CANCER SOCIETY UPDATES PROSTATE ADVICE

The American Cancer Society has updated its advice about prostate cancer screening.

The society's new guidelines urge doctors to talk to men and give them plenty of information before they have a PSA test to make sure they understand its limits.

Recent studies suggest the PSA test may lead to unnecessary treatment for many men.

The test can't clearly indicate whether a cancer is aggressive or harmless.

The cancer society has not recommended routine screening for most men since the 1990s.

"Treatment of early prostate cancer leads to some very clear risks. And all of this is tempered by the fact that we don't know whether we're doing anybody any good," said Dr. Andrew Wolf, lead author of the guidelines. "It was very clear that informed decision-making needed to be the centrepiece of the guidelines."

MOUTH-TO-MOUTH CPR STILL BEST FOR CHILDREN

The American Heart Association has recommended a "hands only" approach to CPR since 2008, emphasizing the importance of performing rapid chest compressions on victims of sudden cardiac arrest.

The group decided to nix the mouth-to-mouth portion of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in part because studies show that it doesn't improve overall survival and, in part, to increase the odds that a bystander would perform any kind of CPR at all.

But a new study finds that the old-fashioned version of CPR is more effective at resuscitating children in cardiac arrest.

Japanese researchers examined the medical records of 5,170 youths aged 17 and younger who were treated by emergency medical personnel for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the years 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Unfortunately, only 9 per cent of those children survived, and even fewer -- 3 per cent -- had a "favourable neurological outcome."

But the ones who got CPR from a bystander stood a much better chance of preserving their neurological function than those who didn't -- 4.5 per cent vs. 1.9 per cent, according to a report published online yesterday by the journal Lancet.

The researchers also found that conventional CPR was more likely to result in a "favourable neurological outcome" than compression-only CPR.

In their analysis, 7.2 per cent of children given chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth had a good outcome, compared with 1.6 per cent of kids who got compressions only.

In a commentary accompanying the study, Spanish researchers say the reason is probably that most cases of sudden cardiac arrest in children -- 71 per cent in the Japanese study and more than 90 per cent in other studies -- are probably caused by noncardiac events.

In such cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is helpful.

Only about a third of cases in adults are thought to have noncardiac origins. When cardiac arrest has a cardiac cause, either type of CPR works equally well.

They conclude that bystanders should continue to provide traditional CPR to children in cardiac arrest.

NO-DRUGS DEPRESSION RELIEF DURING PREGNANCY

Up to a quarter of all women suffer from depression during pregnancy, and many are reluctant to take antidepressants.

Now a new study suggests that acupuncture may provide some relief during pregnancy, even though it has not been found to be effective against depression in general.

In the Stanford University study, almost two-thirds of women who had depression-specific acupuncture experienced a reduction in at least 50 per cent of their symptoms, compared with just under half of the women treated with either massage or regular acupuncture.

The findings appear in the March issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Lead author Rachel Manber said the results suggested that some symptoms of depression during pregnancy might be related to physical discomfort that is alleviated by acupuncture.