Health News

Studies confirm colon cancer screening reduces deaths

Studies confirm colon cancer screening reduces deaths

A new analysis suggests that it’s worth it to follow screening recommendations and have the test done every 10 years (or every five for those at high risk.)

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, Harvard researcher Reiko Nishihara and co-authors assessed colonoscopy use, colorectal cancer cases and colorectal cancer deaths among participants in the multi decade Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

Following 88,902 subjects over 22 years, they found that people who underwent endoscopic screenings were less likely to develop colon cancer than people who didn’t. Subjects who had clean colonoscopies, sigmoidoscopies and polypectomies were, respectively, 56%, 40%, and 43% less likely to develop the disease than subjects who were not screened.

The team estimated that 40% of the colon cancers that developed over the study period would have been prevented if all participants in the studies had went in for colonoscopies.

In a separate study in the same journal, Dr. Aasma Shaukat of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Heath Care System and co-authors wrote that a different screening test — the fecal occult blood test, which detects blood in a stool sample — is also effective in reducing deaths from colorectal cancer.

In that report — a 30-year follow-up on earlier work involving more than 46,000 participants — scientists who reviewed death records through 2008 found a 32% reduction in the risk of death from the disease among patients in the trial who underwent annual screening during the periods of 1976 to 1982 and from 1986 to 1992.

In an editorial also published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Theodore R. Levin and Dr. Douglas A. Corley of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers wrote that the studies showed that fecal occult blood tests as well as colonoscopies were effective screening measures, and suggested that current guidelines make sense for patients.

Because the data sets can’t be compared directly, they cautioned against concluding that colonoscopies are necessarily better than the blood test on the basis of the findings. Studies have found that more patients choose to get blood tests in addition to colonoscopies if they are offered — one reason why the Kaiser system in Northern California, where both co-authors work, uses a “combined approach.”

Randomized trials that are already underway may help determine what testing approach prevents the most cancers and deaths, they wrote.

Source: LasAngelestimes

Man diagnosed with brewing beer in his stomach

The Texas man had a rare disease called “auto-brewery syndrome” that made him frequently drunk without ingesting alcohol.

A case study details why an unnamed 61-year-old Texas man was often drunk throughout the day, even on days when he insisted that he had not had a drink. He was eventually diagnosed with “auto-brewery syndrome,” a rare disease that has only a few confirmed cases in the last 30 years.

People with the syndrome have too much yeast in their intestinal tract. When they eat carbohydrates, the yeast turns the carbohydrates into ethanol and they become intoxicated from the inside out

“The physicians were not aware of any way that a person could be intoxicated without ingesting alcohol and therefore believed he must be a ‘closet drinker.'” Dr. Barbara Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, study authors

Doctors — and even the man’s wife, who is a nurse — didn’t believe him for a long time when he said he wasn’t drinking. His wife regularly made him take a Breathalyzer test and he would consistently register a blood alcohol level (BAL) of 0.33% to 0.4%, or 5 times the legal driving limit.

In 2010 the man was placed under strict observation for 24 hours, after which he still had a high BAL. Doctors determined his condition was likely due to medication he had because of a 2004 surgery that destroyed helpful bacteria in his gut. As a result, yeast built up.

The man was placed on a low-carb diet, given antifungal medication and recovered. The study suggest that physicians consider the possibility of the rare condition if confronted with a case of someone claiming they become drunk without drinking.

Source: cir.ca.news

Breast Screenings Services Increased in VA

In 2007, Breast Cancer Initiative was started.

In the last five years, services for screening and treatment of breast cancer have been increased in the U. S, but with this the time taken for the treatment also increased at one hospital.

In a study conducted by Baltimore Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Center, it was found that although the number of mammograms conducted after 2007 increased, yet it took women an extra 18 days for getting the treatment after the diagnose. Since 2007 screening and treatment of breast cancer has been given a priority in the hospitals.

The main objective of this study was to find out that with the rise in number of women receiving screening and treatment in made any kind of impact on the time taken for treatment after the positive diagnosis of the disease.

The survey revealed that before this breast cancer initiative, 33 days was the usual time period between the positive diagnosis and the treatment, however, after the initiative since more women came for the screening, this time period extended to an average of 51 days.

It was found that between year 2002 and 2012, as many as 7,355 mammograms were carried out by the Baltimore VA Medical Center and more than 90% of the total number were performed after 2007.

The survey included all the women turning to VA from the rural medical centers. According to the researchers the time gap could also have increased due to the need of second mammograms as well.

Source: topnews.us

 

Deadly Amoeba in Water Supply Possibly Linked to Hurricane Katrina

Deadly brain eating amoeba inwater may possibly linked to hurricane Katrina

A deadly brain-eating amoeba found in the water supply of a New Orleans suburb could be related to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina, according to officials from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed last week that the deadly Naegleria fowleri amoeba has been found in the St. Bernard Parish water supply.

