News about health and medicine

Decaf drinkers had higher cholesterol

Fresh questions are percolating about the health effects of coffee, this time the decaffeinated variety.

One of the first substantial studies to test it like a drug found higher blood levels of cholesterol-precursor fats in those drinking decaf vs. regular coffee or none at all.

But the differences were very small.

"I don't think there's a health threat," regardless of which type of coffee is consumed, said Dr. H. Robert Superko, of Fuqua Heart Center in Atlanta, who did the study when previously at Stanford University. He reported on it last month at an American Heart Association conference.

Study participants were given Mr. Coffee machines, premeasured bags of Maxwell House and periodic blood tests so scientists could tell just how much caffeine and coffee they had consumed over eight weeks.

The 187 volunteers were put into three groups: no coffee, 3 to 6 cups a day of regular, or 3 to 6 cups of decaf. Coffee was consumed black, no cream or sugar. Diet surveys were taken for a week at the beginning and the end so researchers could evaluate whether changes in eating habits might have affected results.

The result: decaf drinkers had modestly higher levels — 8 to 18 percent — of fatty acids and precursors of LDL or bad cholesterol than the others.

Antidepressant cuts the appeal of meth

A common antidepressant, bupropion, can reduce the craving for methamphetamine, providing the possibility of a drug treatment for the powerfully addictive stimulant, according to a study to be published last month.

Dr. Thomas F. Newton, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the study, found that subjects who were given bupropion reported a lesser high after treatment as well as a less-intense craving after watching a video of actors favorably portraying meth use.

Although the four-week study involved only 20 patients, its results were encouraging because there is no available drug treatment for methamphetamine addiction.

Bupropion, sold under the trade name Wellbutrin, has long been used as an antidepressant and treatment to stop smoking.

Heard the latest urban legend?

Many women turn to professional waxing to get rid of unwanted hair, but could the practice put salon customers at risk for herpes?

A new e-mail making the rounds warns that it could. The message cites a woman's call to a radio station explaining how she contracted herpes — a virus that mostly causes painful oral or genital sores and blisters — after having her lips and eyebrows waxed at a nail salon in New York.

"The married woman who stated that she never cheated was wondering how she possibly got herpes not only on her lip but on her eyebrows," the e-mail states.

Here's how, the e-mail suggests: Many salons don't change wax tools between customers. According to the e-mail, "If someone has herpes those bacteria are now on the stick and now the bacteria festers and grows in the hot wax."

Snopes.com, a Web site that identifies and vets urban legends, says there's no truth to the suggestion, citing information from the National Herpes Hot Line.

According to Eileen Dunne, a medical epidemiologist who specializes in sexually transmitted diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, herpes is a "very fragile" virus that is transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, making transmission via hot wax at a salon "very, very unlikely."

Seattle Times wire services