CHECKUP\NEWS, TIPS & TRENDS\Cooking with gas can affect lungs.

Women who cook on gas stoves may want to order out more often. The gas could be giving them asthmalike symptoms and worsening their lung function, British researchers report.

In a study of 1,159 people, women who said they cooked with gas were more likely to have had wheezing, breathlessness, asthma attacks and hay fever during the past year than women who used other cooking methods.

The link between gas cooking and allergy symptoms was not found in men, however. Lead researcher Dr. Deborah Jarvis of St. Thomas' Hospital in London speculated that either women are more susceptible to gas than men, or they simply cook more frequently, exposing themselves to the gas more often.

Results of the survey, conducted in the English towns of Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich, were reported this week in the medical journal The Lancet.

Natural gas can produce high indoor concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, which can adversely affect the lungs, according to an editorial accompanying the study.

"I think the chief suggestion here would be to use other means of cooking - electric as opposed to gas," said Dr. R. Michael Sly, chief of allergy and immunology at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Get it out: People with heart disease who suppress their anger or depression may die sooner from their condition than people who express their emotions, a new report suggests.

In a study of 303 men and women in a cardiac rehabilitation program, people who experienced distress but tended not to talk about it - known as a Type D personality - were almost four times more likely to die in the next six to 10 years than people with other personality types.

About 27 percent of people with Type D personalities died during the study, compared with 7 percent of other patients, according to the study, published this week in the medical journal The Lancet.

To be considered a Type D personality, people need to have both negative emotions and the tendency to suppress them - two traits that can lead to social isolation and depression, according to lead study author Dr. Johan Denollet of the University Hospital of Antwerp in Belgium. Experiencing one or the other trait had no effect on a person's risk of death, he said.

Don't touch that sheet: Have you been throwing away that information sheet the druggist gives you when you get a prescription?

Then you're the person the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is worried about. While many pharmacists now give out such patient-information sheets when they dispense drugs, the FDA believes that people aren't reading them - and even when they do, they may not be getting all the information they need.

This could result in people not taking their medicine properly, or taking it with other drugs that could cause harmful interactions, the FDA has said.

To solve that problem, the agency asked a group of experts to come up with ways to make the leaflets more patient-friendly. At a two-day workshop in Maryland recently, the panel offered a list of suggestions, including making critical information more prominent, and using simple language and pictures to make it understandable to a mass audience.