News in brief - Sept. 5, 2005

Oral drugs as effective as insulin for children, teens with type 2 diabetes - Mammography found to boost survival

Oral drugs as effective as insulin for children, teens with type 2 diabetes

Hypoglycemic drugs could be as effective as insulin shots to bring type 2 diabetes in children and teenagers under control, says a study in the June Pharmacotherapy.

Researchers at Ohio State University reviewed the medical records of 42 children and adolescents with the disease. About one-third were initially treated with insulin shots, and the rest were treated with metformin, sulfonylureas or combination therapy. All patients experienced reductions in their hemoglobin A1c levels, and the authors concluded that drug therapy, which tends to be easier for patients than insulin shots, might be an acceptable treatment strategy for this age group.

Mammography found to boost survival

In comparison with women whose breast cancer is detected by other means, women whose disease is picked up by screening mammography are more likely to survive, according to a study in the Aug. 17 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center pooled the results of three large breast cancer screening trials for a total of 150,000 participants. Even after controlling for the fact that screening mammography was more likely to detect cancer at an earlier stage, women were less likely to die of their disease if this was the detection method.

Authors suspect this could be because mammography can detect tumors that are slower growing and less deadly than those detected because of the appearance of symptoms.

"Of two women who have the same age, size of tumors, similar stage of cancer and spread to lymph nodes, the one whose cancer was detected with mammography has a reason to be happier than the woman whose cancer was detected symptomatically," said Donald A. Berry, PhD, study author and chair of the department of biostatistics and applied mathematics.