US researchers said that undiagnosed cases of celiac disease, where the immune system has a strong adverse reaction to the protein found in wheat and other grains, appear to have increased dramatically in the last 50 years. They also found, over a 45 year follow up, that people with undiagnosed celiac disease have a nearly four-fold increased risk of premature death from any cause.

The study was led by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and appears online in the July issue of the journal Gastroenterology.

For the study the researchers analyzed blood samples taken from 9,133 healthy young adults from Warren Air Force Base between 1948 and 1954, and compared them to those of 12,768 more recently recruited, gender-matched individuals who were born around the same time (5,558 people) as the Air Force group, or who were of similar age (7,210 people) when they gave their blood samples.

They tested the blood samples for signs of celiac disease (by first looking for tissue transglutaminase and, if abnormal, for endomysial antibodies).

The researchers measured survival of the Air Force base group over 45 years, and compared the prevalence of undiagnosed celiac disease between that group and the more recently recruited one.

The results showed that:

* 14 (0.2 per cent) of the Air Force group had undiagnosed celiac disease.

* In the Air Force group, over 45 years of follow up, death from all causes was nearly 4 times greater among individuals with undiagnosed celiac disease than those whose blood samples did not show signs of the disease (hazard ratio = 3.9; while the 95 per cent confidence interval ranged from 2.0-7.5 with P < .001).

* Undiagnosed celiac disease was found in 68 (0.9 per cent) of individuals with similar age at sampling and 46 (0.8 per cent) in those born around the same time.

* The rate of undiagnosed celiac disease was 4.5-fold and 4-fold in these more recently sampled groups than in the Air Force group that was sampled over 50 years ago.

The authors concluded that:

"During 45 years of follow-up, undiagnosed [celiac disease] was associated with a nearly 4-fold increased risk of death."

"The prevalence of undiagnosed [celiac disease] seems to have increased dramatically in the United States during the past 50 years," they added.

People who have celiac disease cannot tolerate gluten, a protein present in wheat, rye, and barley, and other foods. The protein is mostly present in food, but is also used as an ingredient in other every day products that enter the digestive tract, such as medicines, vitamins and lip balms.

The disease damages the small intestine and stops the body properly absorbing nutrients from food. There are people all over the world living with the disease, which was originally thought to be a childhood syndrome, but we now know that it is a common genetic disorder.

In the US there are some 2 million people with celiac disease, or around 1 in 33 individuals. If you have a biological parent, sister, brother or child with the disease, the chances of you having it are around 1 in 22.

The only treatment for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet, and for most people avoiding gluten their whole life will stop the symptoms, heal any existing intestinal damage, and stop further damage, with improvements noticeable within days of starting the diet.

A healed intestine can then absorb nutrients from food during digestion.

If you are diagnosed with the condition you need to spend time with a dietician to learn about foods that are and aren't safe to eat, including how to read labels and packaging so you know which foods to buy.

If a person with celiac disease isn't diagnosed early enough then because their body can't get the nutritients it needs, they will probably develop longer term symptoms such as shorter stature and dental enamel problems.

Researchers at the University of Bristol tracked the movements of 1,307 children using GPS technology.

They also asked the pupils, aged ten and 11 from 23 schools, to complete a questionnaire about how much freedom they were given to travel outside the home unsupervised by their parents.

Participants said they were never, sometimes, often or always allowed to go to local shops, a big shopping centre, park or playground, sports centre, swimming pool, library, school, cinema, friend's house, amusement arcade, bus stop or train station.

The researchers found that both boys and girls given greater freedoms were much more active on weekdays than those closely watched by adults.

"This is the first study to show that freedom to move around unsupervised in the local and wider neighbourhood is directly related to how physically active children are,” the Scotsman quoted Dr Ashley Cooper, senior investigator on the study, as saying.

"These findings suggest that giving children more independence to move outside is related to greater levels of physical activity, which is important for health.

"But we also know that parents restrict how much independence they give their children for very good safety reasons.

"More work now needs to be done so we can discover how to get that balance right," Cooper added.

Additional research is called for and patients with moderate to severe periodontitis should receive evaluation and possible treatment to reduce their risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to a special consensus paper by editors of The American Journal of Cardiology and Journal of Peridontology in the July 1, 2009 issue of The American Journal of Cardiology, published by Elsevier.

Periodontitis, a bacterially-induced, localized, chronic inflammatory disease, destroys connective tissue and bone that support the teeth. Periodontitis is common, with mild to moderate forms affecting 30 to 50% of adults and the severe generalized form affecting 5 to 15% of all adults in the USA. In addition, there is now strong evidence that people with periodontitis are at increased risk of atherosclerotic CVD - the accumulation of lipid products within the arterial vascular wall.

