Month: September 2013

Brain Activity Found Beyond EEG ‘Flat-lined’ Deep Coma

Scientists say they’ve discovered a totally new kind of brain activity lurking beyond the “flat-lined” state seen in deep comas.

A team of Canadian and Romanian researchers found evidence of cerebral activity both in a human coma patient and in 26 cats induced by drugs into an incredibly deep (but reversible) coma. They describe the new phenomenon, which they’ve dubbed “Nu-complexes,” in a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE.

Initial stages of comas are comparable to deep sleep, but if a person progresses into a deeper and deeper quietude, the brain state alters more dramatically. In cases of very deep comas, an electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor will render a flat line (also called an isoelectric line), marking a state in which the brain’s electrical activity has either stopped or is so low it is virtually undetectable. This is considered one of the boundary lines between having a living brain and brain death, but is not the only criteria that doctors use to declare someone brain-dead; there usually has to be evidence of structural damages in the brain as well.

This new research suggests that cerebral activity can revive after the flat-lined state, under certain conditions. The work started when Romanian doctor and study coauthor Bodan Florea observed unusual brain activity in a hospital patient who went into a coma following a heart attack.

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com

Hot exercise classes catching on like fire

Mimi Benz discovered her fervor for hot exercise by accident. She had taken heated yoga classes but had never thought to combine high temperatures with her true passion, indoor cycling, until the air conditioning broke during a cycling class at her gym.

From that first hot ride, she was hooked.

“I loved it,” says Benz, explaining that with a heated workout she didn’t have to waste time warming up. “It improves blood flow throughout your body, so you go into a high-calorie burn more quickly. And it feels really good afterwards.”

In 2011, Benz opened the Sweat Shoppe, a heated indoor cycling studio in North Hollywood.

“I wasn’t sure how people would respond, so in the beginning we had half heated classes and half non-heated classes.” But the demand for heated classes was so high that by 2013 they’d eliminated non-heated rides from the schedule.

As the demand for hot workouts continues to rise, heated studios are popping up all over, offering everything from traditional Bikram yoga, which started the hot exercise trend with a regimented sequence of yoga postures performed in a 105-degree room with 40% humidity, to hot power yoga, hot Pilates and hot barre. Some classes even incorporate hot weightlifting.

Bikram’s static poses can be sustained at over 100 degrees, but more dynamic classes are typically in the 95-degree range, and the Sweat Shoppe’s SweatCycle classes top out at 85 degrees. “If you go hotter, that’s nuts” and not safe, says Benz.

The allure of heat

As for why people love the heat so much, Benz says it’s partly a psychological response to sweat streaming from your pores. “People feel they’ve accomplished more if they’re drenched. It is very addictive; a lot of our clients can’t cycle anywhere else because they’re so used to riding in a heated environment.”

Laurel Hilton, a writer and hot-yoga enthusiast from Mill Valley, Calif., agrees that once you go hot it’s hard to go back. “I’m addicted to sweating. In the heat you get a sort of exhausted euphoria. You almost feel like you’re floating during practice. Without heat, it’s just not the same experience.”

After becoming acclimated to high temperatures, working out in the heat gets easier. “It’s the same thing any football coach knows,” says Craig Crandall, director of the Thermoregulation Laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “When you take [players] out in the beginning of the season, you can’t work them out hard. They’ll die.” But give them a chance to acclimate, and they’ll be able to push themselves.

Another reason people are attracted to heated workouts: If a heat-acclimated person does the usual workout in a cool environment, it will be a breeze in comparison, says Benz.

Does heat make a better workout?

Though many heated exercise champions believe they’re burning more calories because their hearts are beating faster, that’s not true, says Crandall. “It’s oxygen uptake that determines the number of calories burned, not heart rate.” When people exercise in the heat, they lose blood volume as they sweat, so the amount of blood ejected per heart beat decreases. To compensate, the heart rate increases. For a given workload, a person’s heart rate will always be higher in the heat.

