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Weekly News Roundup
December 12, 2016
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Dennis J. Barbour, JD, Editor
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Young Males: Keep it Moving
By now it is pretty well accepted both that physical inactivity is bad - recently linked to 6 percent of all cases of heart disease worldwide and 11 percent of all premature deaths in the United States - and that exercise is good, because it tends to increase life span and protect against heart disease. Yet few studies actually show that exercise reduces the unhealthful impacts of too much sitting. People who work out but also sit for long hours - active couch potatoes, you might say - may often share the same elevated risks for disease and early death as their less active peers. A study published last month in The American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism is one of the first to directly compare exercisers who also sit extensively with those who are more active generally. For their study, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin asked seven healthy young male volunteers to wear monitors and spend four active days in a row and four sedentary days in a row. When active, the subjects walked as often as they could, averaging more than 17,000 daily steps, and ended up sitting for a total of roughly eight hours a day on average; when sedentary, they sat for 14 hours or so. The findings suggest that a single vigorous workout may do little to counter the effects of prolonged sitting, while strolling around frequently in addition to exercising does seem to keep the harm at bay.
New York Times, December 9, 2016
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Measure your penis and chat about mental health, young Swedes told
A clinic in southern Sweden hopes that its new penis measuring tape will convince more young men to stop by for appointments.
The tape, which measures diameter rather than length, is designed to help young men find the appropriate size of condom. It is part of a new project in collaboration with the Blekinge county council which aims to get more young me
n to visit youth clinics. "When you get guys to visit you can move on to mental health, so we want to get them here one way or another," Emelie Svensson, a district nurse at the clinic told radio station P4 Blekinge. Since October the clinic has been visiting male-dominated upper secondary school courses to inform them about their work and sexual health, and will now also begin to visit homes for vulnerable young people. The Blekinge clinic is not the first in Sweden to use this kind of scheme. This time last year a public clinic in Stockholm
started handing out measuring tapes to young men
in an effort to encourage them to practice safer sex.
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The Philippines is not doing enough to tackle soaring HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men by offering greater access to HIV testing and condoms, an international rights group said on Thursday. The prevalence of HIV among men who have sex with men in the Southeast Asian country has increased tenfold over the last five years, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report. Last year, at least 11 cities in the Philippines reported HIV prevalence rates of more than 5 percent among men who have sex with men, the study said. The Philippines introduced effective policies targeting the outbreak of HIV among sex workers in the 1990s, however "it has failed to adapt its prevention strategies in line with the epidemic's shifting epicenter", HRW said in a statement.
Business Insider, December 7, 2016
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Training providers to inform parents that adolescents are due for an HPV vaccine, as opposed to engaging in an open-ended conversation, is an effective way to increase vaccine initiation, according to a study published in
Pediatrics
. Clinics that received announcement training reported a 5 percentage point increase in HPV vaccine initiation coverage for 11- and 12-year-olds at 6 months compared with control clinics (95% CI 1.1% to 9.7%), reported the researchers, led by
Noel T. Brewer, PhD
, of the University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill and chair of the National HPV Vaccination Roundtable. Conversely, providers who were trained on participatory conversations did not see an increase in coverage.
MedPage Today, December 5, 2016
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Researchers suggest 2007 recession may have spurred rise in pot use among men with low incomes
As more American adults choose to puff at the marijuana pipe, a gender difference is becoming clear -- men are significantly more likely to smoke pot than women, a new study finds. Compared with 2002, an additional 6 million men reported past-year pot smoking in 2014. For women, that number was 4 million, the researchers said. Use remained at about 13 percent for men and 7 percent for women for a number of years. But after 2007, use rose about 4 percent among men and 3 percent among women, according to study authors Hannah Carliner and Deborah Hasin. They are epidemiologists at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. "These changes parallel national trends in decreased perceived harmfulness of marijuana use, and legalization of both recreational and medical use in over half of U.S. states," Carliner said in a university news release. "However, changes in attitudes and legality do not sufficiently explain why we observe a sharp increase in use in 2007, or why this increase was greater in men than in women," she added. Further investigation revealed that the widening gender gap was driven by people with low incomes. Between 2007 and 2014, marijuana use increased about 6 percent among men in households earning less than $20,000 annually, compared to only 2 percent of women in that group.
Medline Plus, December 5, 2016
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The Weekly News Roundup is produced by The Partnership for Male Youth and is released every Monday.
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