Week of November 29, 2006, Issue #580
FRONT
Well, Well, Well
Connie Howard / health@vueweekly.com
There’s some good news on the health front for a change—a reason, finally, to permit ourselves a bit of a coffee break, a reason to indulge instead of resist a craving, a reason to be a little less plodding and determinedly goal-oriented, a reason to balance what we must do with what we want to do.It turns out that mental effort such as exercising will power or learning something new requires a pile of glucose in the brain. Even an isolated act of self-control causes glucose in the body to drop enough to reduce odds of success with a subsequent task requiring effort or will power.
So go with the flow, I say. Take a minute to clear your head, do something pleasant, something that doesn’t require superhuman effort. Balance exercises of discipline or restraint with small indulgences, and who knows, you may just be more productive in the end.
I like the sound of it, much like I liked the sound of stress-elevated cortisol levels and lack of sleep causing weight gain. Not that sleeping and eating around the clock are what I want to do, but maybe there’s wisdom in pacing ourselves. And it’s a message Albertans in particular might want to take to heart, given the news this week that we work more hours than most other Canadians do.
There was more good news this week, though, sort of at least. Labelling of cosmetics and personal-care products is coming. Manufacturers have until November of next year to sell off unlabelled products. The only problem is that unless you’re a chemist and know what things like acenocoumarol, bendroflumethiazide and zoxazolamine actually are, shopping will continue to be overwhelming for label readers. Why not just leave the offensive, potentially dangerous chemicals right out, I want to know.
But the good news just kept coming this week: breast cancer survival rates seem to be levelling off. A 10-year survival rate reflects the numbers of patients still alive 10 years after the diagnosis of their cancer, and more of us are making it to the 10-year mark.
This could be really, really good news, and I so want it to be, but there are a few things to consider.
Earlier detection and more aggressive treatment may in fact be allowing more of us to make it to the 10-year mark, but it doesn’t mean we’re disease-free, or that we’ll make it to the next 10-year mark.
Survival rates often improve primarily because of improved lead time—the amount of time between diagnosis and death automatically increases with earlier detection, whether that early diagnosis leads to decreased mortality or not.
Also distorting the picture is death from other causes, often treatment-related death. Breast cancer patients that die from the treatment itself—the radiation or chemotherapy (yes, this happens)—don’t necessarily get recorded as breast cancer deaths. And if they’re not breast cancer deaths, mortality rates go down, and survival rates go up, whether things have really changed or not. Aggressive treatment may send the breast cancer running, but if that aggressive treatment included tamoxifen, the potential breast cancer statistic may have just jumped the fence to become a uterine cancer one instead.
The incidence rate, which reflects the proportion of new diagnoses of breast cancer during a specified period of time, unfortunately hasn’t changed, according to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation—it has been stable since 1993. We’re still getting it, same as before, just surviving a little longer.
I’m cynical, I know, but I can’t help but think that those campaigning for research funds are eager to announce some successes.
And ultimately, however accurate or inaccurate the survival rate pictures are, for the 22 000 Canadian women who will still get breast cancer this year, prevention would’ve been nicer.
The prevention people who keep insisting that prevention involves more than eating right and exercising—who keep insisting on industry regulation of carcinogens in our food and air and water and personal-care products—are the ones who have it right. V