Fennville Star Player Collapsed From Cardiac Arrest After Scoring Victory Shot, Clinching Perfect Season

Celebration turned to tragedy Thursday night at a Michigan high school when 16-year-old Wes Leonard collapsed on the basketball court and later died after scoring the game-winning shot in overtime, helping his team clinch a perfect season.

According to Dr. David A Start, the forensic pathologist and medical examiner of Ottawa County, the cause of death was cardiac arrest due to dilated cardiomyopathy -- an enlarged heart.

Leonard's game-winning layup, which earned two of his 21 points that game, led the undefeated Fennville Blackhawks to a 57-55 win over Bridgman High School. Teammates hoisted in him the air moments before he collapsed.

"He made the shot and then the game was over, we had won, everyone rushed the court," said Tobias Hutchins, a senior at Fennville High School who was at the standing-room-only game. "He did the team lineups where they all shake hands, the basketball team held him up, he started walking, then collapsed."

Case Number One, Martha

Martha is 55 years old, healthy and no history of heart disease. Nonetheless, Martha has been taking a statin drug for "high cholesterol" under the care of "the top cardiologist" in South Florida for the past five years. Martha has also been under my care taking a bioidentical hormone program for menopausal symptoms, and doing very well. Every six months, we run a lab panel which always shows low cholesterol of 170, courtesy of her statin anti-cholesterol drug.

Just Ask Judith Walsh MD in JAMA

And, every time Martha comes into the office to review her lab results, I print out a 2004 JAMA article by Judith Walsh, MD who reviewed thirteen statin drug clinical trials from 1966 to 2003.(1) Dr. Judth Walsh concludes that cholesterol lowering drugs provide no health benefit for women. I give her this article and, at the same time, explain to her that no woman should be on a statin drug. Lowering cholesterol with a statin drug has no health benefit for women, that's a fact, and public information readily available.

Playing Games With Statins

Every six months I recommend to Martha stopping the statin drug, and every six month, her cardiologist puts her back on the statin drug. This has been going on for three years now.

Finally Success At Convincing Martha to Stop the Statin Drug

Finally this last time, Martha seems more receptive to idea that the statin drug is harming her and not helping her. She is sitting in my office recounting multiple health problems for which she sees numerous doctors: back pain, asthma, sinus infections, skin problems, and allergies. I suggested to Martha the possibility that many of her health problems are caused by the low cholesterol from the statin drug. Martha finally sees the light, goes home and tosses the bottle of pills into the garbage can.

Feeling Better

About a week later, Martha called me and reported, "I feel so much better off that statin drug, thank you so much! ". Apparently, the statin drug was causing adverse health effects, and Martha was now feeling much better.

Britain is under the grip of vast insomnia epidemic and almost one in ten of them are under the influence of sleeping pills.

Though it is the fact that Margaret Thatcher took the sleep only for five hours a day and survived, the scientists warn that enough night sleep is very important as that of good food and exercise.

They also warned the public that not enough sleep will cause damage to heart, diabetes and obesity and they insist to take care of the problem. If it is not treated in time, it will spoil both mental and physical health.

The survey conducted by the Economic and Social Research Council revealed that Britons do not have enough sleep and one in eight does not have the sleep even for six hours.

But experts warned that taking a pill daily to have the sleep is not the right answer.

Sleep researcher Neil Stanley told that people are very interested in taking a sleep pill as quick fix rather than looking for cause.

He said that only lifestyle and environmental changes alone could solve this sleep disorder and there is no medicine to cure it.

Dear Mark,

I am studying to become a nurse and am taking my first nutrition class at a local college. As one of our assignments we had to record everything we ate for an entire week. After looking at my results my teacher was dumbfounded. To make a long story short, my teacher told me that I should only be eating 38 grams of protein each day, and that any more than that could harm my kidneys. I've been Primal for 2 years and am healthier than ever. I am 5′ 2″ and and a very lean 105 pounds. Should I be concerned?

