CHECKUP UCLA TO SCREEN HEALTHY SMOKERS FOR STUDY.

Byline: - Staff and Wire Services

Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center along with others nationwide have launched the National Lung Screening Trial to find out if screening for lung cancer before symptoms appear reduces cancer deaths.

Nationwide, the study seeks to enroll 50,000 healthy current or former smokers at risk of lung cancer. The primary goal of the study is to determine if chest X-ray or chest computerized tomography (CT) is more effective at reducing lung cancer deaths. At Jonsson, the only California site currently offering the screening study, researchers hope to enroll 2,000 to 4,000 current and former smokers within the next 18 months.

Lung cancer kills more Americans every year than breast, prostate, colon and pancreas cancers combined, and is responsible for about 28 percent of all cancer deaths in the United States.

Study volunteers will receive their screenings free. To qualify, volunteers need to meet these requirements:

-- Be current or former smokers age 55 to 74.

-- Have never had lung cancer and have not had any cancer within the last five years.

-- Are not currently enrolled in any other cancer screening or prevention trial.

-- Have not had a CT scan of the chest or lungs within the last 18 months.

For more information on the study, please call the Jonsson Cancer Center's toll-free clinical trials hotline at [phone] or the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Information Service at [phone].

JOINT CUSTODY: Married couples may share more than the same bed and an occasional argument.

Spouses of people with asthma, depression and peptic-ulcer disease are 70 percent more likely to suffer from the same disease, says a new study appearing in the Sept. 21 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Spouses also had a greater chance of suffering from high blood pressure and hyperlipidemia - excess cholesterol in the blood - if their partners had the condition, though the risk here was less than 70 percent.

The implication is that some environmental cause or shared behavior is behind the condition.

Scientists already knew that spouses of people with hypertension were at an increased risk for that disease, but some of the other findings in this sample of 8,386 married couples were more of a surprise. All the results were adjusted for age, obesity and smoking status in both partners.

And there may, in fact, be different explanations for why different diseases are prevalent in couples.

In the case of hypertension and hyperlipidemia, for instance, shared diet or exercise patterns may play a role. Asthma could be explained by allergens found in the home.

The findings may have implications for public health: Should couples and families be screened for the same diseases?