A new study has found that walking for 30 minutes a day could lower the risk of death from colon cancer.

According to researchers, such a simple routine could also reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes and other cancers and can even be beneficial after cancer diagnosis, reports the Daily Express.

Researchers examined data from more than 150,000 people between 1982 and 2005. Those who exercised consistently for at least 10 years showed the lowest risk of colon cancer death.

The most benefits showed in those who exercised most, said lead author Kathleen Wolin, of Washington University.

"You get enormous 'bang for the buck'. You go for a 30-minute walk every day and you're going to reduce your risk of a number of diseases.

"It's never too late but it's also never too early to start being active.

Even those who haven't can begin after diagnosis and see some real benefits as well," she said.

For all of you working women out there who face stressful situations on a daily basis - a cup of joe might be just the thing you need to get through the day.

In a study by psychologists at Bristol University in the U.K., researchers found caffeinated coffee helped to boost a woman's performance in high-pressure environments, the Telegraph reported.

But the same does not hold true for men. In fact, male participants in the study who drank several cups of strong coffee became less confident and took longer to complete tasks.

The researchers said the findings suggest "the key to coffee's effects on the sexes lies in the way men and women respond differently to stress."

It's estimated that 100 million Americans consume about 350 cups of coffee a day.

The findings are published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Majority of people with high cholesterol levels do not receive the treatment they need to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke, an international study has found.

"Many of these people - living in England, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Scotland, Thailand and the United States of America - are unaware that they need treatment, which is easily accessible in the form of low-cost medicines," says the study published in the International Public Health Journal, the bulletin of the World Heath Organisation (WHO).

According to the largest-ever study - covering 147 million people - 78 per cent of adults who were surveyed in Thailand had not been diagnosed, while 53 per cent of Japanese who had been diagnosed remained untreated.

"Cholesterol-lowering medication is widely available, highly effective and can play an essential role in reducing cardiovascular disease around the world," says co-author, Gregory A Roth, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in USA. "Despite this, effective medication coverage for control of high cholesterol remains disappointingly low." he added.

Researchers have developed a highly sensitive assay that could change the way to diagnose the degenerative neurological condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), providing a fast, accurate alternative for early diagnosis of this rare but deadly condition.

The assay has been developed by microbiologist Ryuichiro Atarashi of Nagasaki University, Japan, and his team.


CJD is a prion disease, in which an isomer of a common protein known as the prion protein (PrP) takes on an abnormal shape and becomes an infectious variant called PrPSc. This variant is thought to trigger the subsequent malformation of other PrP proteins. Unlike their normal counterparts, PrPSc prions cannot be broken down, and instead accumulate - often clustering in brain tissue.

The pockets of abnormal tissue that result cause brain tissue to develop a sponge-like appearance, and because prion conditions can be spread by affected humans or animals, the diseases are often referred to as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs).

One problem that has plagued developers of non-biopsy diagnostic techniques is that it is often difficult to avoid false positives among samples taken from patients with neurodegenerative disorders other than CJD.

So Atarashi and his colleagues used a new assay known as a real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QUIC) assay. 'Quaking-induced' refers to in vitro shaking, which researchers believe helps to accelerate the reactions, enabling the assay to produce results more quickly.

The team tested cerebrospinal fluid samples from 18 people with CJD and 35 people with other neurodegenerative diseases. This pilot group produced no false positives, and CJD was correctly diagnosed more than 83 pc of the time.

"This technique allows definitive ante-mortem confirmation of CJD," Nature quoted Atarashi, who added that this is currently difficult because it demands the detection of PrPSc in patients' biopsy specimens, as saying.

The findings have been published online in Nature Medicine. (ANI)

Although, the US Preventative Services Task Force recommends breast cancer [abnormal cells that divide without control, which can invade nearby tissues or spread through the bloodstream and lymphatic system to other parts of the body. ] screenings for women every other year in the later stages of their lives, a new study claims frequent mammograms that begin at a younger age can save thousands of lives.

According to researchers, women who get screened for malignancy every year after the age of 40 cut their risk of dying of breast cancer [abnormal cells that divide without control, which can invade nearby tissues or spread through the bloodstream and lymphatic system to other parts of the body. ] by 71 percent as opposed to those who undergo mammograms less frequently after the age of 50 years.

According to experts, the fact that young women too can get breast cancer is underestimated. As a result of earlier mammograms, younger women receive more treatment options which in turn leads to better chances of survival.

Co-author of the research, Mark Helvie, director of breast imaging at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center stated, "Task force guidelines have created confusion among women, leading some to forego mammography altogether.

"Mammography is one of the few screening tools that has been proven to save lives and our analysis shows that for maximum survival, annual screening beginning at 40 is best. This data gives women more information to make an informed choice about the screening schedule that's best for them."

Comparison of guidelines
For the purpose of the study, the researchers compared the guidelines issued by the task force on mammography for screening every other year in women 50-74 with those of the American Cancer Society that recommending an annual screening exam in women 40-84.

The experts used a total of six model scenarios of screening mammography designed by the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network.

It was noted that if women opt for breast cancer detection at age 40, they cut the risk of death from malignant tumors by 40 percent.

In contrast, when mammography begins at 50 and occurs every other year, breast cancer deaths go down by 23 percent. The difference translates into 71 percent more lives saved with annual screening starting at 40.

The investigators noted that on average women aged 40-49 years who go for an annual ritual of cancer detection will have a false-positive mammogram once in every 10 years.

R. Edward Hendrick, Ph.D., clinical professor of radiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, lead investigator stated, "The task force overemphasized potential harms of screening mammography, while ignoring the proven statistically significant benefit of annual screening mammography starting at age 40.

"In addition, the panel ignored more recent data from screening programs in Sweden and Canada showing that 40 percent of breast cancer deaths are averted in women who get regular screening mammography.

"Our modeling results agree completely with these screening program results in terms of the large number of women lives saved by regular screening mammography."

The study will be published in the February issue of the 'American Journal of Roentgenology.'

The benefits of mammogram
According to experts, women should undergo a clinical breast exam not only to save their life, but also to avert a mastectomy and avoid other radical cancer treatments.

The aim of cancer screening is to detect the malignancy before it starts to cause symptoms.

The tumors found in the advanced stage are larger and are more likely to have already spread. On the other hand, breast cancers found during mammography are generally smaller and still confined to the breast.

Finding the cancer at the initial stage means a better prognosis [a prediction of the course of the disease] . Smaller tumors can be effectively treated with a lumpectomy [a surgical procedure in which only the tumor and a small area of surrounding tissue are removed] , a type of breast conserving therapy which removes the cancerous lump while sparing the rest of the breast.