Health & WellnessS


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Statins Cause Serious Structural Muscle Damage

S. L. Baker
Natural News
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:00 UTC
If there is a super star in Big Pharma's list of money making drugs, it may well be the group of medications known as statins. The New York Times reported last year that statins are, in fact, the biggest selling drugs in the world. Their names, like Lipitor and Crestor, are familiar from countless television and magazine ads and almost everyone knows someone taking a statin. Promoted widely as safe, they are actually known to cause a litany of potential side effects. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) web site notes that about one in 1,000 of those taking statins suffer from muscle pain. Usually, these aches go away. But not always. And now new research shows that in some people statins cause serious structural damage to muscles.

The study, just published in CMAJ (the Canadian Medical Association Journal) suggests that patients who are taking statins and who complain to their doctors about muscle tenderness or pain could well be describing severe muscle problems due to the drugs. Although muscle damage is usually associated with elevated levels of an enzyme called creatine phosphokinase, the CMAJ research shows that's not always the case. And it may take muscle biopsies to show that underlying structural injury has occurred.
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Gene Associated With Language, Speech And Reading Disorders Identified


ScienceDaily
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:00 UTC
A new candidate gene for Specific Language Impairment has been identified by a research team directed by Mabel Rice at the University of Kansas, in collaboration with Shelley Smith, University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Javier Gayán of Neocodex, Seville, Spain.

The finding, reported in the current issue of the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, was discovered by examining genes previously identified as candidate genes for reading impairments or speech sound disorders.

The results point toward the likelihood of multiple genes contributing to language impairment, some of which also contribute to reading or speech impairment.

A gene on Chromosome 6 - KIAA0319 - was associated with variability in language abilities in a study of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their family members, as well as with variability in speech and reading abilities. Children with SLI who were selected for the study had no hearing loss, general intellectual deficit or autism.
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Brain can Cope with Emotions of Psoriasis

Salynn Boyles
WebMD Health News
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:00 UTC
Psoriasis can lead to physical scars, but the emotional scars from the skin disease can run deeper.

The thick, red, scaly skin lesions that characterize the condition often influence how people with psoriasis feel about themselves and how others see them.

Now new early research suggests that the brains of some patients may actually adapt to cope with the body image and self-esteem issues that can accompany the skin disorder.

Using brain imaging focused on an area of the brain believed to control feelings and reactions to disgust, researchers in the U.K. showed that psoriasis patients tended to react less strongly to facial expressions registering disgust than people without the skin condition.

The study was small, with just 12 men with psoriasis and 12 men without the skin condition. But the findings suggest the brains of psoriasis patients eventually become rewired to protect against the negative emotional responses of others, researchers say.
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Family

Heat Forms Potentially Harmful Substance In High-fructose Corn Syrup, Bee Study Finds

LeBlanc et al
EurekAlert!
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:51 UTC
Image
© Credit: Wikimedia CommonsA new study shows that heat can produce a potentially toxic substance in high-fructose corn syrup that may kill honeybees.
Researchers have established the conditions that foster formation of potentially dangerous levels of a toxic substance in the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that is often fed to honey bees. Their study, which appears in the current issue of ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, may also have implications for soft drinks and dozens of other human foods that contain HFCS. The substance, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), forms mainly from heating fructose.
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Ambulance

From dust to bust, America's poor take on a new type of monster

Chris McGreal
UK Guardian
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:35 UTC
Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath, Chris McGreal recreates John Steinbeck's famous fictional journey to reveal life in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression

Looking back on the past few weeks, Johnnie Levy can see how she was driven to the brink of death and didn't care.

The sharpest economic downturn of her 63 years stripped Levy of her beloved job as a seamstress and unravelled her world until she found herself sitting in a church hall in the black end of Tulsa waiting to see a nurse with a syringe in one hand and a Bible in the other.
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Health

How Safe Or Unsafe Are Medical Imaging Procedures?


Science Daily
Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:54 UTC
In a new study of nearly one million adults between the ages of 18 and 64, nearly 70 percent of participants underwent at least one medical imaging procedure between July 2005 and December 2007, resulting in an average effective dose of radiation nearly double the amount they would otherwise be exposed to from natural sources.

Nearly 20 percent of participants received at least moderate annual doses of radiation from diagnostic tests, and women and older individuals were at greater risk for radiation exposure, according to a report in the August 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Info

Sugar Consumption Limits Urged by Heart Association

Ron Winslow & Shirley S. Wang
The Wall Street Journal
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:48 UTC
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© Sergio Capursi/The Wall Street Journal
Sweet Surrender: Sugar Curbs Urged

Most women should limit sugar intake to 100 calories, or six teaspoons, a day. Men should limit their consumption to 150 calories. That won't be easy. A 12-ounce can of cola has 130 calories, or eight teaspoons.

The American Heart Association is taking aim at the nation's sweet tooth, urging consumers to significantly cut back on the amount of sugar they get from such foods as soft drinks, cookies and ice cream.
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Attention

Best of the Web: Jaw Dropping Propaganda: Healthy food obsession sparks rise in new eating disorder

Amelia Hill
Guardian.co.uk.
Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:09 UTC
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© Red Pill Press
Eating disorder charities are reporting a rise in the number of people suffering from a serious psychological condition characterized by an obsession with healthy eating.

Comment: Obsession? Since when has making informed dietary choices and learning about how certain foods and food additives affect the human body become an obsession?

The condition, orthorexia nervosa, affects equal numbers of men and women, but sufferers tend to be aged over 30, middle-class and well-educated.

Comment: Well-educated, meaning the ability to read and discern between what is good for human consumption and what is pure poison? The ability to critically think and ask researched and informed questions about food quality, supplementation, production and distribution?

The condition was named by a Californian doctor, Steven Bratman, in 1997, and is described as a "fixation on righteous eating". Until a few years ago, there were so few sufferers that doctors usually included them under the catch-all label of "Ednos" - eating disorders not otherwise recognized. Now, experts say, orthorexics take up such a significant proportion of the Ednos group that they should be treated separately.
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Syringe

Judge denies group's request that pregnant women be offered swine flu vaccines free of neurotoxins

Nedra Pickler
Associated Press
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:52 UTC
A judge on Wednesday denied an advocacy group's bid to prevent the government from giving pregnant women flu vaccines with a preservative that contains mercury.

Leaders of the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs say their effort took on a new urgency when a government advisory committee recently recommended that pregnant women be among the first people to get swine flu vaccinations when the vaccine becomes available this fall.

Comment: Those "studies" were a deliberate cover-up. The world is still waiting for a true scientific study comparing the vaccinated population against the completely unvaccinated population. The reason it hasn't been done is simple: they're afraid of what they might find. According to an interview with Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, when asked the question about the mercury-autism link:
"I think that the public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational," Healy said.

"But public health officials have been saying they know, they've been implying to the public there's enough evidence and they know it's not causal," Attkisson said.

"I think you can't say that," Healy said. "You can't say that."

Healy goes on to say public health officials have intentionally avoided researching whether subsets of children are "susceptible" to vaccine side effects - afraid the answer will scare the public.

"You're saying that public health officials have turned their back on a viable area of research largely because they're afraid of what might be found?" Attkisson asked.

Healy said: "There is a completely expressed concern that they don't want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people."


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People

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

John Cloud
TIME
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:35 UTC
As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy - an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week.

I have exercised like this - obsessively, a bit grimly - for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship - a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts - I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out?
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