Medical news you can use

Here are three pieces of good news from the medical front:

•A new study reveals that daily exercise can help fight off the common cold — another good reason to work out. Specifically, older women who walked for a half hour every day had half the number of colds in a year. Not only that, but during the final three months of the study, the benefits increased to three times the protection from colds. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle aren’t sure yet how exercise plays a part, but they suspect that there are changes in the immune system.

♦ ♦ ♦

•And here’s another reason to eat your vegetables: Researchers now report that eating vegetables slows the rate of age-related memory loss in people age 65 and older. This was a comprehensive two-year study of nearly 3,800 Chicago-area seniors. It showed that those who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables per day slowed their cognitive decline by 40 percent, the equivalent of five years of aging. Oddly enough, eating fruit doesn’t help, and researchers at the Rush University Medical Center will do more study to figure out why.

♦ ♦ ♦

•Finally, the Mayo Clinic is running a clinical trial to test Botox, commonly used for wrinkles, as a treatment for knee arthritis.

Mayo scientists are assembling a test group of people over the age of 40 whose knee arthritis hasn’t responded to treatment — exercise, physical therapy or medication. So far, Botox has been used for other types of pain such as migraines and muscles spasms, and they wonder if the temporary muscle paralysis that Botox causes might be a way to short-circuit pain messages before they get to the brain. Initial tests suggest that they might be onto something, hence the formal clinical trials.

For more information, or to see about participating in the trial, call the hotline at 1-507-266-1179.