June 23, 2011, Bloomberg News, Oliver Renick

Newly diagnosed cancer cases cost the global economy $300 billion in 2010, as illnesses once believed to be largely confined to wealthier countries took hold in developing nations, a Harvard University economist said.

Tobacco use, alcohol intake, obesity and decreased physical activity have grown in poorer countries, causing the rise of cancer and diabetes, said David E. Bloom, professor of economics and demography at Harvard’s School of Public Health in Boston. Bloom and other researchers held a briefing today in advance of the United Nations High Level Meeting on noncommunicable diseases.

The Sept. 19-20 meeting will be the first gathering of the UN Assembly dealing with cancer, cardiovascular illness, chronic lung conditions and diabetes. These diseases cause 60 percent of deaths worldwide, killing 36.1 million people annually, according to an April report by the World Health Organization.

“Noncommunicable diseases will evolve into a staggering economic burden in the coming years,” Bloom said. “It’s a huge impediment to the mitigation of poverty.”

Bloom said treating newly diagnosed cancer cases cost $300 billion globally in 2010, and obstructive pulmonary disease — often correlated with smoking tobacco — costs $400 billion a year.

Not Confined to Health

“Economic policy makers like ministers of finance and ministers of planning see noncommunicable diseases as an issue confined to the health sector,” a misperception that needs to be addressed, Bloom said. “Dangers of NCDs are well-ensconced in the business screen of the world community,” he said.

The global decline in productivity due to illness and deaths from noncommunicable diseases will reach $35 trillion by 2030, Bloom said, an amount seven times larger than the current level of global health spending. Noncommunicable diseases undermine physical and human capital, as losses of labor put a burden on developing countries, he said.

“The main asset the poor possess is their labor, and that is the most threatened by the noncommunicable diseases,” Bloom said.

Cary Adams, chief executive officer of the Union for International Cancer Control, said people in poorer countries were “getting fatter, lazier, smoking too much tobacco, and eating unhealthy food.”

“It is the poorest people in the poorest nations that suffer the most,” said John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society, at the briefing.

Poverty Cycle

Seffrin said more than 80 percent of noncommunicable diseases occur in low and middle-income countries. “Noncommunicable diseases perpetuate the poverty cycle,” he said.

The estimate of the costs of noncommunicable diseases includes medical care, transportation, information and education campaigns, and productivity losses from those who die, Bloom said. Of 14,000 business executives surveyed worldwide, he said half believed that noncommunicable diseases would have a negative impact on their bottom line.

“Think about health spending as not consumption but investment,” said Bloom. “As investment that yields a handsome rate of return.”

“This is a moral issue,” Seffrin said. “Unlike other health problems in the past, we know what’s coming.”

via Global Rise in Cancer Cost $300 Billion in 2010, Harvard Economist Says – Bloomberg.

June 21, 2011, Press release, Harvard School of Public Health

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and University of California, San Francisco, researchers suggests that men with prostate cancer who smoke increase their risk of prostate cancer recurrence and of dying from the disease. A link also was found between smoking at the time of prostate cancer diagnosis and aggressive prostate cancer, overall mortality (death) and cardiovascular disease mortality.

“In our study, we found similar results for both prostate cancer recurrence and prostate cancer mortality,” said Stacey Kenfield, lead author of the study and a research associate in the HSPH Department of Epidemiology. “These data taken together provide further support that smoking may increase risk of prostate cancer progression.”

The study was published in the June 22-29, 2011, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It is the largest study to date to look at the relation between smoking at the time of prostate cancer diagnosis and prostate cancer-specific mortality and recurrence.

Kenfield and her colleagues conducted a prospective observational study of 5,366 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1986 and 2006 in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The researchers documented 1,630 deaths, 524 (32%) due to prostate cancer, 416 (26%) due to cardiovascular disease, and 878 prostate cancer recurrences.