“We know exercising in heat will cause a slightly higher oxygen uptake, but [the difference is] very small, less than 10%,” and likely to be offset by a decreased workload, Crandall says.

Another common misconception is that sweating profusely “detoxifies” the body. “That’s silliness,” says Crandall. “I don’t know of any toxins that are released through sweat.” He adds that the function of sweating is to cool you down, not clean you out.

So is there any physiological benefit to working out in the heat? Crandall says the benefit is heat acclimation itself, which improves sweating efficiency, increases blood flow to the skin and expands blood volume, bringing more blood to the muscles.

There is some evidence that heat acclimation can boost athletic performance. A 2010 study looking at elite cyclists found that those who added a 10-day heat training regimen to their normal training routine saw a 7% increase in their performance. The performance-boosting effects lasted one to two weeks after heat exposure.

But Santiago Lorenzo, the study’s lead author, former Olympic decathlete and a professor of physiology at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Erie, Pa., cautions, “The results we saw apply to highly trained cyclists. How to translate this to someone of average fitness or a weekend warrior? Chances are it would still work—but we need studies to confirm that.”

Safety during heated exercise

“Even if you’re running in the desert or an area with high humidity, you still usually have a draft to cool you off,” says Shannan Lynch, director of education for Mad Dogg Athletics Inc. “But when you sit in a heated room without airflow, the temperature can get dangerously hot.”

The conditions can lead to reduced blood flow to your skin, thus less cooling, and eventual heat exhaustion or even heat stroke. Warning signs include a dry mouth, headache, increasing fatigue, nausea and dizziness.

If you exercise in the heat, Lynch says, replace the fluid that you lose. Weigh yourself before and after. American College of Sports Medicine guidelines recommend that people drink 20 to 24 ounces of water or sports beverage for every pound they lose.

As far as contraindications for heated exercise, “If you have any kind of heart condition, only try it after you get the green light from a physician,” Lynch says, adding. “Pregnant women should not be exercising in a heated environment.”

Source: http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-sweat-it-20130914,0,522826.story

Could Detectives Use Microbes To Solve Murders?

In the woods outside Huntsville, Texas, scientists are trying to determine whether they can use the microbes that live on the human body as microscopic witnesses that could help catch criminals.

It’s a strange scene at the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility. At first, it’s easy to miss the human bodies scattered among the tall pines, wild grass and weeds.

“We hope microbes can tell crime scene investigators how long a person has been dead,” Sibyl Bucheli of Sam Houston State University explains, as she leads a group of researchers and visitors from NPR through a tall, chain-link fence surrounding the facility and down a dusty path to her research plot.

The facility is one of the few places where, in the interest of developing new tools for forensic science, researchers can leave human bodies out in the open to study what happens as the remains decompose.

Bucheli is an entomologist who has spent years studying the ways insects on a body can help pinpoint how long a murder victim has been dead. Knowing how long it takes a particular species of fly to complete its life cycle from egg to larva to pupa to winged insect, for example, can help an investigator figure out how long a corpse has been exposed to the insects, establishing a minimum time since death.

That got Bucheli thinking. “If insects change through time, then so do bacteria,” she says. “And if insects can be used, so can the bacteria.”

It’s possible, she says, that information from bacteria could improve the accuracy of these time-of-death estimates. The microbes might also be useful when insects aren’t present, she says, helping to determine how long a person has been dead, when insects aren’t available to do that.

Such research is just in the beginning stages, but already, a scientific team at the University of Colorado has been able to use bacteria alone to narrow down how long a mouse has been dead to within three days.

“We’re really pushing the envelope of microbial forensic science,” says microbial ecologist Jessica Metcalf, a member of that Colorado team. She and her boss, microbiome researcher Rob Knight, have come to the forensics facility in southeastern Texas to collaborate with Bucheli, hoping to do with human bodies what they did in the mice.

