Medical News

Cigarette smokers have lower IQs than non-smokers, and the more a person smokes, the lower their IQ, a study in over 20,000 Israeli military recruits suggests.

Young men who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day or more had IQ scores 7.5 points lower than non-smokers, Dr. Mark Weiser of Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and his colleagues found.

“Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programs designed to prevent smoking,” they conclude in the journal Addiction.

While there is evidence for a link between smoking and lower IQ, many studies have relied on intelligence tests given in childhood, and have also included people with mental and behavioral problems, who are both more likely to smoke and more likely to have low IQs, Weiser and his team note in their report.

To better understand the smoking-IQ relationship, the researchers looked at 20,211 18-year-old men recruited into the Israeli military. The group did not include anyone with major mental health problems, because these individuals are disqualified from military service.

According to the investigators, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.

The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status as measured by how many years of formal education a recruit’s father had completed.

The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military. IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day. IQ scores from 84 to 116 are considered to indicate average intelligence.

Recruits aren’t allowed to smoke while intelligence tests are administered, the researchers note, so it’s possible that withdrawal symptoms might affect smokers’ scores. To address this issue, they also looked at IQ scores for men who were non-smokers when they were 18 but started smoking during their military service. These men also scored lower than never-smokers (97 points, on average), “indicating that nicotine withdrawal was probably not the cause of the difference,” the researchers say.

The researchers also compared IQs for 70 pairs of brothers in the group in which one brother smoked and the other did not. Again, average IQs for the non-smoking sibling were higher than for the smokers.

The findings suggest that lower IQ individuals are more likely to choose to smoke, rather than that smoking makes people less intelligent, Weiser and his team conclude.

SOURCE: Addiction.

A synthetic form of a naturally occurring hormone combined with chemotherapy inhibited tumor growth and achieved a 25 percent cure rate in mice with a deadly brain cancer called glioblastoma, a new study reports.

Currently, people diagnosed with glioblastoma have a poor prognosis and relatively short life expectancy.

The mice in the study were treated with thymosin alpha 1 (Talpha1/thymalfasin), a synthetic form of the hormone thymosin, produced by the thymus gland.

“Our hypothesis was that the immune system basically needs a boost to kill the cancer cells,” Dr. Suzanne de la Monte of Rhode Island Hospital, who led the research, said in a news release from the hospital. “We know that thymosin is currently being used in Europe to treat cancer, so we set out to see what effect this could have on glioblastomas.”

When Talpha1 was used alone, the tumor continued to grow. But the researchers found that combining it with chemotherapy produced promising results in the mice.

“We looked at giving chemo plus Talpha1 as a sort of immune booster,” de la Monte explained. “What we found is that when you give Talpha1 and the chemo agent together, not only do you have a slower rate of tumor growth with cells being killed, but there have also been cures. We achieved a 25 percent cure rate in these animal models.”

The study was published online in the Journal of Oncology.

The researchers said they now want to test the combination treatment in people with glioblastoma.

SOURCE: Rhode Island Hospital

Minority teen boys smoke more when they suffer discrimination, but that’s not the case for minority teen girls, a U.S. study finds.

Perceived discrimination had no effect on smoking rates among minority girls aged 12 to 15 and was associated with lower rates of smoking among minority teen girls aged 16 to 19.

“Our findings in girls, especially in the older girls, really surprised us,” study first author Dr. Sarah Wiehe, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said in a news release from the school. “We do not know why older girls who perceived discrimination were less likely to smoke, but there may be a possibility that they perceived discrimination because they were pregnant and also that they did not smoke due to pregnancy.”

The study included 2,561 black and Hispanic teens, aged 12 to 19, living in low-income households in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. About 25 percent of the teens reported discrimination within the previous six months, and 12 percent said they’d smoked within the previous 30 days.

Increased smoking by boys who suffer higher levels of discrimination may be caused by increased stress from male-specific targeting by police and business, the study concluded.

“Boys and girls may experience discrimination differently due to where they spend their time and that may account for the differences in whether discrimination was associated with smoking,” Wiehe said. “In other words, the context of discrimination matters. We need to be aware that discrimination is a public health problem for adolescents — one related to major health issues like smoking — and need to actively work to reduce these occurrences.”

The study appears online and in the March print issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

New research in mice suggests that a commonly used drug combination might protect people from being infected by the AIDS virus through the major routes of transmission.

Previous research showed that the drugs could prevent vaginal transmission. In this study, the medication prevented HIV infection through anal sex and intravenously.