The researchers found that men with prostate cancer who were current smokers had a 61% increased risk of dying from prostate cancer, and a 61% higher risk of recurrence compared with men who never smoked. Smoking was associated with a more aggressive disease at diagnosis, defined as a higher clinical stage or Gleason grade (a measure of prostate cancer severity). However, among men with non-metastatic disease at diagnosis, current smokers had an 80% increased risk of dying from prostate cancer.

Compared with current smokers, men with prostate cancer who had quit smoking for 10 or more years, or who had quit for less than 10 years but smoked less than 20 pack-years before diagnosis, had prostate cancer mortality risk similar to men who had never smoked. Men who had quit smoking for less than 10 years and had smoked 20 or more pack-years had risks similar to current smokers.

Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed form of cancer diagnosed in the United States and the second leading cause of cancer death among U.S. men, affecting one in six men during their lifetime. More than 2 million men in the U.S. and 16 million men worldwide are prostate cancer survivors.

Study co-authors include Meir Stampfer, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, and June Chan, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and urology at University of California, San Francisco.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

“Smoking and Prostate Cancer Survival and Recurrence,” Stacey A. Kenfield, Meir J. Stampfer, June M. Chan, and Edward Giovannucci, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 22-29, 2011.

via Smoking May Increase Risk of Prostate Cancer Recurrence, Death – June 21, 2011 -2011 Releases – Press Releases – Harvard School of Public Health.

Associated Press, December 1, 2010

Lugging around a few extra pounds? One of the largest studies to look at health and weight finds that you don’t have to be obese to raise your risk of premature death. Merely being overweight carries some risk, too.

Go to the BMI-calculator to see if you’re overweight.

Obesity increases the risk of death from heart disease, stroke and certain cancers. But whether being merely overweight contributes to an early death as well has been uncertain and controversial. Some research has suggested being a little pudgy has little effect or can even be a good thing.

The latest research involving about 1.5 million people concluded that healthy white adults who were overweight were 13 percent more likely to die during the time they were followed in the study than those whose weight is in an ideal range.

“Having a little extra meat on your bones — if that meat happens to be fat — is harmful, not beneficial,” said Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society, senior author of the study.

The study’s conclusions, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, are similar to three other large studies, said the lead author, Amy Berrington of the National Cancer Institute.

“Now there’s really a very large body of evidence which supports the finding that being overweight is associated with a small increased risk of death,” Berrington said.

For their government-funded analysis, the researchers pooled 19 long-term studies of mostly white adults. They used each person’s body mass index — a measure of height and weight — and checked to see who died during the follow-up periods, which ranged from five to 28 years.

They focused on people who were healthy at the beginning of the studies, excluding smokers and those with heart disease or cancer because those affect death rates and researchers wanted to see the impact of weight alone.

The lowest death rate for healthy women who had never smoked was in the high end of the ideal body mass index range — between 22.5 and 24.9. Compared with that group, those who were overweight had an increased risk of death of 13 percent. The increased risk ranged from 44 to 88 percent for those who were obese. The morbidly obese were 2½ times more likely to die prematurely. The results for men were similar.

Most of the participants in the studies were white so the research focused on them. Results may be different in other ethnic and racial groups, Berrington said. She said evidence suggests that for the same BMI level, African-Americans might have a lower risk of death and Asians a higher risk.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese. Overweight begins at a BMI measurement of 25, obese at 30 and morbidly obese at 40. A 5-foot-6 person is considered overweight at 155 pounds, obese at 186 pounds and morbidly obese at 248 pounds.

Because of its size and the diversity of studies included, the research “provides strong evidence against the position that it’s a good thing for health to be overweight,” Thun said.

The notion that a “bit of reserves” would help keep you from getting sick probably stems from the days when food was scarce, he said.

The latest research was launched after a controversial 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that concluded being overweight didn’t raise the risk of death; that report included smokers and those with pre-existing illnesses.

