Health & WellnessS


Health

Exposing The Links Between Doctors And Big Pharma

Republican senator Chuck Grassley has made it his mission to shake up the cosy relationship between doctors, researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. Now he is introducing legislation to force drugs companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors. He tells Jim Giles why he has chosen to be a troublemaker

Does it really matter that some academics and doctors "forget" to declare their income from drug companies?

The public relies on the advice of doctors and has a right to know about financial relationships between those doctors and the companies that make the pharmaceuticals they prescribe. The same goes for leading researchers, as they influence the practice of medicine. If the payments are transparent, I believe that people who have close connections with a company will be a little more cautious about the extent to which they push one drug over another. US taxpayers should also know as they spend billions of dollars on prescription drugs and devices through Medicare and Medicaid.

Last year, you made claims about a psychiatrist using grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test a drug. You alleged he had not properly disclosed the stock he held in the company that owned the drug - claims which he has denied and which his employer has cleared him of. Can you tell me about that?

I am not able to comment on the specifics of any cases. But I can say that my discovery of undisclosed financial relationships between drug companies and researchers has put pressure on the NIH. It's a trustee of $24 billion in federal grants each year. It needs to make sure that those receiving its grants manage conflicts of interest.

Cheeseburger

A Nation of Mindless Eaters

Increasingly, we have become a nation of mindless eaters. Some federal scientists have been watching us, and particularly where we eat. Their observations, described in a report issued last week, suggest that a substantial share of calorie consumption occurs as a "secondary" activity. Like snacking, or dining when our mind is focused on something else - usually watching TV or driving.

One tip to avoid overeating: Pay attention to what you consume. Listen to the body. When it's hungry, eat slowly (because satiety cues take a while to develop and register). And when the body says it's had enough, accept that. Put down the fork. Drop the cookie you were about to bite. Pitch out what remains in your beverage glass or soft-drink can.

Book

Reading: Yours, Mine, Ours: When You and I Share Perspectives

While reading a novel, as the author describes the main character washing dishes or cooking dinner, we will often create a mental image of someone in the kitchen performing these tasks. Sometimes we may even imagine ourselves as the dishwasher or top chef in these scenarios. Why do we imagine these scenes differently - when do we view the action from an outsider's perspective and when do we place ourselves in the main character's shoes?

Psychologist Tad T. Brunye from the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) and Tufts University, along with Tali Ditman, Caroline R. Mahoney and Holly A. Taylor from Tufts University and Jason S. Augustyn from the US Army NSRDEC, investigated how pronouns can influence the way we imagine events being described.

Family

Men view half-naked women as objects, study finds

Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske's team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.

The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or "things you manipulate with your hands," Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.

Syringe

FDA Broadens Interpretation of Restriction on Drugs in Supplements, Reclassifies Vitamin B6 as a Drug

FDA recently gave its most thorough explanation of how it interprets a provision that prohibits drugs in dietary supplements, lawyers at Hyman Phelps & McNamara say, and industry is worried that interpretation will hurt the development of supplement ingredients. The supplement measure is nearly identical to a recently added restriction on food, and the lawyers predict food ingredient development will be similarly affected.

Arrow Up

Soaring Autism Rates Linked to Environmental Causes

A study recently published in the journal Epidemiology has suggested that rapid increases in autism rates in California cannot be explained by migratory trends and looser diagnosis criteria, but is instead most likely down to environmental exposures. Not exactly news to those well versed in natural healing, but perhaps such findings will finally represent a breakthrough of sorts for the scientific and medical community.

Comment: An unhealthy gut and immune system, and a toxic environment triggers certain genes in people susceptible to autism. CheckThe UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman, M.D. for more information on systemic body disorders that affect the brain.


Magnify

Alzheimer's may hijack chemical mechanism

Chicago - U.S. scientists proposed a new theory on Wednesday of how Alzheimer's disease kills brain cells they said opens new avenues of research into treatments for the fatal, brain-wasting disease.

They believe a chemical mechanism that naturally prunes away unwanted brain cells during early brain development somehow gets hijacked in Alzheimer's disease.

"The key player we're focusing on is a protein called APP," said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, executive vice president of research drug discovery at the U.S. biotechnology company Genentech Inc, whose study appears in the journal Nature.

Tessier-Lavigne said amyloid precursor protein, or APP -- a key building block in brain plaques found in Alzheimer's disease -- is the driving force behind this process.

Heart

The American Heart Disassociation

Heart
© David Goehring
Heart disease was once thought to be less of a problem for women than for men. Research now indicates that heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death among women in the US (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Heart Disease Facts and Statistics, 2008), while confirming that women with an intact uterus have a lower incidence of heart disease because they benefit from the uterine advantage.

In his article, "Prostacyclin From The Uterus And Woman's Cardiovascular Advantage," James D. Shelton writes, "Prostacyclin emanating from the uterus is proposed as a major contributor to the reduced risk of coronary disease among women." He refers to the uterus as a "systemically active organ whose removal significantly increases subsequent risk of myocardial infarction" (Prostaglandins Leukotrienes and Medicine, 1982).

Comment: Of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed every year, two-thirds may be unnecessary, experts say. The truth: Several other approaches are available that may have fewer complications and shorter recovery times.


Heart

Heart Attack Knowledge Can Save Women's Lives

February is National Heart month and a good time to reflect on the strides that have been made in preventing and treating heart disease

However, heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of women and men. And since the 1980s, more women than men have died of heart disease in this country.

Women who have the most serious type of heart attack are less likely than men to receive proper hospital treatment and are less likely to survive.

Health

Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad?

Image
© Christopher Bissell / StoneMany people with psychiatric disorders don't sleep well, for instance being plagued with insomnia.

Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems. The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients. Shockingly, it also means that many people, including children, could be taking psychoactive drugs that cannot help them and might even be harmful.

No one knows how many people might fall into this category. "That is very frightening," says psychologist Matt Walker from the University of California, Berkeley. "Wouldn't you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 per cent, 5 per cent or 50 per cent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?"

First, we'd need to know how and to what extent sleep disorders could be responsible for psychiatric problems. In the few years since sleep researchers identified the problem, they have made big strides in doing just that.