Personal Health: News and Notes

Repeatedly hitting a soccer ball with the head may result in brain abnormalities over the long term, a new study of advanced brain scans concludes. In a separate study, frequent "heading" also was linked to lower results on tests of verbal memory and mind-body coordination.

Both studies, led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, looked at several dozen athletes who said they had headed soccer balls hundreds of times per year.

In the brain-scan study, the authors found that more heading was associated with lower scores on a measure of brain-cell integrity called fractional anisotropy, recorded with a type of advanced MRI. The threshold above which abnormalities started to appear in various brain regions was 1,000 to 1,500 headings per year, the authors reported last week at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

In the second study, athletes who said they headed a ball more than 1,186 times per year scored lower on verbal memory and visual motor function tests than those who headed the ball less often.

- Tom Avril

Soup may be mmm mmm good, but beware of the soup-can lining.

A study by Harvard University researchers found that consuming canned soup five days in a row dramatically increased urinary levels of bisphenol A (BPA).

BPA, used to make the polycarbonate plastic that lines some metal food and beverage cans, has been shown to interfere with animals' reproductive development, and has been linked to human heart disease and diabetes.

In the Harvard study, a group of volunteers downed a 12-ounce serving of vegetarian canned soup for five days in a row, while another group consumed fresh vegetarian soup, made without canned ingredients, for five days. After a two-day break, the groups reversed their assignments.

BPA levels in urine samples of the 75 volunteers were 1,221 percent higher after five days of canned soup than after the fresh-soup slurping.

The study, in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association, notes that more research is needed to determine how long the elevated BPA levels last. - Marie McCullough

You might think it's better to have surgery in the morning, before the surgeon is worn out, than later in the day, but a new study finds your chances of being alive a month after surgery are the same no matter when the procedure is done.

A team led by Daniel Sessler examined the results of 32,001 elective surgeries done at Cleveland Clinic between 2005 and 2010. They found that the risk of death was not affected by the time of day of the surgery, the day of the week, or the month of the year. For comparison's sake, they also looked at the phase of the moon. As expected, it didn't change the outcomes.

The analysis also found no difference in complication rates for procedures performed at different times.

The study was published in the December issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, the journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society.

- Stacey Burling

There may be good reason to ask about financial ties if your doctor orders an expensive imaging test for your aching back: Patients whose doctors own the equipment are likelier to get scans they might not need than those whose doctors have no financial interest, a small study suggests.

Researchers analyzed reports on 500 MRI scans performed on patients with lower-back pain that had been sent for review to Duke University. Of the scans with normal results, 106 were ordered by orthopedic surgeons who owned the machines versus 57 by doctors without financial ties.

The normal scans accounted for about half of those ordered by surgeons with financial connections, compared with about a quarter in the other group. The results suggest that some doctors who own MRI scanners use them excessively on patients who probably don't need them, to help pay for the expensive equipment and make a profit, said study coauthor Ramsey Kilani, a radiology instructor at Duke University.

- Lindsey Tanner, Associated Press