Welcome to The Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.
Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.
You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.
Thanksgiving may be over but these recipes for pumpkin can be used throughout the winter. Like all winter squash, pumpkin is an excellent source of vitamin A, in the form of beta carotene, and a very good source of vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber and manganese.
Long-time statin users have lower gallstone risk
(Reuters Health) – People who take cholesterol-lowering statins for at least one to two years appear to be less likely to develop gallstones, a study of nearly two million Danish residents shows.
Among those receiving at least five prescriptions for the drugs, the risk of developing gallstones fell by 11 to 24 percent — and the more prescriptions, the larger the decrease.
No family link seen between Parkinson’s, melanoma
Reuters Health) – Research has suggested that families affected by melanoma skin cancer may also have a higher-than-average rate of Parkinson’s disease — but a large new study found no evidence of such a link.
This doesn’t mean no genetic link exists, the authors of the new study say. But it does suggest that such a link might not have very important effects.
Forgotten patients hold key to heart device safety
Reuters Health) – A little-known and unregulated practice by companies developing new medical devices could be making the products look better and safer than they really are, U.S. researchers said Tuesday.
Companies testing new high-risk devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators or stents often have doctors practice on ‘training patients’ first.
But the outcomes for such patients rarely make it into the premarket approval applications sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to a new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers say uncover HIV, insulin resistance link
(Reuters) – Researchers at the Washington of Medicine say they have uncovered why so many people with the HIV virus develop a dangerous insulin resistance that leads to diabetes and heart disease.
The culprit lies in the powerful drugs that prevent the development of AIDS and have extended the lives of many HIV patients, the researchers say. They hope the discovery will allow development of safer antiviral drugs.
Half of Americans facing diabetes by 2020: report
Reuters) – More than half of Americans will have diabetes or be prediabetic by 2020 at a cost to the U.S. health care system of $3.35 trillion if current trends go on unabated, according to analysis of a new report released on Tuesday by health insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc.
Diabetes and prediabetes will account for an estimated 10 percent of total health care spending by the end of the decade at an annual cost of almost $500 billion — up from an estimated $194 billion this year, according to the report titled “The United States of Diabetes: Challenges and Opportunities in the Decade Ahead.”
Stem cell trial offers hope for vision patients
(Reuters) – Christopher Goodrich of Portland, Oregon, can’t wait to stick a needle in his eye.
Goodrich hopes to be one of the first patients enrolled in clinical trial that just got a go-ahead from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, only the second trial approved anywhere in the world to test human embryonic stem cells in people.
Advanced Cell Technology, a small Massachusetts-based biotechnology company that has struggled to bring human embryonic stem cells from the lab to the clinic, will begin recruiting 12 patients in Oregon and Massachusetts with a rare eye condition called Stargardt’s macular dystrophy.
Pomegranate juice could help kidney patients
(Reuters Health) – There may be a seed of truth amidst the many health claims for pomegranate juice, researchers from Israel said Thursday, at least for kidney patients on dialysis.
They found that such patients who gulped a few cups of the tart liquid every week lowered their chances of infections, the second-leading killer of the more than 350,000 Americans on dialysis.
(Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson said on Wednesday it is recalling 9 million more bottles of its Tylenol painkiller because they do not adequately warn customers about the presence of trace amounts of alcohol used in the product flavorings.
The latest in a seemingly incessant string of J&J recalls involves three brands of Tylenol Cold Multi-Symptom Liquid. The Tylenol formulations include Daytime 8-ounce Citrus Burst, Severe 8-Ounce Cool Burst, and Nighttime 8-Ounce Cool Burst.
[New J&J recalls hit Benadryl, Motrin, Rolaids
(Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson, which has been beset with recalls of Tylenol and other consumer products over the past year, has recalled almost 5 million additional packages of Benadryl, Motrin and Rolaids because of manufacturing “insufficiencies.”
