Month: December 2013

It is possible to think yourself well

What if you had the ability to heal your body just by changing how you think and feel? I know it sounds radical, coming from a doctor. When people are doing everything “right”—eating veggies, avoiding red meat and processed foods, exercising, sleeping well and so forth—we should expect them to live long, prosperous lives and die of old age while peacefully slumbering, right? So why is it that so many health nuts are sicker than other people who pig out, guzzle beer and park in front of the TV?

I consider myself one of those health nuts. I drink my green juice, take my vitamins, hike and practice yoga daily, get quality sleep, see a doctor and avoid harmful toxins. And yet I have come to believe that the purely physical realm of illness—the part you can diagnose with laboratory tests—is only part of the equation. It’s a big part, mind you, but not the whole shebang. My experience with patients (as well as my personal background) has led me to the conclusion that whether they become sick or stay healthy, as well as whether they remain ill or manage to heal themselves, might have more to do with everything else that’s going on in their lives than with any specific health standard they abide by.

When healthy habits aren’t enough
Five years ago, I started working in an integrative medicine practice. My new patients were some of the most health-conscious people I’ve ever had the privilege to serve. Many of them ate a vegan diet, worked out, slept soundly each night and took vitamins every morning. But some of them were also mysteriously sick, complaining of fatigue, aches, gastrointestinal disturbances and other symptoms. I was baffled! I ran batteries of tests, and occasionally I would pick up something that eventually resulted in the complete resolution of a patient’s symptoms. But more often than not, I would find nothing.

I was really motivated to solve the puzzle of why these “healthy” patients were so sick. Instead of focusing exclusively on physician-recommended behaviors, medical history and other traditional factors, I dug deep into their personal lives. I asked them questions: “What do you love about yourself? What’s missing from your life? What do you appreciate about your life? Are you in a romantic relationship? If so, are you happy? If not, do you wish you were? Are you fulfilled at work? Do you feel like you’re in touch with your life’s purpose? Do you feel sexually satisfied? Do you express yourself creatively? Do you feel financially stable, or are you stressed about money? If your fairy godmother could change one thing about your life, what would you wish for?”

My patients’ answers often gave me more insight into why they might be sick than any lab test or exam could. They were unhealthy not because of bad genes or poor habits or rotten luck, but because they were lonely or miserable in their relationships, stressed about work, freaked out about their finances or profoundly depressed.

On the flip side, I had other patients who ate junk, forgot to take their supplements, rarely exercised and enjoyed seemingly perfect health. Their responses revealed that their lives were filled with love, fun, meaningful work, creative expression, spiritual connection and other traits that differentiated them from the sick health enthusiasts.

Source: health

New Artificial hearts won’t beat

The human heart beats 60 to 100 times a minute, more than 86,000 times a day, 35 million times a year. A single beat pushes about 6 tablespoons of blood through the body.

An organ that works that hard is bound to fail, says Dr. Billy Cohn, a heart surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute. And he’s right. Heart failure is the leading cause of death in men and women, killing more than 600,000 Americans every year.

For a lucky few, a heart transplant will add an average of 10 years to their lives. For others, technology that assists a failing heart — called “bridge-to-transplant” devices — will keep them alive as they wait for a donor heart.

Unfortunately, more often than not, the new heart doesn’t arrive in time.

That’s why Cohn and his mentor — veteran heart surgeon Dr. O.H “Bud” Frazier — are working to develop a long-term, artificial replacement for the failing human heart. Unlike existing short-term devices that emulate the beating organ, the new machine would propel blood through the body at a steady pace so that its recipients will have no heartbeat at all.

The concept of a pulseless heart is difficult to fathom. Cohn often compares it to the development of the airplane propeller. When people started to develop flying machines, he says, they first tried to emulate the way birds fly — by flapping the wings aggressively.

“It wasn’t until they decided, ‘We can’t do this the way Mother Nature did,’ and came up with the rapidly spinning propeller that the Wright Brothers were able to fly,” Cohn says.
The idea of an artificial heart goes back decades.

Frazier began medical school in what he describes as “the Kennedy Era.”

“We were going to the moon; we were going to achieve world peace,” and Frazier wanted to develop the first artificial heart. In 1968, he left for Vietnam as a flight surgeon. Thirteen months later, his helicopter was shot down, and he nearly died.

“That experience convinced me I should stick to something more meaningful for the rest of my life.”
That he did. The veteran surgeon, inventor and researcher has devoted the last half century to developing technologies to fix or replace the human heart, the most notable of which is the newest generation of continuous flow Left Ventricular Assist Devices, known as LVADs.

