Health & WellnessS


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Male midwife warns of epidural epidemic

staff writers
NEWS.com.au
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:39 UTC
Women should embrace the full pain of childbirth to bond with their babies instead of resorting to anaesthetic drugs, a leading male midwife has said.

UK professor Dr Denis Walsh said the pain of labour should be considered a "rite of passage" and a "purposeful, useful thing".

The pain prepares women for the responsibilities of motherhood, he wrote in an international journal published yesterday.
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Mayo Clinic study questions belief that autistic children have more gut problems


Chicago Tribune
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:41 UTC
A new study casts doubt on a commonly held but controversial belief that autistic children have more gut problems than their peers.

The Mayo Clinic study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found autistic kids in the study were more likely than their nonautistic counterparts to be picky eaters or constipated. But the researchers did not find a significant difference between the two groups when it came to diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, bloating, reflux or vomiting.

"We did not find a difference in gastrointestinal symptoms in total," said Dr. Samar Ibrahim, lead study author and a Mayo Clinic pediatric gastroenterology fellow.

Comment: The article is misleading in stating the reason why autistic children are placed on gluten-freecasein-free (GFCF) and other restrictive diets. These are often not due to obvious gastrointestinal symptoms per se. Rather, the working hypothesis is that in some autistic people, improperly digested gluten and casein are turned into peptides which act as endogenous opiates, impairing brain function. Additionally, an unusual immune response can be triggered by those peptides which further contributes to the problem. Regrettably, the study appears to support the mainstream medical agenda that offers little to autism sufferers.

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Study: Tanning beds as deadly as arsenic

Maria Cheng
Associated Press
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:30 UTC
International cancer experts have moved tanning beds and other sources of ultraviolet radiation into the top cancer risk category, deeming them as deadly as arsenic and mustard gas. For years, scientists have described tanning beds and ultraviolet radiation as "probable carcinogens."

A new analysis of about 20 studies concludes the risk of skin cancer jumps by 75 percent when people start using tanning beds before age 30. Experts also found that all types of ultraviolet radiation caused worrying mutations in mice, proof the radiation is carcinogenic. Previously, only one type of ultraviolet radiation was thought to be lethal.

The new classification means tanning beds and other sources of ultraviolet radiation are definite causes of cancer, alongside tobacco, the hepatitis B virus and chimney sweeping, among others.
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Attention

The Super-bug in Your Supermarket

Stephanie Woodard
Prevention.com
Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:51 UTC
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A potentially deadly new strain of anti-biotic-resistant microbes may be widespread in our food supply. Protect your loved ones with Prevention's Special Report.

About 2 years ago, dozens of workers at a large chicken hatchery in Arkansas began experiencing mysterious skin rashes, with painful lumps scattered over their hands, arms, and legs. "They hurt real bad," says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare hands. "When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug." Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists antibiotics (including methicillin), making it hard to treat, even lethal. According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000 Americans a year--more than die from AIDS.
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As MRSA Gets Worse, the FDA Discovers Antibiotic Abuse on Factory Farms

Tom Philpott
Grist
Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:58 UTC
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Incubating chickens—and what else?
A bill now circulating in the House, sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D.-NY), would limit the amount of antibiotics that can be used on factory animal farms.

There's good news and bad news on that front. The bad news: "The farm lobby's opposition makes its passage unlikely," The New York Times reported Monday. The farm lobby's opposition is like that. But The Times should be more precise: it's really the agribusiness lobby - representing a few large companies - that wields power.

Ok, now to the good news: Obama's FDA has come out in support of restricting antibiotics. FDA official Joshua Sharfstein testified at a hearing sponsored by Slaughter that the agency will seek to limit antibiotic use on factory farms.

That marks a sea change. Until now, the FDA had been silent on the problem of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that develop on factory farms - even as evidence of their existence piled up.
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High-fat, high-sugar foods alter brain receptors


PhysOrg
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:56 UTC
Overconsumption of fatty, sugary foods leads to changes in brain receptors, according to new animal research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The new research results are being presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior. The results have implications for understanding bulimia and other binge eating disorders.

Dr. Bello and colleagues report that either continuous eating or binge eating a high fat, high sugar diet alters opioid receptor levels in an area of the brain that controls food intake. Opioids are a family of chemicals with actions similar to those of morphine; however, opioids exist naturally in the brain and have been linked to feelings of pleasure and euphoria. "These results are interesting because we saw changes in opioid receptor gene expression in a brain area that controls how much we eat during a meal", said Bello.
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Under a Cloud - Darkness Linked to 'Brain Drain' in Depressed People


e! Science News
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:48 UTC
A lack of sunlight is associated with reduced cognitive function among depressed people. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health used weather data from NASA satellites to measure sunlight exposure across the United States and linked this information to the prevalence of cognitive impairment in depressed people. Shia Kent, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, led a team of US researchers who used cross-sectional data from 14,474 people in the NIH-NINDS-funded REGARDS study, a longitudinal study investigating stroke incidence and risk factors, to study associations between depression, cognitive function and sunlight.

He said, "We found that among participants with depression, low exposure to sunlight was associated with a significantly higher predicted probability of cognitive impairment. This relationship remained significant after adjustment for season. This new finding that weather may not only affect mood, but also cognition, has significant implications for the treatment of depression, particularly seasonal affective disorder".
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The Dichotomy of Effective Prayer


Examiner
Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:20 UTC
"Please God, get me out of this and I'll do anything!"

It is said there are no atheists in foxholes. Must we face the end to discover the magical nature of effective prayer? If we can understand what it is and how it works, we can learn to use it. The dichotomy of this intimate experience is why the rain dance works and begging doesn't.

What is prayer? Is it real? If it is, what's the mechanism? Various studies using meditation and ritual suggest something out of the ordinary happens when people focus on others, in fact the more the merrier. To understand prayer, we must understand some basics about the universe.
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Molecule Plays Early Role in Nonsmoking Lung Cancer


PsysOrg
Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:00 UTC
The cause of lung cancer in never-smokers is poorly understood, but a study led by investigators at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and at the National Cancer Institute has identified a molecule believed to play an early and important role in its development.

The findings, published online recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may lead to improved therapy for lung cancer in both never-smokers and smokers, including those with tumors resistant to targeted drugs such as gefitinib.

The study examined lung tumors from people who had never smoked and found high levels of a molecule called miR-21. The levels were even higher in tumors that had mutations in a gene called EGFR, a common feature of lung cancer in never-smokers.
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Researchers Develop 'Brain-Reading' Methods


PsysOrg
Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:00 UTC
It is widely known that the brain perceives information before it reaches a person's awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

That has changed with the findings of scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles who have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person's mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

As reported in a forthcoming (Oct. 2009) issue of Psychological Science, the findings obtained by Stephen José Hanson, psychology professor at Rutgers; Russell A. Poldrack, professor at UCLA, and Yaroslav Halchenko, (now a post-doctoral student at Dartmouth College), have provided direct evidence that a person's mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research also suggests that a more comprehensive approach is needed for mapping brain activity and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.
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