J&J said the recalls, like many of the earlier ones, involved products made at its plant in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. The facility was closed earlier this year to fix quality-control lapses, including unsanitary conditions.
Second-hand smoke kills 600,000 a year: WHO study
(Reuters) – Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.
In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.
Harm in hospitals still common for patients
(Reuters Health) – Despite a decade of efforts to improve patient safety in hospitals — initially inspired by a seminal report on the problem from the U.S. Institute of Medicine in 2000 — harmful errors and accidents are still common, new research suggests.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that between 2002 and 2007, the number of patients experiencing infections acquired in the hospital, medication errors, complications from diagnostic techniques or treatments, and other such “harms” did not change.
EU to ban Bisphenol A in baby bottles in 2011
(Reuters) – The European Union will ban the use of organic compound Bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic baby bottles from 2011 with the backing of a majority of EU governments, the EU’s executive Commission said Thursday.
UK watchdog adviser: Cloned cattle meat likely safe
(Reuters) – Meat and milk from cloned cattle show no difference in composition from that of traditionally bred cows and so are unlikely to pose a food safety risk, an advisory committee to Britain’s food safety regulator said.
The Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, following an open meeting on Thursday, said that consumers still may want to see effective labeling of products from clones and their offspring partly due to animal welfare concerns.
Many preventable cancers caught at late stage: CDC
(Reuters) – Nearly half of colorectal and cervical cancers and a third of breast cancers in the United States are diagnosed in the late stages, even though screening tests are available to detect them early on, a report by U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.
They said more work is needed to ensure people get screened for these cancers, which could lead to early detection and more lives saved.
“This report causes concern because so many preventable cancers are not being diagnosed when treatment is most effective,” Dr. Marcus Plescia of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.
Social medical sites need disclosures: U.S. complaint
(Reuters) – Web sites offering a sense of community to people with diseases or ailments often are created by marketers who fail to disclose that they are sharing data about site users, a complaint filed with U.S. regulators charged on Tuesday.
Four pro-privacy groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, detailing a number of techniques that marketers use to identify people who are potential purchasers of particular medications.
Haiti cholera spreading faster than predicted: U.N.
(Reuters) – Haiti’s deadly cholera epidemic is spreading faster than originally estimated and is likely to result in hundreds of thousands of cases and last up to a year, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.
Since the disease first appeared in mid-October it has killed 1,344 people as of Friday in the poverty-stricken and earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation.
But U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Haiti Nigel Fisher said the real death toll might be “closer to two thousand than one” because of lack of data from remote areas, and the number of cases 60,000-70,000 instead of the official figure of around 50,000.
Cholera-hit Haiti needs nurses, doctors: U.N.
(Reuters) – Haiti needs a surge of foreign nurses and doctors to stem deaths from a raging cholera epidemic that an international aid operation is struggling to control, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official said.
About 1,000 trained nurses and at least 100 more doctors were urgently needed to control the epidemic, which has struck the impoverished Caribbean nation months after a destructive earthquake.
The outbreak has killed more than 1,400 Haitians in five weeks and the death toll is climbing by dozens each day.
Vatican broadens case for condoms to fight AIDS
(Reuters) – Pope Benedict’s landmark acknowledgement that condoms are sometimes morally justifiable to stop AIDS can apply to anyone — gays, heterosexuals and transsexuals — if that is the only option to avoid transmitting the HIV virus to others, the Vatican said Tuesday.
The clarification, which some moral theologians called “groundbreaking,” was the latest step in what is already seen as a significant shift in Catholic Church policy.
It came at a news conference to launch the pope’s new book, “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Sign of the Times.”
New drug shows promise against Asian liver fluke
Reuters) – An experimental drug called tribendimidine could help cure millions of people infected with a parasitic worm known as the Southeast Asian liver fluke, which can cause cancer, Swiss scientists said on Thursday.
