A type of liver disease once thought to afflict primarily adult alcoholics appears to be rampant in children.

Some one in 10 children in the U.S., or more than 7 million, are thought to have the disease, according to recent studies.

The condition, in which the normally rust-colored organ becomes bloated and discolored by yellowish fat cells, has become so common in non-drinkers that it has been dubbed nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

The disease’s prevalence is alarming doctors who worry about its progression to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, when the fatty liver becomes inflamed and cells are damaged. That leads to the end stage of cirrhosis, when the liver forms scar tissue and ultimately stops working.

The condition’s rise is tied to the obesity epidemic—about 40 percent of obese children have it—but isn’t caused solely by being overweight. The disease appears to be growing among normal-weight children too, experts say.

And even though obesity rates are starting to level off, the prevalence of fatty liver disease continues to rise, they say.

It also has no symptoms, which means a person could have it for decades without knowing.

The Cleveland Clinic’s Pediatric Preventive Cardiology and Metabolic Clinic treats and studies nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

“The disease is very silent,” said Naim Alkhouri, director of the Pediatric Preventive Cardiology and Metabolic Clinic at the Cleveland Clinic.

Because fatty liver disease has been recognized only fairly recently in children, it’s unclear how the disease progresses into adulthood. Roughly 10 percent of people with fatty liver disease will develop NASH; another 15 percent to 20 percent of those will get cirrhosis. While the early stages of fatty liver disease and NASH are reversible, cirrhosis is not.

“This is just really worrisome to have this number of children who have a disease this severe,” said Miriam Vos, a pediatrics professor at Emory University School of Medicine who studies and treats kids with fatty liver disease.

In a study published this year, Dr. Vos and her colleagues looked at data from a national health study for elevated liver enzymes, a sign of fatty liver disease. The percentage of children in the sample suspected of having the disease grew to 10.7 percent between 2007 and 2010, from about 4 percent between 1988 and 1994.
Read more: Fox News

 

When you gain weight, you probably blame it on the workouts you skipped or the junk food you’ve been eating. But there’s another surprising factor that might be screwing with the number on the scale. Certain personality traits are associated with obesity, according to new research recently presented at the APA Convention in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Tricky Traits

Across four studies and more than 8,900 people, researchers found that people high in neuroticism (those who are prone to negative emotions like anxiety, sadness, or loneliness) and people low in conscientiousness (those who are disorganized, undisciplined, and easily distracted) are more likely to have a higher BMI. Having either one of these traits appears to increase your risk of obesity, but fortunately, having both of them doesn’t amplify the effect, study author Angelina Sutin, assistant professor at Florida State University, said.

More: What Your Food Cravings Say About Your Health

What It Means for Your Waistline

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every person with either of these traits will automatically be obese, Sutin said. Instead, it means these personality traits can lead to behaviors that tend to cause weight gain. For instance, someone high in neuroticism might get stressed out more easily, which could lead to emotional eating and stress-fueled cravings. And someone low in conscientiousness might be a little disorganized and flaky, which can make it harder to plan out healthy meals or stick to a diet and fitness routine.

More: The Time You’re Most Likely to Binge

But if this sounds like you, you’re not totally doomed.

“We usually think about personality being very stable,” Sutin said. “But the expression of personality can be changed.”

So if you recognize these traits in yourself, just make an effort to avoid indulging in the unhealthy behaviors that can go along with them. That might mean hiding the chocolate ice cream when you’re super stressed or setting a reminder to hit the grocery store so you’re not grabbing fast food five nights a week. You may not be able to change your personality, but you can make tweaks to keep your health and weight in check.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/09/09/how-your-personality-impacts-your-weight/#ixzz2eYpetbEx

Former smokers can gain an extra seven days of life for every 28 days they refrain from tobacco, a new study has suggested.

People wanting to quit smoking are being urged to join the ‘Stoptober challenge,’ which starts on October 1, the Independent reported.

According to a government campaign from Public Health England, someone who quits for a month and does not start again could gain an extra seven days of life every 28 days for the rest of their life.

Source: zee news/health

Researchers from University of Pittsburgh have created a health monitor that in addition to documenting what a person eats, can also accurately match those images against a geometric-shape library, providing a much easier method for counting calories.

The study demonstrates a new computational tool that has been added to the prototype—a device that fastens to the shirt like a pin. Using its newly built comprehensive food-shape library, the eButton can now extract food from 2D and 3D images and, using a camera coordinate system, evaluate that food based on shape, color, and size.

