News in brief - March 20, 2006

Details on older driver training-the-trainers program - Immigrants' health worsens after moving to the U.S. - Delay in surgery for prostate cancer does not affect curability

Details on older driver training-the-trainers program

The application deadline is March 31 for the American Medical Association's second training-of-trainers program in older driver safety. The program is scheduled for June 15-16 in Chicago.

With support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the AMA has, since 2003, run the Older Drivers Training-of-Trainers safety program based on the AMA Physician's Guide to Assessing and Counseling Older Drivers.

The program is designed to educate physicians and other health care professionals on the public health issue of older driver safety.

Medical societies are invited to organize multidisciplinary teams to apply for this intensive, two-day workshop. Five teams will be selected, each consisting of two physicians, at least one state licensing authority representative and one driver rehabilitation specialist. Travel and lodging costs for these teams will be covered by the program.

To date, the program has resulted in six multidisciplinary teams conducting more than 100 programs, training more than 7,000 physicians and allied health professionals in the older drivers curriculum and distributing thousands of copies of the AMA's 226-page older driver safety guide for physicians.

For more information visit the Association's Web site (www.ama-assn.org/go/olderdrivers) or call 312-464-4179.

Immigrants' health worsens after moving to the U.S.

A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study has found that immigrants to the United States become less healthy the longer they live here.

For example, 22% of Hispanic immigrants living in the United States for five years or longer were obese, compared to 16% of Hispanic immigrants residing in the United States for less than five years.

The report from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics is based on six years of data from the National Health Interview Survey. The significantly better physical and mental health of immigrants compared with their U.S.-born counterparts occurred despite the former's limited access to health care and little or no health insurance, according to the report.

The report also found that Hispanic immigrants who had lived in the United States for five or more years also were more likely to have hypertension (20% vs. 13%) and cardiovascular disease (5% vs. 4%) than their counterparts who lived in the United States for less than five years.

Similarly, immigrant black and Asian adults also reported better physical and mental health than their U.S.-born counterparts.

NHIS data are available online (www.cdc.gov/nchs).

Delay in surgery for prostate cancer does not affect curability

Delaying surgery for patients with small, low-grade prostate cancer does not appear to increase the risk of the disease progressing to an incurable form, according to a 10-year-study published in the March 1 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers found the risk of incurable prostate cancer, which was defined as a less than 75% chance of remaining disease-free 10 years after surgery, was the same for men receiving immediate surgical treatment and those who waited, on average, two years before surgery.

"This study suggests that for carefully selected men with prostate cancer who are monitored, the window of cure does not close in the short term," said H. Ballentine Carter, MD, lead author of the study and a professor of urology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

"For those men diagnosed with early-stage, low-grade prostate cancer, an alternative to immediate surgical treatment would be careful surveillance," Dr. Carter said.