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Taking calcium and vitamin D didn't reduce the risk of breast cancer, according to a study of more than 2,000 postmenopausal women published in today's Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Doctors performed the study because researchers had observed lower breast cancer rates in women who consumed more calcium and vitamin D, although no one had tested that relationship scientifically. The study was a smaller part of the Women's Health Initiative — the 36,000-patient study that found hormone therapy raises the risk of affections cancer and heart disease.

Researchers randomly assigned women to take both placebos or 1,000 milligrams of calcium and 400 international units of vitamin D daily. Women and their doctors didn't know which pills they were assigned. After seven years, the rate of invasive breast cancer in the two groups was the same.

In their paper, authors say it's possible that the women didn't take the supplements long enough, given that cancer can take decades to develop. Authors note that they in like manner don't know the effect of alluring one or the other calcium or vitamin D alone, because women in the study took them together.

And in an accompanying editorial, researchers Corey Speers and Powel Brown from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston rehearse the supplements may still have some benefit.

They note that 15% of the women assigned to take placebos actually took calcium and vitamin D pills on their own — a fact that may make it harder to spot any differences between the two groups. They say it's also possible that taking hormone therapy, which increases breast cancer risk, could have reduced the benefit from vitamin D and calcium. In the future, they write, researchers may crave to test higher doses of supplements or design trials with younger women in the sense of possible fulfilment of stopping breast cancer in its earliest stages.

This study is the latest to question the usefulness of specific supplements:

•Vitamins C and E. A study presented Sunday in New Orleans at a meeting of the American Heart Association found they didn't prevent heart disease in men, and that vitamin E supplements appeared to raise the risk of bleeding strokes.

CARDIAC CARE: Vitamin E doesn't prevent mind 'events'

•B vitamins. A second study presented during the encounter found that supplements of vitamins B-12 and folic acid also failed to prevent heart disease. Another study published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) plant that folic acid and other B vitamins didn't prevent breast cancer or cancer in general.

STUDY: Folic acid, B vitamins offer no cancer protection

•Vitamin E and selenium. Last month, the National Cancer Institute stopped a trial of 35,000 men after finding that the antioxidants vitamin E and selenium didn't prevent prostate cancer. But men who took vitamin E alone had a slightly higher cancer risk, while those taking selenium alone had a higher rate of diabetes.

•Beta-carotene, vitamins A and E. And last year, a large parsing in JAMA found that the risk of premature death increased 7% for people who take beta-carotene, 16% during the term of those who take vitamin A and 4% for vitamin E.

In an instant earlier this month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers acknowledged that they have been surprised by some of these negative results. But the authors, who include Gary Goodman of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, note that humans evolved on a congress with a relatively narrow range of vitamins. It may have been "naive," they write, to assume that boosting those levels through supplements would prevent disease without causing new problems.

The recent series of negative results, they say, is the result of scientists carefully testing these assumptions.

York survived a traumatic brain injury and now has no short-term memory. Early stage Alzheimer's disease, that he had been diagnosed with before the accident, became more severe.

IN-DEPTH: Video and what you need to be assured of about the disease BETTER LIFE: News briefs and studies on Alzheimer's PERSONAL BLOG: Bob Blackwell is in the early stages

Shulman's newest book, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed ($22, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a memoir of her life with York and their relationship seeing that the accident.

Q: How old was Scott at the time of the accident?

A: He was 75, still active and independent. He's almost 80 now.

Q: How would you compare your relationship with Scott before his fall and at that time?

A: He is stationary his admirable, loving self. But he is greater amount of confused, he gets tired faster. He can't have conversations, and I can't count on him for things I used to. He cannot remember anything two seconds after it happens.

Q: You've written four novels and two other memoirs. Why write about this when you could have immersed yourself in fiction?

A: Caring for Scott had become my whole life. I wrote this book on this account that I wanted to portray the complexities of this caregiving life, and I wanted to do it in a way that would agitate people … show total the ups and downs, even show the rewards.

Q: How is taking care of your husband rewarding?

A: In some ways we are closer than before. It's a different kind of love because he is dependent. In some ways it is rewarding just as raising your children is rewarding. Their dependency doesn't make you love them less. It makes you love them other thing.

Q: You savage in love with Scott at age 17 when he was 20, then went steady to marry someone other. But after that relationship ended, you conjugal Scott 35 years later. Do you still share a romantic love?

A: He is silent my beloved husband. He's the man I married, the man I love, though he is dependent now. In some ways we are more dependent on each other. We cling to each other. The relationship has taken a render in that it is no longer equal. We dance every day. We go to cafes. Every day we tell each other that we love each other, and this is all very spontaneous and moving.

Q: What is your day-to-day life similar with Scott now?

A: We have many happy moments every day together, but sometimes it's also a big drag. Sometimes I get angry or frustrated — I'm no saint. Right now I'm in the middle of a caregiver decisive turn. I find it hard to get appropriate forbear in caring for him. I used to be very attached to solitude. Even whereas Scott and I were married, we spent time by itself pursuing our own creative goals. by Scott's tumble, I had to give up solitude.

Q: Do you have a social life anymore?