The research raises the prospect that “one single pill once a day, totally available in the pharmacy for patients, can be used to prevent transmission by any mode anywhere in the world,” said J. Victor Garcia-Martinez, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and senior author of a study published online Jan. 20 in PloS One.

But there’s no guarantee that the drugs will protect people, even though the mice had “humanized” immune systems. And the idea of preventing HIV transmission through medication raises a host of issues.

The drug in question, Truvada, is a combination of the medications tenofovir and emtricitabine. It’s used to treat people with AIDS and to stop HIV infection from setting in after exposure to the virus. In hospitals, doctors and nurses sometimes take it after getting stuck with a needle that might be contaminated.

Garcia-Martinez and his colleagues previously found that the drug prevented vaginal transmission of HIV in mice. In the new study, they examined mice known as “BLT” because human bone marrow, liver and thymus cells had been transplanted into their bodies, giving them what the researchers consider to be a human immune system.

Some mice got doses of Truvada and others did not; all were exposed to HIV rectally or intravenously at a higher level than typical in human exposure. Of the 17 mice given Truvada, only one — which had been exposed intravenously — became infected.

By contrast, several mice that did not take Truvada became infected.

The drug works by preventing the virus from making more virus in the body, Garcia-Martinez said.

“The biggest caveat is that even though we’re using humanized mice, this is not a human being,” he said. On the other hand, studies in humans should let researchers know soon if it works in people, and the mice research helps scientists “get a handle on what the virus will do in humans,” he said.

So why not give Truvada to everyone at risk for HIV infection, such as people who have many sex partners?

For one thing, the drug is expensive, costing hundreds of dollars a month. And there’s concern that people would take more sexual risks if they were to take the drug, potentially robbing the medication of its infection-preventing power if it’s not 100 percent effective.

Side effects could be a problem too, as could forgetting to take the drug.

Even so, the idea of a preventive drug treatment — a “chemical condom,” as some call it — might not be out of the question.

“It’s reasonable to think that this might one day prove to be a strategy you could use,” said A. David Paltiel, a professor who studies HIV issues at the Yale School of Medicine.

SOURCES: J. Victor Garcia-Martinez, Ph.D., professor, medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, N.C.; A. David Paltiel, Ph.D., professor, public health, and acting head, division of health policy and administration, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.

“Out of control” binge eaters who get help from a therapist do better in the short-term than people who use self-help techniques, new research shows.

But in the long-term, self-help and therapist-led or therapist-assisted approaches seem to have about the same effectiveness, Dr. Carol B. Peterson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her colleagues found.

Binge eaters often eat large amounts of food while feeling a loss of control over their eating. It is different from the binge-purge syndrome of bulimia because binge eaters do not purge afterward by vomiting or taking laxatives. Binge eating disorder is contributing to the rise in obesity.

While medications can help reduce bingeing episodes among people with the disorder, psychotherapy is the most effective approach to treatment, Peterson and colleagues note in a report in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Self-help interventions have also shown promise.

Peterson’s team compared the effectiveness of various group therapy approaches by randomly assigning 259 adults with binge eating disorder to 20 weeks of therapist-led, therapist-assisted, or self-help group therapy, or to a waiting list.

After treatment, just over half of people who had therapist-led group treatment were abstaining from bingeing, compared to a third of those in the therapist-assisted groups, 18 percent in the self-help groups, and 10 percent in the waiting list group. The frequency of binge eating was also lower in the therapist-led or assisted groups compared to the self-help group or the waiting list group.

When the researchers followed up 6 and 12 months after treatment ended, they found no difference in bingeing abstinence rates or binge eating frequency among the groups.

However, the study participants who got help from therapists were more likely to stick with the treatment for 20 weeks; 88 percent of people in the therapist-led groups and 81 percent of those in the therapist-assisted groups completed 20 weeks of treatment, compared to 68 percent of people in the self-help groups.

“The presence of a therapist may enhance short-term abstinence and reduce the likelihood of dropout,” Peterson and her team say. But self-help groups may be helpful when therapists aren’t available, they add.

“These findings suggest that self-help group treatment may be a viable alternative to therapist-led interventions in some settings,” Dr. Walter Kaye of the University of California San Diego writes in an editorial accompanying the study.

“It should be noted, however, that the power of such treatments may be limited since many patients continued to have substantial degrees of binge behaviors at 12-month follow-up,” Kaye notes.