BMW's vehicle sales reach 1.8 million in 2012: CFO

BMW , the world's largest premium carmaker, has sold about 1.8 million vehicles in 2012, its chief financial officer told a German newspaper.
"One of our goals was to increase vehicle sales in 2012 and to reach a new record in deliveries. With about 1.8 million vehicles, we have achieved this," the executive, Friedrich Eichiner, told Die Welt in an interview.
In December, BMW said vehicle sales in the January-November period had increased by 10.1 percent to 1.66 million. For the whole of 2011, BMW had vehicles sales of 1.67 million.
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Settlement reached in Toyota acceleration cases

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday it has reached a settlement worth more than $1 billion in a case involving unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles.
The company said the deal will resolve hundreds of lawsuits from Toyota owners who said the value of their cars and trucks plummeted after a series of recalls stemming from claims that Toyota vehicles accelerated unintentionally.
Steve Berman, a lawyer representing Toyota owners, said the settlement is the largest in U.S. history involving automobile defects.
"We kept fighting and fighting and we secured what we think was a good settlement given the risks of this litigation," Berman told The Associated Press.
The proposed deal was filed Wednesday and must receive the approval of U.S. District Judge James Selna, who was expected to review the settlement Friday.
Toyota said it will take a one-time, $1.1 billion pre-tax charge against earnings to cover the estimated costs of the settlement. Berman said the total value of the deal is between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion.
Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against Toyota since 2009, when the Japanese automaker started receiving numerous complaints that its cars accelerated on their own, causing crashes, injuries and even deaths.
The cases were consolidated in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana and divided into two categories: economic loss and wrongful death. Claims by people who seek compensation for injury and death due to sudden acceleration are not part of the settlement; the first trial involving those suits is scheduled for February.
As part of the economic loss settlement, Toyota will offer cash payments from a pool of about $250 million to eligible customers who sold vehicles or turned in leased vehicles between September 2009 and December 2010.
The company also will launch a $250 million program for 16 million current owners to provide supplemental warranty coverage for certain vehicle components, and it will retrofit about 3.2 million vehicles with a brake override system. An override system is designed to ensure a car will stop when the brakes are applied, even if the accelerator pedal is depressed.
The settlement would also establish additional driver education programs and fund new research into advanced safety technologies.
"In keeping with our core principles, we have structured this agreement in ways that work to put our customers first and demonstrate that they can count on Toyota to stand behind our vehicles," said Christopher Reynolds, Toyota vice president and general counsel.
Current and former Toyota owners are expected to receive more information about the settlement in the coming months. Some information is also available at http://www.ToyotaELsettlement.com , a website created for Toyota owners affected by the settlement.
"We are extraordinarily proud of how we were able to represent the interests of Toyota owners, and believe this settlement is both comprehensive in its scope and fair in compensation," Berman said.
Toyota has recalled more than 14 million vehicles worldwide due to acceleration problems in several models and brake defects with the Prius hybrid. The automaker has blamed driver error, faulty floor mats and stuck accelerator pedals for the problems.
Plaintiffs' attorneys have spent the past two years deposing Toyota employees, poring over thousands of documents and reviewing software code, but the company maintains those lawyers have been unable to prove that a design defect — namely Toyota's electronic throttle control system — was responsible for vehicles surging unexpectedly.
Both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA were unable to find any defects in Toyota's source code that could cause problems.
The company has been dogged by fines for not reporting problems in a timely manner.
Earlier this month, NHTSA doled out a record $17.4 million fine to Toyota for failing to quickly report floor mat problems with some of its Lexus models. Toyota paid a total of $48.8 million in fines for three violations in 2010.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda appeared before Congress last year and pledged to strengthen quality control. Recent sales figures show the company appears to have rebounded following its safety issues.
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Large, powerful storm heads east; at least 6 dead

A powerful winter storm system pounded the nation's midsection Wednesday and headed toward the Northeast, where people braced for the high winds and heavy snow that disrupted holiday travel, knocked out power to thousands of homes and were blamed in at least six deaths.
Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed, scores of motorists got stuck on icy roads or slid into drifts, and blizzard warnings were issued amid snowy gusts of 30 mph that blanketed roads and windshields, at times causing whiteout conditions.
"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.
The system, which spawned Gulf Coast region tornadoes on Christmas Day and a historic amount of snow in Arkansas, pushed through the Upper Ohio Valley and headed toward the Northeast. Forecasts called for 12 to 18 inches of snow inland from western New York to Maine starting late Wednesday and into Thursday and tapering off into a mix of rain and snow closer to the coast, where little accumulation was expected in such cities as New York and Boston.
The storm left freezing temperatures in its aftermath, and forecasters also said parts of the Southeast from Virginia to Florida would see severe thunderstorms.
Schools on break and workers taking holiday vacations meant that many people could avoid messy commutes, but those who had to travel were implored to avoid it. Snow was blamed for scores of vehicle accidents as far east as Maryland, and about two dozen counties in Indiana and Ohio issued snow emergency travel alerts, urging people to go out on the roads only if necessary.
Some 40 vehicles got bogged down trying to make it up a slick hill in central Indiana, and four state snowplows slid off roads as snow fell at the rate of 3 inches an hour in some places.
Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened Arkansas highway were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision, and two people, including a 76-year-old Milwaukee woman, were killed Tuesday on Oklahoma highways. Deaths from wind-toppled trees were reported in Texas and Louisiana.
The day after a holiday wasn't expected to be particularly busy for AAA, but its Cincinnati-area branch had its busiest Wednesday of the year. By mid-afternoon, nearly 400 members had been helped with tows, jump starts and other aid, with calls still coming in, spokesman Mike Mills said.
Jennifer Miller, 58, was taking a bus Wednesday from Cincinnati to visit family in Columbus.
"I wish this had come yesterday and was gone today," she said, struggling with a rolling suitcase and three smaller bags on a slushy sidewalk near the station. "I'm glad I don't have to drive in this."
Traffic crawled at 25 mph on Interstate 81 in Maryland, where authorities reported scores of accidents.
"We're going to try to go down south and get below" the storm, said Richard Power, traveling from home in Levittown, N.Y., to Kentucky with his wife, two children and their beagle, Lucky. He said they were well on their way until they hit snow in Pennsylvania, then 15-mph traffic on I-81 at Hagerstown, Md. "We're going to go as far as we can go. ... If it doesn't get better, we're going to just get a hotel."
More than 1,400 flights were canceled by evening, according to FlightAware.com, and some airlines said they would waive change fees. Delays of more than an hour were reported Wednesday at the three New York City-area airports, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
In Arkansas, some of the nearly 200,000 people who lost power could be without it for as long as a week because of snapped poles and wires after ice and 10 inches of snow coated power lines, said the state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas. Gov. Mike Beebe sent out National Guard teams, and Humvees transported medical workers and patients. Snow hadn't fallen in Little Rock on Christmas since 1926, but the capital ended Tuesday with 10.3 inches of it.
Other states also had scattered outages. Duke Energy said it had nearly 300 outages in Indiana, with few left in Ohio by early afternoon after scores were reported in the morning.
As the storm moved east, New England state highway departments were treating roads and getting ready to mobilize with snowfall forecasts of a foot or more that was expected to start falling late Wednesday and through Thursday.
"People are picking up salt and a lot of shovels today," said Andy Greenwood, an assistant manager at Aubuchon Hardware in Keene, N.H.
As usual, winter-sports enthusiasts welcomed the snow. At Smiling Hill Farm in Maine, Warren Knight was hoping for enough snow to allow the opening of trails.
"We watch the weather more carefully for cross-country skiing than we do for farming. And we're pretty diligent about farming. We're glued to the weather radio," said Knight, who described the weather at the 500-acre farm in Westbrook as being akin to the prizes in "Cracker Jacks — we don't know what we're going to get."
