'OHANA BRIEFS
Pregnancy not added cancer risk
Advertiser Staff and News Services
Because pregnancy raises hormone levels, breast cancer survivors have grappled with the fear that trying to become a mother could increase the chance of cancer recurrence.
"Oncologists have always told women with invasive cancer to wait at least five years before becoming pregnant and that, even then, it was a bad idea," says Dr. Melvin J. Silverstein, medical director of the University of Southern California's Lee Breast Center.
A new study finds that's not the case. Researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston studied 383 patients, 35 and younger, who had undergone chemotherapy, including 47 women who became pregnant.
Risk of recurrence was 25 percent among women who conceived; 54 percent among those who didn't conceive. Nearly a quarter of the 205,000 breast cancers diagnosed yearly occur in childbearing women. Half remain fertile after chemotherapy.
The figures may mean women seeking to become pregnant tend to be healthier overall.
Those with a post-pregnancy recurrence tended to have earlier-stage disease and less cancer spread to the lymph nodes.
The study appears in the Feb. 1 issue of Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society.
Sleep consolidates, restores memories
Proving yet again the value of sleep, researchers at the University of Chicago have found that brain activity during sleep encourages higher types of learning.
Three groups of college students were tested to see if they could understand words generated by a voice synthesizer.
Students who trained on the synthesizer in the evening and tested in the morning after a good night's sleep delivered the best results, reports Reuters Health.
Researchers say sleep consolidates memories, protecting them against interference or decay, and also appears to restore memories.
Do kids know when you skip pages?
According to a poll by Parenting.com, 37 percent of parents sometimes skip pages while reading to their children, and 17 percent skip whenever they can get away with it.
Do kids notice? Thirty-six percent of parents said yes, but 35 percent said they figure it out.
Eat off the floor, expect to get sick
If you've got kids, you're probably familiar with the five-second rule: If a piece of food that falls on the floor is picked up within five seconds, it's probably OK to eat — right?
Maybe not, according to Kansas State University food scientist Karen Blakeslee.
Blakeslee cites recent research at the University of Illinois that put the "rule" to the test.
Researchers sterilized two-inch tiles, inoculated them with E. coli bacteria and then placed fudge-striped cookies and gummy bears on the tiles.
Results showed that the foods — chosen after a survey showed that people were more apt to pick up sweets — were infected within five seconds.
Has to be 'amazing' to beat out sleep
Given the choice between amazing sex and eight hours of sleep, two out of three moms pick sex, according to a recent poll by Parenting magazine.
