By Steve Rothaus

More than 70% of lesbian and gay and respondents over age 40 reported concerns about losing the ability to care for themselves in a recent study conducted by Community Marketing, Inc. The majority also feared becoming sick or disabled, being dependent on others, and outliving their savings. When asked which resources they would rely on for long-term financial and social care as they age, less than 8% of respondents said they would place significant reliance on long-term care insurance, leaving us to wonder how prepared lesbians and gay men are for the kinds of health issues that often come with old age. Respondents placed the most emphasis on:

• Health care insurance: 22%
• Medicare: 20%
• Personal savings: 19%
• Social Security: 16%

65% of respondents expect for provide care to a partner sometime in the future, 44% for a parent, and 34% for a friend. However, respondents were less certain of who would care for them – 59% said a partner would be there to help care for them, 29% a friend, and 20% no one.

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Men with jobs that require them to be physically active may be getting benefits beyond salary and health insurance - they may be at a decreased risk of developing prostate cancer, according to a study at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center.

Researchers studied more than 2,100 men who worked at the Rocketdyne facility in the San Fernando Valley, many of whom were exposed to radiation and chemicals that may have increased their risk for certain cancers. The research team identified 362 men who developed prostate cancer and compared them to 1,805 men of similar age and socioeconomic status who did not get prostate cancer.

“The message from this study for today is that if you’re more active, you may be able to prevent this cancer from happening,” said Beate Ritz, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher, an associate professor of epidemiology in the UCLA School of Public Health and the study’s senior author.* “If you have a desk job, do something physically active to counterbalance it.”

The case-control study nested within a larger cohort of more than 10,000 subjects focused on men who worked at the nuclear and rocket engine testing facility from the 1950s to the early 1990s. The cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed between January 1988 and December 1999. Researchers obtained cancer incidence data for the workers from the California Cancer Registry and seven other cancer registries in neighboring states where workers may have moved after retirement.

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Black barbers are being enlisted in the campaign to get black men tested for colon cancer

Oak Brook, Ill. -  Each year more than 150,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with colon cancer and over 50,000 will die from the disease. Death rates from colon cancer are higher among African Americans than any other population group in the U.S. The American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), representing the specialists in colon cancer screening, advises African Americans to speak to their physician about getting screened for colon cancer.

"Colon cancer is preventable with regular screening and is curable when detected early," said ASGE President Grace H. Elta, MD, FASGE. "All men and women are at risk for colon cancer and should begin screening for the disease at age 50. It concerns me that African Americans are being diagnosed with colon cancer at a higher rate than other populations. This disease does not discriminate against race or gender; your age is the single most important risk factor. I encourage African Americans to talk to their doctor about colon cancer screening."

Colorectal cancer, also referred to as colon cancer, is cancer of the colon or rectum and is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. for men and women combined. Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer among African American men and women, with more than 16,000 cases estimated to be diagnosed each year and approximately 7,000 deaths annually. Some people are at a higher risk for the disease because of age, lifestyle or personal and family medical history. People who are diagnosed at early stages have a 90 percent chance of a cure and surviving. That is why screening for prevention and early detection is so important. Some studies have shown that African Americans are more frequently diagnosed with colon cancer at a younger age, leading some experts to suggest that African Americans begin screening prior to age 50. African Americans should ask their physician about an appropriate screening schedule.

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By Leslie Goldman

Lidocaine, methyl salicylate, hydrocortisone. You probably don't think twice about using over-the-counter creams with these ingredients when you need to soothe a sore muscle or bug bite, prep your legs before hair removal, or combat that vaginal itch. If the product's available without a prescription, it can't hurt you, right? Wrong.

One study estimates that women apply 175 chemicals a day from cosmetics, creams, and toiletries alone.

Take Arielle Newman, for instance, a New York City-area high school track star who died last year from a sports-cream overdose. She'd used large amounts of popular OTC pain-relieving ointments like Icy Hot and Ben-Gay on her sore muscles. The key ingredient in such products is methyl salicylate, which built up in Newman's body, may have interacted with other aspirin-based meds she was using, and caused her to go into cardiac arrest.

Another case: In 2005, Shiri Berg, 22, of North Carolina died of a lidocaine overdose. Following the instructions she'd been given by the staff at a local hair-removal clinic, she generously applied a numbing gel to her legs, then covered them in plastic wrap. On her way to the clinic to get hair lasered from her legs, Berg passed out. She went into convulsions, then a coma. Eight days later, she was dead.

Women dying in the name of hair removal? Athletes putting themselves at risk by using mentholated muscle soothers? Extreme situations, to be sure. But with all the stuff each of us slathers on our skin (one study estimates that women apply 175 chemicals a day from cosmetics, creams, and toiletries alone), it's no surprise that potential hazards are lurking.

