life, according to a new study. Professor Rolf Halden, an environmental health engineer from Arizona State University, conducted the research. He’d worn contact lenses for years, when he started to wonder, “Has anyone done research on what happens to these plastic lenses”? His team began looking into the issue and, based on a small survey, they estimate that 15-20% of the US’S 45 million contacts wearers dispose of their lenses in the toilet or the sink at least sometimes. They then observed lenses at waste plants and found that they don’t break down entirely – meaning that tiny fragments are likely to end up in the ocean. Lenses form only a tiny fraction of the plastic waste in the sea, the study found, but users should still be careful to dispose of them in the bin and not down the drain.