Behind the storm, Mississippi's governor declared states of emergency in eight counties with more than 25 people reported injured and 70 homes left damaged.
Cindy Williams, 56, stood near a home in McNeill, Miss., where its front had collapsed into a pile of wood and brick, a balcony and the porch ripped apart. Large oak trees were uprooted and winds sheared off treetops in a nearby grove. But she focused instead on the fact that all her family members had escaped harm.
"We are so thankful," she said. "God took care of us."
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Associated Press writers Rick Callahan and Charles Wilson in Indianapolis, Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Ark.; Jim Van Anglen in Mobile, Ala.; Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Miss.; Julie Carr Smyth and Mitch Stacy in Columbus, Ohio; Amanda Lee Myers in Cincinnati; David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md.; Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H.; and David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.
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Wells Fargo doesn't have to pay clients $203 million: court

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court vacated an injunction and a $203 million restitution order against Wells Fargo & Co in consumer litigation over the bank's overdraft policies, according to a ruling issued on Wednesday.
But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco also found Wells had violated part of California's unfair competition law, and sent the case back to trial court in San Francisco to determine what relief is appropriate.
A spokesman for the bank, Ancel Martinez, said Wells was pleased with the decision. Plaintiff attorney Michael Sobol said he was confident the damages could be reinstated by the lower court judge.
"The misrepresentations found by the district court have been affirmed," Sobol said.
Wells Fargo, prior to April 2001, posted customer debit card purchases to their bank accounts in order of lowest charge to highest, which minimized the number of overdrafts, according to the ruling.
But beginning in April 2001, the bank began posting debit card purchase from highest to lowest, which maximized the number of overdrafts, the 9th Circuit wrote.
A San Francisco federal judge certified a class action on behalf of Wells Fargo customers, who incurred overdraft fees because of high-to-low sequencing. The judge then issued an injunction ordering the bank to cease the practice, as well as a $203 million restitution award.
In its ruling, the 9th Circuit found that federal law preempted part of the California statute on which the injunction was based.
"Federal law does not, however, preempt California consumer law with respect to fraudulent or misleading representations concerning posting," the court wrote.
The case in the 9th Circuit is Gutierrez vs. Wells Fargo, 10-16959.
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Toyota seeks to settle acceleration cases for $1.1 billion

DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp plans to spend $1.1 billion to resolve sweeping U.S. class-action litigation over claims that millions of its vehicles accelerate unintentionally, as the Japanese automaker looks to turn the page on the biggest safety crisis in its history.
About 16 million Toyota, Lexus and Scion vehicles sold in the United States spanning the model years 1998 to 2010 are covered by the action, according to court filings made public on Wednesday. Thirty nameplates are affected, including the top-selling Toyota Camry midsize sedan and Corolla compact car.
Toyota, the No. 3 automaker in the U.S. market, admitted no fault in proposing the settlement, one of the largest of U.S. mass class-action litigation in the automotive sector. Investors snapped up shares of Toyota and its stock rose 2 percent in early trading.
"This was a difficult decision, especially since reliable scientific evidence and multiple independent evaluations have confirmed the safety of Toyota's electronic throttle control systems," Christopher Reynolds, general counsel for Toyota Motor Sales, USA, said in a statement.
"However, we concluded that turning the page on this legacy legal issue through the positive steps we are taking is in the best interests of the company, our employees, our dealers and, most of all, our customers."
The figure eclipses other settlements in the auto industry including Bridgestone Corp's $240 million payout to Ford Motor Co in 2005 over Ford's massive Firestone tire safety recall in 2001. Ford replaced 13 million Firestone tires, installed mostly as original equipment on the company's popular Explorer SUV, in one of the biggest recalls in U.S. history.
Toyota said it would take a one-time pretax charge of $1.1 billion to cover the costs. The company said it plans to book the charge as operating expenses in its October-December third quarter.