One of the first tasks the day we visit is placing three fresh bodies in the woods. A small tractor pulls up, carrying the first body inside a blue plastic body bag. Three men lift the body off the tractor and place it on the ground. They unzip the bag and carefully unwrap the white sheet that swaddles the cadaver.

“We want to do this as respectfully as possible,” Bucheli says.

It’s a difficult moment. Corpses that have been in the field a little longer look like mummies, barely recognizable as human. The new remains are from people who have only recently died and donated their bodies for scientific research. Bucheli is clearly moved. She pauses briefly for what she calls her “thank-you moment.”

“I’m deeply appreciative of the people who make my research possible … all of them,” she says.

The scientists mark each body’s position with a metal post and then begin several hours of intense work, meticulously gathering dozens of samples of bacteria.

They carefully scrape the skin in the same spots on each body and methodically scoop up dirt from precise locations near the remains. Their plan is to come back day after day, month after month, to sample these exact spots, to figure out if, over time, the communities of bacteria in these various spots change in predictable ways as time passes and the remains decompose.

“We’re looking for a microbial clock,” Metcalf says. A clock like that could be used as a reference tool in forensic investigations.

Microbes might one day help police in other ways, too, the scientists say. The population of bacteria on a person who died of natural causes, for example, might look different than the bacteria on someone who was beaten to death.

And because different varieties of microbes are found in different places, the bacterial census of a corpse might show whether a body has been killed in one place and then dumped in another. Microbes might also help police who are searching for unmarked graves.

“If you suspected that there’s a body buried in a certain field, can you just swab little bits of soil and say, ‘Oh this particular area has microbial organisms that we usually find associated with a decomposing corpse?’ ” Metcalf asks. That’s the sort of question she and Bucheli hope their work will help answer.

And that’s not all. Knight says he thinks microbes could one day provide for each of us a kind of microbial fingerprint that could help police solve all sorts of crimes while we’re alive, as well as after we’re dead.

Back on campus, Knight demonstrates how it works. He pops open a small plastic vial, grabs a cotton swab and pulls out his laptop to test the keyboard.

“You dip the Q-tip in the saline solution and you rub it thoroughly on the individual key,” he explains. The swab quickly turns a greasy brown.

“So what’s on there is a combination of finger grease, dust and bacteria … maybe as many as a billion,” Knight says. “Definitely enough to track it back to an individual.”

Knight has been able to use an analysis of these communities of bacteria to match people to objects they’ve touched. So microbes might be able to do things like link a suspect to a murder weapon or the scene of the crime, he says.

“There are a lot of cases where it’s clear that the suspect touched something but you don’t have a print you can use off it,” Knight says.

He even thinks that analyzing the different communities of microbes on peoples’ bodies might eventually prove to be a useful tool for tracking an individual’s movements — to see if the person had recently returned from Afghanistan or been in Boston, for example.

All of this, Bucheli hopes, will one day help answer the most important question for the families of victims: Who is responsible?

“I’m somebody’s mom,” Bucheli says. “I’m somebody’s sister. You always think about: Who? Who did this?”

Now, no one yet knows how much of this research will prove useful in forensics. Most practical applications are likely years away. But it’s already clear that some of these techniques will likely raise lots of questions — about privacy, civil liberties and how much we want our microbes to reveal about ourselves.

Source: http://wuot.org/post/could-detectives-use-microbes-solve-murders

How Many Die From Medical Mistakes In U.S. Hospitals?

It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient’s death, the numbers come out worse.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous “To Err Is Human” report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials — and quoted ubiquitously in the media.

In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year.

Now comes a of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death.

That would make medical errors the, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.

The new estimates were developed by John T. James, a ‘s space center in Houston who runs an advocacy organization called . James has also about the death of his 19-year-old son after what James maintains was negligent hospital care.

Asked about the higher estimates, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association said the group has more confidence in the IOM’s estimate of 98,000 deaths. ProPublica asked three prominent patient safety researchers to review James’ study, however, and all said his methods and findings were credible.