University of South Carolina obesity researcher Steven Blair said the results were consistent with other studies and the “massive effort” was commendable. But he said there wasn’t enough information available about fitness level or physical activity. A proponent of the “fit and fat” theory, Blair said his research has shown that obese people who are tested and deemed fit did not face increased risks of dying.

“If we want to get to the bottom of the health hazards of overweight and obesity, we have to have better data on physical activity,” Blair said. “Until we do that, there’s uncertainty of how important BMI is as an important predictor of mortality.”

via The Associated Press: Study says even being a bit overweight is risky.

Food and Health News, November 22, 2010

Eating five portions of fruit and vegetables per day is one of the means that experts most frequently recommend for preventing cancer. Now, the European EPIC study carried out by researchers from 10 countries has shown that, in the case of lung cancer, the important thing is not just the quantity but also the variety of fruit consumed, which can reduce the risk by up to 23%.

“This research looks more deeply into the relationship between diet and lung cancer”, María José Sánchez Pérez, co-author of the study and director of the Granada Cancer Registry at the Andalusian School of Public Health, tells SINC.
She says: “Aside from the amount consumed, it’s also important to take into account the variety. A varied diet reduces the risk of developing this cancer, above all in smokers”.

The results of this study, which have been published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, show that eating “more than eight sub-groups” of vegetables cuts this risk by 23% compared with eating “less than four sub-groups”. In addition, this risk falls by a further 4% for each unit added to the diet from another sub-group.

“A significant link was only found in smokers”, the researcher stresses. “For every two additional units of different kinds of fruits and vegetables in the diet, the risk of lung cancer falls significantly by 3%. So if smokers increase the variety of fruit they eat they could have a lower risk of developing this type of cancer”.

The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) involves 23 centres from 10 European countries (Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and Sweden, working with a sample of 500,000 European subjects (41,000 of whom live in the Spanish regions of Asturias, Granada, Guipúzcoa, Murcia and Navarre).

Lung cancer continues to be one of the most common cancers in developed countries. For this reason, despite the encouraging results of this study, Sánchez Pérez concludes that “the most effective way of preventing it continues to be reducing the prevalence of tobacco consumption among the populace”.

The effect by type of cancerous tissue

Greater variety in fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with a lower risk of developing epidermoid carcinoma of the lung, with an additional two units of fruit and vegetable consumption leading to a 9% reduction in risk. This effect is clearer among smokers (where the risk falls by 12%).

No significant association between fruit and vegetable consumption and the risk of developing lung cancer was seen for the other kinds of tissues affected (adenocarcinoma and small and large cell carcinoma).

Made possible by: Stephan van Duin

The New York Times, Duff Wilson, November 13, 2010

Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.

The industry has ramped up its efforts in advance of a gathering in Uruguay this week of public health officials from 171 nations, who plan to shape guidelines to enforce a global anti-smoking treaty.

This year, Philip Morris International sued the government of Uruguay, saying its tobacco regulations were excessive.World Health Organization officials say the suit represents an effort by the industry to intimidate the country, as well as other nations attending the conference, that are considering strict marketing requirements for tobacco.

Uruguay’s groundbreaking law mandates that health warnings cover 80 percent of cigarette packages. It also limits each brand, like Marlboro, to one package design, so that alternate designs don’t mislead smokers into believing the products inside are less harmful.

The lawsuit against Uruguay, filed at a World Bankaffiliate in Washington, seeks unspecified damages for lost profits.

“They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” says Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the W.H.O.’s Tobacco Free Initiative. Uruguay’s gross domestic product is half the size of the company’s $66 billion in annual sales.

Peter Nixon, a vice president and spokesman for Philip Morris International, said the company was complying with every nation’s marketing laws while selling a lawful product for adult consumers.

He said the company’s lawsuits were intended to combat what it felt were “excessive” regulations, and to protect its trademark and commercial property rights.

Cigarette companies are aggressively recruiting new customers in developing nations, Dr. Bettcher said, to replace those who are quitting or dying in the United States and Europe, where smoking rates have fallen precipitously. Worldwide cigarette sales are rising 2 percent a year.