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Noticing a few extra hairs in your comb lately? Is your new hairstyle a result of trying to conceal areas of thinning hair rather than a fashion choice? Are you paying more attention to the multitude of advertisements promoting hair growth? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be one of the millions of people experiencing some form of hair loss. But to whom should you turn for help? The key to managing the condition is to consult a dermatologist, a physician trained in the diagnosis and treatment of all forms of hair loss.

Speaking today at the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology, dermatologist Amy J. McMichael, MD, FAAD, associate professor of dermatology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., discussed the most common forms of hair loss, current treatment options and possible futuristic therapies.

"For both men and women, hair loss can be devastating and adversely affect one's overall quality of life," said Dr. McMichael. "As with most medical conditions, the key to controlling the hair loss cycle is to seek treatment early. The problem is that most people tend to ignore the first signs of hair loss or delay treatment, hoping that their hair will regrow on its own. Since there are many types and causes of hair loss, it is vital that patients seek a proper evaluation by a dermatologist at the first sign of a problem."

Androgenetic Alopecia (Pattern Hair Loss)

The most common form of hair loss, androgenetic alopecia (commonly referred to as male- or female-pattern hair loss) is a hereditary condition that affects men and women. In male-pattern hair loss, a receding hairline is common, as well as hair loss on top of the scalp. Women, on the other hand, typically maintain their frontal hairline but tend to have visible thinning over the front and top of the scalp. However, occasionally a man will experience female-pattern hair loss and a woman will show signs of male-pattern hair loss for reasons unknown to researchers.

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When America’s first lady disclosed that she had breast cancer, the story made headlines. That was back in 1974, and until Betty Ford made her courageous announcement, public discussion of the disease was taboo. Mrs. Ford was cured, and the publicity she generated promoted crucial cancer research and helped motivate millions of women to get life-saving tests and treatment.

Because of the frank discussions Mrs. Ford initiated, a celebrity’s breast cancer has moved off the front page. But in 2003, when a former U.S. senator made a similar announcement, it was again headline news, this time because the patient was a man, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts.

Men like Senator John Kerry and General Colin Powell are increasingly forthright about prostate cancer, but most guys are reluctant to own up to “women’s problems” like breast disease. But men have breasts, too. The male breast is much smaller than its female counterpart, and it cannot produce milk. Because of this smaller size and simpler structure, breast disease is much less common in men than women. Still, men can develop important breast problems, both benign and malignant. Early detection is the key to a successful outcome, so every man should understand the basic elements of male breast disease.

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'Shaft' Star Battled Male Breast Cancer, Now Raises Awareness

By Katharine Stoel Gammon

When Richard Roundtree was diagnosed with cancer in 1993, he was bowled over.

"The doctor told me, 'You have breast cancer,'" recalls Roundtree, who played John Shaft in the iconic 1971 film "Shaft." I heard the cancer part first -- it was only later that I heard the breast part. I couldn't believe it."

Roundtree found the lump while filming a movie in Costa Rica.

"It just didn't feel right," he says. "I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, so I decided to get it checked out when I was back in L.A."

For years after his diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, Roundtree kept quiet about his status as a cancer survivor.

"I was in the closet, so to speak, until after the fifth year when I was cancer free," he says.

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Leading a sedentary lifestyle may make us genetically old before our time, a study suggests.

A study of twins found those who were physically active during their leisure time appeared biologically younger than their sedentary peers.

The researchers found key pieces of DNA called telomeres shortened more quickly in inactive people. It is thought that could signify faster cellular ageing.

The King's College London study appears in Archives of Internal Medicine.

An active lifestyle has been linked to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

However, the latest research suggests that inactivity not only makes people more vulnerable to disease, but may actually speed up the ageing process itself.

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By Krista Mahr

Prostate cancer may not be at the top of your list of topics for dinner conversation with Dad. But you might reconsider: About 10% of prostate cancer cases are linked with family history, and evidence for the disease's genetic roots is growing. Researchers have recently identified a series of gene markers that, when present with family history of the disease, increase a patient's risk of prostate cancer more than nine times. Those markers, say researchers, can be detected in a simple saliva or blood sample — good news for a condition whose prognosis is improved by early detection.

In a study published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a team of American and Swedish researchers reported the results of a DNA analysis of over 4,700 Swedish men. The study found that patients whose genes contained four of the five common variants, found to be associated with prostate cancer in 2006 and 2007, had a 400% to 500% increased risk of developing the disease. That risk shot up to over 900% in patients who had the genetic variants and a family history, accounting for nearly half of the prostate cancer cases in the study. "We've never seen this before," says Dr. Jianfeng Xu of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study conducted jointly with researchers at Sweden's Karolinksa Institute and Johns Hopkins Brady Urological Institute, among others. Because the variants are common in the general population and their collective association with cancer is so strong, Xu says his findings could help doctors move quickly into the next phase of prostate cancer research: "How to predict individual risk for prostate cancer and catch it early."

