Health & Wellness
After lighting up are you experiencing more headaches, stomach cramps or a coppery taste in your mouth? Does your new FSC (fire-safe cigarette) taste bad, cause dry mouth and are you coughing more?
New York State was one of the first states to require that cigarettes be made with the new fire-safe paper. This paper is constructed by gluing two or three thin bands of less-porous paper together with an ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer emulsion based adhesive (carpet glue).
These papers have bands (see image) that act as speed bumps, so if the cigarette is left unattended it will self-extinguish. The coalitions that passed these laws believe that these cigarettes would limit the number of cigarette fire deaths.
Though this law was passed in 2004, the number of deaths caused by fires from cigarettes hasn't been greatly reduced, but complaints from smokers all over the U.S have multiplied.
Read more at
Examiner.com
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By training intensely, people can cut their training hours dramatically, research finds.
People who complain they have no time to exercise may soon need another excuse.
Some experts say intense exercise sessions could help people squeeze an entire week's workout into less than an hour. Intense exercise regimens, or interval training, was originally developed for Olympic athletes and thought to be too strenuous for normal people.
But in recent years, studies in older people and those with health problems suggest many more people might be able to handle it. If true, that could revolutionize how officials advise people to exercise -- and save millions of people hours in the gym every week. It is also a smarter way to exercise, experts say.
"High-intensity interval training is twice as effective as normal exercise," said Jan Helgerud, an exercise expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "This is like finding a new pill that works twice as well ... we should immediately throw out the old way of exercising."
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American researchers found that vitamin B3, or niacin restored a brain's neurological function after a stroke.
American researchers have found it can "rewire" the brain by improving blood vessels in patients.
Doctors at the Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit, found that vitamin B3, or niacin - a common water-soluble vitamin - restored a brain's neurological function after a stroke.
Scientists said the findings from the study of rats, which will lead to a similar trial in humans, could result in new low cost treatment for stroke patients.
"If this proves to also work well in our human trials, we'll then have the benefit of a low-cost, easily-tolerable treatment for one of the most neurologically devastating conditions," said Dr Michael Chopp, scientific director of the Henry Ford Neuroscience Institute, who led the study.
According to none other than the esteemed health experts of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) web site, "... people 65 and older should get their regular, or 'seasonal', flu vaccine as soon as possible...People age 65 and older are at increased risk for complications from seasonal influenza compared to younger people and are recommended for annual seasonal flu vaccines." If that's not enough to convince you older folks definitely need flu shots, try this proclamation from the National Institutes of Health (NIH): "You should get a flu shot every year if you are 50 or older ..."
It turns out, however, there's no valid scientific evidence to back up these recommendations. In fact, a new study just published in the Cochrane Systematic Review concludes: "Evidence for the safety and efficacy of influenza vaccines in the over 65s is poor, despite the fact that vaccination has been recommended for the prevention of influenza in older people for the past 40 years."
A research team conducted an extensive investigation of studies based on previous vaccine trials.
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Household dust holds hidden dangers
It's hard to get too worked up about dust. Yes, it's a nuisance, but it's hardly one that causes us much anxiety - and our language itself suggests as much. We call those clumps of the stuff under the bed dust bunnies after all, not, say, dust vermin.
But there's a higher ick factor to dust than you might think. And there's a science to how it gets around - a science that David Layton and Paloma Beamer, professors of environmental policy at the University of Arizona, are exploring.
Layton and Beamer, whose latest study has been accepted for fall publication in the journal
Environmental Science & Technology, knew a lot about their subject even before they set to work. Historically, everyone from chemists to homemakers has tried to figure out just what dust is made of, and the Arizona researchers drew their preliminary data mostly from two studies of household dust conducted in the Netherlands and the U.S. The American survey in particular was a big one, covering six Midwestern states. Layton and Beamer also included a localized study in Sacramento, Calif., that focused particularly on lead contamination. What all those surveys showed was decidedly unappetizing.
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has warned that the public should avoid genetically modified (GM) foods, stating, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation."
A large number of studies and incidents have implicated GM foods in a wide variety of health problems, including accelerated aging, immune dysfunction, insulin disorders, organ damage and reproductive disruption.
For example, female rats fed a diet of GM soy experienced a drastically higher infant death rate, and their surviving infants were smaller and less fertile than the offspring of rats fed on a non-GM soy diet. Male rats fed the GM soy had their testicles change from pink to blue, and the GM soy was also observed to damage the DNA of sperm and embryos. Fertility problems such as abortion, infertility, premature delivery, prolapsed uteri, infant death, and even delivery of unformed infants (bags of water) have been observed in farm animals fed GM cottonseed and corn.
Los Angeles - Life is full of worries. When you're battling a chronic illness, it seems almost impossible to escape nagging anxieties. When will I feel better? Will my condition worsen? When can I return to work or school?
But if you exercise regularly, you probably will feel much less anxious - regardless of the status of your illness. In a study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed data from 40 studies on how exercise affects anxiety. All of the 3,000 study participants were sedentary individuals who had chronic illnesses but were able to exercise in sessions of at least 30 minutes.
Ethan Burnett spent a lot of time alone in his bedroom, and that was before he hit puberty.
Being alone was OK for Ethan, because at his desk and his chair in the corner of his room, in front of his computer, he was comfortable. That wasn't the case when Ethan was at school or at church surrounded by other boys and girls his age.
Ethan (names of the teens in this story have been changed) was a gamer, and even at 12, he spent much of his idle time on the Internet. The first time he stumbled across pictures of people having sex, it fit. Like his games, the stream of Internet pornography did not stop, and even though looking at porn and masturbating felt wrong to Ethan, alone in his room, there was no one to stop him.
Those who live in industrialized countries have easy access to healthy food and nutritional supplements, but magnesium deficiencies are still common. That's a problem because new research from Tel Aviv University suggests that magnesium, a key nutrient for the functioning of memory, may be even more critical than previously thought for the neurons of children and healthy brain cells in adults.
Begun at MIT, the research started as a part of a post-doctoral project by Dr. Inna Slutsky of TAU's Sackler School of Medicine and evolved to become a multi-center experiment focused on a new magnesium supplement, magnesium-L-theronate (MgT), that effectively crosses the blood-brain barrier to inhibit calcium flux in brain neurons.
Published recently in the scientific journal Neuron, the new study found that the synthetic magnesium compound works on both young and aging animals to enhance memory or prevent its impairment. The research was carried out over a five-year period and has significant implications for the use of over-the-counter magnesium supplements.
A group led by Dr. James M. Musser at the Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious Diseases Research of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston, Texas has demonstrated that the cytotoxin Paton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) does not affect methicillin-resistant Staphlococcus aureus (MRSA)-induced pneumonia.
Their report can be found in the March 2010 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.
Community-associated-MRSA causes a wide spectrum of infections, ranging from mild skin problems to fatal invasive diseases. MRSA spreads rapidly from initial topical symptoms to affect vital organs, often resulting in widespread infection, toxic shock, and 'flesh eating' pneumonia. MRSA is resistant to traditional anti-staphylococcal beta-lactam antibiotics and is therefore much more difficult to treat.