The pathogens were discovered after a 4-year-old boy was infected with the amoeba and died. The Naegleria fowleri thrives in warm freshwater and causes a deadly form of meningitis when inhaled through the nose.

Jake Causey, the chief engineer at the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said the severe drop in population in St. Bernard’s parish immediately after Hurricane Katrina could have affected the water supply. If a majority of a town’s population leaves the area, the water in the water system may remain sitting in pipes longer. As a result the chlorine can dissipate and pathogens can grow.

Before Hurricane Katrina the parish’s population was approximately 67,000, according to the St. Bernard Chamber of Commerce. After the storm, the population dipped below 15,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jonathan Yoder, an epidemiologist with the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Disease at the CDC, said anything that could dilute the chlorine used to disinfect the water supply could lead to more pathogens in the system.

Girl, 12, in Critical Condition With Brain-Eating Amoeba

“This organism likes warm water and if it can get in the system and there’s not enough disinfection, it can colonize and it can grow in the system,” said Yoder.

While under-use of the water system due to a population drop could affect the chlorine levels, Yoder said, but he clarified it was too early in the CDC’s investigation to confirm, and it was only speculation at this point that Hurricane Katrina could have affected the water supply.

The parish is currently flushing out the water system with chlorine, and water has been turned off at schools in the area.

This is the first time that the amoebas have been found in the treated water of a U.S. water system.

Early symptoms of a Naegleria infection include a severe frontal headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, according to the CDC. But those can swiftly give way to a stiff neck, seizures, confusion and hallucinations as the amoeba makes its way up through the nasal cavity into the brain.

“After the start of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly and usually causes death within about five days,” the according to the CDC. “People should seek medical care immediately whenever they develop a sudden onset of fever, headache, stiff neck and vomiting, particularly if they have been in warm freshwater recently.”

Source: abcnews.go.com

 

How ‘smart teeth’ could detect health habits

Artificial teeth that detect when people chew, drink, speak and cough could help people track exactly how much they eat, along with other aspects of their health, researchers say.

In a study, the scientists used dental cement to glue sensors onto the teeth of eight volunteers. The devices were accelerometers that recognized movement in all three dimensions, and were coated with dental resin to keep them safe from saliva. Thin wires connected to the sensors helped collect their data.

The researchers had the volunteers chew gum, drink a bottle of water, cough or read a section of an article. The participants spent about 40 seconds on each activity.

“Our mouth is an opening into our health — our drinking and eating behaviors shed light on our diet,” said researcher Hao-hua Chu, a computer scientist at National Taiwan University in Taipei. “How frequently we cough also tells us about our health, and how frequently we talk is related to social activity that can be related to health.”

Each of these activities moves teeth in a unique way. When it came to recognizing what a study participant was doing based solely on data from the devices, the system researchers developed was up to 93.8 percent accurate

Source: huffingtonpost

2-year-old world’s youngest to have bariatric surgery

A morbidly obese two-year-old has become the youngest person in the world to undergo bariatric surgery.

The parents of the toddler from Saudi Arabia who weighed (73 pounds) and had a Body Mass Index of 41 sought help because he suffered sleep apnea that caused him to stop breathing while asleep.

Two attempts to control his weight by dieting failed said the medics who carried out the bariatric surgery Mohammed Al Mohaidlya, Ahmed Sulimana and Horia Malawib in an article in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.

When he first presented to an endocrinologist at 14 months, the toddler weighed (47 pounds) but after dieting for four months his weight increased by (18 pounds).

The doctors from Prince Sultan Military Medical City at Riyadh were unable to ascertain whether the child’s parents stuck to the diet.

By the time the boy was referred to the obesity clinic he weighed (65 pounds) and his obesity had led to sleep apnea and bowing of the legs.

A further attempt at dieting failed and when he reached (73 pounds) doctors decided to perform surgery.

Surgeons carried out a laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy on the boy which involved removing the outer margin of the stomach to restrict food intake, leaving a sleeve of stomach, roughly the size and shape of a banana.

Unlike a lap band, the surgery is not reversible.

“To our knowledge LSG has never been tried in very young age children,” the surgeons say in their report. “We present here probably the first case report of the successful management of a two year old morbidly obese boy.”

Within two months the boy lost 15 per cent of his body weight and two years after the 2010 surgery his weight had fallen from (73 pounds) to (53 pounds) and his BMI of 24 was within the normal range.

Obesity expert adjunct professor Paul Zimmett from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute said the case was “shocking” and “very unusual”.