By Heather Knight

City and state officials announced an agreement Thursday with developers of the former UC Berkeley Extension site in San Francisco to include more affordable housing - more than doubling the number of such dwellings for the 413-unit project at 55 Laguna St.

While 66 of the 328 rental apartments for families had been designated as affordable, the new agreement makes an 85-unit complex for seniors - most of whom are expected to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender - affordable as well. The units for seniors previously were to be rented at the market rate.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, Assemblyman Mark Leno, state Sen. Carole Migden, the mayor's Office of Housing and gay rights and housing activists pushed to increase the percentage of affordable dwellings in the project from 16 percent to 37 percent. On Thursday, they celebrated the agreement with the University of California and A.F. Evans, the development company hired for the project.

Older adults who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) have “a history of caregiving” that creates networks of people who support each other during their senior years, according to a questionnaire study of 199 LGB seniors. The study found that more than two-thirds of the participants had provided care to one or more people during the previous five years.

“These findings contradict old myths about elderly gay people leading lonely lives of quiet desperation,” said Dr. Robert-Jay Green, executive director of the Rockway Institute, a national center for LGBT research and public policy. “LGB seniors create vibrant communities of care that overcome the difficulties posed by discrimination or by greater levels of rejection from their biological families.”

The study was conducted by Arnold H. Grossman and Eliza Dragowski of New York University, and Anthony D’Augelli of Pennsylvania State University and was published in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, Vol. 18, No. 3/4, 2007, pp. 15-38. The sample of LGB adults was aged 40 to 85 and was recruited from agencies providing services to LGB elders in New York City and Los Angeles. About one-quarter of participants were age 40 to 59; the remaining three-quarters were 60 years or older. The group was highly educated, with 63 percent having completed a bachelor’s or master’s degree.

Encore House, an unusual non-profit enterprise dedicated to providing housing for gay and lesbian seniors. Located at the corner of Sunset and Ivar (at the same intersection as the Farmer’s Market and across the street from Sunset + Vine), Encore House contains 104 rental units, 3000 square feet of public space and a total of 460 parking spaces.

This $18 million project was developed by the Gay & Lesbian Elder Housing Group and McCormack Baron Salazar with the help of $5 million of CRA funds.

African-American gays report existence is comfortable, somewhat invisible

By Mark Melady

Kathy J. Linton grew up in Dorchester believing African-American lesbians did not exist.

“When I did come out my family told me I couldn’t be gay because there was no such thing as a black lesbian,” said Ms. Linton, education and outreach director at the Rape Crisis Center of Central Massachusetts. “I didn’t know I existed practically up until about 10 minutes before I came out.”

Ms. Linton and other gay blacks living in Worcester still experience some degree of the invisibility willed on them by segments of the straight black community, especially the black ministry. But though they are a minority within a minority, they describe their lives here as comfortable, if sedate, and largely free of racial or gender prejudice.

They support gay marriage and codifying anti-discrimination protection based on sexual preference and expanding hate crimes to include gays, but they are hardly monolithic in their views about life, love, racism within the wider gay community and, for that matter, whether marriage and greater straight acceptance puts homosexuals in danger of being “normalized.”

Rodney Glasgow, director of diversity at Worcester Academy, calls gay marriage a human right while acknowledging that the difference between a civil and human right may be semantics. He opposes the notion that gay marriage is good because it will eventually bestow normalcy on homosexuals.

By Gary J. Gates

The well-publicized failure of Gov. Ernie Fletcher's campaign to secure a last-minute surge in conservative voters by telling them that Gov.-elect Steven Beshear would recreate Kentucky as a "new San Francisco" marks an important change in both Kentucky and national political strategies.

New analyses of Census Bureau data suggest that this failed "gay card" strategy may in part be a result of a dramatically more visible lesbian and gay population in some of the most conservative parts of the country -- including Kentucky's largest city, Louisville.

Since 1990, the Census Bureau has tracked the presence of same-sex "unmarried partners," commonly understood to be lesbian and gay couples. From an initial count of about 145,000 same-sex couples in 1990, the 2006 data show that this population has increased fivefold to nearly 780,000 couples. The number of same-sex couples grew more than 21 times faster than did the U.S. population.

Kentucky has seen an astounding twelve-fold increase from 862 same-sex couples counted in 1990 to more than 10,300 in 2006. In the same time period, the number of self-identified same-sex couples in other socially conservative Mountain, Midwest and Southern states exceeded a six-fold increase. Compare that with liberal East and West Coast states, where increases have been less than four-fold. Now either there's been a wildly successful gay recruitment campaign, or lots more lesbian and gay couples are "coming out" on government surveys.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Food and Drug Administration has decided to put more prominent warnings of potential hearing loss on impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.

