Mens Health Ideas

Ron Viarengo is pretty clear about screening for prostate cancer. He doesn’t want it.

Not the prostate-specific antigen test and definitely not the digital rectal exam. Both are routine procedures performed in about three-quarters of U.S. men older than 50.

So, news Wednesday that scientists have moved a step closer to creating a genetic test to detect the disease did nothing to sway Viarengo, a 64-year-old Vermont manufacturing sales representative.

He’s among a minority of American men who’ve weighed the pros and cons of prostate cancer screening tests — and decided that it’s better not to know.

“I think my basic philosophy is that there were way too many unknowns about it,” said Viarengo, who first considered prostate testing last summer. “I just decided that I’m not going to worry about something that is quite nebulous.”

It may be promising that American and Swedish researchers have identified genetic markers that appear to raise the risk of prostate cancer nearly 10 times in men with a family history of the disease, as reported in a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Read more »

When John Vanek told his girlfriend’s teenage son that the couple had decided to get married, the 13-year-old Ian rushed over to hug his future stepdad.

But it didn’t take long for the relationship to fray. Ian soon became sullen and combative. Soon Vanek, a 49-year-old police sergeant from San Jose, and Ian were thrashing out their differences in family counseling.

“This is a test,” said the teen, explaining why he was giving his stepdad such a hard time. When Vanek asked when the test was going to end, Ian responded simply, “I don’t know.”

From age-old fairy tales like Cinderella to modern movies like “Enchanted,” stepmothers have gotten a bad rap. But a new study finds it’s often the stepfather who can have a tough time adjusting to his new, blended family.

While stepparents of either gender tend to be aloof, stepdads are more likely than stepmoms to fight with teenage children, especially if the child is a boy, says Erini Flouri, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Institute of Education at the University of London. Stepdads were more likely than biological fathers to see their stepteens as hyperactive or badly behaved, the researchers found.

Read more »

Older men with early-stage prostate cancer are not taking a big risk if they keep an eye on the disease instead of treating it right away, suggests the largest study to look at this issue since PSA tests became popular.

Only 10 percent of the 9,000 men in the study who chose to delay or skip treatment had died of prostate cancer a decade later. The vast majority were alive without significantly worsening symptoms or had died of other causes.

Even the 30 percent who eventually sought treatment were able to delay it for an average of 11 years.

“It is important news,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “It may persuade some middle-of-the-roaders that we are overtreating this disease,” and that PSA testing may be amplifying the problem, he said. The PSA blood test to help detect tumors has been widely used since the 1990s.

Grace Lu-Yao of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey led the study and will report results at a cancer conference later this week in San Francisco.

Read more »

Bone tests aren’t just for women anymore. New guidelines are calling for older men to get a routine check for bone-thinning osteoporosis.

There’s news for women, too: A new computerized tool uses more than bone-density tests to predict who is at highest risk of breaking a bone in coming years — by adding in such important risk factors as whether a parent ever broke a hip.

It’s an effort to better target who really needs treatment and who can safely skip it, even before someone’s bones become thin enough to be officially labeled an osteoporosis patient.

And it promises a major shift in bone care.

“You treat the people who have high risk, and you would reassure the women at low risk and ask them to come back for a re-check in a few years,” explains Dr. Ethel Siris of Columbia University and president of the National Osteoporosis Foundation, which issued the new guidelines last week.

Moreover, the new work stresses that a disease long associated with little old white ladies actually can strike anyone as they age. The biggest change: The NOF guidelines recommend a bone-mineral density X-ray test for all men 70 and older, just like women 65 and older have long been urged to get. (Men and women may need the tests sooner if other factors put them at high risk.)

Read more »

After two decades, Sean Reid of Surrey, British Columbia, discovered that he had a son. Fred Turley of Des Plaines, Ill., learned he didn’t have a daughter. And Wendy Lieb of Lewis Center, Ohio, made certain she wasn’t going to be a grandmother quite yet.

In all three situations, crucial genetic information altered the lives of the people involved. And in each case, it came not from a doctor or other medical source, but from a $29.99 kit on a drugstore shelf.