What’s the right number? Nobody knows for sure. There’s never been an actual count of how many patients experience preventable harm. So we’re left with approximations, which are imperfect in part because of inaccuracies in medical records and the reluctance of some providers to report mistakes.

Patient safety experts say measuring the problem is nonetheless important because estimates bring awareness and research dollars to a major public health problem that persists despite decades of improvement efforts.

“We need to get a sense of the magnitude of this,” James said in an interview.

James based his estimates on the findings of four recent studies that identified preventable harm suffered by patients — known as “adverse events” in the medical vernacular — using use a screening method called the , which guides reviewers through medical records, searching for signs of infection, injury or error. Medical records flagged during the initial screening are reviewed by a doctor, who determines the extent of the harm.

In the four studies, which examined records of more than 4,200 patients hospitalized between 2002 and 2008, researchers found serious adverse events in as many as 21 percent of cases reviewed and rates of lethal adverse events as high as 1.4 percent of cases.

By combining the findings and extrapolating across 34 million hospitalizations in 2007, James concluded that preventable errors contribute to the hospital patients annually.

That is the baseline. The actual number more than doubles, James reasoned, because the trigger tool doesn’t catch errors in which treatment should have been provided but wasn’t, because it’s known that medical records are missing some evidence of harm, and because diagnostic errors aren’t captured.

An estimate of 440,000 deaths from care in hospitals “is roughly one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the United States each year,” James wrote in his study. He also cited other research that’s shown hospital reporting systems and peer-review capture only a fraction of patient harm or negligent care.

“Perhaps it is time for a national patient bill of rights for hospitalized patients,” James wrote. “All evidence points to the need for much more patient involvement in identifying harmful events and participating in rigorous follow-up investigations to identify root causes.”

Dr. Lucian Leape, a Harvard pediatrician who is referred to the was on the committee that wrote the “To Err Is Human” report. He told ProPublica that he has confidence in the four studies and the estimate by James.

Members of the Institute of Medicine committee knew at the time that their estimate of medical errors was low, he said. “It was based on a rather crude method compared to what we do now,” Leape said. Plus, medicine has become much more complex in recent decades, which leads to more mistakes, he said.

Dr. David Classen, one of of the Global Trigger Tool, said the James study is a sound use of the tool and a “great contribution.” He said it’s important to update the numbers from the “To Err Is Human” report because in addition to the obvious suffering, preventable harm leads to enormous financial costs.

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital whose book Unaccountable calls for greater transparency in health care, said the James estimate shows that eliminating medical errors must become a national priority. He said it’s also important to increase the awareness of the potential of unintended consequences when doctors perform procedure and tests. The risk of harm needs to be factored into conversations with patients, he said.

Leape, Classen and Makary all said it’s time to stop citing the 98,000 number.

Still, hospital association spokesman Akin Demehin said the group is sticking with the Institute of Medicine’s estimate. Demehin said the IOM figure is based on a larger sampling of medical charts and that there’s no consensus the Global Trigger Tool can be used to make a nationwide estimate. He said the tool is better suited for use in individual hospitals.

The AHA is not attempting to come up with its own estimate, Demehin said.

Dr. David Mayer, vice president of quality and safety at Maryland-based , said people can make arguments about how many patient deaths are hastened by poor hospital care, but that’s not really the point. All the estimates, even on the low end, expose a crisis, he said.

“Way too many people are being harmed by unintentional medical error,” Mayer said, “and it needs to be corrected.”

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/09/20/224507654/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-u-s-hospitals

E-readers may help dyslexics read more easily

Electronic devices may help those with dyslexia improve their reading speed and comprehension, a new study suggests.

While e-readers are growing in popularity as convenient alternatives to traditional books, researchers have found that convenience may not be their only benefit.

The team discovered that when e-readers are set up to display only a few words per line, some people with dyslexia can read more easily, quickly and with greater comprehension.