Renee

Well, Renee, I'm sorry to break it to you, but all those subjective health markers - like being "healthier than ever," a "very lean 105 pounds," and satisfied enough to be "Primal for 2 years" - mean absolutely nothing because you are destroying your kidneys by exceeding your daily allotment of six ounces of animal protein. In fact, it's highly likely that feeling good and maintaining a trim, lean figure are byproducts of impending kidney failure. The human body, you see, is a cruel practical joker dead set on destroying itself (hence the daily internal manufacturing of that poison known as cholesterol); it's only trying to keep you pacified with regards to your health long enough for outright kidney failure to commence. You should be extremely concerned. I only hope this message reaches you in time.

Part of the answer to how and why primates differ from other mammals, and humans differ from other primates, may lie in the repetitive stretches of the genome that were once considered "junk."

A new study by researchers at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine finds that when a particular type of repetitive DNA segment, known as an Alu element, is inserted into existing genes, they can alter the rate at which proteins are produced - a mechanism that could contribute to the evolution of different biological characteristics in different species. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Repetitive elements of the genome can provide a playground for the creation of new evolutionary characteristics," said senior study author Yi Xing, Ph.D., assistant professor of internal medicine and biomedical engineering, who holds a joint appointment in the UI Carver College of Medicine and the UI College of Engineering.

"By understanding how these elements function, we can learn more about genetic mechanisms that might contribute to uniquely human traits."

Alu elements are a specific class of repetitive DNA that first appeared about 60 to 70 million years ago during primate evolution. They do not exist in genomes of other mammals. Alu elements are the most common form of mobile DNA in the human genome, and are able to transpose, or jump, to different positions in the genome sequence. When they jump into regions of the genome containing existing genes, these elements can become new exons - pieces of messenger RNAs that carry the genetic information.

U.S. researchers say evidence is mounting that regions of the human brain can take over functions they were not genetically designed to perform.

Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say a study has shown that in individuals born blind, parts of the visual cortex -- not receiving any visual sensory stimuli -- are recruited for language processing, contradicting the assumption that such processing can only occur in highly specialized brain regions that are genetically programmed for language tasks.

"Your brain is not a prepackaged kind of thing. It doesn't develop along a fixed trajectory; rather, it's a self-building toolkit," says Marina Bedny of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "The building process is profoundly influenced by the experiences you have during your development."

While functions like language, hearing and vision have distinct processing centers in the brain, studies are beginning to suggest there's some flexibility in assigning brain functions.

Scanning the brains of blind subjects as they performed a sentence comprehension task, researchers found their visual brain regions were sensitive to sentence structure and word meanings in the same way as classic language regions of the brain are, PhysOrg.com reported Monday.

"The idea that these brain regions could go from vision to language is just crazy," Bedny says. "It suggests that the intrinsic function of a brain area is constrained only loosely, and that experience can have really a big impact on the function of a piece of brain tissue."

You may have heard about the longevity and health of the Okinawan people. According to records kept by the Japanese since 1879, the people of Okinawa just may be the longest-lived people in the world, often staying healthy and active into their nineties, or even longer.

Many have claimed that this longevity and health is due to a low-fat, meat-free, high-vegetable diet. Being skeptical of such claims, I researched traditional Okinawan cooking and traditions.

My skepticism was justified, as it usually is. The long-lived, healthy people of Okinawa eat a diet that is heavily based on meat. Mostly pork. Mostly fat pork. The main cooking fat is pork lard. Many foods are fried in pork lard. The Okinawans traditionally do not rely on doctors when they get ill, but on food-based remedies consisting of - pork organs. In fact, pork is so vital to Okinawan culture that Okinawans often refer to their land as the "Island of Pork."

The real lesson of Okinawan longevity is "Eat fat, live long."

Busy scientists at India's Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research have trained their sights on an almost universal ailment: the common cold.

And they have what appears to be very good news for cold sufferers.

Their latest review, published in The Cochrane Library, found that the mineral zinc could shorten the duration of the common cold, and make symptoms less severe.

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution and Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

When Atkins first published his Diet Revolution in 1972, Americans were just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.

Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with béarnaise sauce . . . bacon cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as the diet progressed.

Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings.

There's a long list of anti-inflammatory foods that can help manage inflammation and pain in the body - and ginger may be one of the best. In a new study, ginger was found to be superior to common non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).