Clipmarks | rmowery's Health collection

Hearing loss is silent epidemic in U.S. troops

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:55:54 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Hearing loss is silent epidemic in U.S. troops

Soldiers coming home with permanent hearing damage and ringing in ears

SAN DIEGO - Large numbers of soldiers and Marines caught in roadside bombings and firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home with permanent hearing loss and ringing in their ears, prompting the military to redouble its efforts to protect the troops from noise.

Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terror, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.

Tags: hearing, troops

AP probe finds drugs in drinking water

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:01:37 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

AP probe finds drugs in drinking water

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

Tags: drinking water, chemicals, drugs, health

15 INSTANT ENERGY BOOSTERS

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:32:01 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.mirror.co.uk

13 November 2006

15 INSTANT ENERGY BOOSTERS

FEELING TIRED AND SLUGGISH NOW WINTER'S HERE? WELL HERE'S HOW TO PUT THE OOMPH BACK INTO YOUR DAY

By Michele O'Conner

WE all experience energy slumps during our working day, but new research has pin-pointed 2.16pm as the time most of us flag.

This is when we officially have the least amount of energy or enthusiasm for anything, according to the study commissioned by Typhoo tea.

So, whether your get-up-and-go has got-up-and-gone by 2.16 or anytime, for that matter, here are 15 easy ways to prevent yawning fever...

Tags: energy, health, wakeup, mind, psychology

Zapping sleepers’ brains boosts memory

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:00:25 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Zapping sleepers’ brains boosts memory

18:00 05 November 2006

Roxanne Khamsi

NewScientist.com news service

Applying a gentle electric current to the brain during sleep can significantly boost memory, researchers report.

A small new study showed that half an hour of this brain stimulation improved students’ performance at a verbal memory task by about 8%. The approach enhances memory by creating a form of electrical current in the brain seen in deep sleep, the researchers suggest.

Jan Born at the University of Luebeck in Germany, and colleagues, recruited 13 healthy medical students for the study and gave them a list of word associations, such as “bird” and “air”, to learn late in the evening. Afterwards, researchers placed two electrodes on the forehead and one behind each ear of the volunteers and let them sleep.

The students’ various sleep stages were monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. When the students entered a period of light sleep, Born’s team started to apply a gentle current in one-second-long pulses, every second, for about 30 minutes. The EEG readings revealed that this current had put students into a deeper state of sleep.

The next morning, the students performed about 8% better on the word memory test than when they underwent the same type of memory experiment without brain stimulation.

Tags: sleeping, brain, memory, memory retention, electrostimulation

Contaminated tomatoes blamed for salmonella outbreak

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 04:31:11 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: FRACK! My salad is slowing disappearing.

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Contaminated tomatoes blamed for salmonella outbreak

POSTED: 8:34 p.m. EST, November 3, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Contaminated fresh tomatoes served in restaurants were the cause of a recent salmonella outbreak that sickened dozens of people in 21 states, health officials said Friday.

The outbreak, now over, sickened at least 183 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were no reports of deaths, although 22 people were hospitalized. Interviews with victims, including detailed surveys of what they had eaten and where before falling sick, led investigators to suspect restaurant tomatoes as the cause.

"We have identified tomatoes eaten in restaurants as the cause of this outbreak. We don't have any information that a name or a certain type of restaurant is involved. As far as we can tell, it's across the board," said Dr. Christopher Braden, a foodborne outbreak and surveillance expert with the CDC.

Tags: food, contamincation, salmonella, health

Caffeine-stoked energy drinks wire a generation

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 01:39:00 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

Caffeine-stoked energy drinks wire a generation

POSTED: 9:29 a.m. EST, November 2, 2006

Energy drinks aren't merely popular with young people. They attract fan mail on their own MySpace pages. They spawn urban legends. They get reviewed by bloggers. And they taste like carbonated cough syrup.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- More than 500 new energy drinks launched worldwide this year, and coffee fans are probably too old to understand why.