An element in many cases of dyslexia is called a visual attention deficit.

It is marked by an inability to concentrate on letters within words or words within lines of text. Another element is known as visual crowding – the failure to recognise letters when they are cluttered within the word.

Using short lines on an e-reader can alleviate these issues and promote reading by reducing visual distractions within the text.

“At least a third of those with dyslexia we tested have these issues with visual attention and are helped by reading on the e-reader,” said Matthew H Schneps, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and lead author of the research.

“For those who don’t have these issues, the study showed that the traditional ways of displaying text are better,” said Schneps.

The study examined the role the small hand-held reader had on comprehension, and found that in many cases the device not only improved speed and efficiency, but improved abilities for the dyslexic reader to grasp the meaning of the text.

The team tested the reading comprehension and speed of 103 students with dyslexia who attend Landmark High School in Boston. Reading on paper was compared with reading on small hand-held e-reader devices, configured to lines of text that were two-to-three words long.

The use of an e-reader significantly improved speed and comprehension in many of the students. Those students with a pronounced visual attention deficit benefited most from reading text on a handheld device versus on paper, while the reverse was true for those who did not exhibit these issues.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ereaders-may-help-dyslexics-read-more-easily/1171261/

A Video Game Makes Old Brains Act Younger

Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.

Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults.

  Cognitive scientists say the findings, to be published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, are a significant development in understanding how to strengthen older brains. That is because the improvements in brain performance did not come just within the game but were shown outside the game in other cognitive tasks.

  Further supporting the findings, the researchers were able to measure and show changes in brain wave activity, suggesting that this research could help understand what neurological mechanisms should and could be tinkered with to improve memory and attention.

  The research “shows you can take older people who aren’t functioning well and make them cognitively younger through this training,” said Earl K. Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not affiliated with the research. “It’s a very big deal.”

  The study highlights an emerging field in which researchers are trying to better define and even expand the limits of attention, which is seen as crucial to performance, memory and intelligence. Previous studies, done at the University of Rochester and focused more on young people, show that heavy use of certain off-the-shelf, intense shooting games can lead to improvements in a user’s ability to ignore distractions, and even learn.

  Daphne Bavelier, who led that research, cautioned that the field was young, and that brain training could have side effects, like changing how the brain functions for the worse.

  “We know we can rewire the brain, but the challenge is how to do it properly,” she said. “We’re in the primitive age of brain training.”

  The significance of the research seems underscored by the title on the cover of the Nature issue reporting it: “Game Changer.”

  Still, this generation of research came with other strong warnings from neuroscientists, who say it in no way proved that interacting with computers provided a surefire way to get smarter. Dr. Miller said most so-called brain games did not work as advertised, and the research shows that scientists should develop the games and objectively test their effectiveness.

  But he and others also said these developments might offer some antidote to a problem often made worse by technology: limited focus because of constant stimulation and multitasking.

  The latest research was the product of a four-year $300,000 study done at the University of California, San Francisco. Neuroscientists there, led by Dr. Adam Gazzaley, worked with developers to create NeuroRacer,  a relatively simple video game in which players drive and try to identify specific road signs that pop up on the screen, while ignoring other signs deemed irrelevant.

  One of the main early findings of the study reinforced just how challenging it is to multitask successfully, particularly as people age. People in their 20s experienced a 26 percent drop in performance when they were asked to try to drive and identify signs at the same time (rather than just identify the signs without driving). For people in their 60s to 80s, the performance drop was 64 percent.

  But after the older adults trained at the game, they became more proficient than untrained people in their 20s. The performance levels were sustained for six months, even without additional training. Also, the older adults performed better at memory and attention tests outside the game.

  “That is the most grabbing thing here,” Dr. Gazzaley said. “We transferred the benefit from inside the game to different cognitive abilities.”

  Still, Dr. Gazzaley said the findings should not be taken to suggest that any activity or video game would improve cognition or lead to brain changes.

