Your Tuesday morning health roundup:
- Prostate cancer treatment: An ultrasound therapy that destroys cancer cells shows promise for treating prostate cancer without causing the incontinence and impotence common after surgery or radiation. But the experimental treatment, called high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), was tried on just 41 men and has not been directly compared with other therapies or assessed for long-term effectiveness.
Surgery for diabetes: The latest study to look at weight loss surgery as a diabetes treatment found that people who got the surgery did much better than people who continued standard diabetes medications. Eighty percent of surgery patients and none of the patients on standard medications were diabetes-free after 18 months. But the study only included obese patients who had already failed to control their type 2 diabetes with medication, so continued failure was not surprising, some experts say.- Salty fast food: Is a McNugget a McNugget anwhere in the world? Not when it comes to salt. A new study finds that fast food items sold in the United States and Canada are consistently saltier than versions sold in Europe. For example, a McDonald's chicken McNugget in the United States has 2.5 times the salt as a United Kingdom McNugget. McDonald's says salt in U.S. products has dropped since 2010, when researchers collected data -- but also says differences reflect taste preferences and the practices of local suppliers. High salt intake is linked to high blood pressure and most people in the United States eat too much salt, public health officials say.
Today's talker: Mix extreme dieting with bridal anxiety and you get a possibly unhealthy fad: the pre-wedding feeding-tube diet. A Florida doctor is promoting a $1,500, 10-day program in which he supplies brides-to-be with a nose tube and a 800-calorie-a-day feeding solution that induces rapid, though temporary, weight loss. Some women say fitting into the perfect wedding dress makes such measures worthwhile.
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