Modeled after an Archimedes Screw, a machine that raises water to fill irrigation ditches, the continuous flow LVAD is a pump that helps failing hearts push additional blood through the body with a rapidly spinning impeller.

Today, the continuous flow LVAD has been implanted in 20,000 people worldwide, including former Vice President Dick Cheney before he received a heart transplant nearly two years later.

In some cases, the LVAD’s turbine has essentially taken over the pumping process entirely from the biological heart. In these instances, the implant recipient barely has any pulse at all.

Observing what happened in these patients led Frazier to one compelling question: If the LVAD can take
over for a weakened heart, could it replace the organ entirely?

In 2004, Frazier asked Cohn to collaborate on a new research project. Cohn’s interest in heart surgery dates back to when he was a young boy reading articles about world-renowned heart surgeons Dr. Michael E. Debakey and Dr. Denton Cooley, who developed and played a role in the transplant of the first artificial heart in a human in 1969.

Now the holder of some 70-odd U.S. patents, Cohn says his work with Frazier to build an artificial heart is the most ambitious project of his career.

The surgeons set out to combine two LVADs to replicate the functions of the heart’s right and left ventricles. Using two commercially available LVAD turbines, Frazier and Cohn combined the devices with plastics and other material used for implants: hernia mesh, Dacron cardiovascular patches and medical silicone. Everything met FDA standards, but Cohn describes the final product as “rather kludged together.”

The surgeons tested their invention by installing it in around 70 calves. All of the cows produced a flat line on an EKG, which measures heart electrical activity, yet they stood, ate and walked around, paying seemingly no notice to a small technicality: They had no heartbeat.

In order for the FDA to approve the device for clinical trials, the calves needed to live for at least one month. Cohn and Frazier’s device trumped these standards, with many calves living healthily for full 90-day studies.

Cohn and Frazier were encouraged, and in March 2011, put their artificial heart into a human patient.
Craig Lewis, 55, was admitted to the Texas Heart Institute with amyloidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that fills internal organs with a viscous protein that causes rapid heart, kidney and liver failure. Without some intervention, Lewis would have been dead in days. Frazier and Cohn decided it was the right moment to test their device and the surgeons undertook the lengthy procedure.

Less than 48 hours later, Lewis was sitting up, talking and using his laptop. When doctors put the stethoscope to Lewis’s heart, all they heard was a steady whir of what sounded like a boat propeller. Lewis survived for six weeks until his failing kidneys and liver got the best of him and his family asked doctors to unplug the device.

Source: CNN

Cancer: two in three patients will survive by end of decade

The chances of a patient dying from three of the most common cancers will soon be half what they were 20 years ago, figures show.

Earlier diagnosis and advances in surgery and treatment mean that by 2020 the total death rate from breast, prostate and bowel cancer will have dropped by 44 per cent since the early 1990s.

Estimates by Macmillan Cancer Research show that by the end of the decade, 64 per cent of women will survive breast cancer, 64 per cent of men prostate cancer and 61 per cent of sufferers will beat bowel cancer.

But campaigners remain concerned that survival rates for lung cancer – the second commonest form – are not increasing at the same pace.

Figures show that by 2020 the proportion of patients expect to live beyond five years after diagnosis will stll be less than one in four.

The illness is the second biggest killer after heart disease and is usually diagnosed only when it is too late to be treated.

And despite the advances in the other three cancers, survival rates in Britain still lag well behind those in other European countries. A major study of 29 countries found that the UK was on a par with Slovenia, Czech Republic and Estonia far below France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Campaigners say GPs need to be given more training to help them spot the warning signs – especially for lung cancer – so patients can be referred for tests.

Professor Jane Maher, chief medical officer at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: ‘People diagnosed with three of the four most common cancers are more likely to survive but GPs need more support to help them diagnose lung cancer earlier.

‘We’ve been working with the GP community to develop the tools that can help.’

Figures by Macmillan show that by 2020 the proportion of patients surviving breast and prostate cancer will have increased by two-thirds since 1992. Over the same period, the amount surviving bowel cancer will have risen by 50 per cent.

The charity said the advances are largely due to earlier diagnosis, with patients being more aware of the warning signs and improved scans.

There have also been major advances in surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and, more recently, new drugs to target certain genes, which have drastically boosted survival chances.

n 1992, only 39 per cent of those diagnosed with breast cancer lived for at least five years – the measure of survival. For prostate cancer patients the figure was 28 per cent and for bowel cancer 33 per cent.

Katherine Woods, research information manager at Breast Cancer Campaign said: ‘These figures look really encouraging.

