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Autism, a brain disorder that interferes with communication and social skills, affected an estimated one in 110 American 8-year-olds in 2006, according to a federal study released Friday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at the medical diagnoses of 307,790 children who were age 8 in 2006. They found 2,757, or 0.9 percent, had been diagnosed with autism.

The CDC team found that autism cases were four to five times higher among boys than girls, with 1 in 70 boys and 1 in 315 girls identified.

The overall ratio is far higher than previous estimates that the incurable family of conditions affected 1 in 150 U.S. children. A few decades ago autism was thought to be rare.

The average increase since 2002 for boys was 60 percent while the average increase for girls was 48 percent, the study said.

The CDC also found autism was far more common among non-Hispanic white children, but found increases in autism among all racial groups included in the review.

Researchers reported a 55 percent increase in autism for white children, 41 for black children and 90 percent among Hispanic children. Estimates of increases for Asian/Pacific Islander children ranged from 1.0 percent to 16.2 percent, the CDC said.

‘BETTER DETECTION’

The CDC’s Catherine Rice, who led the study, said there was no single factor behind the rising numbers of the brain disease.

“Some of the increases are due to better detection, particularly among children who may not have come to attention in the past — including girls, Hispanic children and children without cognitive impairment,” Rice told reporters.

But she said something may be happening to make autism more common as well.

The researchers said most children with autism showed symptoms before age three, but identification is often not made until later. The CDC study found the average age of diagnosis was 4-1/2 years.

The study analyzed data collected from 11 Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network sites — in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

There is no cure for autism, a spectrum of diseases ranging from severe and profound inability to communicate and mental retardation to relatively mild symptoms. But experts believe intensive, early treatment can help many children with the disorder.

“Before the 1980s, the term ‘autism’ was used primarily to refer to autistic disorder and was thought to be rare, affecting approximately one in every 2,000 children,” the researchers wrote.

Parents and advocates have been alarmed by the rise in numbers since then, although some of the increase could be attributed to changes in diagnosis and classification.

The advocacy group Autism Speaks called on the U.S. government to step up its efforts to develop treatments.

“We need meaningful action now that acknowledges the scope of this problem and allocates the resources necessary to take the fight against autism to a new level,” co-founder Bob Wright said in a statement.

Autism research is due for a large infusion of money from President Barack Obama’s $5 billion plan to boost U.S. medical and scientific research.

“There’s a multi-pronged approach going on because we know that there is no single cause for autism. We’re not going to find the one answer,” the CDC’s Rice said.

Autism researchers are looking at a broad range of potential environmental factors, including household products, medical treatments, diet, food supplements and infections. Some recent studies have found strong evidence of several genetic causes for autism.

Pfizer Inc, the world’s largest drugmaker, announced in July that it has begun developing treatments for autism.

Women with the highest heart disease risk were the most likely to quit taking hormone therapy after it was shown to offer no protection against cardiovascular disease, a new analysis of national data shows.

Dr. Angela Hsu and colleagues from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City found that while 28 percent of women with heart disease were taking hormone replacement therapy in 1999-2000, just 8 percent were in 2003-2004. But for low-risk women, the decline was much smaller, from 20 percent to 17 percent over the same time period.

During the early 1990s, Hsu and her team note, hormone therapy was touted as an effective way to reduce heart disease risk in postmenopausal women. But in 2002, researchers halted a huge study of hormone therapy called the Women’s Health Initiative after they found hormones actually boosted the risk of heart disease, stroke, and potentially fatal blood clots known as pulmonary embolisms.

After word spread of hormone therapy risks, use dropped sharply, from around 11 million women 45 to 74 years old in 1999-2000 to 6 million by 2003-2004. Hsu and her colleagues hypothesized that women at the greatest risk of heart disease would account for most of this reduction in hormone use.

For women with cardiovascular disease, they found, hormone use dropped by 70 percent, while it fell by nearly 50 percent in women with two or more risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure or diabetes. Among women with one or fewer heart disease risk factors, however, use dropped just 15 percent, which wasn’t statistically significant.

The researchers also found the sharpest decline in hormone use among non-Hispanic white women, who had previously been most likely to use hormone replacement. Both non-Hispanic black women and Hispanic women were much less likely to be using hormone replacement therapy than white women in the first place, and for both groups there was no significant reduction in hormone therapy use.