“It’s rather like the other day when we saw one of our spacecrafts going out of our solar system into the dark regions of space, it’s going into unknown territory,” he said of the case. “We have no idea what effect this may have on the child’s growth and unless he has proper follow up he may suffer vitamin deficiencies.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/09/19/morbidly-obese-2-year-old-world-youngest-to-have-bariatric-surgery/#ixzz2fQDzapE9

 

Mountain Dew Mouth’ Is Destroying Appalachia’s Teeth

Appalachia has a distinct culture of sipping soda constantly throughout the day. “Here in West Virginia, you see people carrying around bottles of Mountain Dew all the time — even at a public health conference,” says public health researcher Dana Singer.

By now, we’ve all heard of the health risks posed by drinking too much soda.

But over in Appalachia, the region that stretches roughly from southern New York state to Alabama, the fight against soda is targeting an altogether different concern: rotted teeth.

Public health advocates say soft drinks are driving the region’s alarmingly high incidence of eroded brown teeth — a phenomenon dubbed “Mountain Dew mouth,” after the region’s favorite drink. They want to tackle the problem with policies, including restricting soda purchases with food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and currently in Congress).

“We are using taxpayer dollars to buy soda for the SNAP program, and we are using taxpayer dollars to rip teeth out of people’s heads who can’t afford dental care and are on Medicaid,” says Dana Singer, a research analyst at the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department in Parkersburg, W.Va., who wants to see stricter regulations on sales of all sugary beverages in the region. “It makes no sense to be paying for these things twice.”

The beverage industry has repeatedly that its products are destroying teeth. But dentists beg to differ.

“I see erosion from the acids in the drinks, and decay from the sugars,” says , a dentist in South Charleston, W.Va. “They go hand in hand many times, and they’re equally bad. I would definitely attribute these problems to drinks.” Both sodas and energy drinks, he says, “are more damaging than food.”

Dentists have also found that the effects of soda on teeth are strikingly similar to the effects of methamphetamine or crack on teeth, as I in May. Drinking more than a soda a day raises the risk that found in many soft and energy drinks will eat away at your tooth enamel and its pearly white color. To get a sense of what that looks like, check out .

Back in 2009, Priscilla Harris, an associate professor at the Appalachian College of Law, issued the first battle cry in the war against Mountain Dew mouth with a legal brief titled “,” which explores how the drink became ingrained in the region’s culture. Since then, she’s been leading the charge to come up with policies to tackle the problem.

Harris says that dental problems are especially bad because dental care is harder to get in Appalachia, which includes many of the poorest and most remote communities in the country. Many people don’t trust the well water in their homes because of pollution concerns and probably drink more soda because of it, she says. She’s received a from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the problem.

And there’s another reason why soda mouth is so pervasive in Appalachia, Harris says: the region’s distinct culture of sipping soda constantly throughout the day. Singer adds, “Here in West Virginia, you see people carrying around bottles of Mountain Dew all the time — even at a public health conference.”

The drink is also native to the region. Mountain Dew was, before PepsiCo bought the brand.

“What Mountain Dew has going for it is that it’s high in caffeine and high in sugar,” Harris says, adding, “Students tell us it tastes best, and it’s a habit.”

While Harris says that there aren’t a lot of comprehensive surveys of dental health in Appalachia, signs of a rampant problem are unmistakable: Some 26 percent of preschoolers in the region have tooth decay, and 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have had a tooth extracted because of decay or erosion. That’s according to calculations by Singer, who is working with Harris.

The elderly are affected, too. Some 67 percent of West Virginians age 65 or older have lost six or more teeth owing to tooth decay or gum disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Singer says one of the best opportunities to curb the problem is targeting programs like SNAP, which allows recipients to buy soda. According to a by Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, the federal government is spending $1.7 billion to $2.1 billion on soda purchases through SNAP.

Under current guidelines, any kind of soda of any size can be purchased with SNAP card — even Mountain Dew, which has 170 calories in a single 12-ounce can.

Various states, from Florida to Tennessee, have proposed bills that would restrict the use of SNAP to buy soda, sugary treats or other unhealthful foods. Singer says she would like to see West Virginia and other states in Appalachia try this approach.

Basic education, says Harris, is also needed: “We also just need to let people know that you can drink these drinks safely, but they can also do harm.”

Source: npr.org

Ear Wax From Whales Keeps Record Of Ocean Contaminants

How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans.

The study used the ear wax extracted from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore on a California beach back in 2007. Scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History collected the wax from inside the skull of the dead whale and preserved it. The column of wax was almost a foot long.

“It’s kind of got that icky look to it,” says, an environmental scientist at Baylor University who was involved in the study. “It looks kind of like a candle that’s been roughed up a bit. It looks waxy and has got fibers. But it’s pretty rigid — a lot stronger and a lot more stable than one would think.”

There are light and dark layers within the column, each layer corresponding to six months of the whale’s life, Usenko says. Historically the rings have been used to estimate the age of the whale, he says, “very similar to counting tree rings.”