‘We know that deaths from breast cancer are decreasing, and are on track to continue to do so. But it is not quick enough.’

And Drew Lindon, head of policy and campaigns at Prostate Cancer UK, said: ‘While prostate cancer survival rates have improved compared to other cancers, beneath the surface we see worrying indications that Britain is lagging behind the European average on survival rates.

‘One man dies every hour from prostate cancer and yet we still have no reliable way of being able to tell the killer forms from those which might never cause harm.

‘Men in Britain dese
rve better and that’s what we’re fighting for.’

Source: Daily Mail

Triplet Births Due to Fertility Treatments Are Declining

More than one-third of U.S. twins, and more than three-quarters of triplets and other multiple births, are now born as a result of fertility treatments, according to estimates from a new study.

In 2011, 36 percent of twin births and 77 percent of triplet and higher-order births (quadruplets, etc.) were aided by fertility treatments, which include both in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other treatments, such as the use of drugs to stimulate the ovaries and induce ovulation, the study found.

Between 1998 and 2011, the national rate of triplet and higher-order births decreased by nearly 30 percent — a trend that researchers called good news.

Part of that decline may be related to a 1998 change in guidelines that discouraged doctors from implanting three or more embryos during a single IVF cycle. After that, the proportion of triplet and higher-order births attributable to IVF declined by 33 percent (from 48 percent in 1998 to 32 percent in 2011).

However, there’s still a lot of work to be done to reduce the U.S. rate of multiple births, said study researcher Dr. Eli Y. Adashi, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University. The percentage of twin births resulting from IVF and non-IVF fertility treatments is still on the rise.

Why a decline in multiple births is good

Twin and other multiple births increase the risk of complications for the mother and infant, including the risk of premature delivery. An unintended consequence of fertility treatment technology was an increase in the nation’s multiple-birth rate, Adashi said.

The new study also suggests that non-IVF fertility treatments deserve greater attention, as they now contribute to a greater proportion of multiple births than IVF does. The percentage of triplet and higher-order births resulting from non-IVF treatments increased from 36 percent in 1998 to 45 percent in 2011, the study found.

“When people hear ‘multiple,’ they intuitively point at IVF,” Adashi said. The study found “IVF is an actor,” he said, but “not the leading culprit when it comes to the genesis of multiples.”

But unlike multiple births from IVF, which result from the number of embryos that are intentionally implanted, multiple births from non-IVF fertility treatments are difficult to prevent, Adashi said. That’s because non-IVF treatments, including oral and injectable drugs, stimulate ovulation in ways that cannot be precisely controlled, Adashi said.

How to reduce multiple births

But there are a few steps doctors can take that may reduce the rate of multiple births from non-IVF fertility treatments, such as lowering the doses of the ovulation-stimulating drugs, Adashi said.

“Increased awareness of multiple births resulting from non-IVF fertility treatments may lead to improved medical practice patterns and a decrease in the rate of multiple births,” the researchers wrote in the Dec. 5 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

To come up with their estimates, the researchers analyzed information on birth rates between 1962 and 1966 — before the advent of fertility treatments — to get a measure of the natural rate of multiple births. They also used publicly available data on IVF births between 1997 and 2011.

Because no database tracks multiple births due to non-IVF treatment, the researchers estimated this number by factoring in the natural rate of multiple births and IVF births. The researchers also took into account maternal age, which increases the chance of giving birth to multiples, but were not able to account for other factors, like obesity, which some studies suggest increases the chances of giving birth to twins.

source: live science

5 Common Cold and Flu Facts, Fictions, and Surprising Half-Truths

No matter how many cold and flu seasons you’ve weathered in your years, chances are you’re still buying into some far-too-common illness myths. So before you waste another perfectly good sick day lying around in bed (instead of out playing hooky), we ran some of the most popular pieces of cold and flu wisdom past New York City physician Jennifer Collins, M.D., a diplomat of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology and Internal Medicine. Here’s how they held up.

You Shouldn’t Exercise With a Cold: Myth
Skip the gym and you’ll actually stay sick longer. “Light to moderate exercise when you’re sick can actually boost your immune system’s function,” Collins says. She recommends reducing your workout intensity by 75 to 80 percent to prevent overstressing your body. Also, make sure you wipe down your gym equipment—and your hands—both before and after use. One study in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine found the cold virus (a.k.a. rhinovirus) on 63 percent of fitness centers’ machines.

