A new study has revealed that higher overall acidity of the diet, regardless of the individual foods making up that diet, increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.

The study of more than 60,000 women was conducted by Dr Guy Fagherazzi and Dr Francoise Clavel-Chapelon, Center for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, INSERM, Paris, France, and colleagues, and is the first large prospective study to demonstrate these findings.

A western diet rich in animal products and other acidogenic foods can induce an acid load that is not compensated for by fruit and vegetables; this can cause chronic metabolic acidosis and lead to metabolic complications.

A total of 66,485 women from the E3N study (the French Centre of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition were followed for new diabetes cases over 14 years.

Their dietary acid load was calculated from their potential renal acid load (PRAL) and their net endogenous acid production (NEAP) scores, both standard techniques for assessing dietary acid consumption from nutrient intake.

During follow-up, 1,372 new cases of incident type 2 diabetes occurred. In the overall population, those in the top 25 percent (quartile) for PRAL had a 56 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared with the bottom quartile.

Women of normal weight, BMI of 25 and under, had the highest increased risk (96 percent for top quartile versus bottom) while overweight women (BMI 25 and over) had only a 28 percent increased risk (top quartile versus bottom). NEAP scores showed a similar increased risk for higher acid load.

"A diet rich in animal protein may favour net acid intake, while most fruits and vegetables form alkaline precursors that neutralise the acidity. Contrary to what is generally believed, most fruits such as peaches, apples, pears, bananas and even lemons and oranges actually reduce dietary acid load once the body has processed them," researchers said.

"In our study, the fact that the association between both PRAL and NEAP scores and the risk of incident type 2 diabetes persisted after adjustment for dietary patterns, meat consumption and intake of fruit, vegetables, coffee and sweetened beverages suggests that dietary acids may play a specific role in promoting the development of type 2 diabetes, irrespective of the foods or drinks that provide the acidic or alkaline components," they added.

The study is published in the journal Diabetologia.

A decade-long research effort to uncover the environmental causes of breast cancer by studying both lab animals and a group of healthy US girls has turned up some surprises, scientists say.

At the center of the investigation are 1,200 school girls who do not have breast cancer, but who have already given scientists important new clues about the possible origins of the disease.

Some risk factors are well understood, including early puberty, later age of childbearing, late onset of menopause, estrogen replacement therapy, drinking alcohol and exposure to radiation.

Advances have also been made in identifying risky gene mutations, but these cases make up a small minority.

"Most of breast cancer, particularly in younger women, does not come from family histories," said Leslie Reinlib, a program director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"We have still got 80 percent that has got to be environmental," said Reinlib, who is part of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP) program that has received some $70 million in funds from the US government since 2003.

Some of its researchers track what is happening in the human population, while others study how carcinogens, pollutants and diet affect the development of the mammary glands and breast tumours in lab mice.

The program`s primary focus is on puberty because its early onset "is probably one of the best predictors of breast cancer in women," Reinlib said.

Puberty is a time of rapid growth of the breast tissue. Research on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombings in Japan has shown that those exposed in puberty had a higher likelihood of developing breast cancer in adulthood.

The 1,200 US girls enrolled in the study at sites in New York City, northern California and the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area beginning in 2004, when they were between the ages of six and eight.

The aim was to measure the girls` chemical exposures through blood and urine tests, and to learn how environmental exposures affected the onset of puberty and perhaps breast cancer risk later in life.

Researchers quickly discovered that their effort to reach girls before puberty had not been entirely successful.

"By age eight, 40 percent were already in puberty," said Reinlib. "That was a surprising bit of information."

Further research has shown that the girls appear to be entering puberty six to eight months earlier than their peers did in the 1990s.

A study published last week in the journal Pediatrics on this cohort of girls found that obesity was acting as a primary driver of earlier breast development.

Other studies on the girls have focused on chemicals that are known as endocrine disruptors because they are believed to cause either earlier or later breast development.

Initial results showed "for the first time that phthalates, BPA, pesticides are in all the girls they looked at," said Reinlib.

Researchers were taken aback by the pervasiveness of the exposures, but also by the data which appeared to show some plastic chemicals might not be as influential on breast development as some have feared.

"They didn`t find much of an association between puberty and phthalates, which are these chemicals that leach out of plastic bottles and Tupperware," Reinlib said.

Another major finding regarded blood chemicals from two nearby groups in Ohio and Kentucky, both drinking water that was apparently contaminated by industrial waste.

Girls in northern Kentucky had blood levels of an industrial chemical -- perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA or C-8) found in Teflon non-stick coating for pans -- three times as high as those who drank water from the Ohio River near Cincinnati, where water was filtered with state-of-the-art technology.

"Northern Kentucky did not have granular activated carbon filtration" in their water supply said researcher Susan Pinney, a professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine.

"In 2012 they put it in after they learned of our preliminary results." Families were also notified of their daughters` blood levels, she said.

