Unintended pregnancy raises risk of future ones

Women who’ve had an unplanned pregnancy are at risk of future unplanned pregnancies, regardless of risk factors like age and education, researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island found. Of 542 women and teenagers enrolled in a study to encourage contraceptive use, those with a history of unplanned pregnancy were twice as likely to have another unplanned pregnancy over the next two years. In the study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, age and education emerged as the strongest risk factors.

ZERO TO 20

Counselling on alcohol key to teens’ sexual health

When healthcare providers are talking to adolescents about sexual health, alcohol must be a part of the conversation, conclude researchers from the University of Sheffield and Doncaster Primary Care Trust. The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing suggest that healthcare professionals who work with adolescents do what they can to get young males to think about how girls feel and to empathise with them, while helping young women develop the social skills they need to resist pressure from boys and peers to have sex. Also, they add, “helping young people to approach alcohol sensibly should be a key element of sexual health promotion,” given that alcohol and sex are “inextricably linked.”

20 TO 50

Too little sleep tied to increased cancer risk

Regular exercise can reduce a woman’s risk of cancer, but the benefits may slip away if she gets too little sleep, researchers from the National Institutes of Health found. Looking at women between 18 to 65 years of age, who were in the upper half in terms of the amount of physical exercise they got per week, they found that sleep appeared to play an important role in cancer risk.

Those who slept less than seven hours every night had a 47 per cent higher risk of cancer than those who got more sleep — even among the physically active women.

ABOVE 50

Type 2 diabetes may slow mental processing speed

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School state that among the mental abilities that are affected by Type 2 diabetes, the speed at which the brain processes information appears to be the most severely impaired, particularly in patients with undiagnosed disease. Brain function tests revealed that patients with diagnosed diabetes had significantly slower mental processing speed, compared to non-diabetic subjects. The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, indicates that those with undiagnosed diabetes, both processing speed and memory performance were significantly worse relative to their non-diabetic peers.