An FDA statement said the goal was "to display more prominently the potential risk of sudden hearing loss, and to guide consumers on what to do if they experience sudden problems with their hearing."

Revatio, used to treat pulmonary hypertension, also will get the same labelling changes, the FDA said.

The warnings followed what the administration called "a very small number" of patients reporting hearing loss and at times ringing in the ears and dizziness.

"Because some level of hearing loss is usually associated with the aging process, patients on these drugs may not think to talk to their doctor about it," said Janet Woodcock, MD, FDA deputy commissioner for scientific and medical programs, chief medical officer, and acting director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Bounce back

By Randy Shore

Two Vancouver businessmen are in the planning stages to build a luxury retirement complex for gays.

Partnered with RainbowVision of Santa Fe, N.M., Dean Malone and Darren Stoltz have held three quietly advertised "town hall" meetings in gay and lesbian communities in Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster.

Malone and Stoltz run Plum Living, which provides in-home support and health care services for gays and lesbians.

"We told people about the meetings through our little network of people and word of mouth and expected maybe 10 or 15 people to show up," said Malone. "We got more than 50 people at each meeting, so I think this is something that the community wants."

Very few care homes welcome openly gay residents, said Chris Morrissey of Vancouver's GLBT Generations Project, adding that after years or even a lifetime of living out of the closet, many gays face the prospect of hiding their sexual orientation to get the care they need in old age.

By Chris Kearney

For more than nine decades gay pensioner Mike Soper hid his sexuality for fear of persecution.

Now, at the age of 93, he has become one of the country's oldest authors after publishing his first book, The Heart Entrapped - a gay romance.

Mr Soper only decided to write the novel after 'coming out' at the age of 91 - and only told his fellow residents at the The Old Vicarage nursing home, in Moulsford, where he lives, after they asked to read his novel.

He said: "When all the old ladies heard about the book, they asked if they could read it. So I had to tell them I was gay and that it was a gay-themed novel."

Mr Soper, a former academic at Christ Church, Oxford, until 1981, said it had been nice to be honest about his sexuality after so many years.

It's more valuable than follow-up screenings, study finds

By Alan Mozes

(HealthDay News) -- A first-time colonoscopy to remove precancerous polyps plays a bigger role in reducing the risk of dying from colon cancer than do follow-up screenings done years later, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that patients who forego follow-up colonoscopies in the decade following the initial procedure will still reap the benefits sown by a first removal of polyps -- called a polypectomy.

Post-polypectomy colonoscopies do, however, become more important in protecting against colon cancer death as patients enter their second decade following the first colonoscopy, the study authors said.

"The initial colonoscopy has a major impact -- a huge, huge effect -- on reducing colon cancer deaths," said study lead author Ann G. Zauber, an associate attending biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's department of epidemiology and biostatistics, in New York City.

"The risk for dying from colon cancer drops 90 percent after the initial colonoscopy," she said. "And in the first 10 years, 90 percent of that reduction is due to that first procedure. Only 10 percent of the risk drop is due to follow-up colonoscopies."

As baby boomers reach the age when prostate cancer is most prevalent, scientists are working quickly to develop new treatments and encourage diet changes

By Jennifer Barrett Ozols

Daniel Kronenfeld was 64 and in good health in 1997 when he got an abnormally high result from a routine PSA screening, which measures the levels of a specific protein produced by the prostate gland. Three biopsies later, the prognosis was confirmed: he had prostate cancer.

“Before that, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to prostate cancer,” says Kronenfeld, now 72. “But once you get it, you find out about all these people around you that had it or then get it subsequently.”

In fact, one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime, and the rate is even higher among African-American men. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among all American men; it is also the second most deadly. An estimated 232,000 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, and about 30,000 men will die from the disease. And those numbers are expected to climb as the baby-boom generation reaches its 50s and 60s. After turning 50, a man’s chance of developing prostate cancer increases rapidly with more than 70 percent of all prostate cancer cases diagnosed in men over the age of 65.

Science Daily — African-American men are more likely to have their prostate cancer return after treatment, but their disease is no more aggressive when it does recur than that of their white counterparts, according to a study led by Duke Prostate Center researchers.

"Our study found that African-American men have a slightly higher risk of what is known as PSA recurrence, which is a blood test that indicates the presence of cancer based on the levels of a certain biomarker known as prostate-specific antigen," said Stephen Freedland, M.D., a urologist at Duke and senior researcher on the study. "We were encouraged, however, to see that their disease is not necessarily more aggressive than that of white men, once it has recurred."

African-American men tend to have higher PSA levels at initial diagnosis of prostate cancer, as well, despite being diagnosed at younger ages. This suggests that there may be an underlying genetic and biologic component that predisposes African-American men to prostate disease, Freedland said, highlighting the need for black men to have prostate screening early and often.