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MONDAY, June 23 (HealthDay News) -- Oral cannabis (a form of medical marijuana) was ineffective in treating certain types of acute pain and actually increased sensitivity to some other kinds of discomfort, say researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.

Their study included 18 healthy women who were given oral cannabis or a placebo. The women were then evaluated for heat and electrical pain thresholds in skin areas that had induced sunburn. This is an accepted method of assessing response to acute pain.

"The surprising result of our study was the absence of any kind of analgesic activity of THC-standardized cannabis extract on experimentally induced pain using well-established human model procedures," study author Dr. Birgit Kraft said in a prepared statement. "Our results also seem to support the impression that high doses of cannabinoids may even cause increased sensitivity in certain pain conditions."

The study is published in the July issue of the journal Anesthesiology.

Previous research has suggested that cannabis and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC -- the main psychoactive component of marijuana) may help ease chronic pain in cancer patients, spinal cord injury patients, and people with multiple sclerosis. There have been inconsistent findings about the effects on acute pain.

This new study's findings about oral cannabis and acute pain are seemingly conclusive, according to the researchers.

"From comparisons with previous clinical data, the lack of pain relief from the cannabis dosage and oral administration in our study cannot be considered the result of inadequate dosage or insufficient intestinal absorption," Kraft said. "The high levels of THC detected in the blood of our subjects as well as the occurrence of typical THC side effects argue for sufficient availability, and thus we draw the conclusion that THC was not effective in treating acute pain."

However, cannabis may remain a viable treatment option for certain types of chronic pain.

"Pain is a very complex and subjective phenomena," Kraft said. "Chronic pain has not only been shown to lead to changes in peripheral and central neural processing, but also to be associated with psychosocial problems, physical disorders, and functional disabilities. Recent studies have indicated that cannabis can be effective in treating certain types of chronic pain and helping patients to cope by improving quality of life."

More information

The National Pain Foundation has more about marijuana and pain  .

THURSDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Wars around the world have killed three times more people over the past half-century than previously estimated, a new study suggests.

The finding supports the notion of armed conflict as a "public health problem" whose instability leads not only to violent deaths, but to indirect deaths from infectious disease and other causes, experts add.

"War kills more people than we had previously thought," said lead researcher Ziad Obermeyer, a research scientist at Brigham & Women's Hospital, in Boston. "And that has to be taken into account when we're looking historically, and it's important for people and policy makers to know when they're looking at the consequences of the war. It's important that there's an awareness of how many people actually die."

In the study, Obermeyer's group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected after the end of the wars.

This method avoids problems collecting data during active combat, and also reduces counting deaths twice or exaggerating the number, Obermeyer said.

The researchers estimate that 5.4 million people died from 1955 to 2002 as a result of wars in 13 countries. These deaths range from 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million in Vietnam.

According to Obermeyer, the estimates are three times higher than those of previous reports. Data from this new study also suggests that 378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994, compared with 137,000 estimated at the time.

The biggest differences were seen in Bangladesh, where 269,000 people died during that country's struggle for independence, compared with previous estimates of 58,000, the report shows. In Zimbabwe, the researchers estimate that 130,000 people have died in times of conflict, compared with earlier estimates of 28,000.

The findings are published in the June 20 online edition of the British Medical Journal.

According to the authors, current methods of collecting data on those killed during war are plagued by biases that produce inaccuracies and underestimate the number of people actually killed. This can lead to widely varying casualty estimates. For example, in Iraq, a report published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2006 estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by that time since the start of the war -- a claim disputed by the White House, whose own estimates put the death toll at 30,000.

In their study, Obermeyer's team drew on several sources to try to more accurately estimate the number of military and civilian deaths from recent wars. Their estimates do not include people who died during the war from starvation, sickness or other conditions indirectly caused by war.

"There is a notion in political thought that the number of deaths due to war has been declining in recent years," Obermeyer noted. "That is attributed to a lot of different things, but among them technological innovations like 'smart' bombs and different strategic priorities. This idea appears to be supported by media reports. But what we are finding is these reports are not a reflection of reality."

Contemporary media reports of deaths are not to be fully trusted, Obermeyer addeds. "The reason we should be skeptical of media reports is that they are subject to political pressures and cannot always be verified," he said. "These numbers can be pushed up or down, depending upon what kind of political pressure is being exerted."

Richard Garfield, a professor of clinical international nursing at Columbia University in New York City and the author of an accompanying editorial in the journal, said that even this method underestimates the number of people killed in wars.

"Even though the data on war deaths is not very good, it is much better . . . in poor developing countries -- where virtually all wars now are -- than it was 10 or 20 years ago," Garfield said.

