FAT BITCH

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A single joint of marijuana obstructs the flow of air as much as smoking up to five tobacco cigarettes, but long-term pot use does not increase the risk of developing emphysema, new research suggests.

The study by New Zealand's Medical Research Institute found that longtime pot smokers can develop symptoms of asthma and bronchitis, along with obstruction of the large airways and excessive lung inflation. The paper was released Tuesday ahead of its publication in the journal Thorax.

"The study shows that one cannabis joint causes a similar degree of lung damage as between 2.5 and five tobacco cigarettes," said lead author Sarah Aldington.

However, the researchers found that the progressive chronic lung disease emphysema, often associated with cigarette smoking, was uncommon among marijuana smokers. Only 1.3 percent of the long-term pot smokers were found to have signs of the disease compared to 16.3 percent of those who combined marijuana and tobacco, and 18.9 percent of those who only smoked tobacco.

Marijuana smokers had symptoms that included wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and phlegm - all of which were associated with tobacco smokers, except chest tightness.

The study, which used lung function tests, high-resolution X-rays and questionnaires, also revealed that among marijuana smokers damage occurred to the small, fine airways which are important for taking in oxygen and removing waste gases. The extent of damage rose in proportion to the number of joints smoked.

Last week, another study published in The Lancet medical journal suggested that using marijuana may increase the likelihood of becoming psychotic, with even infrequent use potentially raising the overall small risk by up to 40 percent.

The three-year Thorax study involved 339 people in New Zealand, where pot smoking is fairly common. An estimated 160 million people use marijuana worldwide.

Participants were recruited into four groups based on smoking habits - nonsmokers, tobacco-only smokers, tobacco and marijuana smokers, and marijuana-only smokers.

To qualify as a long-term marijuana user, participants had to have smoked a minimum of one joint a day for five years, said institute director Richard Beasley, who also participated in the study. Tobacco users had to have smoked a pack a day for one year.

Earlier studies have shown that smoking one joint results in three to five times more carbon monoxide and tar inhaled than smoking a cigarette of the same size. The New Zealand research also showed that the "products of combustion" in marijuana are very similar to tobacco, Beasley said.

Part of the reason for this is the way joints are smoked, with users often inhaling and holding the smoke in longer for a better hit. Marijuana joints typically do not have filters and they have shorter butts than cigarettes with a higher smoke temperature. Pot also is commonly smoked through various types of pipes.

Jeff Garrett, president of the Australia-New Zealand Thoracic Society, who was not involved in the study, said that although researchers found emphysema among marijuana smokers relatively rare, he emphasized that it does occur.

Hospital specialists also are seeing an increasing number of people with emphysema specifically related to marijuana smoking, he said.

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Associated Press Medical Writer Margie Mason contributed to this report from Hanoi, Vietnam.

© 2007 The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations. It's more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.

College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex - they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and "it feels good," according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.

Expressing love and showing affection were in the top 10 for both men and women, but they did take a back seat to the clear No. 1: "I was attracted to the person."

Researchers at the University of Texas spent five years and their own money to study the overlooked why behind sex while others were spending their time on the how.

"It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes ... that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love," said University of Texas clinical psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study's co-author. "That's not what I came up with in my findings."

Forget thinking that men are from Mars and women from Venus, "the more we look, the more we find similarity," said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego. Goldstein, who wasn't part of Meston's study, said the Texas research made a lot of sense and adds to growing evidence that the vaunted differences in the genders may only be among people with sexual problems.

Meston and colleague David Buss first questioned 444 men and women - ranging in age from 17 to 52 - to come up with a list of 237 distinct reasons people have sex. They ranged from "It's fun" which men ranked fourth and women ranked eighth to "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease" which ranked on the bottom by women.

Once they came up with that long list, Meston and Buss asked 1,549 college students taking psychology classes to rank the reasons on a one-to-five scale on how they applied to their experiences.

"None of the gender differences are all that great," Meston said. "Men were more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women. Women were more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner."

But this is among college students, when Meston conceded "hormones run rampant." She predicted huge differences when older groups of people are studied.

Since her study came out Tuesday, people are coming up with new reasons to have sex.

"Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some added," Meston said.