  “There’s a big leap between what we did here and the real world,” he said. If someone tries to multitask in everyday life, his performance could remain steady or be harmed by the divided attention. The tools people use, he said, must have scientific rigor behind them in the same way that training of great athletes requires a regimen.

  The researchers created a second layer of proof by monitoring the brain waves of participants using electroencephalography. What they found was that in older participants, in their 60s to 80s, there were increases in a brain wave called theta, a low-level frequency associated with attention. When older subjects trained on the game, they showed increased bursts of theta, the very types of bursts seen regularly in people in their 20s.

 Source: Nytimes.com

Ten worst cities for people with fall allergies

                        If you hear a lot of sneezing this fall, it may be coming from Wichita.

Wichita ranked No. 1 in the 2013 Fall Allergy Capitals report, out Tuesday from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA). The report compares the most challenging U.S. cities to live in for people with fall allergies.

The primary allergy trigger this fall will be ragweed pollen, says the not-for-profit organization, based in Landover, Md. It says outdoor mold also will be a problem because it continues to grow and is likely to be spread by fall weather and wind patterns.

The foundation looked at the 100 most populated, consolidated metropolitan statistical areas in the continental USA. The ranking is based on pollen scores, number of allergy medications used per patient, and number of board-certified allergists per patient. The report was sponsored by Dymista, a prescription nasal spray for relief of allergy symptoms.

An interactive map of the 100 cities is available at www.allergycapitals.com, along with resources for patients and doctors.

After Wichita, the highest-ranked cities are Jackson, Miss., and Knoxville, Tenn.

The top cities are “places where ragweed thrives,” says Mike Tringale, vice president of external affairs at AAFA. “In addition, there is some crossover — some grasses are still pollinating.”

A couple of major metropolitan areas jumped in the ranking. Dallas climbed from No. 26 last fall to No. 18 this fall, and Detroit moved up nine spots, to No. 19.

“Ragweed grows in urban areas, such as in cracks in sidewalks, along sides of roads and on roofs of buildings,” Tringale says.

“AAFA encourages the approximately 40 million Americans who suffer from seasonal allergies to learn more and consult an allergy specialist for proper diagnosis and treatment of seasonal allergy symptoms,” he says.

The ranking is not meant to get people packing their bags, he says. “Don’t move; improve. Improve your understanding of your diagnosis and your treatment. Improve your knowledge about how to avoid allergy triggers and reduce allergens in your home.”

“Allergies are bad everywhere,” says Michael Kaliner, medical director of the Institute for Asthma and Allergy, which has offices in Chevy Chase and Wheaton, Md. “If allergies are left untreated or treated with the wrong medication, it can cause some serious complications.”

Top 10 worst cities for fall allergies

1. Wichita

2. Jackson, Miss.

3. Knoxville, Tenn.

4. Louisville

5. Memphis

6. McAllen, Texas

7. Baton Rouge

8. Dayton, Ohio

9. Chattanooga, Tenn.

10. Oklahoma City

Source: USAtoday.com

Being married may help cancer survival

Being married may significantly improve the likelihood of surviving cancer, researchers say.

In a new study of more than 700,000 people with diagnoses of the most deadly cancers in the United States, patients who were married were more likely to detect their disease early, receive potentially curable treatments and live longer. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The researchers observed a 20% reduction in deaths among the patients who were married compared to unmarried patients – a benefit bigger than several kinds of chemotherapy used for treating cancer.

“It is pretty astonishing,” Dr. Paul Nguyen, the study’s senior author, said. “There’s something about the social support that you get within a marriage that leads to better survival.”

While the study found a strong link, researchers did not show that marriage directly causes better survival among cancer patients. The study examined associations between marital status and cancer outcomes.

The protective benefits of marriage may be due, in part, to spouses who stay on top of their partner’s health, especially their recommended cancer screenings, study authors said.

