TUESDAY, Oct. 7 (HealthDay News) -- A new analysis of existing research finds little evidence that circumcision protects gay men from infection with the AIDS virus, but the issue is still far from settled.
For one thing, studies conducted prior to the age of powerful AIDS drugs showed that circumcision did have a preventive effect. For another, no one has launched the most definitive type of research into the effects of circumcision on AIDS rates among gay men.
"There remains an open question as to whether circumcision will actually be a public health tool in the fight against AIDS for men who have sex with men," said Dr. Sten Vermund, director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health.
It's already clear that circumcision lowers rates of AIDS infection by 50 percent to 60 percent among heterosexual men. Circumcision appears to provide protection, because it rids a man of cells inside the foreskin that seem to be especially susceptible to AIDS infection, explained study author Gregorio A. Millett, a senior behavioral scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the effects of circumcision on gay men have remained a topic of intense debate. "People are interested in finding out what other things can we add to the HIV arsenal," Millett said. "As for now, we're not sure [circumcision] is something we can add to the arsenal."
In the new study, Millett and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 15 studies that looked at a total of more 53,000 men, 52 percent of whom were circumcised. The findings are in the Oct. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The more recent studies that the researchers analyzed failed to find a statistically significant protective effect from circumcision.
However, circumcised men had a 53 percent lower risk of becoming infected with HIV prior to 1996, the era that preceded the use of powerful AIDS drugs, Millett said. The meaning of that number isn't clear; it's possible that many of the men who avoided HIV infection in the older studies engaged in less risky sex, he added.
Vermund said the question of whether circumcision protects gay men from HIV won't be answered until a clinical trial is conducted. Such a study may require some participants to undergo circumcision to understand how it affects their risk of HIV.
Vermund, co-author of a commentary accompanying the new study, added: "It would be nice if the global community would say, 'Look, we continue to have a horrific problem in men who have sex with men around the world. We need to know whether circumcision is a tool that could reduce the incidents, and we're not going to know that unless we do the clinical trials.'"
Such a study would be difficult to launch in the United States, he said, but it might be possible in South America, where gay men are less likely to be circumcised.
More information
Learn more about HIV and circumcision from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
WEDNESDAY, March 19 (HealthDay News) -- In the culinary battle of the sexes, men are decidedly the carnivores while women prefer leaner, greener fare, a new study finds.
Why the difference? Biology may play a role, but "more obvious are cultural influences, which suggest that salads and quiche are dainty; hunks of meat manly," according to Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
Besides confirming some well-worn stereotypes, the findings might be of public health benefit, because understanding the differences in eating habits between men and women could help develop strategies to get both sexes to eat healthier diets, experts say.
"We thought it would be interesting to see whether there were any gender differences," lead researcher Beletshachew Shiferaw said in a prepared statement. "To our knowledge, there have been studies in the literature on gender differences in eating habits, but nothing this extensive."
The findings were to be presented Wednesday in Atlanta at the 2008 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases.
In the study, Shiferaw's team collected data on almost 15,000 American adults who participated in the Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network survey, which ran from May 2006 to April 2007. Participants were queried on the various food they had eaten over the past seven days.
They found that men were more likely than women to eat a wide variety of meat such as poultry, veal, and game. For example, 21 percent of males had eaten ham in the past week vs. 18 percent of women, the survey found.
On the other hand, women were more likely than men to eat vegetables. For example, 35 percent of women reported eating carrots at least once in the past week, compared with 29 percent of men. Thirty-seven percent of women reported eating tomatoes, compared with 32 percent of men. The same difference held for fruits such as strawberries, raspberries and nuts. Women were also more likely to eat eggs and yogurt.
However, there were exceptions to the trend. Men were more likely than women to eat asparagus and brussels sprouts, for example.
Gender also played a role when it came to mealtime risk-taking -- eating items that are known to be more likely to transmit foodborne disease. For example, the survey found that men were more likely to eat rare hamburger or runny eggs. On the other hand, women were more likely than men to eat alfalfa sprouts, which have been linked to illness outbreaks in the past.
"The reason we looked at consumption and risky behaviors was to see if there was a statistically significant difference between men and women, and if there is, this information could be used by health educators to target interventions," Shiferaw said.
Katz believes that all of this might help move people to a more healthful diet.
"The notion that men and women differ systematically, if not altogether consistently, in food preferences has long been known" he said. "The issue was perhaps never captured more pithily than this: 'Real men don't eat quiche.'"
There is value in studying the food choices people commonly make, Katz added.
"Knowing what foods men and women favor helps clarify the work required to move toward dietary patterns more conducive to overall health," he said.
More information
For more information on healthy eating, visit the U.S. Department of Agriculture.