But the number of countries adopting tougher rules, as well as the global treaty, underscore the breadth of the battleground between tobacco and public health interests in legal and political arenas from Latin America to Africa to Asia.

The cigarette companies work together to fight some strict policies and go their separate ways on others. For instance, Philip Morris USA, a division of Altria Group, helped negotiate and supported the anti-smoking legislation passed by Congress last year and did not join a lawsuit filed by R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard and other tobacco companies against the Food and Drug Administration. So far, it is not protesting the agency’s new rules, proposed last week, requiring graphic images with health warnings on cigarette packs.

But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.

It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.

In Ireland and Norway, Philip Morris subsidiaries are suing over prohibitions on store displays.

In Australia, where the government announced a plan that would require cigarettes to be in plain brown or white packaging to make them less attractive to buyers, a Philip Morris official directed an opposition media campaign during the federal elections last summer, according to documents obtained by an Australian television program, and later obtained by The New York Times.

The $5 million campaign, purporting to come from small store owners, was also partly financed by British American and Imperial Tobacco. The Philip Morris official approved strategies, budgets, ad buys and media interviews, according to the documents.

Mr. Nixon, the spokesman, said Philip Morris made no secret of its financing of that effort. “We have helped them, not controlled them,” he said.

Mr. Nixon said Philip Morris agreed that smoking was harmful and supported “reasonable” regulations where none exist.

“The packages definitely need health warnings, but they’ve got to be a reasonable size,” he said. “We thought 50 percent was reasonable. Once you take it up to 80 percent, there’s no space for trademarks to be shown. We thought that was going too far.”

These days in courts around the world, the tobacco giants find themselves on the defensive far more than playing offense. The W.H.O. and its treaty encourage governments and individuals to take legal action against cigarette corporations, which have encountered growing numbers of lawsuits from smokers and health care systems in Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey.

But in other parts of the world, notably Indonesia, the fifth-largest cigarette market, which has little regulation, tobacco companies market their products in ways that are prohibited elsewhere. In Indonesia, cigarette ads run on TV and before movies; billboards dot the highways; companies appeal to children through concerts and sports events; cartoon characters adorn packages; and stores sell to children.

Officials in Indonesia say they depend on tobacco jobs, as well as revenue from excise taxes on cigarettes. Indonesia gets some $2.5 billion a year from Philip Morris International alone.

“In the U.S., they took down billboards, agreed not to sponsor music events, no longer use the Marlboro cowboy,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “They now do all of those things overseas.”

The world’s second-biggest private cigarette maker, British American Tobacco, with $4.4 billion profits on $23 billion sales in the year ending June 30, is spending millions of dollars lobbying against anti-smoking health measures, like smoke-free air policies in theEuropean Union.

A video on the company’s Web site says some of the proven methods of reducing smoking — like taxes and display bans — encourage a black market in cigarettes and that, in turn, would finance drug, sex and weapons traffickers and terrorists.

The six-minute video, in which actors play gangsters, one with an Eastern European accent, concludes, “Only the criminals benefit.”

The conference beginning on Monday in Punta del Este, Uruguay, will try to add specific terms to a public health treaty known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which since 2003 has been ratified by 171 nations. It would eventually oblige its parties to impose tighter controls on tobacco ingredients, packaging and marketing, expand cessation programs and smoke-free spaces and raise taxes — proven tactics against smoking.

President George W. Bush signed the treaty in 2004 but did not send it to the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is needed for ratification. President Obama hopes to submit it to the Senate next year, a White House spokesman said on Thursday.

One recommendation drawing fire from tobacco farmers would either restrict or prohibit the use of popular additives, like licorice and chocolate, to blended tobacco products that account for more than half of worldwide sales.

The International Tobacco Growers’ Association says that could threaten the makers of burley tobacco, an air-cured leaf that has long been sweetened with additives, costing millions of farmers their jobs and devastating economies worldwide.

