CHECKUP : NEWS, TIPS AND TRENDS APNEA SUFFERERS DO BADLY ON ROAD.

You might be safer getting in a car with a drunken driver than riding with some people who have sleep apnea, the nighttime breathing disorder, a study suggests.

Some people with sleep apnea are so impaired during the day from interrupted sleep that their driving skills are as bad or worse than those of someone under the influence of alcohol, says the study published in this month's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The research involved 21 men with apnea and 21 without the sleep disorder, whose driving skills were tested in a lab using a driving performance simulator. The driving skills of men without apnea were tested when they were sober and when they drank alcohol, for comparison with the sober, sleep- deprived men.

More than half of the sleep apnea group was worse than the drunken comparison group in two driving skills: tracking (keeping the vehicle in its lane) and visual search (looking out for pedestrians, other vehicles, traffic signs and lights).

A tall tale: Tall people are likely to have a greater life expectancy than their shorter counterparts - up to a point at least, says a British expert on aging. Bernard Harris told the British Congress of Gerontology that some research has shown that women ages 40-44 and up to 5 feet 6 inches tall had half the mortality rate of women 8 inches shorter. But he said the link with longer life disappeared for men taller than 6 feet 1 inch.

Take two: The old standard medical advice to ``take two aspirin and call me in the morning'' seems to pass the test of time. The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to change aspirin labels to include taking a tablet during a suspected heart attack.

The proposal stems from new research suggesting that aspirin may help prevent deaths when given to people actually experiencing heart attacks.

Earlier studies showed that regularly taking small doses of aspirin helps to prevent heart attacks.

Up in smoke: When the price of cigarettes goes up, teen-agers are three times more likely to quit smoking than adults, a study found. A 75-cent increase in the price of a pack of cigarettes between 1992 and 1994 would have reduced the number of smokers ages 12 to 18 by 1.6 million, according to a study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Results were released by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Balloon or bypass?: From the patient's perspective, balloon angioplasty and coronary bypass surgery work equally well in alleviating the chest pain called angina that plagues people with heart disease.

A new British study, which analyzed outcomes of more than a thousand patients, found that both surgery and the less-invasive method using balloons to pry open clogged arteries provided pain relief to the majority of patients. Those findings were based upon patient response to questions about pain.