Hagens Berman, the law firm representing Toyota owners who brought the lawsuit in 2010, issued a statement saying that the settlement was valued between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion. In a memo filed in court, the lawyers said the settlement was "a landmark, if not a record, settlement in automobile defect class action litigation in the United States."
Toyota's recall of more than 10 million vehicles between 2009 and 2011 hurt the company's reputation for reliability and safety. Toyota faces an estimated $10 billion in potential civil liability in U.S. courts, for consumer fraud, personal injury and wrongful death claims stemming from acceleration complaints.
Wednesday's $1.1. billion settlement does not cover the wrongful death or injury claims.
LINGERING EFFECTS
The effect of the recalls on sales and loyalty remains "difficult to isolate," IHS Automotive analyst Rebecca Lindland said.
"A lot of their growth through the early 2000s were first-time Toyota buyers," she said. "Those are the people that were most vulnerable to saying, 'I'll never own a Toyota again.' The long term effects won't fully be realized until all of the cars that have been impacted by the recall have been retired."
The biggest safety crisis in Toyota's history began to get public notice in August 2009 when an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor and three members of his family were killed in a Lexus ES 350 that crashed at a high speed.
A separate lawsuit over the death of the Saylor family was settled out of court. A handful of wrongful death and personal injury cases are still pending, but the vast majority of the litigation over this issue will be finished if the proposed settlement is approved, said a person with knowledge of the remaining lawsuits who wished to remain anonymous.
Within a half year of the Saylor family crash, Toyota President Akio Toyoda and other company executives were questioned in a high-profile U.S. Congressional hearing, and Toyoda made a public apology.
Toyota maintained all along that its electronic throttle control system was not at fault. It reiterated that on Wednesday.
A study by U.S. safety regulator the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and NASA found no link between the reports of unintended acceleration and Toyota's electronic throttle control system.
INCREASINGLY COMMON
The settlement, which must be approved by a California federal judge, includes direct payments to customers as well as the installation of a brake override system in more than 2.7 million vehicles, according to the settlement agreement filed in court.
The terms include a $250 million fund for former Toyota owners who sold vehicles at reduced prices and a separate $250 million fund for owners not eligible for the brake override system.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs are slated to receive up to $200 million in fees and $27 million in costs, according to court documents.
Richard Cupp, a professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, said the settlement was large for the automotive sector but was dwarfed by other litigation involving economic loss claims. State cases against the tobacco industry, for instance, amounted to more than $200 billion.
"That could mean that lawsuits like these could become increasingly common, even where there is not provable physical injury on large scale," Cupp said.
The case is In re: Toyota Motor Corp. Unintended Acceleration Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 10-ml-02151.
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Woman’s ‘Dystextia’ Stroke Sign: ‘Some is where!’

Smartphone autocorrect is famous for scrambling messages into unintelligible gibberish but when one man received this garbled text from his 11-week-pregnant wife, it alarmed him: “every where thinging days nighing,” her text read. “Some is where!” Though that may sound like every text you’ve ever received, the woman’s husband knew her autocorrect was turned off. Fearing some medical issue, he made sure his 25-year-old wife went immediately to the emergency room. When she got there, doctors noted that she was disoriented, couldn’t use her right arm and leg properly and had some difficulty speaking. A magnetic resonance imaging scan — MRI — revealed that part of the woman’s brain wasn’t getting enough blood. The diagnosis was stroke. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. A short hospital stay and some low-dose blood thinners took care of the symptoms and the rest of her pregnancy was uneventful. Click here to read about how texting pedestrians risk injuries The three doctors from Boston’s Harvard Medical School, who reported the case study online in this week’s Archives of Neurology, claim this is the first instance they know of where an aberrant text message was used to help diagnose a stroke. In their report, they refer to the woman’s inability to text properly as “dystextia,” a word coined by medical experts in an earlier case. Dystextia appears to be a new form of aphasia, a term that refers to any trouble processing language, be it spoken or written. The authors of the Archives paper said that at least theoretically, incoherent text messages will be used more often to flag strokes and other neurological abnormalities that lead to the condition. “As the accessibility of electronic communication continues to advance, the growing digital record will likely become an increasingly important means of