But age is not what Usenko was after. He studies how chemical pollutants like DDT and flame retardants are affecting whales. These pollutants get deposited in fatty tissues, such as whale blubber. And scientists often analyze blubber to see what whales are eating.

But analyzing blubber has a limitation, Usenko says.

“I would only know that organism — that [particular] animal was exposed to those contaminants,” he says. “I wouldn’t know when.”

And so he thought, why not look at ear wax, which is also a fatty material that accumulates toxic chemicals.

Because each layer of wax corresponds to six months of a whale’s life, by working through a plug of wax, Usenko could figure out when the animal was exposed to a particular chemical.

In this case, Usenko and his colleagues found that the whale had been exposed to worrisome pollutants throughout its lifetime.

He says the high levels of DDT surprised him.

“It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve stopped using this compound,” he says, “but to still see it showing up at such high concentrations — one of the dominant chemicals we see — was surprising.”

Usenko and his team also determined that “a significant percentage of the exposure occurred in the first, early stages of the animal’s life,” when it was still nursing, and perhaps especially vulnerable. At that point, the pollutants came from the mother, through her milk, the scientist says.

Usenko says he can’t tell just from looking at the wax whether these chemicals are hurting the development of young blue whales. He studied only one animal, and the ear wax alone can’t reveal whether the chemicals caused harm.

But the ear wax also contained a record of fluctuations in stress hormones throughout the animal’s life. And that, in combination with the chemical pollution data, may in the future provide better insight into the potential impacts of these chemicals on whales, Usenko says.

His appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But he needs more data, he says, so he has requested that scientists start collecting ear wax from dead beached whales the world over and mail the samples to him.

Source: npr news

Medical school program trains doctors for the future of medicine

Health care in America has changed drastically over the last decade – but the way doctors are trained has been the same for over 100 years. Now, some of the nation’s top medical schools are revamping their programs.

“Probably the single biggest reason was trying to prepare students for what health care was going to be like in a decade,” Dr. Charles Lockwood, dean of The Ohio State University (OSU) College of Medicine told FoxNews.com. “Because if you think the last 10 years have been quite a change, really when we begin to be able to sequence people’s entire DNA, and identify every conceivable illness that they’re going to have, and begin to design prevention along those lines ― it’s going to require a very different mindset for docs.”

Typically, medical students spend their first two years of medical school hitting the books, but at OSU’s College of Medicine, they’re trained as medical assistants in the first six weeks, and within eight weeks, they are seeing patients as health coaches.

“Working with patients in a service-type fashion early on in the curriculum is extremely valuable to the students ― it keeps them grounded in why they came to medical school,” Dr. Daniel Clinchot, vice dean for education at OSU’s College of Medicine said of the school’s new Lead. Serve. Inspire program. “Having your patient population that you work with over the course of 18 months is very unique, and I think really is inspiring for many of our students.”

Historically, American medicine has always centered around doctors, but a growing shift in health care delivery has put more emphasis on ensuring quality outcomes for patients.

“You have to do a lot more teaching of patients, you have to explain their illness, you have to explain all the options available for their therapy, you have to spend a lot of time talking about prevention,” said Lockwood. “Communication skills are something that are going to be critically important for the future doc, and that’s not something we’ve emphasized before in medical education.”

Advances in technology and a focus on prevention are just two of the health care changes that helped shape the new Lead. Serve. Inspire curriculum. All incoming medical students are given iPads and classes are available as traditional lectures, podcasts and e-learning modules.

In a state-of-the-art clinical skills center on campus, students can practice virtual laparoscopy and robotic procedures. And there are four critical care simulation bays with life-like mannequins that can mimic human illnesses and medical emergencies. From a control room outside the simulation area, instructors create scenarios that test the students’ ability to treat patients under pressure in the emergency room, operating room, trauma center and labor and delivery wing.

“I think the best thing about the simulations is that it helps you practice in a lower-stress environments than when you’re actually working with patients,” Shannon Emerick, a medical student at OSU’s College of Medicine, said. “You can kind of get the jitters out, and by pretending these are real patients, you can make sure you have everything straight by the time you’re working with actual people.”

Learning the business of health care is also at the core of the Lead. Serve. Inspire program. Health care economics classes are built into the curriculum, and students also have the option to minor in business or take time off to get their MBA to help them prepare to run a successful practice in the future.

“It’s crucial that they understand the cost of health care,” said Lockwood. “Every test that they order, they need to understand exactly what that costs, every imaging procedure, every test that they do has a cost, and they need to understand what it is, and is it absolutely necessary or is there another way to get that information?”

Source: Fox News

 

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.

Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.

More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.

To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.

Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned.

Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.

In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them.

In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.

A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ region

Read More: New York times