Men who suffer from migraine headaches appear to be at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, mostly due to a higher risk of having a heart attack, researchers report.

But the advice to men with or without migraines is the same, experts say: Pay attention to heart risk factors such as elevated blood pressure and cholesterol.

"Migraine has been associated with major risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as hypertension and elevated cholesterol, so patients with migraine should focus on traditional risk factors until we understand why migraine is linked with cardiovascular disease," said study author Dr. Tobias Kurth, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.

This is only the second study to find a correlation between migraine and heart disease. Previous research by the same team of investigators found an association in women who experienced migraines with "aura," or visual disturbances preceding the attack.

This time, the researchers followed more than 20,000 men participating in the Physicians' Health Study, all of whom were free of heart disease at the beginning of the study.

Drugs that regulate the hormone estrogen may help to prevent enlargement of the prostate gland in older men, Australian scientists said on Monday.

Early results from animal studies presented at a medical conference in London showed that an experimental estrogen-regulating drug prevented the swelling of the prostate gland which occurs as men age.

"We still have to try the drugs in humans, but so far these are very promising results," said Professor Gail Risbridger, of Monash University in Melbourne.

"This work holds out the possibility that we may be able to help patients with benign disease as well as men with prostate cancer by using these designer drugs."

The prostate is a small gland about the size of a walnut. An enlarged prostate, or benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH), usually affects men over 60. It can cause urinary problems, infections and be very painful.

Estrogen is considered a female hormone but it also plays a role in the development of the prostate gland. The hormone has both positive and negative effects.

"There are two things that estrogens do, good and bad, but in different diseases," Risbridger told Reuters.

The bad effect is that the hormone can drive malignancy but on the positive side it can stop BPH from developing.

Risbridger and her team tested the experimental drug, an estrogen receptor-beta agonist, on transgenic mice with BPH. In a study presented at the Society for Endocrinology conference, she said the drug activated just one of the two cell receptors for the hormone to produce the positive impact.

The scientists found regulating the estrogen receptor beta stopped the development of benign prostate hyperplasia, while the negative effects were due to switching on the estrogen receptor alpha.

"When you give one of the estrogen selective drugs that only activates a particular type of estrogen receptor, beta, you can prevent the hyperplasia from developing," she said.

In the mice, the drug stopped development of the illness and improved the health of the animals which had existing BPH.

"Ideally, we would want to promote the good effects of estrogen receptor beta and block the bad effects of estrogen receptor alpha," Risbridger added.

"It's interesting work, and we are pleased that preclinical testing may translate into real benefits for patients.

--> -->

The conference, 'Different needs - exploring ways to work with men around cancer prevention and early detection', was hosted by the Irish Cancer Society (ICS).

 

Over 150 delegates who work with men in a range of areas, from primary care to sport, heard how men in Ireland continue to die at a younger age than women. The were also told how men are generally reluctant to engage in preventative health behaviours and many tend to present late during an illness, such as cancer.

Speaking at the conference, Prof Donald Nicholas of Ball State University, Indiana, US emphasised that men and women's experiences with health differ greatly.

"The source of these differences is the masculine gender socialisation process, where growing up, males are exposed to gender role messages, which include 'be tough, be strong, don't be feminine, don't express emotions other than anger and never appear vulnerable or weak'. Men who strongly endorse these attitudes and beliefs have a greater incidence of health problems and are less likely to be willing to seek help", Prof Nicholas explained.

"Men in Ireland have higher rates of lung cancer, colorectal cancer and non-melanoma skin cancer than their female counterparts, which are the most common cancers between both sexes in Ireland", Prof Armstrong said.

The conference coincides with Men's Cancer Action Week, which runs to the end of the week. As part of this campaign, the ICS released the results of a survey of 600 men. This revealed that over 50% of men still do not know that prostate cancer is the most common male cancer and overall, men are not health conscious and think their health problems will simply go away.

The conference also heard that the five year survival rate in Ireland for men across all cancers is 38.4%, which is lower than the European average of 39.6%.

 

Scientists are working on a male contraceptive drug that stops the development process of sperm but the condition is reversible.

Tests on rats show that blocking connections to cells that "nurture" developing sperm makes the animals infertile.

The US and Italian researchers say they used relatively low doses of drug and found no obvious side effects.

When sperms are being made in the body in a process called spermatogenesis they sit next to other cells, called Sertoli cells, which nurse and help them grow. If the connection between these two cell types is broken infertility can result in men.

In the study, authors used a recently developed molecule called Adjudin to dislodge the developing sperm from the Sertoli cells. However, Adjudin is also known to be toxic at high doses.

Low levels of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) correlate with reduced erectile function in patients with coronary heart disease, clinicians from Germany report in the European Heart Journal for September.

"Levels of EPC are an independent predictor of erectile function in patients with coronary heart disease and may be the link between cardiovascular risk factors, endothelial dysfunction and ED," Dr. Magnus Baumhaekel from Universitatsklinikum des Saarlandes in Homburg/Saar, Germany told Reuters Health.

"Thus, increasing levels of EPC may help those patients with erectile dysfunction due to generalized atherosclerosis," the researcher said.

"ED is a frequent symptom of generalized atherosclerosis in the elderly, especially in patients with cardiovascular risk factors and diseases, the investigators point out.

Depressed older men are much less likely than depressed older women to recognize their depression and seek treatment for it, a study confirms.

Several themes that help to explain these disparities also emerged in the study, conducted by Dr. Ladson Hinton of the University of California-Davis School of Medicine and colleagues.