identifying neurologic disease, particularly in patient populations that rely more heavily on written rather than spoken communication,” they wrote. Even though jumbled texts are so common, Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is the director of the stroke center at Duke University, said he also believes it’s possible they can be used to sound the alarm on a person’s neurological state, especially in a case like this where the text consisted of complete words that amounted to nonsense rather than the usual autocorrected muddle. “It would have been very easy to dismiss because of the normal problems with texting but this was a whole conversation that wasn’t making sense,” Goldstein said. “I might be concerned about a patient based on a text like this if they were telling me they hadn’t intended to send a disjointed jumble but they weren’t able to correct themselves.” In diagnosing stroke, Goldstein said both patients and medical professionals tend to discount aphasic symptoms, even in speech, but they can often be the first clue something is up. In this woman’s case, other signs were there. Her obstetrician realized in retrospect that she’d had trouble filling out a form earlier in the day. She had difficulties speaking too which might also have been picked up sooner if a recent upper respiratory infection hadn’t reduced her voice to a whisper. But unlike this woman, most people leave their autocorrect turned on. If we relied solely on maddeningly unintelligible text messages to determine neurological state, neurologists might have lines out the door.
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Link between pot, psychosis goes both ways in kids

Marijuana (cannabis) use may be linked to the development of psychotic symptoms in teens - but the reverse could also be true: psychosis in adolescents may be linked to later pot use, according to a new Dutch study. "We have focused mainly on temporal order; is it the chicken or the egg? As the study shows, it is a bidirectional relationship," wrote the study's lead author Merel Griffith-Lendering, a doctoral candidate at Leiden University in The Netherlands, in an email to Reuters Health. Previous research established links between marijuana and psychosis, but scientists questioned whether pot use increased the risk of mental illness, or whether people were using pot to ease their psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions. "What is interesting in this study is that both processes are going on at the same time," said Dr. Gregory Seeger, medical director for addiction services at Rochester General Hospital in upstate New York. He told Reuters Health that researchers have been especially concerned about what tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active property in pot, could do to a teenager's growing brain. "That's a very vulnerable period of time for brain development," and individuals with a family history of schizophrenia and psychosis seem to be more sensitive to the toxic effects of THC, he said. A 2010 study of 3,800 Australian teenagers found that those who used marijuana were twice as likely to develop psychosis compared to teens who never smoked pot (see Reuters Health article of March 1, 2010 here:). But that study also found that those who suffered from hallucinations and delusions when they were younger were also more likely to use pot early on. CHICKEN v. EGG For the new study, published in the journal Addiction, the researchers wanted to see which came first: pot or psychosis. Griffith-Lendering and her colleagues used information on 2,120 Dutch teenagers, who were surveyed about their pot use when they were about 14, 16 and 19 years old. The teens also took psychosis vulnerability tests that asked - among other things - about their ability to concentrate, their feelings of loneliness and whether they see things other people don't. Overall, the researchers found 940 teens, or about 44 percent, reported smoking pot, and there was a bidirectional link between pot use and psychosis. For example, using pot at 16 years old was linked to psychotic symptoms three years later, and psychotic symptoms at age 16 were linked to pot use at age 19. This was true even when the researchers accounted for mental illness in the kids' families, alcohol use and tobacco use. Griffith-Lendering said she could not say how much more likely young pot users were to exhibit psychotic symptoms later on. Also, the new study cannot prove one causes the other. Genetics may also explain the link between pot use and psychosis, said Griffith-Lendering. "We can say for some people that cannabis comes first and psychosis comes second, but for some people they have some (undiagnosed) psychosis (and) perhaps cannabis makes them feel better," said Dr. Marta Di Forti, of King's College, London, who was not involved with the new research. Di Forti, who has studied the link between pot and psychosis, told Reuters Health she considers pot a risk factor for psychosis - not a cause. Seeger, who was also not involved with the new study, said that there needs to be more public awareness of the connection. "I think the marijuana is not a harmless substance. Especially for teenagers, there should be more of a public health message out there that marijuana has a public health risk," he said. Griffith-Lendering agrees. "Given the severity and impact of psychotic disorders, prevention programs should take this information into consideration," she said.
