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A small but growing number of women with breast cancer are choosing to have the unaffected breast removed in an effort to prevent a recurrence, researchers reported Monday.

Using data from New York State hospitals, the researchers found that between 1995 and 2005, the prevalence of preventive mastectomy among women with a history of cancer in one breast more than doubled.

The procedure was performed in about 2 percent of all women diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995 and 1996 — rising to just over 4 percent by 2005.

In contrast, there was only a small increase in preventive mastectomies among women who had no personal history of breast cancer but were considered at risk because of a strong family history of the disease.

The findings suggest that while the number of preventive mastectomies performed each year in New York was small, the procedure is becoming more common, the researchers report in the journal Cancer.

The more marked increase among women with a history of breast cancer raises some concerns, senior researcher Dr. Stephen B. Edge, of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, told Reuters Health.

The central issue, he explained, is that there is no evidence that removing the unaffected breast improves long-term survival.

While preventive mastectomy likely cuts the chances of cancer developing in the second breast, the ultimate impact on survival is a more complicated matter.

Edge noted that among women who are not at high genetic risk of breast cancer — about 95 percent of all breast cancer patients — the odds of developing cancer in the second breast are between 10 percent and 20 percent over 20 to 30 years.

The large majority of those cancers, he added, are detected early and effectively treated.

So in deciding whether to have a preventive mastectomy, women need to consider the uncertain long-term benefits and the risk of complications — which include bleeding, infection and nerve damage.

“Women need to be carefully counseled on the issues of the risks of developing a second cancer, and the largely minimal or no impact this may have on their survival,” Edge said.

The study findings are based on data from hospital discharge records and the New York State cancer registry. Of the nearly 70,000 women who underwent mastectomies between 1995 and 2005, 9 percent — 6,275 women — had one for preventive reasons.

Of women having a preventive mastectomy, 81 percent had a history of breast cancer. The number of these procedures rose from 295 in 1995 to 683 in 2005.

Meanwhile, the number of preventive procedures performed among women with no personal history of breast cancer showed a much a smaller change — 106 in 1995, versus 128 in 2005.

The data cannot offer any potential reasons for the increases, and Edge said there is “clearly” a need for more research into the factors that are influencing women’s decisions on preventive mastectomy.

Athletic teens sleep better than their couch-potato peers and have fewer problems concentrating at school, a new study finds.

Researchers in Switzerland asked 434 adolescents with an average age of 17 to keep a log of their sleep and daytime habits for one week. The 258 student athletes, part of the “Swiss Olympic Classes,” exercised about 17.5 hours a week. The 176 more sedentary teens exercised for about 4.5 hours a week.

The teen athletes reported waking fewer times during the night, higher energy levels during the day and a greater ability to concentrate than their less-active peers.

The study, by researchers at the Basel Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel, Switzerland, appears online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“This study shows that, in adolescents, being an athlete is predictive of high sleep quality, low daytime tiredness and high concentration during the day,” said Dr. David Rapoport, director of the sleep medicine program at the New York University School of Medicine. “While it is entirely possible that the good sleep and the favorable daytime profile is caused by exercise, the data do not allow us to conclude this directly.”

Rapoport said that there may be reasons other than the increased exercise helping athletes sleep better than others.

“There are other factors, such as having a favorable psychological profile or predisposition, and there may be something about athletes other than exercise, such as self-discipline, which leads to their ability to sleep well,” he said.

A sensor made with gold nanoparticles can detect lung cancer in a patient’s breath and may offer a diagnosis before tumors show up on an x-ray, Israeli scientists said on Sunday.

The device, which the developers say would be cheap enough for everyday use by family doctors, detected lung cancer with 86 percent accuracy and may offer a way to screen for a disease not usually diagnosed until it has spread and is no longer curable.

It uses sensors based on gold nanoparticles to detect specific compounds — volatile organic compounds (VOC) — that lung cancer patients have in high levels in exhaled breath.

Breath testing is already recognized as a way of linking specific VOCs in exhaled breath to a certain medical conditions. In 2006, researchers found dogs could be trained to smell cancer on the breath of patients with 99 percent accuracy.

Hossam Haick, one of the scientists working on the sensor, said he hoped it could soon allow doctors to have a simple test at hand to screen people during routine appointments.

“Conventional diagnostic methods for lung cancer are unsuitable for widespread screening because they are expensive and occasionally miss tumors,” Haick and colleagues wrote in Nature Nanotechnology.

“This device is not at all expensive. The whole idea in this development was to devise something very sensitive, and very cheap and very portable,” Haick, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, told Reuters.

Lung cancer kills 1.3 million people a year and is the leading cause of cancer death across the world. Only 15 percent of patients live more than 5 years, in part because the disease is usually diagnosed so late.

The device developed by Haick and his colleagues is a nine-sensor array consisting of gold nanoparticles combined with different organic groups that respond to various VOCs released by lung tumors.

They tested 56 healthy people and 40 patients who had been diagnosed with lung cancer using conventional methods.

They found the sensor could distinguish the breath of lung cancer patients from the of the control group with more than 86 percent accuracy.

Haick said the patented device needed to be more rigorously tested and obtain approval from drug licensing authorities before it could go into production.

“I would say that could take three to five years,” he said.

Various other methods exist to measure VOCs, including a breath test using color spots, but existing techniques are often expensive, slow and sometimes require the breath to be concentrated or dehumidified first.