Health

Walnut gets honor of first food to tout promising health claims

WASHINGTON - For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has allowed producers of a food to advertise health claims that are based on promising, but not conclusive, scientific testing.

The recipient of the agency's first approval of a "qualified" health claim is the walnut, which can be promoted as helpful in warding off heart disease. Similar health claims for others nuts are being reviewed, and FDA officials said they will be acted on soon.

The new label approved for whole and chopped walnuts will read: "Supportive but not conclusive research shows that eating 1.5 oz. of walnuts per day, as part of a low saturated fat and low cholesterol diet, and not resulting in increased caloric intake, may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease."

ORLANDO - A blood-boosting drug that cancer patients use and athletes abuse might offer another benefit: preserving brain function after radiation.

EPO, or erythropoeitin, dramatically improved learning and memory in mice after cancer treatment, a study found.

If tests in people find the same thing, the drug could help protect the brain when radiation is given. Experts think it might be especially good for children having radiation for brain tumors.

EPO is a hormone that stimulates bone marrow to make red cells, which contain hemoglobin, the substance that carries oxygen to muscles and tissues. Sold as Procrit and other brand names, it was licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1989 for treating anemia after chemotherapy.

The study was done by C. Shun Wong and others at Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and presented at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Orlando.

Providing sexually active teenage girls with emergency contraception pills in advance did not make them more likely to have unprotected sex, a study found.

But having the pills at hand made it more likely the adolescents would use them within 12 hours of having unprotected sex, when the hormone pills are most effective at preventing pregnancies, said Dr. Melanie Gold, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and lead author of the study.

The results are being published in next month's issue of the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology.

An experimental SARS vaccine protected mice against the respiratory illness that killed nearly 800 people last year, but a safe and effective vaccine for humans is probably still a long way off.

Results published in today's issue of the journal Nature show the vaccine triggered an immune response in the mice and dramatically reduced the level of the virus in the lungs of inoculated mice.

But researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which developed the gene-based vaccine, said more experiments are needed to determine if it will work in humans.

A large new study casts doubt on one of the hottest ideas in the field of heart disease - that inflammation levels in the bloodstream are a powerful predictor of heart attacks.

The report in today's New England Journal of Medicine questions the value of a blood test routinely used by some doctors to measure inflammation. And it challenges year-old recommendations from the U.S. government that doctors consider the test for some patients.

The researchers said their findings suggest inflammation is only a moderate predictor of heart disease, less than some studies have indicated. They said the test does not add much beyond other risk factors such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking.

"There's no good scientific reason to be using it as a predictive test," said Dr. John Danesh, one of the British researchers at the University of Cambridge.

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