“We all know the real objective here is to eliminate tobacco consumption,” says Roger Quarles, a Kentucky grower and president of the association.
Cigarette Giants in Global Fight on Tighter Rules – NYTimes.com.

Food and Health News, November 13, 2010

In the second paper in The Lancet Series on Chronic Disease and Development, experts show that in the UK everyone eating a healthy diet would deliver big health effects with minimal knock-on effects to domestic agriculture and trade. But in a middle-income country like Brazil, it’s a different story. There, healthier eating (both in Brazil or the UK) could have a major impact on agriculture, trade, and, by definition, jobs. The second paper is by Professor Richard Smith, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and colleagues. The paper is the first to examine the health and economic knock-on effects of healthy eating together in this manner.

Transition to diets that are high in saturated fat and sugar has caused a global public health concern, as the pattern of food consumption is a major modifiable risk factor for chronic non-communicable diseases. For example, cardiovascular disease is the world’s leading cause of death, and although the number of deaths from such disease is highest in high-income

countries, it is rapidly becoming a major health burden in middle-income countries. But unlike many risk factors for other diseases, changing dietary habits to target chronic disease can have a major impact on the wider economy of the country concerned, and other countries who produce and export diet-related products, thus causing disruption to vested interests, while also having variable impacts on health. Yet although agri-food systems are intimately associated with this transition towards western diets, agriculture and health sectors are largely disconnected in their priorities, policy, and analysis, with neither side considering the complex inter-relation between agri-trade, patterns of food consumption, health, and development.

Improvements to diets will necessitate changes in agricultural production and trade worldwide, resulting in various winners and losers between sectors of the economy, rural and urban communities, and regions and countries.

Adherence to WHO dietary recommendations in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries would mean a substantial decrease in the consumption of vegetable oils (by 30%), dairy products (by 28%), animal fats (by 30%), meat (eg, pork by 13•5% or mutton and goat by 14•5%), and sugar (by 24%), and a substantial increase in the consumption of cereals (by 31%), fruits (by 25%), and vegetables (by 21%). The UK government has estimated that, if diets matched nutritional guidelines, 70 000 premature deaths could be prevented each year, with a saving to the health service of £20 billion every year.

The authors estimated that, to meet WHO healthy eating guidelines of no more than 10% of dietary energy as saturated fat, adults in the UK would need to reduce dietary saturated fat consumption by 22%, and adults in São Paulo by 7%. These figures equate to reductions of 7% in disability-adjusted life years and 3270 (3%) premature deaths averted in 1 year in the UK, and reductions of 3% of disability-adjusted life years and 2800 (2%) premature deaths averted in 1 year in Brazil.

But reductions similar to those required above by the UK, if translated across the EU, could have a massive impact on major meat exporters such as Brazil and China, damaging their economies and causing widespread job losses. The world economy would have to adjust to less meat and dairy produce. However, the authors point out that the jobs lost in the meat industry could be at least partly replaced by jobs elsewhere in agriculture, as other sectors such as cereal and fruit production increase to make up the calories lost from the diet through meat.

The authors say: “The benefits of such a healthy diet policy will vary between populations, not only because of population dietary intake but also because of agricultural production, trade, and economic factors… Knowledge of the effects of dietary change on both national health and wealth, and of winners and losers from policy change, are essential to secure a sustainable food policy to maximise health benefits and minimise potential risks.”

They add: “Our analysis suggests that the UK would acrue substantial health benefits and associated low costs from adoption of a diet low in saturated fat from animal sources. Conversely, Brazil would experience little health benefit but far more striking economic costs from such a policy.”

They conclude: “Public health policy makers need to judge whether present agriculture and trade are contributing to—or detracting from— efforts to attain dietary goals, and how agricultural policy interventions could help achieve dietary goals.”

The New York Times, November 10, 2010

Federal drug regulators unveiled 36 proposed warning labels for cigarette packages on Wednesday, including some that are striking pictures of smoking’s effects.