Men tend to experience and express their depression differently than women, they report in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Men less often express common symptoms of depression, such as depressed mood or sadness, and may actively try to conceal or mask their depression, whereas women tend to be more open about their depressed mood.

Men are also more apt to express their depression through anger, rage and risky behavior.

The stereotypical "tough-guy" image, which can make men unwilling to admit to feeling blue, is another key factor that keeps many older depressed men from being diagnosed and treated, the team found.

"Old school" or "John Wayne type" older men are difficult to diagnose and treat because they perceive depression to conflict with their masculinity, Hinton and colleagues have observed. For this subgroup, depression connotes vulnerability or weakness and is in direct conflict with an image of men as self-sufficient, tough and stoic.

Consistent with prior studies, Hinton's group has found that the stigma of depression is an important barrier to care in men, particularly its association with severe mental illness.

The team's observations are based on an analysis of data from 1,800 depressed adults age 60 years or older participating in a study of depression, as well as interviews with 30 trial physicians, depression care managers and study recruiters.

"The public health importance of improving care for depression among older men is clear," conclude the researchers. "Older men experience higher rates of completed suicide than any other age and gender group (approximately eight times higher than older women)," they write. The men in this study were also more likely than women have suicidal thoughts.

"Because depression is one of the most important suicide risk factors," they add, "elucidating gender-specific aspects of depression care has the potential to reduce this disparity, close the gender gap in depression treatment, and lessen the enormous burden of suffering for older adults and their families caused by depression in older men."

SOURCE: American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, October 2006.

Sex is not the only thing that women, whose partners pop impotency drug Viagra, will be getting, for also in store for them is the snoring that the pill is prone to cause the men.

A study by researchers in Brazil has found that the sex pill aggravates sleep apnea - a condition which causes a snoring racket, reports The Sun.

The study found that that found men on Viagra were twice as likely to experience sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is a common disorder that can be very serious. In sleep apnea, breathing stops or gets very shallow while a person is sleeping.

Each pause in breathing typically lasts 10 to 20 seconds or more. These pauses can occur 20 to 30 times or more an hour.

The most common type of sleep apnea is obstructive sleep apnea. During sleep, enough air cannot flow into the lungs through the mouth and nose even though a person may try to breathe.

When this happens, the amount of oxygen in the blood may drop. Normal breaths then start again with a loud snort or choking sound.

The risks of undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea include heart attacks, strokes, impotence, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure and heart disease.

In addition, obstructive sleep apnea causes daytime sleepiness that can result in accidents, lost productivity and interpersonal relationship problems. The severity of the symptoms may be mild, moderate or severe.

Washing the penis regularly lowers the risk of HIV infection in uncircumcised men, and even among men who are circumcised, according to two papers in the Journal of AIDS for September.

Male circumcision is associated with a reduced prevalence of HIV, according to Dr. Nigel O'Farrell, from Ealing Hospital in London, and colleagues. They now suggest that interventions to improve genital hygiene may also effective in reducing HIV infection risk.

Specifically, they theorized that the presence of "subpreputial penile wetness" -- a lanolin-like wetness commonly found under the foreskin in most uncircumcised men -- would increase risk, and that washing to keep the area under the foreskin dry would reduce risk.

Their study included 386 uncircumcised men residing in or near Durban, South Africa, who were free of genital lesions or discharge. Clinicians who examined the men observed that half had some degree of wetness around the penis. Approximately 80 percent were judged to be slightly wet, 19 percent as wet, and 2 percent as very wet.

In contrast, only one of 36 circumcised men they examined had wetness.

The prevalence of HIV infection was 66.3 percent among men with penile wetness, versus 45.9 percent in those with no wetness. After adjusting for HIV predictors and confounders, the adjusted odds ratio (OR) for HIV infection was 2.27 when comparing men with wetness versus those who were dry. The degree of wetness did not affect the risk.

The authors note that the HIV prevalence among uncircumcised men without penile wetness was close to that of circumcised men (42.9 percent).

Although many of the factors associated with penile wetness were poverty-related, Dr. O'Farrell's group suggests that "information, education, and communication programs at a number of levels would be needed: for instance, encouraging washing related to sexual activity -- precoital or postcoital or as an everyday life skill."

In the second Journal report, Dr. King K. Holmes, from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and associates interviewed 150 men living in Kenya regarding socioeconomic status and hygiene practices; 15 percent were HIV positive, and 97 percent were circumcised.

Components of hygiene associated with risk included the amount of time spent in a bath (more than 10 minutes) and bathing immediately after sex.

Multivariate analysis revealed three independent risk factors for HIV infection: previous treatment for a serious illness, circumcision, and genital hygiene.

SOURCE: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes September 2006.

Obese men are more likely to be infertile than their slimmer peers, according to the first study to look at whether a man's weight influences a couple's fertility.

Every excess 10 kilograms, or 20 pounds, may cut a man's fertility by 10 percent, Dr. Markku Sallmen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki and colleagues at National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, write in the September issue of Epidemiology. Sallmen was a post-doc at NIEHS when he conducted the study.

The researchers looked at couples participating in the Agricultural Health Study who had attempted pregnancy over the past four years. The analysis was limited to couples for whom the wife was younger than 40.

Remove foods high in saturated fat, trans-saturated fat and cholesterol from your diet and use soy protein foods such as tofu or soy milk. Tulane University researchers found they are beneficial to cardiovascular health, and help lower "bad" cholesterol, while raising the "good" variety.

The study published in the Sept. 1, 2006 issue of The American Journal of Cardiology and gives strong support to the notion that soy protein should be part of a comprehensive dietary intervention for the prevention and treatment of high blood cholesterol levels.