However, all deaths because of war are not being counted, Garfield said, since even Obermeyer's team left out the more indirect deaths from starvation, infectious disease and other illnesses, and forms of injury not directly linked to armed combat.

"We are counting more of the violent deaths, but we only irregularly address indirect deaths, which may be far greater than combatant deaths," he added.

More information

The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count   offers their tally of lives lost in the current Iraq conflict on their Web site.

THURSDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Working overtime puts you at a higher risk for developing anxiety and depression, a new study suggests.

Men who worked 40 hours a week or less had a 9 percent "possible" depression score on standard screening questionnaires, while 12.5 percent of their counterparts who worked overtime showed signs of depression and anxiety. For women, the possible depression rate increased from 7 percent to 11 percent.

The results, published in the June issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, also show anxiety and depression rates were higher among less-skilled workers and those with lower incomes. The study looked at 1,350 overtime workers and 9,000 with normal work hours in Norway.

Men who worked the most overtime -- nine to 60 hours a week -- showed the greatest link to anxiety and depression. These men tended to have lower work skills and education levels than others and have jobs involving heavy manual labor and shift work. While these men were at highest risk, even moderate overtime work appeared to bump up the risk of "mental distress," the authors noted.

What causes working long hours to increase anxiety and depression was not explored in the study.

More information

The American Psychological Association has more about work stress  .

THURSDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Crop workers, most of them foreign-born, have the highest rate of death from heat-related illness, a new U.S. report released Thursday found.

From 1992 to 2006, 68 of the 423 workers in the United States who died from heat-related illness were involved in crop production, U.S. health officials said.

Their death rate is 0.39 per 100,000 people compared with 0.2 per 100,000 other workers, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"Heat-related deaths among crop workers were about 20 times higher than the rates for the general work force," Dawn Castillo, chief of the Surveillance and Field Investigations Branch in the Division of Safety Research at CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said during a midday teleconference Thursday.

"Such deaths are preventable," she added. "It is important to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to ensure that workers who toil to put food on our table are not placed at unnecessary risk."

Most of the workers who died from heat-related illness were foreign-born, Castillo added. "From 2003 to 2006, 71 percent of the crop workers who died of heat-related illness were foreign-born," she said.

"The high proportion of these deaths among foreign-born workers in recent years is striking and suggests a need to ensure that communications on the risk of heat-related illnesses be in workers' native languages," Castillo said.

By comparison, she added, 148 of the 423 workers who died from heat-related illness in the time period studied were in the construction industry, which represents 35 percent of all heat-related deaths in the United States.

Agriculture, forestry and fishing accounted for the next highest number of deaths, with 102, or 24 percent of total number, Castillo said.

But in terms of the rate at which workers in a certain occupation die from heat, crop workers appear to be at special risk, the researchers say. In fact, the rate of deaths for crop workers is 2.5 times greater than that of workers in the entire agricultural industry, 3.5 times greater than those in the construction industry and 20 times higher compared with all workers, Castillo added.

The report is published in the June 20 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Heat-related illnesses range from minor problems such as heat cramps and rashes to serious problems such as heat exhaustion and heat stroke. In heat stroke, body temperature rises to a dangerous level. This can be deadly if medical care is not provided immediately.

People with heat stroke can have body temperatures of 103°F or more. The condition is also characterized by red hot and dry skin, with no sweating, rapid pulse, throbbing headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion and unconsciousness.

Crop workers can be at increased risk for heat stroke, because they often wear extra or protective clothing, along with equipment to protect them against pesticide poisoning or nicotine poisoning, the CDC reports.

To illustrate the point, the CDC reported the details of one case in particular.

A male Hispanic was harvesting tobacco in North Carolina in July 2005. The temperature that day reached 93°. In the afternoon, a little before 3 p.m., the man's son saw his father working slowly and advised him to rest. The man ignored the advice.

A short time later, other workers noticed that the man appeared confused. They carried him to shade and tried to get him to drink water. About 4:30 p.m., the man was taken by ambulance to the local emergency department, where his body temperature was recorded at 108°F.

He died, from what officials determined to be heatstroke.

Although the man had been given safety and health training on pesticides, there had been no training given on the dangers and prevention of heat-related illness.

To prevent heat-related deaths among crop workers requires educating both employees and employers of the dangers of working in hot weather. Such education should include recognizing symptoms of heat-related illness, and what to do should these symptoms occur, Castillo said

In addition, workers should be monitored for signs of heat-related illness and proper medical attention should be available, she added.

More information

For more information on heat-related illness, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .