CHECKUP : PHOTOCOPY TONER CAN BE HARMFUL.

Frequent photocopiers beware: Inhaling dust from copy machines may lead to lung disease, Austrian researchers report.

The toner used in copy machines produces dust that contains silicon, iron and copper - all of which can damage lungs when inhaled, warned Dr. Christine Armbruster of the Pulmologisches Zentrum Vienna in Austria.

X-ray exams showed remnants of this dust in the lungs of a 39-year-old nonsmoking newspaper man, Armbruster and colleagues reported earlier this month in the international medical journal the Lancet.

Although smoking restrictions have made office air safer to breathe, ``with increasing use of photocopiers, more patients with lung disease due to exposure from toner dust are expected,'' she predicted.

The lung disease, known as granulomatous pneumonitis, is marked by a dry cough and difficulty breathing during exertion, Armbruster noted. Cells from the lungs and lymph nodes react to the particles of the inhaled toner dust, causing swelling of lung tissue and difficulty breathing, she said.

Two years ago, the Lancet reported that a 44-year-old woman who worked as a clerk in a photocopying store developed another type of lung disease, known as siderosilicosis, in which lungs get clogged with inhaled dust.

Help for headaches?: Nasal drops containing the anesthetic lidocaine can provide some sufferers of migraine headaches with quick relief, a preliminary study finds.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Morris Maizels and colleagues at the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, said that more than half of migraine sufferers saw their symptoms relieved within five minutes of taking the lidocaine drops.

Unfortunately, about two in five of those patients experienced relapse within about an hour, although the others had continued relief of symptoms.

The researchers called for further studies to clarify the benefits of lidocaine to migraine patients.

A depressing disorder: Children who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to become manic depressive than children who do not have the learning and behavioral disorder, a new study shows.

In the four-year study of 140 children with ADHD, about 23 percent developed manic depression, compared with 2 percent of a group of children without ADHD.

And the worse a child's case of ADHD, the more likely he or she was to develop manic depression, according to the study, published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Children who suffered from both disorders were more likely to require psychiatric hospitalization than children with ADHD alone, said lead author Dr. Joseph Biederman, an adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Manic-depressive children are likely to be irritable and hyperactive, and to cycle rapidly between periods of elation and periods of severe depression, Biederman said. They also tend to have lengthy tantrums of aggression and rage.

Post-pregnancy risk: While it has been believed that pregnancy increases a woman's risk for stroke, a new study finds that a woman is at greater risk for stroke after giving birth - not during pregnancy.

The researchers, led by Dr. Steven J. Kittner of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, found that women were at significantly greater risk for stroke in the six weeks following delivery, but not during pregnancy itself.

They arrived at their findings after analyzing strokes that occurred in women between the ages of 15 and 44 in central Maryland and Washington, D.C., from 1988 through 1991.

The new study appeared Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.