The explanation for the link between periodontitis and atherosclerotic CVD is not yet clear, but a leading candidate is inflammation caused by the immune system. In recent years the inflammation is now recognized as a significant active participant in many chronic diseases. Other explanations for periodontitis and atherosclerotic CVD are common risk factors such as smoking, diabetes mellitus, genetics, mental anxiety, depression, obesity, and physical inactivity.

Regardless of the cause, the expert panel believes that the current evidence is strong enough to recommend that doctors assess atherosclerotic CVD in their patients with periodontitis. The research recommends that patients with moderate to severe periodontitis should be informed that there may be an increased risk of atherosclerotic CVD associated with periodontitis, and those patients with one or more known major risk factor for atherosclerotic CVD should consider a medical evaluation if they have not done so in the past 12 months.

A 12-year study that followed over 60,000 Britons, half of whom were vegetarian, suggests that vegetarians had a lower risk of developing cancer than meat-eaters. However, more studies are needed before we can use this evidence as sufficient reason to ask people to change their diets, say the researchers and other experts.

The study was the work of Dr Naomi Allen, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and colleagues from the UK and New Zealand, and is published in the 16 June advance access issue of the British Journal of Cancer.

Allen told the press:

"This is strong evidence that vegetarians have lower rates of cancer than meat eaters."

For the study, Allen and colleagues used data from the British arm of the European Perspective Investment into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) which is following half a million people throughout Europe.

For an average follow up of 12.2 years, they studied 61,566 British men and women, which included 32,403 meat eaters, 8,562 non-meat eaters who ate fish but not meat (the "fish eaters") and 20,601 vegetarians (ate neither fish nor meat).

Over the follow up period there were 3,350 incident cancers of 20 different types, including 2,204 among the meat eaters, 317 among the fish eaters and 829 among the vegetarians.

Using statistical tools they calculated the relative risk of developing cancer among the three groups, and adjusted for age and a range of other potential confounders such as smoking, alcohol, body mass index (BMI), exercise/physical activity, and in the case of the women only, whether they took oral contraceptives.

The results showed that overall, vegetarians were 12 per cent less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, while fish eaters were 18 per cent less likely (however fish eaters was also a smaller sample and potentially a less reliable statistic).

Thus, while in the general population about 33 people in 100 will get cancer at some point in their lifetime, for people who don't eat meat this risk is about 29 in 100.

Such figures suggest a change of diet could prevent 2 million Britons from developing cancer.

But lead author Professor Tim Key, also from Oxford University, told the media we should not rely too strongly on these findings:

"At the moment these findings are not strong enough to ask for particularly large changes in the diets of people following an average balanced diet," he said, according to a BBC report.

For some cancers like leukaemia, stomach and bladder cancers, the risk was considerably lower, with vegetarians 45 per cent less likely to contract one of these cancers than meat eaters, but for other cancers such as prostate, breast and bowel cancer, the risk was much the same for vegetarians and meat eaters.

One of the things that stood out, was the fact that vegetarians appeared to have much lower risk of getting cancers of the lymph and blood. When these were grouped, vegetarians had about 50 per cent lower risk than meat eaters. And in one rare cancer in particular, multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, vegetarians were 75 per cent less likely to develop the disease compared to meat eaters.

And for these cancers the fish eaters had much the same risk as the meat eaters.

Speculating as to why this might be so, the researchers said it could be either because of something in meat, perhaps viruses or compounds that cause mutation, or it could be a protective effect in vegetables.

One area where vegetarians and fish eaters had a much higher risk of cancer was in the case of cervical cancer, where the risk was nearly double for these groups compared to meat eaters.

The researchers suggest this could be down to chance because of the small numbers involved, or it could be something about diet that affects the ability of the cancer-causing virus to take hold.

The researchers said they also found marked differences between meat-eaters and vegetarians in the propensity to cancers of the lymph and the blood, with vegetarians just over half as likely to develop these forms of the disease.

Sara Hiom, director of health information at Cancer Research UK, a charity that funded the research, told the press:

"These interesting results add to the evidence that what we eat affects our chances of developing cancer."

She said we already knew that eating a lot of red and processed meat increased people's risk of stomach cancer but she said we should be careful about interpreting the results of this study.

"The links between diet and cancer risk are complex and more research is needed to see how big a part diet plays and which specific dietary factors are most important," said Hiom, according to a report in the Telegraph.

However, she did say that the low number of vegetarians who developed cancer in this study would suggest that it might be wise to follow the advice of Cancer Research UK, and other groups, that people should eat:

"A healthy, balanced diet high in fibre, fruit and vegetables and low in saturated fat, salt and red and processed meat."

Dr Panagiota Mitrou, the World Cancer Research Fund's Science and Research Programme Manager told the BBC:

"The suggestion that vegetarians might be at reduced risk of blood cancers is particularly interesting."

But he also said the findings should be treated with caution, because we don't know enough about the underlying mechanisms that link diet and these types of cancer.