A British study found that there was a link in bipolar disorder occurring between siblings, but it is not possible to establish whether such patterns are due to genetic or environmental factors or both. Dr. Edmond O'Mahony, at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland -- in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wales and the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital in Birmingham, England -- attempted to identify clinical characteristics within the bipolar spectrum that had a high degree of familiality. The researchers obtained clinical and demographic data on 160 families in which more than one sibling was affected with bipolar disorder. The patient's age at onset, gender, frequency of affective episodes, and proportion of manic to depressive episodes were examined. Intra-pair correlations in affected sibling pairs were then calculated. A significant sibling pair correlation was found for age of disease onset, dimension scores for psychosis and proportion of manic to depressive episodes. Mania, incongruence dimensions, frequency of manic episodes and frequency of depressive episodes were associated with modest correlations, but were not significant.

BRITISH GOVERNMENT LAUNCHES ANTI-SMOKING ADS

Just in time for New Year's resolutions, the British federal Department of Health is launching an anti-smoking advertising campaign. The campaign will highlight the National Health Service Smoking Helpline, which took 10,000 calls in the first week of January 2001 -- three times the average call volume. Television advertisements will begin airing on New Year's Day and will feature Byron Davies, who quit smoking last January after suffering a smoking-related stroke that left him disabled. The 37-year-old Davies had been a heavy smoker since the age of 15. He said he hoped the commercials would persuade others to give up smoking. Public Health Minister Yvette Cooper says the government was doing all it could to help smokers who want to stop. She says the helpline gives friendly, practical advice and support, and that the National Health Service will spend 30 million dollars on smoking cessation services next year. "Last year, 132,500 people set a quit date through smoking cessation services and nearly half of those reported that they had successfully stopped smoking," Cooper says. The British government says smoking kills around 120,000 people every year, making it the United Kingdom's greatest cause of preventable illness and premature death.

BUBBLES IN BUBBLY MAKE PEOPLE DRUNK FASTER

Many people say that champagne bubbles "go straight to their head," making them giggly and light-headed, and researchers confirm it's the bubbles in the bubbly that makes people drunk faster, New Scientist reports. Fran Ridout and a team in the human psychopharmacology unit at the University of Surrey in England threw a couple of "drinks parties" for volunteers in their department. She gave champagne to 12 volunteers -- half fizzy and the other half flat -- she purged the bubbles with a whisk. The following week she repeated the experiment but gave each volunteer the opposite kind of champagne so everyone tried both types. Ridout adjusted the exact intakes so that everyone drank the same amount of alcohol per kilogram of body mass. Sure enough, alcohol levels rose much faster among the bubbly drinkers. After just five minutes, they had an average of 0.54 milligrams of alcohol per milliliter of blood. Those drinking flat champagne averaged just 0.39 milligrams of alcohol. At the end of the 40-minute experiment, those drinking the fizzy champagne averaged 0.7 milligrams per milliliter -- just 0.1 milligrams short of the legal limit for driving in Britain. Those drinking flat champagne had only reached 0.58 milligrams. At the end of the experiment, the bubbly drinkers were visibly worse for wear. "Some could hardly write," Ridout says. "It emphasizes the importance of not drinking before driving."

SOME CANCER SCREENING MAY NOT BE LIFESAVING

Medical researchers are increasingly questioning one of the most widely held beliefs in preventive medicine -- that screening healthy people for cancer and catching it early saves lives, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reports. The evidence shows that some screening tests are much more useful than others, says Dr. Barnett Kramer, the director of the Office of Medical Applications of Research at the National Institutes of Health. Some, like pap tests for cervical cancer and tests for colon cancer, show clear benefits. But evidence for others, like mammography and a blood test for early signs of prostate cancer, are less clear, researchers say, and some experts dispute whether their widespread use actually reduces death rates from cancer. Some new tests, like spiral CT scans of the lungs, are being marketed to patients before they have been shown in large, rigorous studies to benefit anyone. Tests that detect cancer cannot always discern whether the cancer is one that will ultimately kill or is an indolent tumor that might never produce noticeable symptoms, the researchers say, however, even the critics of widespread testing are not necessarily advocating that people forget them. The researchers say people should know what the demonstrated benefits are, and the risks, because once people know they have a cancer they usually seek treatment -- and the treatments themselves can be debilitating, even life-threatening.