WEDNESDAY, July 21 (HealthDay News) -- Older women who binge-drink when pregnant are at higher risk for having children with permanent alcohol-related brain damage, new research finds.

Children of pregnant women 30 or older who binge-drink are more likely to suffer greater damage from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), a group of birth defects that includes irreversible physical and mental disorders as well as permanent mental retardation, the study says.

The findings are reported online in advance of print publication in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"Our finding that children born to older drinking mothers have more alcohol-related attention deficits than children born to younger drinking women is consistent with prior studies," Lisa M. Chiodo, an assistant professor in the college of nursing at Wayne State University, said in a journal news release.

"Although not conclusive, this finding may be due to older moms drinking for longer periods, greater alcohol tolerance, and having more alcohol-related health problems -- all leading to higher levels of alcohol in their fetuses," Chiodo said. "It has also been suggested that changes in body size, metabolism or composition, or number of births, which are all related to maternal age, may be factors increasing the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure."

The study involved 462 children -- divided equally between boys and girls -- who were born to inner-city women recruited while they were pregnant. The researchers examined binge drinking, smoking, cocaine, marijuana and opiate use during pregnancy.

Tracking the offspring of the women up to the age of 7, the authors conducted performance tests to assess attention skills at the study's conclusion.

The team found that those children born to mothers 30 years or older who engaged in binge drinking while pregnant had more attention deficit issues that those born to the younger mothers. Those born to the older moms were found to make more errors on the completed tests and tended to respond to questions more cautiously and slowly.

Researchers said the findings had implications for prevention efforts and training programs for children damaged by exposure to alcohol in the womb.

The National Women's Health Information Center warns that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and that women who are pregnant should not drink at all.

More information

For more on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, visit the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

TUESDAY, July 20 (HealthDay News) -- The cancer drug Avastin should no longer be used as a treatment for breast cancer, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted Tuesday, saying the drug wasn't benefiting patients.

The 12 to 1 vote represented a setback for Avastin, which is the world's best-selling cancer drug, with sales last year of about $6 billion. Avastin is sold by drug maker Roche's Genentech unit, The New York Times reported.

Earlier Tuesday, the advisory committee said data suggested that at least for breast cancer, the initial data that led to accelerated approval of Avastin in 2008 for breast cancer was not borne out by subsequent studies.

The drug is also approved for lung, colon, kidney and brain cancer, the Associated Press reported.

The 13 experts convened by the FDA voted unanimously that the drug's side effects and risks outweighed benefits when used with conventional chemotherapy.

When the FDA approved Avastin for breast cancer patients in 2008, it was on the condition that Roche provide additional studies supporting evidence that the drug kept the disease from worsening for more than five months.

But two follow-up studies failed to show that same effect, and patients did not gain any survival benefits. But they did experience serious side effects, including fatigue, abnormal white blood cell counts and high blood pressure, the AP reported.

"The study shows there's very little benefit to patients with significant toxicity risks and no clear survival benefit," said Natalie Compagni Portis, the FDA advisory panel's patient representative, the news service reported.

The FDA is not bound to follow the recommendations of its advisory committees, but typically does so.

More information

To learn more about Avastin, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

WEDNESDAY, May 26 (HealthDay News) -- Give it up for The Pill: 50 years after it was invented, the oral contraceptive remains the leading method of birth control in the United States, a new report says, just edging out female sterilization.

Interviews conducted between 2006 and 2008 suggest that 10.7 million women aged 15-44 were using the birth-control pill, while 10.3 million had been sterilized.

The report, released May 26 by the National Center for Health Statistics, also suggests that an estimated 62 percent of the 61.9 million women aged 15-44 in the country were using birth control.

The report also found that:

Non-Hispanic white women were more likely to have used the birth control pill than Hispanic, black or Asian women. But blacks were more likely than whites to have taken Depo& Provera, an injected contraceptive that lasts for three months.

Women and girls aged 15-19 were most likely to report taking the birth control pill: 54 percent of them said they did, compared to just 11 percent of those aged 40-44.

More than half of childless women who used contraceptives turned to the birth control pill, but just eight percent of those with three or more children did. Those women with multiple kids were much more likely to have turned to female sterilization.

Women with more education were more likely to choose the pill; the less educated leaned more toward female sterilization.

More information

Visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine for more about birth control.

THURSDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- A step-wise approach accurately spots early stage ovarian cancer in older women at average risk for the disease, new research suggests.

This cancer is known as a silent killer because it is often diagnosed too late to be successfully treated. Scientists have long sought a reliable method of early detection.

The "Risk of Ovarian Cancer Algorithm" (ROCA), which uses a mathematical model, is geared specifically to postmenopausal women at average risk for the disease.

The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), being held next month in Chicago, but were released to reporters at a special news briefing Thursday.

"This ROCA algorithm represents yet another example of personalized medicine. This is personalized towards a screening strategy for a vicious cancer," explained Dr. Douglas W. Blayney, ASCO president, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and medical director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Michigan.

However, experts are awaiting the results of a much larger trial, due out in 2015, before recommending this as routine procedure.

"This is not practice-changing at this time," said study lead author Dr. Karen Lu, professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

"Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic cancer and the fourth leading cause of death in cancer in women," Lu said. "Over 75 percent of cases present with advanced-stage disease, when the cure rate is less than 30 percent. There is no effective screening method at the current time."

Measuring levels of a blood protein called CA-125 can help detect ovarian cancer, but the marker is far less than perfect.

This study involved more than 3,200 postmenopausal women, aged 50 to 74, who had not had ovarian cancer themselves and who had no significant family history of breast or ovarian cancer.

The women started off getting a CA-125 blood test every year. If the test indicated low risk, the women could wait another year before their next test.

If levels were elevated, putting them in an intermediate-risk category, however, the women were scheduled for a follow-up test in three months.

If that test was also high, the women were considered high risk and underwent transvaginal sonography (TVS) or ultrasound, and were referred to a gynecologic oncologist, who decided whether or not surgery was needed.

Over the nine years of the trial, 6.8 percent of the volunteers were bumped up to the three-month CA-125 test group, while only 1 percent were referred to TVS and a cancer specialist.

In total, eight of the more than 3,200 women underwent the recommended surgery. Three of those had invasive early-stage cancer (the three had undergone three years of annual CA-125 testing before moving to the next group), two had "borderline" ovarian tumors and the remaining three had benign ovarian tumors.

The specificity of the ROCA method was 99.7 percent, meaning there were virtually no false-positives, the team noted.

No women with invasive ovarian cancer were missed by the test, Lu said.

If results of the larger ROCA trial, currently underway in Britain, are encouraging, ROCA may be coming to a doctor's office in the not too distant future, "part of the routine health exam for postmenopausal women," Blayney said.

More information

Find out more on ovarian cancer at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.