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Early Childhood Obesity Rates Might Be Slowing Nation-Wide

About one in three children in the U.S. are now overweight, and since the 1980s the number of children who are obese has more than tripled. But a new study of 26.7 million young children from low-income families shows that in this group of kids, the tidal wave of obesity might finally be receding. Being obese as a child not only increases the risk of early-life health problems, such as joint problems, pre-diabetes and social stigmatization, but it also dramatically increases the likelihood of being obese later in life, which can lead to chronic diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Children as young as 2 years of age can be obese--and even extremely obese. Early childhood obesity rates, which bring higher health care costs throughout a kid's life, have been especially high among lower-income families. "This is the first national study to show that the prevalence of obesity and extreme obesity among young U.S. children may have begun to decline," the researchers noted in a brief report published online December 25 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. (Reports earlier this year suggested that childhood obesity rates were dropping in several U.S. cities.) The study examined rates of obesity (body mass index calculated by age and gender to be in the 95th percentile or higher--for example, a BMI above 20 for a 2-year-old male--compared with reference growth charts) and extreme obesity (BMI of more than 120 percent above that of the 95th percentile of the reference populations) in children ages 2 to 4 in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers, led by Liping Pan, of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, combed through 12 years of data (1998 to 2010) from the Pediatric Nutritional Surveillance System, which includes information on roughly half of all children on the U.S. who are eligible for federal health care and nutrition assistance. A subtle but important shift in early childhood obesity rates in this low-income population seems to have begun in 2003. Obesity rates increased from 13.05 percent in 1998 to 15.21 percent in 2003. Soon, however, obesity rates began decreasing, reaching 14.94 percent by 2010. Extreme obesity followed a similar pattern, increasing from 1.75 percent to 2.22 percent from 1998 to 2003, but declining to 2.07 percent by 2010. Although these changes might seem small, the number of children involved makes for huge health implications. For example, each drop of just one tenth of a percentage point represents some 26,700 children in the study population alone who are no longer obese or extremely obese. And if these trends are occurring in the rest of the population, the long-term health and cost implications are massive. Public health agencies and the Obama Administration have made battling childhood obesity a priority, although these findings suggest that early childhood obesity rates, at least, were already beginning to decline nearly a decade ago. Some popular prevention strategies include encouraging healthier eating (by reducing intake of highly processed and high-sugar foods and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption) and increased physical activity (both at school and at home). The newly revealed trends "indicate modest recent progress of obesity prevention among young children," the authors noted. "These finding may have important health implications because of the lifelong health risks of obesity and extreme obesity in early childhood.