Vying for the dollars of teenagers with promises of weight loss, increased endurance and legal highs, the new products join top-sellers Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar to make up a $3.4 billion-a-year industry that grew by 80 percent last year.

Thirty-one percent of U.S. teenagers say they drink energy drinks, according to Simmons Research. That represents 7.6 million teens, a jump of almost 3 million in three years.

Nutritionists warn that the drinks, laden with caffeine and sugar, can hook kids on an unhealthy jolt-and-crash cycle. The caffeine comes from multiple sources, making it hard to tell how much the drinks contain. Some have B vitamins, which when taken in megadoses can cause rapid heartbeat, and numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.

Tags: red bull, energy drinks, caffeine

Cardiologist questioning heart stents

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 11:21:17 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The medical community is having second thoughts about stents.

Tiny metal sleeves placed in arteries to keep blood flowing, stents have become such a popular quick fix for clogged coronary vessels that Americans will receive more than 1.5 million of them this year.

And stents are a big business, generating $6 billion a year in sales for their makers and thousands of dollars in fees for each procedure performed by the specialists implanting them.

But now stent sales are falling and some doctors are rethinking their faith in the devices, driven by emerging evidence that the newest and most common type — drug-coated stents — can sometimes cause potentially fatal blood clots months or even years after they are implanted.

The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it would hold hearings in early December to consider whether to issue new stent safety guidelines.

The evidence indicates that overuse of stents may be leading to thousands of heart attacks and deaths each year, whether because stents are being used in relatively mild cases where drugs should be prescribed instead, or because patients are receiving drug-coated versions where simpler, cheaper bare-metal devices might work just as well.

There is no question that stents have saved countless lives in the short term by preventing impending heart attacks or opening arteries while an attack is being treated. But neither type of stent, no matter how much better it may make a patient feel, has been shown in rigorous clinical trials to improve long-term survival compared with other forms of treatment.

“In the past we’d say, ‘Why not?,’ ” said Dr. William O’Neill, a well-known cardiologist at the University of Miami and longtime advocate of using drug-coated stents. But the new safety data, he said, amounts to “a big why not” for many patients.

Tags: medical, health, heart stents, technology

Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 03:26:41 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes

Parents often think their children grow up too quickly, but few are prepared for the problem that Dr. Michael Dedekian and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported recently.

Published: October 17, 2006

By DARSHAK M. SANGHAVI

At the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May in San Francisco, they presented a report that described how a preschool-age girl, and then her kindergarten-age brother, mysteriously began growing pubic hair. These cases were not isolated; in 2004, pediatric endocrinologists from San Diego reported a similar cluster of five children.

It turns out that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings. In 1979, the medical journal The Lancet described an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, probably caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry. Similar epidemics in Puerto Rico and Haiti were tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980’s.

Increasingly — though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative — some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called “endocrine disruptors,” that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.

Tags: preschool, puberty, kids, pollution, medications, poisions, environment, health

TV Really Might Cause Autism

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:03:53 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.slate.com

TV Really Might Cause AutismA Slate exclusive: findings from a new Cornell study.

Posted Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, at 6:52 AM ET

Listen to the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up for Slate's free daily podcast on iTunes.

Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

Tags: autism, television, cornell study, kids, tv

Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 04:01:19 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs

When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess.

Doctors tried everything they knew -- and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot.

"He preferred death to amputation, and everybody agreed he was going to die if he didn't get an amputation," said Eddy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

With standard techniques exhausted, Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient's ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again.

Tags: honey, honey remedy, ulcer, cures, natural medicine

'Cocaine' takes a hit

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:24:12 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.newsday.com

'Cocaine' takes a hit

Energy drink's name generates controversy and little euphoria, with some decrying its references to drug

BY BRYAN VIRASAMI

Newsday Staff Writer

October 3, 2006

The maker of the latest high-energy drink - Cocaine - must have snorted the real thing, a Queens lawmaker charged yesterday.

Councilman James Sanders Jr., a Laurelton Democrat, said he was shocked when constituents informed him last week about the latest drink hitting the shelves in New York City and Long Island. At a City Hall news conference, he said the drink's name and claims it contains a massive amount of "energy" send the wrong message to young people, who may think the actual drug was OK to use.

