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Obese women who carry most of their extra weight around the stomach are 70 per cent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer, an international team of researchers have said. The findings suggest some of the first evidence that the link between obesity and pancreatic cancer is as strong in women as in men, Juhua Luo of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and colleagues reported in the British Journal of Cancer. “We found that the risk of developing pancreatic cancer was significantly raised in obese postmenopausal women who carry most of their excess weight around the stomach,” she said in a statement. Until now, smoking and chronic pancreatitis were the most well established risk factors for the disease in men and women, with much of the evidence also pointing to a stronger obesity link for men. Luo and colleagues followed more than 1,38,000 menopausal women in the United States for more than seven years to investigate the links between obesity and pancreatic cancer.

Kids exercise lesser with age
Children turn away from exercise in droves in their early teen years after getting much more exercise when they are younger, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The research documented a steady decline in physical activity in 1,032 children in 10 places around the United States who were followed from ages 9 to 15. The researchers had each child in the study, which ran from 2000 to 2006, wear a small device called an accelerometer, which monitors physical activity, when they were ages 9, 11, 12 and 15. At ages 9 and 11, more than 90 percent of the children met the recommended level of at least an hour per day of moderate or vigorous exercise. But by age 15, only 31 percent hit the recommended level on weekdays — and just 17 percent met the mark on weekends, the researchers found.

Neighbourhood affects blood pressure
Researchers found that people who lived in neighborhoods with more opportunities for exercise, less crime, better grocery stores and a closer sense of community had a lower risk having high blood pressure — independent of factors such as income and education level. The findings, published in the journal Epidemiology, suggest that building better neighborhoods might also improve residents’ cardiovascular health. The researchers based their findings on 2,612 adults ages 45 to 85 in NYC, Baltimore and Forsyth County in North Carolina. The participants were surveyed about the conditions surrounding their home — including whether they felt safe, whether nearby markets had a good selection of fruits and vegetables, and whether it was easy to walk in the neighborhood. The study found that people who lived in the most walkable neighborhoods were less likely to have high blood pressure than those in the least pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods.

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