The researchers, who are trying to remove the guess work from the dieting process, said that visually gauging the size of a food based on an imaginary measurement unit is very subjective, and some individuals don’t want to track what they consume.

eButton now includes a library of foods with nine common shapes: cuboid, wedge, cylinder, sphere, top and bottom half spheres, ellipse, half ellipse, and tunnel.

The device snaps a series of photos while a person is eating, and its new formula goes to work: removing the background image, zeroing in on the food, and measuring its volume by projecting and fitting the selected 3D shape to the 2D photograph using a series of mathematical equations.

The study is published in Measurement Science and Technology.

Adults making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level () will be able to sign up for Medicaid, under an expansion paid for entirely by the federal government between 2014 and 2017.

The catch is that states, which share in the expense of regular Medicaid, will have to pay up to 10 percent of the expansion tab later. The governments in some states don’t want to do that. Only half the states were agreed to go ahead with the easier path to coverage made possible by the Affordable Care Act.

So how will the expansion change who signs up for Medicaid coverage? Some researchers at the University of Michigan Health System took a look by analyzing data from the National health and nutrition examination survey

Demographically, the new enrollee population will have a higher proportion of whites, and a higher proportion of males,” Dr. Tammy Chang, lead author of the study, tells Shots. The new enrollees are likely to be younger, too. (See the chart for a fuller breakdown.)

Overall, she says the Medicaid enrollees will be healthier and fewer of them will be obese. But more of them will be smokers and drinkers, and they’re also less likely to be depressed. “We can really focus on them as physicians for prevention and improving their health behaviors,” she says.

The findings were published  in the Annals of Family Medicine.

 

A teenager in the Netherlands who rescued a drowning kitten from a ditch developed a large, blackened open wound on her wrist, which took multiple doctors several weeks to find its rare cause, researchers say.

The kitten that the girl rescued was sick and died the following day, and the 17-year-old went on a trip to Italy and Switzerland, during which time she developed a red wound on her wrist that blistered before turning black. She also developed painful red bumps on her arm, spanning from the wound on her wrist up to her armpit.

Suspecting the wound was a bacterial infection, doctors prescribed antibiotics, but the medicine didn’t work. Once back in her home country, the feverish girl went to the hospital again.

“When I saw the wound, I expected it to be a normal wound, so I was quite surprised when I saw the big ulcer,” said Dr. Jojanneke Heidema, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease at St. Antonius Ziekenhuis Hospital in Nieuwegein, Netherlands, who reported the case.

“It did not look like a normal bacterial infection, so I went looking for other causes of a necrotic ulcer,” Heidema said. Necrotic ulcers are wounds with dead tissue. [Image: the blackened, open wound]

The doctors began to suspect that the wound was caused by the cowpox virus. The cowpox infection is so rare that physicians sometimes have never even seen one, or simply don’t think of it.

The doctors got in touch with a virologist whose lab was equipped to run tests for cowpox. A few days later, lab results proved the cowpox virus was, indeed, the culprit. “The girl had been treated by different doctors for about 13 days by then,” Heidema said.  [Image: red bumps covering the arm]

After another week, the girl got better on own, and the wound healed within two? Months, leaving a scar. Cowpox is a self-limiting disease, meaning it usually doesn’t need medical treatment.

“In cowpox disease, your own immune system will deal with the infection,” Heidema said.

The cowpox virus was involved in the invention of the first vaccine, against the related virus that causes smallpox, the deadly but now eradicated disease. At the end of the 18th century, Edward Jenner, an English physician, observed that milkmaids who had contact with the cattle-carrying cowpox virus rarely contracted smallpox — they seemed protected. Based on this observation, Jenner used the cowpox virus to produce the first smallpox vaccine, in 1796.

Other than cowpox, some possible causes of a necrotic wound like the one the girl had were drug-resistant bacteria, abscess and anthrax, the researchers said.

The doctors learned that the girl had cut herself in her wrist before rescuing the kitten. But it is possible to become sick from an infected cat, cow or small rodent even when the skin is intact, they said.

“Most patients with cowpox infections have had scratches from the infected animal, but there are also cases where no scratches were reported,” Heidema said.

It’s hard to determine how sick the kitten was because it also drowned, the researchers said, but the kitten’s mother and siblings were all ill, and taken to the vet to be put down.

The case report was published Sept. 2 in the journal BMJ Case Reports.