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

Civil Rights Pioneer Has Dementia

Rosa Parks, 91, is suffering from dementia and shouldn't be required to testify in her lawsuit over a rap song named after the civil rights pioneer, her doctor has told a federal judge.

While her lawyers had said over the summer that Parks had been in frail health, this was the first time that her condition of severe memory impairment was described in detail, the Associated Press reported. The wire service said Parks has rarely been seen in public since she canceled a meeting with President Bush in 2001.

Parks' lawsuit claims she was defamed by a 1998 song by OutKast titled "Rosa Parks." The suit insists her name was used without permission for commercial reasons, the AP said.

Parks was 42 in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus. Her arrest sparked a year-long boycott of the bus system organized by a minister who was little-known at the time, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Parks has been dubbed the "mother of the civil rights movement."

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Low Testosterone May Lead to Alzheimer's

Decreased levels of the male hormone testosterone may lead to an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease in men, University of Southern California researchers have found.

The findings are published in a letter to the editor in the Sept. 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers equated the progressive loss of testosterone in older men to a similar change in menopausal women involving loss of the female hormone estrogen. But they said the purported links between estrogen loss and Alzheimer's have been much better researched and documented.

The USC scientists said confirming the link between testosterone depletion and Alzheimer's could help identify men most at risk. Their research found that the hormone appeared to serve two brain functions that relate to Alzheimer's -- protecting neurons from injury and reducing levels of beta-amyloid proteins that have been associated with the memory-robbing disease.

About four million Americans -- half of them men -- have Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said.

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Some People With Migraines at Risk for Brain Damage: Study

People who have frequent migraines are more likely to develop brain damage, new research has found.

The frequency of attacks indicates an increased risk for brain lesions, raising the possibility that in a handful of patients, migraines produce progressive changes in the brain, U.S. and Dutch researchers told a Migraine Trust International Symposium in London on Tuesday.

In 3 percent of cases analyzed, the headaches appeared to grow progressively worse and more frequent, to the point where patients had migraine pain almost every day, according to Prof. Richard Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Up to now, migraines had been considered a chronic "episodic" disorder, according to an account of Lipton's speech in the The Scotsman newspaper.

He identified risk factors for progressive headaches, including more than four per month, obesity, and the need to take painkillers for head pain more than once a week.

Lipton collaborated with scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the newspaper said.

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U.S. Alleges Tobacco Companies Knowingly Deceived Public

Big U.S. tobacco companies collaborated for decades in an effort to deceive the public about the health dangers of smoking, a federal lawyer charged Tuesday during opening remarks of a civil racketeering trial.

The U.S. government is seeking $280 billion in penalties from the tobacco industry.

The government alleges that, starting in the 1960s, big tobacco companies put hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations they created to dispute scientific data that linked smoking to cancer, the Associated Press reported.

In his opening remarks, Justice Department attorney Frank Marine said that internal tobacco industry documents indicated that company executives were aware that this was an attempt to deceive the public.

It was expected that the government's opening statement would last all day Tuesday. Tobacco industry lawyers are scheduled to make their opening statement Wednesday.

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British Blood Products May be Tainted With Mad Cow Variant

People who received plasma and other blood products in Great Britain may have been exposed to the human form of mad cow disease, according to letters sent by British health officials to thousands of individuals.

The letters were sent out following the deaths of two people who may have contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) from a blood transfusion. One of them died of vCJD while the other died of unrelated causes, the Toronto Star reported.

The warning letters were sent to people who received plasma-based products, such as clotting agents, that may have contained vCJD-tainted blood. Health officials said the recipients had only a slightly increased risk of contracting vCJD.

"This information will enable these people and their doctors to take the necessary steps to minimize the risk of onward transmission of vCJD," British chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson said in a news release.

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U.S. Orders 2 Million Doses of Avian Flu Vaccine

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded a contract to Aventis Pasteur Inc. to make and store two million doses of avian influenza H5N1 vaccine, it was announced Tuesday.

The vaccine is designed to counter the H5N1 influenza virus that has killed 29 people in Vietnam and Thailand so far this year.

The $13 million contract is meant to ensure that the United States is prepared for a pandemic of this form of avian influenza virus. The vaccine would be used to protect laboratory staffers, public health workers and, if needed, the general public, according to a HHS news release.

The United States is the first country to produce and stockpile such a large quantity of avian influenza H5N1 vaccine, the statement said.

Last month, HHS announced a national strategy to prepare for and respond to an influenza pandemic.

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