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Children who aren’t allowed to watch R-rated movies are much less likely to start drinking alcohol at an early age, a new study suggests.

Researchers questioned nearly 3,600 middle-school children in New England and followed-up about two years later. In that time, 3 percent of the kids who said their parents never allowed them to watch R-rated movies said they had started drinking alcohol, compared with 19 percent of those who were sometimes allowed to watch R-rated movies and 25 percent of those who said they were allowed to watch such movies “all the time.”

The findings are reported in the May issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

The results highlight how important it is for parents to monitor their children’s media exposure, said Dr. James D. Sargent, a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., and an author of the study.

“We think this is a very important aspect of parenting, and one that is often overlooked,” Sargent said in a news release from the journal.

He added that the new findings supplement the work of previous studies that have linked exposure to R-rated movies and shows with adult content to early drinking, early smoking, sex at a young age and violent behavior.

“The research to date suggests that keeping kids from R-rated movies can help keep them from drinking, smoking and doing a lot of other things that parents don’t want them to do,” Sargent said.

Depictions of alcohol consumption appear in about 90 percent of R-rated movies, Sargent said, which may be one reason why children who see such movies are more likely to start drinking at a young age. But he noted that previous studies have suggested that children who watch R-rated movies become more prone to “sensation seeking” and “risk taking.”

“We think seeing the adult content actually changes their personality,” he added.

People discharged from the hospital with noncardiac (not heart-related) chest pain may require more aggressive cardiovascular risk management than they typically receive, a new study has found.

Noncardiac chest pain can be caused by a number of problems, including panic attack, musculoskeletal pain, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and esophageal hypersensitivity.

The study included 320 patients who were admitted to the hospital with what was believed to be unstable angina, evaluated and discharged with a diagnosis of noncardiac chest pain. After the initial diagnosis of noncardiac chest pain, 49 percent of patients were re-evaluated in the emergency department and 42 percent underwent repeated cardiology evaluations.

Only 15 percent of the patients had gastrointestinal (GI) consultations. Of those, 38 percent had esophagogastroduodenoscopy, 4 percent had manometry (13 tests) and 2 percent had pH probes (six probes), the study authors reported.

“Patients in this study received few GI consultations and underwent even fewer GI tests. Further study is needed to determine whether patients with noncardiac chest pain would benefit from more frequent GI consultations and more diverse use of GI testing modalities,” study co-investigator Dr. Michael Leise, of the Mayo Clinic, said in a news release.

The study also found that patients with noncardiac chest pain didn’t have a significantly higher overall rate of death than expected, but a substantial number of cardiac deaths occurred in these patients.

“We speculate that cardiac death in patients with noncardiac chest pain may relate to overlapping risk factors for GERD and coronary artery disease, including obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, diabetes mellitus and smoking,” Leise said.

He said until more is known about cardiac death in patients with noncardiac chest pain, doctors should screen these patients for cardiac risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, and aggressively manage these conditions.

The study is published in the issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Platelet-rich plasma accelerates healing and bone formation after tooth extraction, a new study shows.

Poor healing after tooth removal can result in excessive jaw bone loss that may delay the use of dental prosthetics or implants, require expensive reconstructive surgery, or be impossible to repair, according to the researchers.

The study included patients who had surgery to remove wisdom teeth. One extraction site was treated with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) while the site on the other side of the mouth was used as a control. During 24 weeks of follow-up, the patients were checked for jaw bone density, healing, bleeding, inflammation, pain and facial swelling.

“The PRP treatment has a positive effect on bone density immediately following tooth extraction,” while the control sites showed a decrease in bone density in the first week after surgery, the researchers said.

“It took approximately six weeks for the control sites to reach the same bone density that the PRP-treated site had reached by week one,” they wrote. “The immediate start of bone formation seen with PRP treatment is of clinical relevance because it is the initial two weeks following bone manipulation oral surgery that are important.”

PRP had little effect on bleeding, inflammation, pain and facial swelling.

Using PRP to promote faster jaw bone formation may reduce the waiting time for dental prosthetics or implants to two to four months instead of the current four to six months, according to the researchers.

The study was recently published in the Journal of Oral Implantology.

Countries in eastern Europe and central Asia face spiralling AIDS epidemics if they fail to help people who inject drugs and stop the spread of infection, the head of the United Nations agency for HIV/AIDS said on Friday.

Michel Sidibe told Reuters countries such as Russia, Ukraine and others could halt or buck the global downward trend in new HIV infections if they ignored the threat posed by drug users and failed to introduce effective “harm reduction” steps.

“HIV infection has slowed down globally, but it is expanding in this region of eastern Europe and central Asia,” he said. “We’re not seeing anything like this in any other region of the world.”

Sidibe, who was due to address a conference on harm reduction in the British city of Liverpool on Sunday, said of the 3.7 million people in the region who inject drugs, a quarter have the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

Drug users, often criminalized and marginalized from health and social services, can spread the virus by sharing needles with an HIV-infected person or pass it on by having unprotected sex.

Infection prevention steps like providing needles, condoms and substitute drugs like methadone — collectively known as harm reduction — are seen by many experts as key to halting the spread of HIV and AIDS, but some governments are reluctant to provide them for fear of being seen to condone drug use.

Sidibe warned newly-emerging and growing pockets of HIV spread among drug users could propel a wave of infections and undermine gains in curbing sexual transmission of the disease.

“What is unacceptable is knowing there is this multitude of epidemics among drug users, we have on average each drug user getting less than two clean needles a month, and only about four percent of those living with HIV getting treatment,” he said.

About 33.4 million people worldwide are infected with the AIDS virus. Since AIDS emerged in the 1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected and 25 million have died.

A report published last month showed that more than 90 percent of the world’s 16 million injecting drug users are offered no help to avoid contracting AIDS.

EFFECTIVE AND COST-EFFECTIVE

Sidibe said there was now “rock solid scientific evidence” to show harm reduction measures were effective in cutting the numbers of new infections with HIV.

He pointed to a 2002 study conducted in 103 cities in 24 countries which found the HIV infection rate fell by an average of almost 19 percent a year in places with needle and syringe programs, but increased by an average of 8.1 percent a year in cities with no such policies.

“But people are scared … and there is a lack of proper understanding of harm reduction,” he said.

Sidibe called on Russia, where the government outlaws the heroin substitute methadone, to show leadership for the region and recognize that protecting drug users, not punishing them, would cost less and help more in the long run.

The UNAIDS chief said in Ukraine protecting a drug user from HIV/AIDS infection would cost less than $100, a fraction of the estimated $825 a year it costs to treat someone with AIDS drugs.

Sidibe pointed to countries like China, which has moved in recent years from a zero-tolerance approach to injecting drug users to what he described as a more “pragmatic” policy of helping them reduce HIV/AIDS infection risk.

“Today they have one of the biggest programs in Asia,” he said. “Our goals will be reached only if we persuade all governments and authorities that harm reduction is more effective than punishment.”