James Kirby, the senior partner and founder of Redux Beverages, a Las Vegas-based company that created the drink, dismissed arguments that it would lead to drug use, but described it as an alternative to the real thing.

"People know the difference; I don't think people will look at our drink and say, 'Oh, I'm going to buy some real cocaine,'" said Kirby, who said he picked the name knowing it would generate controversy and free promotion. "Cocaine is associated with energy, and we're allowed to do this."

But Cocaine Energy Drink, touted as "the legal alternative" to the controlled substance, has touched a raw nerve with some Queens residents and a lawmaker who want to clear shelves of the new product.

Tags: cocaine, red bull, energy drink, marketing

New Device Reveals Hidden Blood Vessels

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:05:45 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

New Device Reveals Hidden Blood Vessels

By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer

NEW YORK—A new device that projects the position of veins directly onto a patient's skin is helping take the guesswork out of medical pricks and injections.

VeinViewer shines harmless near-infrared light onto a patient's skin. The light photons are absorbed by red blood cells inside vessels but bounced back by surrounding tissue.

The reflected photons are captured by a digital video camera and a computer creates a digital image of the vasculature, which is then projected back onto the patient's skin. The hidden veins appear on the skin as colorless lines that crisscross a rectangular patch of neon green [photo].

Tags: veins, vein viewer, health, science

Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:34:00 GMT

clipped by: rmowery
clipper's remarks: Makes sense if all "we" really are is electric signals stuffed into our biological transports devices(our bodies).

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

Tags: out of body, paranormal, electric, brain, neuroscience, psychology

In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:28:01 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.

ROME — Every patient in the cardiac care unit at the San Filippo Neri Hospital who survives a heart attack goes home with a prescription for purified fish oil, or omega-3 fatty acids.

“It is clearly recommended in international guidelines,” said Dr. Massimo Santini, the hospital’s chief of cardiology, who added that it would be considered tantamount to malpractice in Italy to omit the drug.

But in the United States, heart attack victims are not generally given omega-3 fatty acids, even as they are routinely offered more expensive and invasive treatments, like pills to lower cholesterol or implantable defibrillators. Prescription fish oil, sold under the brand name Omacor, is not even approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in heart patients.

In a large number of studies, prescription fish oil has been shown to improve survival after heart attacks and to reduce fatal heart rhythms. The American College of Cardiology recently strengthened its position on the medical benefit of fish oil, although some critics say that studies have not defined the magnitude of the effect.

Tags: fish oil, health, heart, heart attack, omega-3

Bionic Ear System

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:42:47 GMT

clipped by: rmowery

Clip Source: bostonscientific.mediaroom.com

Boston Scientific Announces FDA Approval of Harmony™ HiResolution® Bionic Ear System

NATICK, Mass., Sept. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Boston Scientific Corporation (NYSE: BSX) today announced the approval of its new Harmony™ HiResolution® Bionic Ear System (Harmony System) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Developed by the Company's Neuromodulation Group, the Harmony System delivers 120 spectral bands, 5 - 10 times more than competing systems, helping to significantly increase hearing potential and quality of life for the severe-to-profoundly deaf.

"The Harmony System represents the next generation of cochlear implant technology," said Jeff Greiner, President of Boston Scientific's Neuromodulation Group. "We have brought together unprecedented advancements in science, design and functionality for the user -- furthering our commitment to restoring hearing and improving quality of life for those living with hearing loss due to permanent inner ear or auditory nerve damage."

Designed to enhance music appreciation and improve hearing in a variety of difficult listening environments, the Harmony System couples revolutionary internal sound processing (with the optional HiRes Fidelity™ 120) with the new Harmony behind-the-ear (BTE) external sound processor. Together, the two key components of the Harmony System are designed to provide significantly enhanced spectral resolution compared to conventional systems for a more natural representation of sound to help improve patient performance.

Tags: bionic ear, hearing, deafness, cochlear implants, harmony