Study: Men With Breast Cancer Fare Worse
Breast cancer is rare in menâ€"but also more deadly, new research suggests. Men with the disease often don't survive as long as women, largely because they don't realize they can even get breast cancer, and because they're slow to recognize the warning signs. On average, women with breast cancer live about two years longer than men, according to study findings presented Friday at the American Society of Breast Surgeons annual meeting in Phoenix, Ariz. "Men with breast cancer don't do as well as women with breast cancer, and there are opportunities to improve that," study author Jon Greif, a breast surgeon in San Francisco, told HealthDay. For example, women are encouraged to get breast exams and mammograms, meaning their cancers are often diagnosed earlier, when the tumors are smaller. More awareness of male breast cancer could make a big difference. According to the American Cancer Society, about 1 in every 8 women develops breast cancer, compared to 1 in 1,000 men.
Popular but Dangerous: 3 Vitamins That Can Hurt You
If you tuned into The Daily Show in February, you would have heard Jon Stewart's guest, David Agus, a physician and author of the new best-selling book The End of Illness, fret about what could be called America's vitamin abuse problem.
There have been 50 large-scale studies on supplements, he said, and not one has shown a benefit in heart disease or cancer. "I don't get it," he said. "Why are we taking these?"
Agus is not alone in his frustration. Other experts liken buying vitamins to flushing money down the toilet. In some cases, they mean it literally: If the body gets more of certain vitamins than it needs, it often excretes the excess in urine.
That doesn't stop Americans from spending about $28 billion a year on dietary supplements, including vitamins and herbal supplements.
In some cases, people may be spending money only to put their health at risk. "As Americans, we think more is better, but that's not the case with vitamins," says Dee Sandquist, a registered dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Here are three popular vitamin supplements that prove you can, in fact, get too much of a good thing.
1. Vitamin E. Supplement skeptics often point to the story of vitamin E, which was once considered a promising tool for cancer prevention. The National Cancer Institute was so hopeful that vitamin E supplements would decrease rates of prostate cancer that in 2001 it funded a study designed to test the theory. Instead, the findings revealed that the men who took vitamin E were 17 percent more likelyâ€"not lessâ€"to develop the disease. [Read more: Popular but Dangerous: 3 Vitamins That Can Hurt You]
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4 Herbal Supplements Your Doctor Hates
More than half of Americans have taken a dietary supplement, and it's easy to see why. Popping a pill is painless. Supplements don't require a prescription from a doctor. And there's always some hale bloke out there who will vouch for the miraculous health improvements he experienced while taking this or that herbal remedy.
Plus, herbals often seem safer than drugs and other treatments. If a supplement can be found on stores' shelves alongside healthy foods, it must be wholesome, right?
Wrong. Of the 30,000 products rated by the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database, an independent research and publishing organization, less than one percent earned a top score for safety, effectiveness, and quality.
Unlike prescription medications, dietary supplements aren't reviewed or approved by the FDA before they go on sale. And, although manufacturers have been required to prove that new supplements are "reasonably expected to be safe" since 1994, a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that this law is largely unenforced.
"Consumers have the idea that the people who are selling herbal remedies are doing it out the goodness of their hearts," says Lauren Streicher, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. But supplement makers are even more profit-driven than pharmaceutical companies, which are subject to FDA review, she says. "Does the FDA make mistakes? Yes. But they're the only protection we've got to make sure greed doesn't get in the way of science." [Read more: 4 Herbal Supplements Your Doctor Hates]
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