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  This week in the medical journalsBy Peggy Peck Editor's note: CNN.com has a business partnership with MedPageToday.com, which provides custom health content. A medical journal roundup from MedPage Today appears each Thursday. Too much food, too little exercise Medical journals provided a panoramic view of the obesity epidemic this week. For instance, overweight adolescent girls put on weight because they are ignoring exercise, researchers said. A team from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine said that starting around age 9 and continuing through age 19, girls are eating just a little more but exercising a whole lot less. The researchers followed 1,166 white girls and 1,213 black girls for more than 10 years and reported in The Lancet that just by walking briskly 2.5 hours a week, white girls could avoid gaining as much as 13 pounds during their teens and black girls could prevent gains of as much as 20 pounds. Not everyone wins the battle of the bulge during adolescence. For those who are obese as adults, according to researchers in The Netherlands, overweight men awaiting a gastric-bypass operation are less physically fit than obese women who are planning bariatric surgery. Obese men, the Dutch team reported in Chest, also have more trouble with carbs, which puts them at higher risk for diabetes. The study evaluated 22 men and 34 women who had body mass indexes (BMI) of at least 40 -- a normal BMI range is 18.5 to 24.9. It found that fasting insulin levels, a measure of the body's ability to metabolize sugars, were twice as high in the men than the women. And on the subject of gastric-bypass surgery, sometimes known as weight-loss or bariatric surgery, the journal Health Affairs reported that business is booming for surgeons performing these procedures. The number of these operations increased by a whopping 400 percent from 1998 to 2002. The U.S. Agency for Health Policy Research said that during the same period, hospital costs for these procedures increased by 503 percent, from $157 million to $948 million. Yet this may be a drop in the bucket, because Medicare just agreed to pay for medically necessary weight-loss surgery. Big drop in activity means big weight gains for girls Obese men found less physically fit than obese women Bariatric surgery, a growth market, quadruples in five years Statins a no-go for dementiaEveryone craves a miracle drug and as a class the cholesterol-lowering statins have been the can-do drugs of the past decade. They lower cholesterol, fight inflammation, reduce heart attacks, reduce heart-disease mortality, and that's just the beginning. Other studies have linked statins to a reduced risk of breast, colon, esophageal, liver, pancreatic and prostate cancers. But statins hit the wall this week when a study of more than 2,800 patients found that statins didn't reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. The finding, which was reported in Archives of Neurology, is a little like finding out that Superman has flat feet. Statins for dementia? Big trial finds no benefit Return of the hot flashesThere was a time when hormone replacement therapy was touted as a miracle treatment for postmenopausal women, but that claim lost traction in July 2002 when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute abruptly halted the Women's Health Initiative study. That was because it became clear that women taking Prempro -- a combination of estrogen and progestin -- had an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, blood clots and breast cancer. Thousands of women abruptly stopped taking hormones, but no one knew what would happen when the hormones were stopped. Now we know. Women who had hot flashes and night sweats before they started hormone replacement are likely to have a return of symptoms when the hormones are stopped. The positive news, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is that lifestyle changes like drinking more water, increasing exercise and cutting down on caffeine can reduce symptoms. But they added that herbal and "natural" hormone products are not particularly effective. If symptoms are unbearable, a return to low-dose prescription hormones will again relieve hot flashes. Hot flashes will rebound if hormones are stopped Drawing to an inside straightVery few drugs are without side effects, but neurologists studying Parkinson's disease patients this week report an unusual side effect. Some patients taking Mirapex (pramipexole) for Parkinson's become compulsive gamblers. Writing in Archives of Neurology, the researchers reported 11 cases of pathological gambling associated with the use of dopamine agonist therapy. In seven patients, pathological gambling developed during the first three months of treatment, while in four patients symptoms were reported 12 to 30 months after treatment was started. The Mayo Clinic researchers noted that the brain chemical dopamine, which helps regulate motor functions, also affects behaviors. Six patients also showed signs of compulsive eating, alcohol abuse, increased spending and hypersexuality. Nine of the 11 patients were taking Mirapex and most patients were also taking Dopar (levodopa, L-dopa), but the researchers said they didn't think that was a factor in the compulsive behaviors. Parkinson's drugs linked to pathological gambling Pill extends survival in lung cancerAlso this week researchers with the National Cancer Institute of Canada reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the anticancer pill Tarceva (erlotinib) adds about two months to survival in patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer who have already undergone one or two chemotherapy regimens. Nonsmall cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, kills an estimated 170,000 Americans every year, which makes it the number one cancer killer, so any increase in survival is likely to make headlines. But only 8.9 percent of patients respond to the drug, which costs more than $2,000 a month. The response was best in women, Asians and persons who never smoked -- a rarity among lung cancer patients. Nonetheless, Tarceva is a kinder, gentler way to fight cancer because patients don't have nausea and vomiting, anemia or hair loss when taking the drug, and most patients said treatment makes them feel better with less pain and coughing and fewer breathing problems. Tarceva improves survival in some lung cancer patients Simplicity, simplicity, simplicityLower-tech trumped higher-tech in a second New England Journal of Medicine paper this week. Researchers from Leicester, England, reported that single-chamber pacemakers are as good as dual-chamber pacemakers for preventing death in elderly patients with aterioventricular (AV) block. This type of heart rhythm abnormality occurs when the electrical connection between the upper chambers of the heart -- the atria -- and the pumping chambers -- the ventricles -- is disrupted. The condition is associated with about 20 percent of the cases of sudden cardiac death. The researchers analyzed outcomes in more than 2,000 patients ages 70 or older who had pacemakers implanted to treat AV block. After almost five years, the mortality rate was 7.2 percent in the patients who had more basic, single-chamber pacemakers versus 7.4 percent for those with pacemakers with all the bells and whistles. Moreover, there were twice as many complications in patients with dual chamber devices. Finally, in medicine you can't believe everything you read, at least that's what readers found out in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association. An analysis of the most often cited studies published in major medical journals found that only about half of the published studies that claimed a treatment or intervention worked turn out to be right on further investigation. Worse, seven of the 45 major studies reviewed were shown to be flat-out wrong by newer research. Pacing mode doesn't affect outcomes in high-grade AV block Impressive major clinical trials may have short half-life 
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