Chicken Soup Fends Off Colds: Fact
No wonder you still want your mom when you’re sick. Her chicken soup really does make you feel better. Research published in Chest found that chicken soup reduces the movement of certain white blood cells in the body to reduce cold symptoms. What’s more, typical chicken-soup ingredients like carrots, parsnips, celery, garlic, and onions are packed with vitamins A and D, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium to help your immune system work at its best, Collins says.

Cold Weather Can Make You Catch a Cold: Myth
Record lows don’t cause colds—viruses do. Rhinovirus just happens to be more prevalent in the U.S. during the winter, largely due to migration patterns from other countries. In fact, the biggest contributor to cold-weather colds is found in the warm indoors where people (and their germs) are confined together, she says. You could make like a bear and hibernate—or you can just be extra-generous with the Windex this season.

Dairy Can Worsen Your Symptoms: Half-Truth
A stuffy nose can turn you into a veritable mouth-breather. The result: a dry, itchy throat. While fluids are key to quelling the irritation, and milk is thick enough to coat your throat, that’ll only make it feel even more constrained, Collins says. That doesn’t mean you have to avoid it, though. Contrary to popular opinion, dairy is not a phlegm factory. Just take your milk, cheese, or yogurt with water or juice, she says.

Flu Shots Can Give You the Flu: Myth
You finally gave in and got a flu shot, and the next day you’re in bed with a fever. Coincidence? Actually, yes. “The influenza virus infects you 48 hours before you have any symptoms, so if you get the vaccine during this time period, it will appear that the vaccine caused the flu, but you would’ve gotten sick anyway,” Collins says. Looks like you’re getting a flu shot this year

Source: Details

Risk of falls increases between cataract surgeries

Older adults with cataracts appear to double their risk of falling after surgery on their first eye and before surgery on the second, suggests a new study.

The finding that corrective eye surgery may – at least temporarily – be linked to an increase in falls comes after years of conflicting study results on the subject, researchers write in the journal Age and Ageing.

But the topic remains important as the global population ages and demand for cataract surgery increases. In Australia, where the study was conducted, cataract surgeries tripled over the past two decades.

“This study tells us that timing of cataract surgeries is very important,” Dr. Ediriweera Desapriya of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told Reuters Health.

Desapriya has researched falls in older adults at the Center for Clinical Epidemiological and Evaluation Research, but wasn’t involved in the new study.

“In the past, you didn’t really want to get both eye surgeries done at the same time,” Desapriya said. That was in case of problems like infection or swelling. “But now the technology has improved and complications occur less often,” he said.

For their study, Lynn Meuleners of Curtin University and her team in Perth looked back through detailed electronic health records from Western Australia’s hospitals and its death registry.

Between 2001 and 2008, nearly 28,400 older adults in the region had cataract surgery on both eyes. The researchers found 1,094 of them also took a fall serious enough to warrant a hospital visit during that period.

People waited an average of 10 months between eye surgeries. Compared to the two-year period before any cataract surgery, their chance of falling doubled between procedures.

In the two years after surgery on their second eye, people’s fall risk was 34 percent higher than before their first surgery. The risk of falling also rose with age.

Most people who fell were older than 80, women, city dwellers and were not married.

“It’s a well-conducted study,” said Stephen Lord, a senior principal research fellow with Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. Lord was not involved with the current study, but researches balance and falls among older adults.

“In the intervening time between surgeries, you have a person with two eyes that are no longer equal and this can lead to various effects,” Lord said – like on visual sharpness and depth of field.

“For these things, we need two eyes working together,” he told Reuters Health.

However, at least one previous randomized controlled trial – medicine’s gold standard for research – found people had fewer falls after cataract surgery, Lord said.

Based on this study, doctors could warn patients to be extra cautious after having surgery on their first eye, Desapriya said.

“It is also important to encourage patients to have a second eye cataract surgery early,” Desapriya said. “Otherwise, eyes continue to function monocularly (with just one eye) and patients lose their depth perception.”

The new research cannot point to cataract surgery as the primary cause of the falls – it only suggests they are linked.

The researchers said a limitation of their study is a lack of knowledge about people’s lifestyles, including their living situations, and co-existing eye conditions, both of which could strongly influence fall risk.

They also did not look at falls among people who had not undergone cataract surgery. Such comparisons are helpful when considering changes in risk.

“The aging population is growing rapidly in the U.S. and Canada,” Desapriya said. “And this surgery is becoming a very common clinical procedure.”

According to the National Eye Institute, more than half of all Americans have a cataract or have had cataract surgery by the time they’re 80.

Lord compared cataract surgery to a major change in prescription eyeglasses: in both cases, the brain needs time to adjust to the changes in vision.

But patients and doctors should not shy away from cataract operations, Lord said.

