Health Highlights: Sept. 24, 2007

Mar. 23 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments,compiled by editors of HealthDay:

E.U. Approves New Cervical Cancer Vaccine

The European Union has approved the sale of Cervarix, a vaccine against certain types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that cause cervical cancer, British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline said Monday.

The approval means the vaccine can now be prescribed by doctors in 27 E.U. countries to females ages 10 to 25 to help protect them against cervical cancer. It is the second most common cancer in women, a Glaxo executive said in a statement, Agence France-Presse reported.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration decision on whether to approve Cervarix is expected in January.

Currently, Merck's Gardasil is the only HPV vaccine approved in the United States.

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Too Little -- or Too Much -- Sleep Increases Risk of Death

Both too little and too much sleep can increase the risk of death, says a U.K. study presented Monday to the British Sleep Society.

University of Warwick researchers studied 10,308 people between 1985 and 1988 and between 1992 and 1993 and found that seven hours of sleep a night was optimal for the average adult, CBC News reported.

People who slept five hours a night had a 1.7-fold increased risk of death from all causes and a two-fold increased risk of cardiovascular-related death. But the study also found that those who slept eight hours a night were more than twice as likely to die as people who slept for seven hours.

Researcher Francesco Cappuccio noted that a lack of sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension and type 2 diabetes, CBC News reported.

"But in contrast to the short sleep-mortality association, it appears that no potential mechanisms by which long sleep could be associated with increased mortality have yet been investigated. Some candidate causes for this include depression, low socioeconomic status and cancer-related fatigue," Cappuccio said.