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Smoking 'Can Improve Schizophrenic Minds'

Gabrielle Monaghan
Times Online
Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:49 UTC
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Smoking may cause cancer but the nicotine in cigarettes can improve the lives of schizophrenics by boosting attention and memory.

A chemical in the drug may help people with the mental illness to think more clearly and maintain their concentration, according to Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist who formerly worked at Queen's University Belfast, which has made the finding. She conducted a three-year study to find out why schizophrenia sufferers are three times more likely to smoke than the general population.
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Health

Family Quarrels Can Promote Headaches In Children, Study Finds


Science Daily
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:28 UTC
Family quarrels and a lack of free time can promote headaches in children. This is what Jennifer Gassmann and her coauthors concluded in their study on risk factors, which appears in the current issue of the Deutsches Ärzteblatt International.

This investigation was a component of a large-scale study entitled "Children, Adolescents, and Headache" (Kinder, Jugendliche und Kopfschmerz - KiJuKo), in which data were collected in four annual "waves" from 2003 to 2006. Out of a multitude of variables tested in the larger study, the authors chose to look at the ones that concerned the children's family and leisure time. Up to 30% of all children around the world complain of headache symptoms arising at least once per week.
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Heart - Black

Why Are Our Teenage Daughters the Unhappiest People in Britain?

India Knight
Times Online
Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:58 UTC
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Girls get the best exam results and university places. But the numbers experiencing psychological distress is rocketing

Here's a little vignette (it's a true story): a 15-year-old girl attends London's top girls' school. Her less brainiac little sister goes to another league-topping school nearby, only marginally less exalted. Their mother is collecting Girl A from School A, and remarks out loud on how very thin everyone is, indeed much thinner than the girls at the rival establishment. Girl A, with a toss of her hair, says: "Yeah, we even do anorexia better than them."

Extreme? Actually, no. Being faux-cynical, pouty and contrary has long been part of growing up, but there's a distinction between making it your life's work to annoy your parents and teachers and having serious mental health issues. It turns out that this line is being crossed by Britain's teenage girls, especially "high-achieving" girls from comfortable backgrounds, in vast and alarming numbers.
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Heart

Cancer Survivor Provides Free Health Care for Uninsured


CNN
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:44 UTC
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Faith Coleman's ordeal as an uninsured cancer patient drove her to help others without health insurance.
Bunnell, Florida -- Faith Coleman had no health insurance when she learned she had cancer, but she describes her battle with the illness as "one of the absolute greatest blessings" of her life.

"Having kidney cancer was one of the best things that ever happened to me ... because I can truly empathize with patients," said Coleman, 54.

That compassion inspired Coleman to open a free clinic in her Florida community to help other uninsured people in need of medical care.

In July 2003, Coleman, a nurse practitioner, learned she had a malignant tumor growing on her right kidney. But as a contract worker for several doctors, she did not receive health insurance. Coleman's treatment totaled about $35,000, and she was forced to take out a mortgage on her house to help pay for it.

"I [fell] through the crack ... and I [had] a great job and a good education," said Coleman, a mother of six.
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Attention

WHO: No Tamiflu for healthy people with swine flu


The Associated Press
Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:24 UTC
London - The World Health Organization says healthy people who catch swine flu don't need antiviral drugs like Tamiflu.

In new advice issued to health officials on Friday, the U.N. agency said doctors don't need to give Tamiflu to healthy people who have mild to moderate cases of swine flu.

WHO said the drug should definitely be used to treat people in risk groups who get the virus. That includes children less than five years old, pregnant women, people over age 65 and those with other health problems like heart disease, HIV or diabetes.
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Arrow Down

Surgeon Tied to Bone Product Inquiry Resigns

Duff Wilson
New York Times
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:06 UTC
A former Army surgeon accused of falsifying a study on a bone growth product used on severely injured Iraq war veterans has resigned his teaching position at Washington University in St. Louis, a spokeswoman said Tuesday night.

The surgeon, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, 48, was placed on leave earlier this year while the university investigated charges against him. Medtronic, a maker of the bone growth product Infuse, also suspended his consulting contract. The company paid him nearly $800,000 the last few years.

"Dr. Kuklo has agreed to voluntarily resign from the university, effective September 30, 2009," Joni Westerhouse, a spokeswoman for the medical school, said in an e-mail message Tuesday. "Dr. Kuklo will have no clinical, research, or educational duties for the University between now and that date."
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Syringe

More Propaganda: Study Weighs Risks of Vaccine for Cervical Cancer

Roni Caryn Rabin
New York Times
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:50 UTC
The new vaccine designed to protect girls and young women from cervical cancer has a safety record that appears to be in line with that of other vaccines, a government report has found. Some serious complications occurred, including at least 20 deaths and two cases of Lou Gehrig's disease, but they were not necessarily caused by the vaccine, the study said.

The most common serious complications after vaccination with Gardasil were fainting episodes and an increased risk for potentially fatal blood clots, possibly related to oral contraceptive use and obesity, the study found.
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Pills

Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction

Benedict Carey
New York Times
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:36 UTC
The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form, researchers are reporting after the first rigorous test of the approach performed in North America.

For years, European countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands have allowed doctors to provide some addicts with prescription heroin as an alternative to buying drugs on the street. The treatment is safe and keeps addicts out of trouble, studies have found, but it is controversial - not only because the drug is illegal but also because policy makers worry that treating with heroin may exacerbate the habit.

The study, appearing in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, may put some of those concerns to rest.
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Stop

New York Psychiatrist Exhorts FDA to Rescind Artificial Sweetener Aspartame Approval

Dr. Ralph Walton, M.D.
OpEd News
Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:15 UTC
Margaret Hamburg, M.D.
Commissioner, F.D.A.
5600 Fishers Lane
Rockville, Maryland 20857

Dear Dr. Hamburg,

I would like to urgently request that the F.D.A. re-visit the approval of aspartame.

This is an issue which I have been involved with for the past 25 years - initially because of the adverse effects experienced by one of my patients. I had been treating a then 54 year old woman with imipramine because of recurrent major depressive episodes. Previous psychoanalytically based therapy had proven ineffective, but she responded dramatically to 150mg of imipramine per day. She had done well for 11 years on this medication, but was then suddenly hospitalized with a grand mal seizure and subsequent manic episode.
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Magnify

The Truth About Record-Setting U.S. Life Expectancy

Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:12 UTC
Life expectancy in the United States rose to an all-time high, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today. But that's only half the story.

The country is behind about 30 others on this measure.

Though the United States has by far the highest level of health care spending per capita in the world, we have one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations - lower than Italy, Spain and Cuba and just a smidgeon ahead of Chile, Costa Rica and Slovenia, according to the United Nations. China does almost as well as we do. Japan tops the list at 83 years.
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