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On the Net:

University of Texas study "Why Humans Have Sex": http://tinyurl.com/ypzwvr

Cindy Meston's Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory: http://www.mestonlab.com/

© 2007 The Associated Press.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The lawyer for a surgeon charged with prescribing excessive drugs to a disabled patient to speed up his death and harvest his organs says his client has been the subject of a "witch hunt."

Prosecutors in San Luis Obispo County said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of San Francisco, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and a sedative to 25-year-old Ruben Navarro, who died in 2006.

Roozrokh was charged Monday in the first such criminal case against a transplant doctor in the U.S., the county district attorney's office said.

M. Gerald Schwartzbach, Roozrokh's lawyer, called the charges "unfounded and ill-advised," saying his client "has unfairly been the subject of an 18-month witch hunt."

"Nothing that Dr. Roozrokh did or said at the hospital that night adversely affected the quality of Mr. Navarro's life or contributed to Mr. Navarro's eventual death," Schwartzbach said in a statement.

Roozrokh planned to surrender and post $10,000 bail, Schwartzbach said.

Navarro was taken in a coma to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in 2006 after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest. Although Navarro was found to have irreversible brain damage and was kept on a respirator, he was not considered brain dead because he still had limited brain function.

The day before Navarro died, his family gave approval for a surgical team to recover his organs for donation. That didn't happen, however, because Navarro didn't die within 30 minutes of being removed from life support. He died a day later.

Roozrokh, a surgeon at Kaiser Permanente's now-closed kidney transplant program, was working at the time on behalf of a group that procures and distributes organs. The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the drugs were prescribed "to accelerate Mr. Navarro's death in order to recover his organs."

State law prohibits transplant surgeons from being involved in the treatment of potential organ donors before they are declared dead.

Prosecutors did not pursue murder charges because witnesses said they did not believe the drugs caused Navarro's death.

The coroner's office this year determined Navarro died of natural causes. Last month, his mother, Rosa, filed a wrongful-death and medical malpractice lawsuit against Roozrokh and others, claiming her son was removed from life support without her permission and given lethal doses of drugs.

Navarro, who weighed about 80 pounds, was born with a neurological disorder known as adrenoleukodystrophy. He also had cerebral palsy and seizures.

Roozrokh was charged with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and unlawful controlled substance prescription. If convicted of all three counts, he faces up to eight years in state prison or up to one year in jail and a $20,000 fine as a condition of probation.

© 2007 The Associated Press.

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Federal regulators' demand for further testing of a nonhormonal drug for menopause symptoms should not delay approval of the same drug as a depression treatment, executives at drugmaker Wyeth said late Tuesday.

In a conference call to address concerns triggered by the Food and Drug Administration's decision to require an entire new study of the drug Pristiq, officials at Wyeth said they will work closely with the FDA to speed the drug's approval as the first nonhormonal treatment for menopause symptoms.

On July 16 the FDA said it wants more data on Pristiq's effects on the heart and liver because a very small number of women in studies of the drug for menopause symptoms - mood swings, hot flashes and trouble sleeping - had serious heart or liver complications. The FDA requested Wyeth conduct a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial of one year or longer, a huge blow to Wyeth.

"We believe Pristiq is a safe, effective and much-needed nonhormonal therapy" for menopause, Greg Norden, Wyeth's chief financial officer, told analysts during a conference call Tuesday.

Executives at Madison, N.J.-based Wyeth also said FDA officials have reassured them that the additional safety data required to get approval as a menopause symptom treatment will not hold up approval of Pristiq as a depression treatment.

"We continue to believe it will receive approval in the first quarter of 2008" for depression, Norden said.

The study the FDA requested means the company likely won't be able to reapply for approval of the drug as a menopause drug for about 18 months, and the agency will then have about six months to review the new data and reach a decision.

The company had been counting on the drug's approval last week - or at least nothing more than a short delay - to help it rebound from a huge drop in sales of its Premarin and Prempro after the federal Women's Health Initiative in 2002 linked Prempro to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer and other problems. Subsequent research has found the risks were generally limited to women taking hormones in their 60s and 70s.

The two drugs were once the company's top sellers.

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On the Net: http://www.wyeth.com

© 2007 The Associated Press.

With the recent increased media attention being paid to the National Football League and the controversy over the care of it's players suffering from traumatic brain injuries, many may be surprised to learn that football is not the leading sport in which brain injuries are suffered.