GOOD NEWS

Treating high BP

Cheap diuretics are the best first step in treating high blood pressure to prevent heart failure, according to a study in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation. The study supports a previous report recommending that patients with high blood pressure should start taking a diuretic first, and only add drugs such as ACE inhibitors or beta-blockers if their blood pressure needs to be lowered further. Diuretics, or water pills, lower blood pressure by ridding the body of excess water, often making patients urinate more often. In 1982 they were prescribed in 56 per cent of the cases of high blood pressure treated by drugs, but by 1992 they were prescribed in only 27 per cent of the cases.

Improved sleeping

Researchers from the Divisions of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have found in a controlled clinical study, that melatonin, taken orally during non-typical sleep times, significantly improves an individual’s ability to sleep. This finding, reported in the journal Sleep, is particularly important for rotating or night shift workers, travellers with jet lag and individuals with advanced or delayed sleep phase syndrome. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the body at night in darkness, which helps the brain determine day and night to help regulate sleep cycles and circadian timing.

BAD NEWS

Cancer fatigue

Breast cancer survivors who suffer from persistent, debilitating fatigue years after their diagnosis have something in common: their immune systems don’t shut down following treatment, according to researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles. This constant immune system activation, which researchers discovered by measuring specific proteins in blood samples from survivors, may be causing the fatigue, the researchers write in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association of Cancer Research.

Smoke helps AIDS

Women with AIDS, who tend to be urban and poor, get less benefit from medicines for the disease if they smoke, no matter if they smoke a lot or a little, according to a Reuters report. A study of 924 women in America has found that those who smoked while taking a cocktail of anti-AIDS medicines called highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) were 53 per cent more likely to die than non-smokers during the nearly eight-year study.