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One in 12 in military has clogged heart arteries

Just over one in 12 U.S. service members who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had plaque buildup in the arteries around their hearts - an early sign of heart disease, according to a new study. None of them had been diagnosed with heart disease before deployment, researchers said. "This is a young, healthy, fit group," said the study's lead author, Dr. Bryant Webber, from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. "These are people who are asymptomatic, they feel fine, they're deployed into combat," he told Reuters Health. "It just proves again the point that we know that this is a clinically silent disease, meaning people can go years without being diagnosed, having no signs or symptoms of the disease." Webber said the findings also show that although the U.S. has made progress in lowering the nationwide prevalence of heart disease, there's more work that can be done to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle and reduce their risks. Heart disease accounts for about one in four deaths - or about 600,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new data come from autopsies done on U.S. service members who died in October 2001 through August 2011 during combat or from unintentional injuries. Those autopsies were originally performed to provide a full account to service members' families of how they died. The study mirrors autopsy research on Korean and Vietnam war veterans, which found signs of heart disease in as many as three-quarters of deceased service members at the time. "Earlier autopsy studies... were critical pieces of information that alerted the medical community to the lurking burden of coronary disease in our young people," said Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health. The findings are not directly comparable, in part because there was a draft in place during the earlier wars but not for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom/New Dawn. When service is optional, healthier people might be more likely to sign up, researchers explained. Still, Levy said the new study likely reflects declines in heart disease in the U.S. in general over that span. Altogether the researchers had information on 3,832 service members who'd been killed at an average age of 26. Close to 9 percent had any buildup in their coronary arteries, according to the autopsies. And about a quarter of the soldiers with buildup in their arteries had severe blockage. Service members who had been obese or had high cholesterol or high blood pressure when they entered the military were especially likely to have plaque buildup, Webber and his colleagues reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. More than 98 percent of the service members included were men. "This study bodes well for a lower burden of disease lurking in young people," Levy, who wrote an editorial published with the report, told Reuters Health. "Young, healthy people are likely to have a lower burden of disease today than their parents or grandparents had decades ago." That's likely due, in part, to better control of blood pressure and cholesterol and lower rates of smoking in today's service members - as well as the country in general, researchers said. However, two risks for heart disease that haven't declined are obesity and diabetes, which are closely linked. "Obesity is the one that has not trended in the right direction," Levy said. "Those changes in obesity and diabetes threaten to reverse some of the dramatic improvements that we are seeing in heart disease death rates," he added.
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Obesity declining in young, poorer kids: study

The number of low-income preschoolers who qualify as obese or "extremely obese" has dropped over the last decade, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. Although the decline was only "modest" and may not apply to all children, researchers said it was still encouraging. "It's extremely important to make sure we're monitoring obesity in this low-income group," said the CDC's Heidi Blanck, who worked on the study. Those kids are known to be at higher risk of obesity than their well-off peers, in part because access to healthy food is often limited in poorer neighborhoods. The new results can't prove what's behind the progress, Blanck told Reuters Health - but two possible contributors are higher rates of breastfeeding and rising awareness of the importance of physical activity even for very young kids. Blanck and her colleagues used data on routine clinic visits for about half of all U.S. kids eligible for federal nutrition programs - including 27.5 million children between age two and four. They found 13 percent of those preschoolers were obese in 1998. That grew to just above 15 percent in 2003, but dropped slightly below 15 percent in 2010, the most recent study year included. Similarly, the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from nearly 1.8 percent in 1998 to 2.2 percent in 2003, then dropped back to just below 2.1 percent in 2010, the research team reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Whether kids are obese is determined by their body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight in relation to height - and by their age and sex. For example, a four-year-old girl who is 40 inches tall would be obese if she was 42 pounds or heavier. A two-year-old boy who is 35 inches tall qualifies as obese at 34 pounds or above, according to the CDC's child BMI calculator. (The CDC's BMI calculator for children and teens is available here:.) The new findings are the first national data to show obesity and extreme obesity may be declining in young children, Blanck said. "This is very encouraging considering the recent effort made in the field including by several U.S. federal agencies to combat the childhood obesity epidemic," said Dr. Youfa Wang, head of the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity in Baltimore. Blanck said between 2003 and 2010 researchers also saw an increase in breastfeeding of low-income infants. Breastfeeding has been tied to a healthier weight in early childhood. Additionally, states and communities have started working with child care centers to make sure kids have time to run around and that healthy foods are on the lunch menu, she added. Parents can encourage better eating by having fruits and vegetables available at snack time and allowing their young kids to help with meal preparation, Blanck said. Her other recommendations include making sure preschoolers get at least one hour of activity every day and keeping television sets out of the bedroom. "The prevalence of overweight and obesity in many countries including in the U.S. is still very high," Wang, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health in an email. "The recent level off should not be taken as a reason to reduce the effort to fight the obesity epidemic.
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