Personal Health: News and Notes

U.S. Rep. Todd Akin's assertion about rape - that "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" to prevent pregnancy - has long surfaced among antiabortion advocates.

But leading reproductive-health experts dismiss the claim. "There are no words for this - it is just nuts," said Michael Greene, professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology

at Harvard Medical School.

David Grimes, an ob-gyn professor at the University of North Carolina, said that "to suggest that there's some biological reason why women couldn't get pregnant during a rape is absurd."

Some people have speculated that rape victims get pregnant less than 1 percent of the time because violent emotions disrupt hormones and a woman's body becomes inhospitable to sperm during an attack.

Several experts said no solid data supported such contentions. A 1996 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, one of the few peer-reviewed efforts in this area, estimated that 5 percent of rapes lead to pregnancy.

"Yeah, there are all sorts of hormones, including ones that cause your heart to beat fast when you're frightened," said Greene. "I'm not aware of any data that says that reduces a woman's risk of getting pregnant."

As for the idea that a rape victim's fallopian tubes tighten, Grimes said: "That's nonsense. Everything is working. The tube is very small anyway, and sperm are very tiny - they're excellent swimmers." - Pam Belluck, N.Y. Times
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For people who are extremely overweight and likely to develop diabetes, surgery may be the best form of prevention.

A new study shows that weight-loss surgery not only produced sustained weight loss in obese men and women, but also substantially reduced their odds of developing type 2 diabetes. Over roughly 15-years, those who had one of three types of bariatric procedures were 80 percent less likely to develop the disease than people who tried losing weight with diet and exercise advice from their doctors.

In fact, those who had the worst blood-sugar levels at the start of the study, putting them in a high-risk category called prediabetes, benefited the most from surgery. Their risk of becoming diabetic fell nearly 90 percent.

"The message is that bariatric surgery works," said Claude Bouchard, a physician, an author of the study, and a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. "You can take people on their way to becoming diabetic, and you intervene with bariatric surgery and weight loss, and you have a very, very strong protective effect against type 2 diabetes."
- Anahad O'Connor, New York Times
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A new study says that little kids are three times more interested in more-healthful fast-food options when they're the only ones that come with a toy.

Canadian scientists offered 350 children, ages 6 to 12, McDonald's Happy Meals of better and worse nutritional quality - but a little plastic Smurf toy came only with the good stuff. Kids could choose a hamburger or a grilled chicken wrap with fries and a soda or with apple slices and bottled water. The kids were going to a YMCA day camp and ordered the meals from a form, so the researchers could manipulate which had the toys.

The scientists say they hope the finding will persuade McDonald's and other toy-happy chains to incentivize their healthier kids meals. But in a statement, McDonald's Canada said no dice.

"The toy is a fun and engaging part of the Happy Meal experience for kids and parents alike," the company said, and "we have no plans to change it." - Sari Harrar, www.philly.com/healthykids
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Taking vitamin D supplements may lower children's risk of colds, a new study says.

The study included nearly 250 schoolchildren

in Mongolia with low blood levels of vitamin D during winter. Taking a daily vitamin D supplement cut by half their risk of respiratory infection, the researchers said.

People in Mongolia are known to be at high risk for vitamin D deficiency, especially during winter. The low levels of vitamin D among the Mongolian children in the study are relatively common in some groups of Americans, particularly black children who live in Northern states.

When the study began, the children in the study were given 300 international units (IU) of vitamin D a day, which was higher than the recommended dose. The U.S. National Institute of Medicine now recommends a daily dose of 400 IU for children, while other groups recommend daily doses of up to 1,000 IU for children at risk of vitamin D deficiency. - Robert Preidt, Health Day