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Buddies Are Good for You

By Katharine Greider, October 2007

Being lonely takes a toll on the body that seems to accelerate with age. University of Chicago researchers reported in August's Current Directions in Psychological Science that in their study of college students and of adults age 50 to 68, loneliness had little effect on the health of the younger subjects. But the older people, compared with their more social peers, had higher blood pressure, lower levels of "good" cholesterol and higher levels of the "fight or flight" hormone epinephrine. The paper adds to growing evidence linking social isolation to problems dealing with stress, poor sleep, weak immunity, heart disease, Alzheimer's and suicide, says Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "There are roughly 20 large-scale epidemiologic studies now," he says, "and they all show that the more socially integrated you are, the longer you live."

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Score One for Calcium Pills

By Katharine Greider, October 2007

Can calcium supplements help prevent bone fractures? That's been long debated, but a new analysis of 17 clinical trials concludes that they can. Led by researchers at the University of Western Sydney and published Aug. 25 in the Lancet, the study found that fractures were reduced by 12 percent among those who took supplements. "What recent papers are telling us is that adequate intake of calcium and vitamin D is step one" in preventing osteoporosis, says Ethel Siris, M.D., president of the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Her group recommends at least 1,200 mg. of calcium and 800 to 1,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily for people 50 and over, via diet and supplements. "People should make up their minds," she says, "that just like they're not going to smoke, they're going to get enough calcium and vitamin D."

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Downsides of Diet Soda

By Elizabeth N. Brown, October 2007

Diet soda may mean zero calories—but not zero risk. In analyzing data on 6,000 people in the Framingham Heart Study, scientists from Boston University and the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute found that drinking one soda a day—regular or diet—boosts by 48 percent the risk of developing metabolic conditions, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar and excess abdominal fat, which can cause diabetes and heart disease. The researchers, in the Aug. 24 issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, said it's not clear why diet soda has this effect. California cardiologist and nutrition expert Dean Ornish, M.D., wants the scientists "to demonstrate this [link], which, clearly, they have not done." The AHA notes that diet soda doesn't cause heart disease and is preferable to sugar-sweetened soda.

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Stress Morphs Into Fat

By Katharine Greider, September 2007

Chronic stress—in tandem with a junk-food diet—can lay fat on your belly. Scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington and in Australia and Slovakia have shown in mice that stress activates the hormone neuropeptide Y (NPY), which leads to fat accumulation. The findings, in July's Nature Medicine, have raised hopes that NPY could be manipulated to treat obesity. "The study is absolutely groundbreaking in our understanding of why we gain weight when we're under stress," says Elissa Epel, who studies physiologic effects of stress at the University of California, San Francisco. But she says people get fat for many reasons, so blocking NPY "is not the solution to the obesity epidemic."

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Giving Bones a Break

By Katharine Greider, November 2007

The 300,000 Americans who break a hip each year are at high risk for another fracture. But a once-a-year injection of a new drug could substantially lower that risk. In an international study, 2,100 patients who had broken a hip were given an annual 15-minute infusion of either the osteoporosis drug Reclast or a placebo. During up to five years of monitoring, those taking the drug were 35 percent less likely to break another bone, according to a report in the Nov. 1 New England Journal of Medicine. The study was sponsored by Reclast maker Novartis and led by Kenneth W. Lyles, M.D., of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. The data "are very, very good in terms of both fracture reduction and effects on bone density," says Stephen Honig, M.D., director of the Osteoporosis Center of the New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases. The latest study didn't reveal any safety issues for Reclast, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in August. But the FDA plans to review Reclast and other osteoporosis drugs, including Actonel, Boniva and Fosamax, for possible links to irregular heartbeat. Reclast costs about $1,000 per dose.

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