And while use of hormones fell among all educational levels and all income levels, the biggest drop occurred among richer, more educated women.

Despite the declines the researchers observed, they note that 8 percent of women with heart disease and 14 percent of women with two or more heart disease risk factors were still taking hormone replacement therapy in 2003-2004. The researchers note that they have no information on how long these women took hormone replacement therapy, or why it was prescribed. (Short-term use to treat hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms is currently considered safe.)

The findings suggest, the researchers conclude, that women with heart disease or at the highest risk for heart disease were likely getting hormone replacement therapy to reduce heart risks, “a therapy that was never proven for this indication and ultimately found to be ineffective.”

Thinking about a loved one might help reduce physical pain, according to U.S. researchers, who said their findings show the importance of social relationships and of staying emotionally connected.

The University of California, Los Angeles, study included 25 young women who’d been in a good relationship with a boyfriend for more than six months. Moderately painful heat was applied to the women’s forearms as they looked at photos of their boyfriend, a stranger and a chair.

“When the women were just looking at pictures of their partner, they actually reported less pain to heat stimuli than when they were looking at pictures of an object or pictures of a stranger,” study co-author Naomi Eisenberger, an assistant professor of psychology and director of UCLA’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, said in a news release from the Association for Psychological Science. “Thus, the mere reminder of one’s partner through a simple photograph was capable of reducing pain.”

“This changes our notion of how social support influences people,” Eisenberger explained. “Typically, we think that in order for social support to make us feel good, it has to be the kind of support that is very responsive to our emotional needs. Here, however, we are seeing that just a photo of one’s significant other can have the same effect.”

In another experiment, the women reported less heat-related pain when they held the hand of their boyfriend, compared with when they held the hand of a stranger or held a squeeze ball.

The findings are published in the November issue of Psychological Science.

“This study demonstrates how much of an impact our social ties can have on our experience and fits with other work emphasizing the importance of social support for physical and mental health,” Eisenberger added.

When people think about pesticides and health, cancer and birth defects probably come to mind. But new research shows pesticide exposure may contribute to a much more common affliction: itchy, runny, stuffy noses.

“Pesticides have more potential consequences than we’ve considered. There are a lot of things they can contribute to,” Dr. Jane A. Hoppin, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle, North Carolina, told Reuters Health.

Hoppin is part of a team of researchers who have been studying over 57,000 licensed pesticide applicators since 1993. They began publishing their findings in 2000. Most of the people included in the current investigation, known as the Agricultural Health Study, are farmers, while the rest are workers hired to apply pesticides to crops, seed and animals.

Past studies have linked exposure to certain pesticides with upper respiratory symptoms like wheezing, so Hoppin and her team decided to investigate whether pesticides might cause rhinitis (nasal inflammation), too.

They looked at 2,245 commercial pesticide applicators, 74 percent of whom said they’d had an episode of rhinitis in the past year. This is much higher than the rate of rhinitis seen in the general population, which tops out at around 30 percent.

Exposure to five of the 34 pesticides that the researchers included in their analysis was associated with a greater risk of rhinitis. This included two very commonly used pesticides, 2,4-D and glyphosate; 45 percent and 52 percent of the study participants reporting rhinitis had been exposed to them, respectively.

People may also use these chemicals in their homes and gardens, Hoppin noted, but they’re likely to be exposed to lower concentrations, much less often, than licensed pesticide applicators.

Associations were also seen for diazinon, an insecticide banned for residential use since 2004; petroleum oil, which is often added to pesticides to enhance their stickiness; and benomyl, a rarely used fungicide.

The study only looked at a single point in time, Hoppin noted, so it couldn’t show whether pesticide exposure came before rhinitis, or vice versa. Nevertheless, she added, they found that the risk of rhinitis increased with the number of days a person used petroleum oil or diazinon, which hints at a causal relationship.

In people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS, high-risk behavior, HIV infection itself, as well as late initiation and early discontinuation of anti-HIV therapy all contribute to substantial decreases in life expectancy, United States researchers report.

Using a comprehensive computer model of HIV disease, the researchers simulated cohorts of HIV-infected individuals and compared them with uninfected individuals who had similar demographic characteristics.

