Health & WellnessS


Health

Rehab centers see bankers driven to drink

Claudia Parsons
Reuters
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:19 UTC
Cocaine and martinis On Wall Street? Nothing new there. Masters of the Universe admitting they have an alcohol problem? Not so common.

Experts say more and more people in finance are seeking treatment for addiction as the global economic crisis sinks its teeth into a high-stakes industry where confidence is the name of the game and nobody wants to admit to a weakness.

"We absolutely do see more people coming in naming either a job loss or huge financial reversals or big investments with Bernie Madoff," said Sigurd Ackerman, medical director at Silver Hill Hospital rehabilitation facility in New Canaan, Connecticut.

"They're being admitted with depression or increases in substance abuse, or both."

Ackerman said there was a high concentration of financial professionals in the town, 40 miles from New York, whose main streets are lined with high-end boutiques catering to the well-heeled wives of hedge fund managers and bankers.
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Heart - Black

Dirty Equipment May Have Infected Veterans With HIV

Todd Wright
Miami News
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:18 UTC
More than 3,200 veterans asked to visit their doctor

Doctors at a Miami Veterans Administration hospital may have operated on over 3,200 patients with dirty equipment that may have infected them with deadly diseases.

Officials said Monday colonoscopy patients should meet with a doctor to get screened for HIV, hepatitis and other diseases. That's probably not the best way to pay back people who laid their life on the line for this country.
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Health

Steak and hot dogs linked to early death

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:13 UTC
Image
© Soren Hald/Taxi/GettyConsuming lots of red and processed meats increases the chances of dying within a 10-year period

It gives a new meaning to the phrase "meat is murder": a study of more than half a million Americans has found that consuming steaks, hot dogs and other red and processed meats significantly increased participants' chances of dying during the decade in which they were tracked.

Women who consumed the most red meat - 66 grams (2.3 ounces) per 1000 calories - were roughly 36% more likely to die than women who ate the least red meat - 9.1 grams (0.3 ounces). For men, a similar difference in red meat consumption, upped death rates by 31%.

To put it the other way around, the researchers say that 11% of deaths in men and 16% of deaths in women could be prevented if people who eat a lot of red meat cut their consumption.

"This is probably the biggest and most carefully done study on the relationship between diet and mortality that I've seen," says Barry Popkin, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study.
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Health

HIV-TB 'double trouble' warning


BBC News
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:25 UTC
One in four TB deaths is HIV-related, twice as many as previously recognised, experts say.

Co-infection remains a major challenge and more efforts are needed to spot and treat the two conditions in tandem, says the World Health Organization.

HIV and tuberculosis services must be joined up if we are to achieve global disease control, warn disease experts.

Despite TB killing more people with HIV than any other disease, in 2008 only 1% of people with HIV had a TB screen.
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Arrow Down

Increasing Number of Americans Have Insufficient Levels of Vitamin D


PhysOrg
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:00 UTC
Average blood levels of vitamin D appear to have decreased in the United States between 1994 and 2004, according to a report in the March 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Clinicians previously believed the major health problems associated with vitamin D deficiency were rickets in children and reduced bone mineral content in adults, conditions reduced by fortifying foods with vitamin D, according to background information in the article. More recently, insufficient vitamin D levels have been associated with cancer, heart disease, infection and suboptimal health overall. Evidence suggests that levels of 30 nanograms per milliliter to 40 nanograms per milliliter may be needed for optimum health.

"Vitamin D supplementation appears to mitigate the incidence and adverse outcomes of these diseases and may reduce all-cause mortality," the authors write. However, currently recommended levels of supplementation - 200 international units per day from birth to age 50, 400 international units per day from age 51 to 70 and 600 international units per day for adults age 71 and older - focus primarily on improving bone health. In addition, decreases in outdoor physical activities and successful campaigns to reduce sun exposure may have contributed to vitamin D insufficiency, since sunlight exposure is a main determinant of vitamin D status in humans.
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Sherlock

Gulf War Veterans Display Abnormal Brain Response To Specific Chemicals


Science Daily
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:38 UTC
A new study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers is the first to pinpoint damage inside the brains of veterans suffering from Gulf War syndrome - a finding that links the illness to chemical exposures and may lead to diagnostic tests and treatments.

Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study, said the research uncovers and locates areas of the brain that function abnormally. Recent studies had shown evidence of chemical abnormalities and shrinkage of white matter in the brains of veterans exposed to certain toxic chemicals, such as sarin gas during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The research, published in the March issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, enables investigators to visualize exact brain structures affected by these chemical exposures, Dr. Haley said.

"Before this study, we didn't know exactly what parts of the brain were damaged and causing the symptoms in these veterans," he said. "We designed an experiment to test areas of the brain that would have been damaged if the illness was caused by sarin or pesticides, and the results were positive."
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Butterfly

Leave No Child Inside

Janet Milkman
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:37 UTC
We could improve children's health, reduce crime and build a smarter workforce simply by fully funding parks and recreation at every level of government. Sound crazy? Maybe. But sometimes we miss a simple solution when it is staring us in the face.

We all know that children's chronic health issues -- obesity, ADHD, heart issues, diabetes -- are growing, so much so that Robert Wood Johnson researchers report that the United States has the potential of raising the first generation of children to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.

No wonder. Obesity in children increased from about 4 percent in the 1960s to close to 20 percent in 2004. ADHD diagnoses increased by 33 percent between 1997 and 2002. Kids (and adults) are spending less and less time outdoors.
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Beer

Drinkers' Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk

Nicholas Bakalar
New York Times
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:31 UTC
People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more than embarrassment. The flushing may indicate an increased risk for a deadly throat cancer, researchers report.

The flushing response, which may be accompanied by nausea and a rapid heartbeat, is caused mainly by an inherited deficiency in an enzyme called ALDH2, a trait shared by more than a third of people of East Asian ancestry - Japanese, Chinese or Koreans. As little as half a bottle of beer can trigger the reaction.

The deficiency results in problems in metabolizing alcohol, leading to an accumulation in the body of a toxin called acetaldehyde. People with two copies of the gene responsible have such unpleasant reactions that they are unable to consume large amounts of alcohol. This aversion actually protects them against the increased risk for cancer.

But those with only one copy can develop a tolerance to acetaldehyde and become heavy drinkers.

"What we're trying to do here is raise awareness of this risk factor among doctors and their ALDH2-deficient patients," said Dr. Philip J. Brooks, an investigator with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and an author of the report published on Monday in the journal PLoS Medicine. "It's a pretty serious risk."
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Red Flag

Brain differences mark those with depression risk


Reuters
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:18 UTC
Chicago, Illinois - People who have a high family risk of developing depression had less brain matter on the right side of their brains on par with losses seen in Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Brain scans showed a 28-percent thinning in the right cortex -- the outer layer of the brain -- in people who had a family history of depression compared with people who did not.

"The difference was so great that at first we almost didn't believe it. But we checked and re-checked all of our data, and we looked for all possible alternative explanations, and still the difference was there," said Dr. Bradley Peterson of Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
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Bell

Aggression Among Pre-school Children Is Primarily Among Males And Worsens With Age, Study Finds


ScienceDaily
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:44 UTC
Image
© Credit: Phineas H.Aggression among pre-school children is linked to the male gender, new research shows.
A study led by Catalan researchers has clearly shown the importance of the first developmental life stages in the development of the symptoms of psychopathological disorders. This research confirms the existence of aggression by pre-school children towards their peers, as well as differences according to age and gender. There is a widespread lack of understanding about this important stage of life, and previous data have shown that 1% of the pre-school age population in Spain already shows symptoms of major depression.

The research project, which is part of a broader study aimed at detecting risk symptoms for the development of pathologies among children between the ages of three and six, has confirmed aggression among pre-school children towards their peers.

The results have been published recently in The Spanish Journal of Psychology, and - as is the case in other European countries - show that this aggression is mostly found in males, and increases with age.
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