CHECKUP : NEWS, TIPS AND TRENDS SOME NURSES HELP PATIENTS END LIVES.

While the national debate on helping patients die has so far largely focused on doctors assisting patient suicide or engaging in euthanasia - some nurses are also helping their patients end their lives, a new report finds.

In a nationwide survey of 852 critical-care nurses, 129 said that on at least one occasion they had engaged in euthanasia or assisted in suicide - sometimes without the request or advance knowledge of patients, family members or doctors.

The most common method nurses reported using was administering a lethal dose of a drug to a terminally ill patient, according to study author Dr. David A. Asch, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia.

Thirty-five nurses reported that they had helped patients die by disobeying doctors' orders to provide life-sustaining treatment, according to results of the anonymous survey, published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Better screening needed:o Infection with the bacteria chlamydia can change a woman's life, leaving her fallopian tubes a tangle of scars and destroying her fertility.

Some experts have blamed the sexually transmitted bacteria, which can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), for as many as 45 percent of the cases of tubal infertility and an equally large proportion of ectopic, or tubal, pregnancies.

But many public and private health-care providers have been reluctant to pay for the expensive screening tests because there was no proof that screening for the bacteria would lead to lower rates of PID.

Now a new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that screening high-risk women for chlamydia can cut the number of cases of PID by almost 60 percent.

``This is the kind of evidence we've been waiting for to convince managed-care providers and, in some cases, providers of public health care, that young and adolescent women need to be screened routinely,'' said Dr. Judith Wasserheit, director of the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga.

Help for eating disorder:o Researchers are searching worldwide for people who suffer from the eating disorder known as anorexia nervosa. The new international study, which will take two years to complete, hopes to identify genes that may contribute to anorexia, said Chris Berrettini, a spokeswoman for the study.

Research has shown that the risk for anorexia may be six times higher for people who have immediate relatives with the condition.

The research team is being led by Dr. Wade Berrettini, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pa.

Anorexia nervosa is a disorder in which individuals, usually young women, relentlessly pursue weight loss and is usually linked to a distorted perception of their body.