“You’re going to nag your wife to go get her mammograms. You’re going to nag your husband to go get his colonoscopy,” Nguyen said. “If you’re on your own, nobody’s going to nag you.”

In the study, people who were on their own were 17% more likely to have cancer that had spread beyond its original site.

Unmarried patients in the study were also 53% less likely to receive appropriate therapies. Nguyen, who is a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said spouses can help patients get the treatments they need.

“When I meet somebody by themselves sometimes they can be really overwhelmed by the information,” he said. “All the facts that you need to make your decisions, you don’t even hear those facts when you’re the person. You really need somebody else that’s listening and making those kinds of judgments for you.”

The perks of being married seem to continue as patients undergo their cancer treatments, which can often be painful and difficult to endure, Nguyen said.

“If you’ve got a spouse with you who is kind of helping you at the end of the day, helping you get your other stuff in order and really encouraging you to go to your treatments, I think you’re probably much more likely to complete those treatments and get the benefit of the treatment,” he said. “I’ve definitely taken a lot of patients through treatment where there’s no way they could have made it through without their spouse.”

The results also support findings from a 2005 study showing that older married women with breast cancer had a lower risk of mortality after diagnosis than their unmarried counterparts.

All this might sound like a downer for people who aren’t married, but Nguyen doesn’t see it that way.

“Whatever it is about a marriage that helps people live longer and make it through their cancer, it might very well be that any friend, any loved one can do that for a patient with cancer,” he said.

That may be especially true for men, who seemed to benefit more from marriage in the study than women.

“An unmarried guy might be much more of loner about his healthcare,” Nguyen said.

“Don’t be afraid to bring a buddy. Reach out to people because it could make a big difference.”

Source: http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com

Questioning Steroid Shots for Back Pain

Injecting steroids into the area around the spinal cord, known as an epidural, is the most commonly used treatment for back pain, but a new review of studies suggests that injecting any liquid, even plain saline solution, works just as well.

Researchers pooled the results of 43 studies involving more than 3,600 patients who got various kinds of injections for back pain. As they expected, they found some evidence that epidural steroid injections provided more relief than steroid injections into the muscles.

But the study, published online in Anesthesiology, also found that there was little difference between the amount of relief provided by steroidal and non-steroidal epidural injections.

The researchers suggest that any liquid injected epidural can help reduce inflammation, enhance blood flow to the nerves and clean out scar tissue.

“Epidural steroid injections may provide modest relief for up to two months in people with back pain due to nerve inflammation,” said the senior author of the study, Dr. Steven P. Cohen, a professor of anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins.

But steroids have side effects, and “most of the short-term benefit seems to be not from the steroids, but from the local anesthetic and saline, which may ‘calm’ inflamed nerves that send pain signals,” said Dr. Cohen. “Doctors should consider significantly reducing the steroid dose, or even not using steroids in patients who are at high risk.”

Source: nytimes.com

Global Warming Slowdown Hinders Climate Treaty Effort

More than ever, scientists say they’re convinced the Earth’s climate is warming. Yet lawmakers are struggling to do anything about it because the pace of change has unexpectedly slowed.

The data has caused a United Nations panel to lower predictions of the pace of global temperature increases by 2100, according to draft documents obtained by Bloomberg ahead of publication due on Sept. 27. Still, the most complete assessment of climate science in six years also is likely to conclude that melting ice will make sea levels rise faster than previously projected.

The findings muddy the picture about how much carbon dioxide output is affecting the climate, giving ammunition to those who doubt the issue needs urgent action. Skeptics have succeeded in “confusing the public,” said Michael Jacobs, who advised the U.K. government on climate policy until 2010.

“It’s been a very organized campaign by climate skeptics, using the very, very tiny number of scientists who don’t agree with the almost unanimous view of everybody else and inflating small uncertainties into apparently major challenges to the scientific consensus,” Jacobs said. “One of the challenges of the panel this year is to convince the media, politicians and the public that there is this extraordinarily widespread consensus on the major facts about climate change.”

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com