Designed to cover half of a pack’s surface area, the new labels are intended to spur smokers to quit by providing graphic reminders of tobacco’s dangers. The labels are required under a law passed last year that gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products for the first time.

The proposed labels include pictures of a man smoking from a tracheostomy tube inserted into his throat; a diseased lung; and a woman holding a baby in a smoke-filled room. The proposals stayed away from some of the more gruesome labels used in other countries, where pictures of blackened teeth and diseased mouths are common.

“Today marks an important milestone in protecting our children and the health of the American public,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Wednesday.

The United States was the first country to require that tobacco products bear health warnings, and all cigarette packages now sold in the United States have modest and widely ignored messages, like “Surgeon General’s Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.”

A growing number of countries have gone well beyond such brief warnings, though, and now require large, graphic depictions of smoking’s effects. With Wednesday’s announcement, the United States — whose first European settlements in the 17th century helped to create and feed a global tobacco addiction — edges a step closer to joining those nations’ efforts to reduce the resulting centuries-long epidemic of tobacco-related deaths.

“This is the most important change in cigarette health warnings in the history of the United States,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The labels unveiled on Wednesday are part of a proposed rule-making. The F.D.A. will accept public comment on the 36 proposed labels, and expects to choose the final nine by June. By Oct. 22, 2012, manufacturers will no longer be allowed to distribute cigarettes for sale in the United States that do not display the new graphic health warnings.

Public health officials are hoping that the new labels will re-energize the nation’s antismoking efforts, which have stalled in recent years. About 20.6 percent of the nation’s adults, or 46.6 million people, and about 19.5 percent of high school students, or 3.4 million teenagers, are smokers. Every day, roughly 1,000 teenagers and children become regular smokers, and 4,000 try smoking for the first time. About 400,000 people die every year from smoking-related health problems, and the cost to treat such problems exceeds $96 billion a year.

“When the rule takes effect, the health consequences of smoking will be obvious every time someone picks up a pack of cigarettes,” said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Richard Hurt, director of the Nicotine Dependence Center at the Mayo Clinic, said he was hopeful that the new labels would save lives, although he said that a higher federal tax and tougher workplace smoking restrictions were also needed.

“The evidence is that graphic labels do make a difference in enticing smokers to stop smoking,” he said.

But he predicted that cigarette makers would devise schemes to blunt the labels’ effects with slip covers and other packaging efforts. “It’ll be interesting to see what they try to do,” Dr. Hurt said.

via F.D.A. Unveils Graphic Warnings for Cigarette Packs – NYTimes.com.

Food and Health News, November 6, 2010

Older Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, but they live as long or even longer than their English peers, according to a new study by researchers from the RAND Corporation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older — while still sicker than their English peers — had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography.

The paper was co-authored by James Banks and Alastair Muriel of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and James P. Smith, distinguished chair in labor markets and demographic studies at RAND.

“If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States,” Smith said. “It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be better than the system in England.”

The study expands upon an earlier analysis by Banks and Smith that found that Americans aged 55 to 64 suffered from diseases such as diabetes at rates up to twice those seen among similarly aged people in England. The trend was observed across all socioeconomic groups.

Researchers analyzed information from two comparable surveys of people age 50 and over in the United States and England — the Health and Retirement Survey and the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing — funded by the National Institute on Aging in the United States.

In the new study, researchers examined the prevalence of illness among those 55 to 64 and 70 to 80. They also looked for the first time at the onset of new illnesses in those age groups in the United States and England during the years spanning 2002 to 2006. Finally, researchers examined trends in death rates in each country.

The findings showed that both disease prevalence and the onset of new disease were higher among Americans for the illnesses studied — diabetes, high-blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, stroke, chronic lung diseases and cancer. Researchers found that the higher prevalence of illness among Americans compared to the English that they previously found for those aged 55 to 64 was also apparent for those in their 70s. Diabetes rates were almost twice as high in the United States as in England (17.2 percent versus 10.4 percent) and cancer prevalence was more than twice as high in the United States (17.9 percent compared to 7.8 percent) for people in their 70s.

