Health Discovery: Blues Can Break Your Budget; Watchful Waiting

The Blues Can Break Your Budget

Feeling sad? A bit self-absorbed? Don’t, repeat, don’t go shopping!

Why? Because sad people tend to spend more money, researchers confirmed in a new study.

Thirty-three participants were divided into two groups. One group watched a “sad” movie clip, the other an “emotionally neutral” one. After the showings, participants could buy an ordinary product, such as a bottle of water. Those who watched the sad movie paid the highest prices—in some cases four times what members of the other group paid.

The results of the study, conducted by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon universities and the University of Pittsburgh, will appear in the June edition of Psychological Science.

'Watchful Waiting' May Be Right Choice for Some Prostate Cancer Patients

A wait-and-see approach to treating prostate cancer may be the best course for many men over age 70 with a low PSA (prostate-specific antigen) rating, according to new research findings.

“Our study confirmed that men stricken with prostate cancer later in life rarely die from that disease,” says Grace Lu-Yao, cancer epidemiologist at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and lead investigator. 

Closely monitoring this slow-growing cancer is a reasonable alternative for this group, since surgery and radiation can cause impotence, incontinence and bowel problems, radically affecting the quality of life.

The research results, which were presented at the annual Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in February, analyzed data on 9,000 older men who were diagnosed with localized prostate cancer between 1992 and 2002 but did not receive treatment. Ten years later 80 percent of the men were still alive or had died of causes other than prostate cancer. About 2,600 men were treated eventually, after an average of 10 years.

But “watchful waiting” isn’t the best approach in some cases.

“We’ve known for years that a man with life expectancy of under 10 years should not undergo aggressive treatment for prostate cancer,” says prostate cancer specialist Patrick Walsh, M.D., former director of the Johns Hopkins Brady Urological Institute. “But the otherwise healthy 75-year-old who has aggressive disease does not fall into this category and should consider active treatment.”