Health Care Article

WASHINGTON: Eating or drinking a lot of products containing soy and isoflavones can result in reduced sperm count among men, a Harvard School of Public Health study has shown.

“There has been a lot of interest on whether soy affects fertility because many studies in animals suggest that this is the case, but there are very few studies in humans,” said researcher and lead study
author Jorge Chavarro. “This is only the third study to look at whether soy food has a relationship with
fertility in humans and the first one to find an association in agreement to the animal studies,” he said.

Soy contains isoflavones, an organic compound which acts like female hormones and appears to impede a man’s ability to produce sperm. “Isoflavones are structurally similar to estrogen and can mimic the action of estrogen in the body,” said Chavarro.

“Soy is expected to have estrogen-like activity in many organs and tissues which can be beneficial for some things but it’s certainly not beneficial for sperm production, at least that’s what animal models
suggest.” The Harvard study examined the soy intake of 99 men, determined to be part of couples experiencing fertility difficulties, over the course of three months. - AFP

KUALA LUMPUR: Former teacher Abdollah Amat was wheeled into the Trauma and Emergency Unit
of a public medical centre here in the wee hours of the morning a fortnight ago after complaining of
numbness in his hands and feet.

The 62-year-old city dweller also had tingling sensation on his skin along with fatigue, nausea and chest discomfort. A blood test revealed that his blood potassium level was 7.2 mmol/l. The permissible level for a person is 3.5-5.5 mmol/l. “The doctors who attended to me said I could have suffered
a heart seizure any time,” said Abdollah, who is also a kidney failure patient.

He was diagnosed as having hyperkalemia, a condition where the blood potassium level surpasses
the maximum tolerable point. “The doctors advised me to watch my diet, especially on consuming
less ‘ulam’, my favourite food,” he said. A senior medical science officer at the University Malaya
Medical Centre, Kan Chok On, said potassium is a mineral found naturally in food. It plays a crucial
role in normal muscle and nerve activity, particularly the heart.

“It is a mineral necessary for normal muscle and heart function. However, for some people, high
levels of potassium is dangerous,” said Kan, who works at the centre’s nephrology unit. “The kidneys
remove excess potassium. People with kidney failure have reduced ability to remove excess potassium, causing accumulation of potassium in the blood.” Kan, who has more than two decades of experience dealing with haemodialysis patients, said excessive potassium is flushed out from the body system via the kidneys.

“Any damage to the kidneys, or when these organs are not working properly, may cause an increase
in the potassium level, leading to hyperkalemia,” he said. “Ulam, like petai, and the various green pucuk like pucuk paku, pucuk ubi, daun selom, ulam raja and other green leafy vegetables contain high levels of potassium.

“So do fruits like banana, orange, kiwi, papaya, durian and honeydew as well as coconut and prune juices. You have to exercise caution and limit your consumption of vegetables like bayam (spinach), kangkung (water spinach) and sawi (Chinese mustard).”

The U.S Food and Drug Administration adviser on Wednesday said that Drugs designed to control type 2 diabetes should be subjected to more through safety reviews to ensure they don’t raise the risk of heart problems.The panel of outside experts voted 14-to-2, at the end of a two-day meeting, to recommend that all makers of these drugs conduct long-term cardiovascular trials, even if the drugs show no signs of heart problems in initial trials.

Majority of the panel members also recommended that trials assessing cardiovascular risk should be carry out before a drug is approved for the market; these could be a part of a phase III trial to rule out any significant heart risk. Long-term trials could follow once the drugs was on the market, the adviser said.

Currently, the FDA only requires that drugs for type 2 diabetes lower blood sugar, which is thought to protect diabetics from the debilitating side effects of the disease. (more…)

A compound found in dehydrated tomatoes may help quash prostate cancer tumours, new animal research suggests. Past studies have come to conflicting conclusions as to whether tomatoes or lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, might offer prostate cancer protection, with one recent study finding no correlation between men’s blood levels of lycopene and their risk of prostate cancer.

However, the new findings, reported in the journal Cancer Research, suggest that the processing of the tomato may be a key factor. Researchers found that a form of carbohydrate called FruHis, found
in dehydrated tomatoes, appeared to protect rats from developing prostate tumours. The greatest protection came from dehydrated tomatoes that had been rehydrated into tomato paste and supplemented with additional FruHis. (more…)