In spite of both higher prevalence and incidence of disease in America, death rates among Americans were about the same in the younger ages in this period of life and actually lower at older ages compared to the English.

Researchers say there are two possible explanations why death rates are higher for English after age 65 as compared to Americans. One is that the illnesses studied result in higher mortality in England than in the United States. The second is that the English are diagnosed at a later stage in the disease process than Americans.

“Both of these explanations imply that there is higher-quality medical care in the United States than in England, at least in the sense that these chronic illnesses are less likely to cause death among people living in the United States,” Smith said.

“The United States’ health problem is not fundamentally a health care or insurance problem, at least at older ages,” Banks said. “It is a problem of excess illness and the solution to that problem may lie outside the health care delivery system. The solution may be to alter lifestyles or other behaviors.”

The study also investigated the relationship between the financial resources of individuals in both countries and how soon they would they would die in the future.

While poorer people are more likely to die sooner than their more well-off counterparts, researchers say their finding supports the view that the primary pathway between health and wealth is that poor health leads to a depletion of household wealth, rather than being poor causes one’s health to decline. Researchers found that the substantial changes in wealth that occurred in the years 1992 and 2002 in the United States through increases in stock prices and housing prices did not alter the probability of subsequent death.

Chronic illnesses like obesity and diabetes, generally seen as “Western”, are making worryingly rapid inroads in the developing world, health experts warned at a meeting in Berlin this week.

Around 80 percent of new cases of cancers, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are now being recorded not in the rich West, but in poorer parts of the globe, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures.

[Image by Sophie van Schouwen]

The explosion is a “consequence of importing lifestyles from Western countries,” Francis Collins, head of the US-based National Institutes of Health, told the World Health Summit at Berlin’s Charite hospital.

According to the WHO, the worst-affected areas are southeast Asia and the western Pacific, while the Middle East stands out for swelling rates of obesity.

“An obesity epidemic is inevitable unless policies to reduce intakes substantially from fat and sugar with spontaneous increases in activity are introduced now,” said Philip James, chairman of the British-based International Obesity Task Force (IOTF).

Currently, there are around 300 million people around the world classified as obese, with a body mass index (BMI) — a measure computing body weight and height — of over 30,according to the IOTF.

The rise in the developing world is all the more surprising because these countries are also ravaged by hunger, but the increase in obesity does not necessarily mean that people there are becoming better fed. Obesity often masks underlying deficiencies in vitamins and minerals, the IOTF says.

As these countries develop economically, people’s diets change as more and more of them move to cities and eat high-fat and high-sugar foods, often in Western-style fast food eateries. Urban life also tends to be more sedentary.

As a result, people put on weight, making them more susceptible to chronic illness including diabetes, heart disease and cancer, adding to the strain on already overstretched health care systems.

In India, for example, rates of diabetes are twice as high in urban centres than in rural areas, James said.

According to the WHO, 90 percent of sufferers have Type 2 diabetes — when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it makes — largely as a result of excess body weight and physical inactivity.

Diabetes sufferers are expected to number 300 million in 2025, up from 135 million in 1995, the WHO predicts. Deaths will double between 2005 and 2030.

In 2005, an estimated 1.1 million people died from diabetes, with almost 80 percent of deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries, the WHO said.

But many experts say that the international community has not yet taken on board the growth of chronic diseases in the developing world.

Instead, particularly in Africa, efforts are focused on fighting contagious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, which are also mass killers.

“From a medical point of view, they are preventable,” said Pekka Puska, director general of the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland (THL).

“We need to elevate health to a cabinet issue. We need to put this on the agenda of heads of state,” said Olivier Raynaud, responsible for health issues at the World Economic Forum.

Berlin’s three-day World Health Summit, gathering around 1,000 health experts from around the world, wraps up on Wednesday.

via ‘Western’ diseases spread to developing world: experts – Yahoo! News.