In a study in The Lancet medical journal, researchers found that tribendimidine, developed by the Chinese National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, is as safe and effective as the standard treatment for this fluke — a generic drug called praziquantel — and has a cure rate of 70 percent
WHO to launch cheap meningitis vaccine in Africa
(Reuters) – More than 12 million people in Burkino Faso will be the first to receive a new meningitis vaccine as part of an Africa-wide immunization plan, the World Health Organization said on Monday.
The vaccine, called MenAfriVac and made by Serum Institute of India, will be used to inoculate 450 million people throughout the continent by 2015.
U.N. sees global AIDS epidemic starting to turn
(Reuters) – An estimated 33.3 million people worldwide have the HIV virus that causes AIDS, but the global health community is starting to slow down and even turn the epidemic around, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.
The total number of HIV-infected people in 2009 was down slightly from the previous year’s 33.4 million and at least 56 countries have either stabilized or achieved significant declines in rates of new HIV infections.
Donor eggs may be linked to pregnancy complication
(Reuters Health) – Women who use donated eggs to get pregnant by in vitro fertilization (IVF) might be more at risk for a common but potentially dangerous pregnancy complication than women using traditional IVF, a small study suggests.
Women who get pregnant using IVF — in which an egg is fertilized outside the body, then implanted into a woman’s uterus — are already thought to be at an increased risk for preeclampsia. The condition occurs when a woman’s blood pressure rises during her second or third trimester and her kidneys stop being able to retain protein.
New spermicide may be as good as nonoxynol-9
(Reuters Health) – A new spermicide compound, not yet available in drugstores, may be as good a contraceptive as the drug now in existing gels, films, and foams, hints a new study.
All currently available gel, film and foam spermicides, such as Encare contraceptive inserts and VCF dissolving vaginal films, contain the compound nonoxynol-9. But researchers testing a new mixture of spermicidal compounds called C31G found it to be just as effective at preventing pregnancy, and perhaps even a bit safer to use.
“Spermicides are one of the least utilized contraceptive methods,” lead researcher Dr. Anne E. Burke of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, told Reuters Health.
Mom’s heartburn meds not tied to birth defects
Reuters Health) – A nationwide study from Denmark finds pregnant women have little reason to be concerned about birth defects when taking omeprazole and similar heartburn drugs.
Researchers say there is little reason to suspect such drugs – called proton-pump inhibitors, or PPIs – would harm the fetus. But with an estimated two percent of pregnant women taking them, good safety data are important.
“Medications that are most commonly used in pregnancy are among the ones that require careful study,” said Dr. Allen A. Mitchell of Boston University, who wrote an editorial about the Danish findings in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Breastfeeding on epilepsy drugs no harm to kids’ IQ
(Reuters Health) – Despite concerns that breastfeeding while Mom is on epilepsy medication could hinder infants’ cognitive development, a small study out Wednesday finds no evidence of harm to early-childhood IQ.
Most infants born to women with epilepsy will have been exposed to anti-epilepsy medication in the womb, as most pregnant women with the disorder need to stay on medication to adequately control their seizures.
Many young women may misjudge their weight
(Reuters Health) – Many young women may not realize whether their weight is healthy or not, which could have consequences for their diet and lifestyle habits, a new study finds.
Researchers found that among more than 2,200 women ages 18 to 25 seen at several Texas reproductive-health clinics, “weight misperception” was common among both normal-weight and overweight women.
Women seeking birth control get unneeded pelvic exams
(Reuters Health) – Many doctors require that women have a pelvic exam before they can get a prescription for birth control pills, despite guidelines saying that the step is unnecessary, a new study finds.
In a survey of 1,200 U.S. doctors and advanced practice nurses, researchers found that one-third said they always required women to have a pelvic exam before they would write a prescription for birth control pills.
An even higher percentage – 44 percent – said they “usually” required one, according to findings published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Treating testes trouble early may save fertility
(Reuters Health) – Infertility is probably the last thing on teenage boys’ minds. However, a new study out of Brazil suggests that early treatment of a common testicular condition could preserve future fatherhood potential for some adolescents.