Reid, Turley and Lieb are among more than 800 customers who responded to the first wave of marketing for do-it-yourself DNA paternity tests sold as Identigene by Sorenson Genomics of Salt Lake City.

Sales in three western states — Washington, Oregon and California — were so brisk last fall that Rite Aid Corp. expanded the product this week to some 4,300 stores in 30 states across the country.

“The running joke is that we’re the Maury Povich family,” said Reid, 37, who confirmed years of speculation about a former girlfriend’s son with a kit purchased at a Bellingham, Wash., store. “But why not do it privately? We did this as discreetly, as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible.”

Read more »

Middle-aged men who ate seven or more eggs a week had a higher risk of earlier death, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study adds to an ever-growing body of evidence, much of it contradictory, about how safe eggs are to eat. It did not examine what about the eggs might affect the risk of death.

Men without diabetes could eat up to six eggs a week with no extra risk of death, Dr. Luc Djousse and Dr. J. Michael Gaziano of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School found.

“Whereas egg consumption of up to six eggs a week was not associated with the risk of all-cause mortality, consumption of (seven or more) eggs a week was associated with a 23 percent greater risk of death,” they wrote.

Read more »

Men with diabetes already know that erectile dysfunction can be a distressing side effect of the illness, adding insult to injury for about 80 percent of those who have the disease.

But sexual symptoms may also signal problems that go beyond impaired intimacy, according to new research that shows diabetic men who struggle with impotence face twice the risk for potentially deadly heart problems.

In fact, erectile dysfunction can predict cardiovascular troubles that include chest pain, heart attack, stroke — and death, according to two new studies published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Men with type 2 diabetes can’t afford to ignore the warning, even if it’s embarrassing, said Dr. Peter C.Y. Tong, an associate professor at Prince of Wales Hospital at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who studied the problem in more than 2,300 Chinese men.

Read more »

When Jeremy Adam Smith’s infant son, Liko, woke up in the middle of the night screaming, Smith wanted to help calm him down. While his wife tried to sleep, he’d take the baby into another room and sing, coo and plead with his son to quiet down.

But all that accomplished was keeping all three of them up. More often than not, his wife, Olli, would insist that he just let her breast-feed Liko. It worked like flipping a switch — no more crying.

“For many fathers, they see that and, on the one hand, they don’t want to intrude — and on the other, it’s a lot of work to intrude!” says Smith, who lives in San Francisco with his wife and their now-4-year-old son. Within weeks, he began to back away from trying to soothe his son’s screams.

During the first few months of a new baby’s life, every parent suffers moments of self-doubt. But new research suggests that dads might be especially susceptible to that lack of self-confidence — and that moms may be partly to blame.

Read more »

A Virginia man lost about 80 pounds in six months by eating nearly every meal at McDonald’s.

Not Big Macs, french fries and chocolate shakes. Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce.

Chris Coleson tipped the scales at 278 pounds in December. The 5-foot-8 Coleson now weighs 199 pounds and his waist size has dropped from 50 to 36.

The 42-year-old businessman from Quinton says he chose McDonald’s because it’s convenient.

His inspiration came from his two children and from the story of a blind war veteran who rode a tandem bicycle cross-country.

Coleson says his goal is to get back to the 185 pounds he weighed when he married Tricia Summer. Their 10th anniversary is Saturday.

Just a few more portions of broccoli each week may protect men from prostate cancer, British researchers reported on Wednesday.

The researchers believe a chemical in the food sparks hundreds of genetic changes, activating some genes that fight cancer and switching off others that fuel tumors, said Richard Mithen, a biologist at Britain’s Institute of Food Research.

There is plenty of evidence linking a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables to reduced cancer risk. But the study published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One is the first human trial investigating the potential biological mechanism at work, Mithen added in a telephone interview.

“Everybody says eat your vegetables but nobody can tell us why,” said Mithen, who led the study. “Our study shows why vegetables are good.”

Prostate is the second-leading cancer killer of men after lung cancer. Each year, some 680,000 men worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and about 220,000 will die from it.

Read more »