Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Eating fruits and vegetables, and drinking tea and red wine may offer overweight men and normal weight women some protection from colon and rectal cancers, hint study findings from the Netherlands. Plant-based foods contain flavonoids, compounds thought to interfere with cancer-causing processes, the study team notes in the International Journal of Cancer. Colinda C.J.M. Simons, a PhD student at Maastricht University, and her co-investigators estimated the intake of specific flavonoids in 120,852 men and women, 55 to 69 years old, who filled out dietary surveys as part of a large designed to assess ties between diet and cancer. Over ... Read Full Story

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who smoke or who have high blood pressure or diabetes in middle age are more likely to develop dementia, a new study has found. The good news is that people who take steps to curb these risk factors in their 50s and 60s might have a better shot at avoiding Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia in their 70s and 80s. "People need to know that quitting smoking or controlling high blood pressure or diabetes is going to be beneficial not only for reducing the risk of heart attack, cancer, or stroke now, but also for reducing ... Read Full Story

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to boost Medicare payments to physicians in a move that could help shore up support from doctors for a sweeping Democratic-backed healthcare overhaul. The House voted 243-183 for the bill that would stop a 21 percent Medicare pay cut for doctors next year and put in place an updated payment formula that would better reward primary care physicians and reflect the sharp increase in healthcare costs. Democratic backers said the pay boost was necessary to ensure that the elderly enrolled in the government's Medicare healthcare program did not lose access to doctors. Republican ... Read Full Story

ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG said on Wednesday it would conduct a new late-stage trial to evaluate the effect of one of its drug candidates in combating a thickening of the arteries in patients. The Phase III trial is designed to further evaluate the effect of dalcetrapib on the progression of atherosclerosis in over 900 cardiovascular patients, the company said. Dalcetrapib is in the same class as Pfizer Inc's torcetrapib, which Pfizer scrapped after it was linked to deaths in a study, and which the company had previously hoped would become a $10 billion (5.9 billion pounds) a year drug. Roche ... Read Full Story

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A once-daily pill developed by Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim increased female sex drive in late-stage trials, putting the group in the frame to launch the first non-hormonal treatment for women with low libido. The compound known as flibanserin promoted sexual desire and increased the number of "satisfying sexual events" in women suffering from abnormally low libido, Boehringer said on Monday. The results of four Phase III studies involving more than 2,000 pre-menopausal woman suffering from so-called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) were presented at the congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine in Lyon, France. Unlike Procter & Gamble's hormone patch ... Read Full Story