A varicocele is a widening of the veins in the scrotum, which house the testicles. While frequently harmless, varicoceles can cause pain, testicular shrinkage and, over time, can potentially lead to lower sperm counts and quality.
Silent thyroid problems linked to fractures in men
(Reuters Health) – Elderly men with mild thyroid dysfunction – most of whom are unaware of it – are significantly more likely to develop hip fractures, a new study reports.
Researchers found that men 65 years and older with mild thyroid dysfunction, known as subclinical hyperthyroidism or subclinical hypothyroidism, had at least a two-fold higher risk of hip fracture, which comes with potentially life-threatening complications.
“This certainly raises legitimate concern that we ought to be doing more” to mitigate the potential effects of silent thyroid dysfunction on bone, study author Dr. Jennifer Lee of the University of California, Davis, told Reuters Health. “This is an under-recognized risk factor for hip fracture.”
Once-daily pill helps prevent HIV infection in men
(Reuters) – A once-a-day pill combining two Gilead Sciences Inc AIDS drugs reduced the HIV infection rate by nearly 44 percent in high-risk gay and bisexual men, researchers reported on Tuesday.
Men who took the pill the most consistently had more than a 70 percent lower risk over two years, the U.S. government study in Peru, Thailand, South Africa and elsewhere found.
It is the first study to show that taking drugs before infection can reduce the risk of HIV transmission and has the potential to be a weapon in the fight against the fatal and incurable virus, the researchers said.
Typical acetaminophen dose no threat to kids’ livers
(Reuters Health) – Concerns about liver injuries in kids who take the common painkiller acetaminophen — sold as Tylenol in the U.S. — are unfounded, researchers said on Monday.
“None of the 32,000 children in this study were reported to have symptoms of obvious liver disease,” said Dr. Eric Lavonas of the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver. “The only hint of harm we found was some lab abnormalities.”
I would still use this drug cautiously in children until there are further studies and the “lab abnormalities” are investigated.
Cough and cold meds withdrawal is working: study
(Reuters Health) – The number of young children going to the emergency room after taking too much cough and cold medicine was cut in half after drug companies took medications for their age group off the market, according to a new study.
Doctors say the research, published today in the journal Pediatrics, shows that taking the medications off the shelves did what it was intended to do – but that there is still more that both drug makers and parents can do to protect kids from ending up in the emergency room.
Eat more protein, fewer refined carbs to stay slim
Reuters Health) – A team of European researchers confirms what many weight-loss gurus have claimed: eating more protein and fewer refined carbohydrates helps to keep the pounds off.
Among men and women who had lost at least eight percent of their body weight on a low-calorie diet, those who spent the next six months following a maintenance diet high in protein and low in refined carbs were the least likely to regain any weight, and were also the least likely to drop out of the study.
Fish health benefits may outweigh mercury concerns
(Reuters Health) – It may be a red herring to worry over whether people who eat lots of fish may lose whatever heart benefits they might have gained because of an increased exposure to mercury, a new study shows.
Rich in omega-3 fatty acids, fish is thought to rank high on the list of heart-healthy foods. But it has a potential dark side: many fish species that wind up on the plate have high levels of mercury, a known neurotoxin.
Eating orange and dark green vegetables linked to longer life
(Reuters Health) – Eating lots of orange and dark green veggies such as carrots, sweet potatoes and green beans may be tied to less disease and longer life, suggests a new study.
This time it is not the beta-carotene in vegetables that has the spotlight, but rather its cousin: alpha-carotene. Both are members of the carotenoid antioxidant family. Scientists believe carotenoid antioxidants promote health by counteracting oxygen-related damage to DNA.
Consumption of fruits and vegetables has long been associated with lower risks of health problems such as cancer and heart disease, said Dr. Chaoyang Li of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, in e-mail to Reuters Health.
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