OBJECTIVES. Relatively few studies of drinking among the elderly have been completed despite the growing proportional representation of the elderly in the US population. This study sought to estimate the prevalence of and to observe whether active or health-oriented lifestyles are associated with heavy drinking among the elderly. METHODS. Random-digit dialing telephone interviews were conducted with 2325 Erie County, New York, general population residents aged 60 years or older. RESULTS. The prevalence of heavy drinking was 6%. Adjusted analyses showed positive associations between heavy drinking and being male, having suburban residency, and currently using cigarettes. Negative relationships were observed between heavy drinking and socioeconomic status, rural residency, and degree of health orientation. Age and level of active lifestyle were not significant contributors to the model. CONCLUSIONS. Of the studied variables, health orientation offers the greatest opportunity to address heavy drinking among the elderly.

Of the limited number of epidemiological investigations on aspirin (and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and breast cancer, the majority observe a protective role, yet only a few report dose-response effects for frequency or duration of use. We studied aspirin use among 1,478 breast cancer patients diagnosed from 1982 to 1998, and 3,383 cancer-free hospital controls at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using unconditional logistic regression. Compared to never use,both regular (≧1 tablet per week for ≧1 year) and occasional use were inversely associated with breast cancer (adjusted OR = 0.84, 95% CI 0.64–0.97; adjusted OR = 0.80, 95% CI 0.67–0.96, respectively). Among regular users, an inverse trend was found for number of tablets consumed per week (1, 2–6, or ≧7) with corresponding ORs of 0.95, 0.80, and 0.74 (P_trend = 0.01). Daily use spanning 10 or more years was associated with a more pronounced reduction in risk (P_trend = 0.005). Our findings corroborate the growing body of observational evidence that regular aspirin use may be associated with reduced risk of breast cancer.

Background: While physicians are key to primary preventive care, their delivery rate is suboptimal. Assessment of physician beliefs is integral to understanding current behavior and the conceptualization of strategies to increase delivery.

The study and development of software able to show the effect of aging of faces is one of the tasks of face recognition technologies. Some software solutions are used for investigations, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however some other applications can be proposed for the analysis of visual arts. Here we use a freely available software, which is providing interesting results, for the comparison of ancient marble busts. An analysis of Augustus busts is proposed.Face recognition software and technologies are focusing on the possibility of computer algorithms to recognize a face in some galleries of images, which can be acquired from pictures provided by still images or frames of a video sequence. The software algorithms then must reproduce the innate human ability to recognize a face, a fundamental task in mimic the behavior of the human brain. Another important research in the field of face recognition is the study of the effects of aging in the craniofacial morphology [1]. Human faces change during the life, their features varying affected by several factors ranging from the inherent genetics and the environmental constrains.As told in Ref.2, several agencies of investigation regularly require matching a probe image with the individuals in the missing person database. However, there are often significant differences between facial features of probe and gallery images due to age variation. For instance if the probe image is a 15 years-old boy or girl and the gallery image of the same person is of 5 years, the face recognition algorithm must perform a very difficult task.Researchers have then proposed several age simulation and modeling techniques [2]. These models alter the face according to the facial growth over a specific period of time. The reader can find several references given in [2], the oldest is that of Burt and Perrett [3]. Since the face aging is affecting the performance of face recognition systems, the analysis of synthetically generating age-progressed or age-regressed images is a good method of improving the robustness of face-based biometrics [1]. In Ref.4, the accuracy of methods for the security of biometric verification systems is investigated. The paper presents methods of modeling and predicting facial template aging based on matching score analysis. An interesting social application of a software solution for aging faces was proposed by the Task Force for Tobacco-Free Women and Girls in New York State, which utilized it to illustrate how smoking can affect the facial appearance [5]. The task force members reviewed the literature on the association between smoking and facial wrinkling, provided parameters for customization of the APRIL (age progression image launcher) [6]. Photoshop is also used for ageing the faces, using its FaceAge® plugin. However, this is not freely available. Some software solutions are then used for investigation, some others to show the effects of drugs on healthy appearance, however other applications can be imagined and used, for i...

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