The chemicals can linger in the body for years. Researchers were dismayed to learn that the longer the girls spent breastfeeding as infants -- typically touted for its health benefits -- the higher their PFOA levels compared to girls who were fed formula.

What cannot be studied in the girls is tried on lab mice, who in one experiment are being fed high-fat diets and exposed to a potent carcinogen to see how the two interact.

Mammary tumors develop much faster in the high-fat diet group, said scientist Richard Schwartz of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University.

Fat mice have more blood supply in the mammary glands, higher inflammation levels and display changes in the immune system.

Follow-up studies suggest that cancer risk stays high even if mice are fed high-fat diets in puberty and switched to low-fat diets in adulthood, he said.

"The damage is already done," he said. "Does this mean that humans are at risk the same way? We don`t know that with certainty."

But the findings do reinforce the advice that people often hear regarding how to maintain good health -- avoid fatty foods, maintain a normal weight and reduce chemical exposures wherever possible, experts say.

"It can`t hurt, and it can only help," said Schwartz.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women globally and took 508,000 lives in 2011, according to the World Health Organization.

A new study has suggested that preeclampsia- a condition in pregnancy characterized by high blood pressure, sometimes with fluid retention and protein excretion in the urine- during pregnancy is a risk factor for developing kidney failure later in life.

Recent data from registry-based studies suggest that preeclampsia may be associated with an increased risk of developing kidney failure, but the magnitude of this link and the contributions of individuals' other medical conditions remain unknown.

To investigate the issue, researchers led by Andrea Kattah, MD (Mayo Clinic) studied 8362 residents of Olmsted County, MN who gave birth between 1976 and 1982. Kidney failure cases were identified by linkage with the United States Renal Data System; each case was matched to two controls.

A total of 20 cases of kidney failure were identified and available for analysis.

"Preeclampsia is associated with a higher odds of end stage renal disease. However, after adjusting for diabetes and hypertension, the association was attenuated and no longer significant," the researchers said.

The study was presented at ASN Kidney Week 2013 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA.

The UN has launched the largest-ever polio vaccination campaign in the Middle East, aiming to immunise more than 20 million children in seven countries amid an outbreak of the crippling virus in war-torn Syria, officials said Friday.

"The polio outbreak in Syria is not just a tragedy for children; it is an urgent alarm and a crucial opportunity to reach all under-immunised children wherever they are," Peter Crowley, who heads the UN children's agency's polio division, said in a statement.

The World Health Organisation last week confirmed the polio outbreak in Syria, which had been free of the disease since 1999.

The highly infectious disease affects mainly children under five and can cause paralysis in a matter of hours. Some cases can be fatal.

"In a region that had not seen polio for nearly a decade, in the last 12 months polio virus has been detected in sewage samples from Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip," WHO and UNICEF said in a joint statement.

"It has so far left 10 children paralysed, and poses a risk of paralysis to hundreds of thousands of children across the region," they stressed, pointing out that Syria has seen its immunisation rate plummet from more than 90 percent before the conflict began in March 2011 to 68 percent today.

The whole region will now face an intense vaccination push over the next six months, and will be on heightened alert to spot cases that may have been missed, they said.

More than 650,000 children in Syria, including 116,000 in the strife-torn northeastern Deir Ezzor province where the polio outbreak was confirmed last week, had already received emergency vaccinations, UNICEF and the WHO said.

A new campaign aims to vaccinate 1.6 million children in Syria against polio, measles, mumps and rubella, while Jordan plans to immunise 3.5 million across the country, the UN agencies said, adding that some 18,800 kids had received vaccines in Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp in recent days.

In Iraq, a vaccination campaign has started in the west of the country, with another pending in the Kurdistan region, while Lebanon plans to launch a nationwide vaccination push this week and Turkey and Egypt by the middle of the month.

Thanks to a global drive against polio, the virus is now endemic in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

"Preliminary evidence indicates that the polio virus is of Pakistani origin and is similar to the strain detected in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip," Friday's statement said.

A new study has shown that people who speak more than 1 language, tend to develop dementia up to 5 years later than those who are monolingual.

A team of scientists examined almost 650 dementia patients and assessed when each one had been diagnosed with the condition. The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad (India).

They found that people who spoke two or more languages experienced a later onset of Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and frontotemporal dementia.

The bilingual advantage extended to illiterate people who had not attended school. This confirms that the observed effect is not caused by differences in formal education.

It is the largest study so far to gauge the impact of bilingualism on the onset of dementia - independent of a person's education, gender, occupation and whether they live in a city or in the country, all of which have been examined as potential factors influencing the onset of dementia.

The team of researchers said that further studies are needed to determine the mechanism, which causes the delay in the onset of dementia.

The researchers suggest that bilingual switching between different sounds, words, concepts, grammatical structures and social norms constitutes a form of natural brain training, likely to be more effective than any artificial brain training programme.