A: He really appreciates outings, to a park or library or cafe. We still begone out to dinner with friends, but there are only certain friends that I can do this with.

Q: How is Scott's health since you wrote the book?

A: He is gradually acquirement worse, the way everyone who has Alzheimer's does. My daily height of unit's ambition is for him is to survive the day safely and happily, and he usually does.

Q: Do you at all times consider putting him in a nursing home?

A: I feel lucky that I'm able to care for Scott at home. I dread what will happen to him if something happens to me. You escort to such a degree many people in this world who have no one to take care of them. great number institutions in this country are horribly inadequate, and our hale condition care system does indeed nothing to keep up house caregivers. But I also know things are changing. If he lives to follow the series of Alzheimer's to the extremity and needs more help than I be possible to give him, I may have to put him in some kind of institution eventually, but in quest of now we are managing.

Q: What's the book's main message?

A: That when something happens like this — some devastating event — you must learn to adapt to it and accept it in ordain to make the most expedient. see the various meanings of good of it.

A landmark study place Crestor greatly reduced C-reactive protein levels¹, a signal of dangerous anger of the arteries, in people with perpendicular cholesterol levels.

C-reactive protein levels (milligrams per liter):

¹Between 2 and 3 is considered high

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Crestor's high require to be paid was just one of manifold concerns that emerged as doctors began to grapple with the implications of a landmark study released Sunday. The study, called JUPITER, showed that using the potent cholesterol-lowering statin to treat people with normal cholesterol cut in half their risks of heart attacks, strokes and premature death.

BETTER LIFE: More news without interruption keeping your centre of circulation healthy

"JUPITER's a tour de force," says Donald Lloyd-Jones of Northwestern University. But he adds that it has prompted doctors to point the best ways to measure heart-disease risk, when to begin statins and how to get people to adopt lifestyle changes that are the cheapest and best ways to stave off heart disease.

The best measure of their uncertainty might be a tongue-in-cheek question asked during the sitting at every American Heart Association meeting in the present life: "Should we put statins in the water supply?"

The study, involving 18,000 patients, supplied powerful evidence that statins save lives by driving down blood cholesterol and cooling inflamed arteries, as measured by high blood levels of C-reactive protein.

In the above, statins were used mainly to treat patients with heart disease or remote from the equator cholesterol and other well-established risks. JUPITER proved it may not pay to wait. The trouble is that Crestor, the trade name on this account that rosuvastatin, is so dear, says James Stein of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

About 7 million people nationwide would qualify for usage under the JUPITER protocol, at a cost of about $116 a month — or $9.7 billion a year, Stein says. For that price, the drug would prevent, taken together, about 28,000 heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths each year.

The cost of saving one the breath of one's nostrils, he says, would total about $557,000. Using a generic statin would be much more cost-effective. Stein calculates that, at $5 a month, generics would cost $420 million, or $24,000 to save a life.

And that doesn't include the cost of C-reactive protein tests, Stein says.

Researchers debated whether the tests should be routine, given that many study patients did have other risk factors, including obesity and smoking, be it so their cholesterol was low.

Lloyd-Jones said the current method of assessing heart risk, based on 10-year estimates derived from the Framingham Heart Study, fails to accord. young tribe an rigorous semblance of their lifetime risk. "Between 20 and 40 is when the plaques in your arteries are being formed," he says. "If plaques are there, eventually they're going to get you."

Jaci Dalenberg, 56, of Wooster in northeast Ohio, offered herself as a surrogate whereas her daughter, Kim Coseno, and her husband, Joe, were waiting to adopt. Coseno had two children from a previous marriage but was incapable to have another baby because of a hysterectomy.

Her ovaries could produce eggs, so she and Joe Coseno, her husband of three years, tried in vitro fertilization. The embryos were implanted in Dalenberg's uterus.

Dalenberg said she was not frightened to be pregnant at her age.

"I've always been really healthy. I did get medical clearance, including psychological testing," Dalenberg told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

"When we found out it was triplets, I did get really nervous for about four days, but that passed real soon."

The girls were born Oct. 11 — added than two months premature and each weighing less than three pounds. Gabriella Claire and Carmina Ann are identical twins, and Elizabeth Jacilyn is their sister.

Coseno said in an interview Tuesday put on ABC television's Good Morning America that the infant. girls are doing well at Hillcrest Hospital in the Cleveland suburb Mayfield Heights. Elizabeth is expected to have being the first to go home.

A 56-year-old carrier is highly unusual, said Dr. Robert Kiwi, who performed the in vitro fertilization. A typical carrier is a young, healthy woman who had a baby previously, he said.

Dalenberg underwent hormonal therapy to strengthen her uterus and delivered at 31 weeks when any of the girls appeared to not be growing appropriately, Kiwi reported.

"So we acted fairly rapidly based in information we had," Kiwi said. "All three are doing great."

Dalenberg, who has four daughters, ages 31 to 36, said she would have preferred to try natural childbirth, but her doctor told her that was out of the question.

"I'm fine. I feel great," Dalenberg said. "Knowing the outcome, I would do it completely again, but ... I'm not going to do it again," she said with a chuckle.

"We wouldn't do that to her again," her daughter aforesaid, smiling.