“We estimated that for people in the United States living without HIV, life expectancy beginning at age 33 is an additional 43 years,” first author Dr. Elena Losina, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, told Reuters Health.

“High risk behavior, such as substance abuse, on average, accounts for an 8 year reduction in life expectancy,” Losina added.

HIV infection itself reduces life expectancy by an additional 12 years and a late start or premature discontinuation of HIV treatment further reduces life expectancy to a total of 23 years, she and colleagues report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

“The current therapy for HIV is very effective,” Losina commented, “but unless HIV-infected patients initiate treatment on time and stay on treatment, the treatment benefits would be truncated substantially.”

Minorities, especially minority women, tend to initiate therapy later and are more likely to drop off from care, and this “leads to disproportional losses in life expectancy in these population groups,” she said.

“There is a critical need for people with HIV to begin care in a timely way and to remain in care,” senior investigator Dr. Kenneth A. Freedberg, also from the Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a statement. “HIV testing for all adults in the United States, as currently recommended, with effective linkage to care, will have important survival benefits.”

Statins may boost the risk of fatigue and shortness of breath in some patients with heart failure, a new study suggests. But a second report found the cholesterol-reducing drugs reduce the risk of clots in those with cardiovascular disease, and experts think the benefits outweigh the risks.

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said patients shouldn’t reconsider their use of the statins based on the results of the small U.S. study.

“Patients with heart failure who have an indication for statin therapy, such as coronary artery disease or diabetes, should remain on physician-prescribed statin therapy,” Fonarow said.

At issue is treatment for heart failure, a condition that occurs when the heart fails to beat properly. An estimated 5.7 million people in the United States suffer from heart failure, which can cause fatigue, shortness of breath and fluid build-up in the lungs and legs.

“Approximately two-thirds of patients with heart failure have coronary artery disease,” Fonarow said. “In these patients, statins, while not improving overall survival, have been shown to lower the risk of a cardiovascular event and decrease the likelihood of being hospitalized. In patients with heart failure but without vascular disease, neither benefit nor harm has been demonstrated in clinical trials of statin therapy.”

Researchers at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the medical records of 136 patients with heart failure. They wanted to see how statin use, mainly of the drug atorvastatin (Lipitor), affected two types of heart failure — systolic and diastolic.

Fonarow explained that the heart fails to contract normally in people with systolic heart failure. In those with diastolic heart failure, the heart may not relax properly or be abnormally stiff, he said.

The study findings were to be released this week at the American College of Chest Physicians annual meeting, in San Diego.

Those who had diastolic heart failure and took a cholesterol drug had almost half as much exercise tolerance as those with the condition who didn’t take the drugs, the researchers found.

“Some patients with diastolic heart failure may be more prone to the adverse effect of statins on muscle. It may be that patients with particular preexisting factors will experience unfavorable results from statin therapy, including exercise intolerance, dyspnea [shortness of breath], and fatigue,” study author Lawrence P. Cahalin, a researcher at Northeastern University, said in a statement.

“Not all statins are alike, and not all patients are alike. Some statins are stronger than others and are likely to act differently, given particular patient characteristics, and produce different degrees of wanted and unwanted effects,” Cahalin said. “In our continuing study, we hope to identify patient characteristics that are associated with favorable and less than favorable results from statin therapy.”

For now, Cahalin said tests are in order if heart failure patients taking statins suffer from fatigue, shortness of breath and inability to exercise for very long.

In another study to be released at the meeting, researchers report that statins may help prevent blood clots in people with cardiovascular disease.

Previous research has linked atherosclerosis, a condition in which fatty material builds up along artery walls, and venous thrombosis (VTE). Researchers from Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, who were investigating the association between statin use and incidence of VTE, reviewed data on 593 patients who were hospitalized for heart attack or ischemic stroke.

“In our study, statin therapy demonstrated a protective effect on this group of patients, reducing their overall incidence of developing VTE,” said study author Dr. Danai Khemasuwan.

Patients in the non-statin group were three times as likely to develop VTE as patients receiving statins, they found.

Given the good news/bad news conclusions of these two reports, patients should not panic, experts said. Statins provide significant benefits for patients with cardiovascular disease, Dr. Kalpalatha Guntupalli, president of the American College of Chest Physicians, said in a statement. However, as for any new medication prescribed, clinicians should closely monitor the effects that different types of statins have on individual patients.