“The last thing we want to have happen is to prevent people from receiving cataract surgery,” Lord said. “This surgery has many benefits, such as improving quality of life, increasing a person’s participation in the community and even preventing falls in the longer term.”

“It just seems that, in the short term, there may be a problem while people adjust to their new vision,” he said.

Source: Khaleej times

Spike in U.S. measles cases shows disease still a threat: officials

The number of reported cases of measles in the United States this year is nearly three times the annual average, federal health officials said on Thursday, highlighting the continued threat of the disease 50 years after development of a vaccine.

There have been 175 measles cases so far in 2013, compared with the typical national average of about 60 cases a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The federal health agency said home-grown measles were eliminated in the United States in 2000, but the disease has continued to be carried into the country from people who have traveled abroad.

The CDC said 172 of the 175 U.S. cases this year involved patients who were infected overseas or caught the disease from someone who had traveled internationally. The source of the other three infections remains unknown, the agency said.

“A measles outbreak anywhere is a risk everywhere,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said. “The steady arrival of measles in the United States is a constant reminder that deadly diseases are testing our health security every day.”

Earlier this year, the CDC linked 58 cases of measles in Brooklyn, New York, to an unvaccinated 17-year-old who had traveled to London. Twenty-three cases in North Carolina this year were tied to an unvaccinated resident who contracted the disease while on a three-month visit to India.

The CDC said 158,000 people die worldwide each year from measles.

The last measles death in the United States was in 2003, according to the agency. Before the country launched a widespread vaccination program in 1963, it had 450 to 500 measles deaths each year.

Measles is highly contagious and transmitted when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes. The disease can be spread even before an infected person has developed a rash from the virus.

The CDC recommends that children get two doses of vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, starting at 12 to 15 months of age.

Increased vaccination worldwide and improving the ability of public health agencies to rapidly respond to outbreaks are keys to reducing measles and other diseases, the CDC said.

Source: Yahoo news

Now, ‘biopen’ to draw new bones inside body

Australian scientists have developed a hi-tech handheld ‘biopen’ that can enable surgeons to draw new bone material onto seriously injured people.

The ‘bio pen’ contains stem cells and growth factors, and could eliminate the need to harvest cartilage and grow it for weeks in a lab.

The pen-like device developed at the University of Wollongong (UOW) will allow surgeons to design customised implants on-site and at the time of surgery.

The BioPen will give surgeons greater control over where the materials are deposited while also reducing the time the patient is in surgery by delivering live cells and growth factors directly to the site of injury, accelerating the regeneration of functional bone and cartilage, scientists say.

The BioPen works similar to 3D printing methods by delivering cell material inside a bio-polymer such as alginate, a seaweed extract, protected by a second, outer layer of gel material.

The two layers of gel are combined in the pen head as it is extruded onto the bone surface and the surgeon ‘draws’ with the ink to fill in the damaged bone section.

A low powered ultra-violet light source is fixed to the device that solidifies the inks during dispensing, providing protection for the embedded cells while they are built up layer-by-layer to construct a 3D scaffold in the wound site.

Once the cells are ‘drawn’ onto the surgery site they will multiply, become differentiated into nerve cells, muscle cells or bone cells and will eventually turn from individual cells into a thriving community of cells in the form of a functioning a tissue, such as nerves, or a muscle.

The device can also be seeded with growth factors or other drugs to assist regrowth and recovery, while the hand-held design allows for precision in theatre and ease of transportation.

The BioPen prototype was designed and built using the 3D printing equipment in the labs at Wollongong and was handed over to clinical partners at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, led by Professor Peter Choong, who will work on optimising the cell material for use in clinical trials.

The BioPen will help build on recent work by researchers where they were able to grow new knee cartilage from stem cells on 3D-printed scaffolds to treat cancers, osteoarthritis and traumatic injury.

“This type of treatment may be suitable for repairing acutely damaged bone and cartilage, for example from sporting or motor vehicle injuries,” Choong, Director of Orthopaedics at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne said.

Source: Deccan Chroicle

 

Choir singing can boost mental health

Singing in a choir can boost your mental health, a new study suggests.

Researchers carried out an online survey of 375 people who sang in choirs, sang alone, or played team sports.

All three activities yielded high levels of psychological wellbeing – but choristers stood out as experiencing the greatest benefit.

Compared with the way sports players regarded their teams, choral singers also viewed their choirs as more coherent or “meaningful”.

Nick Stewart, from Oxford Brookes University, who led the study, said: “Research has already suggested that joining a choir could be a cost-effective way to improve people’s wellbeing. Yet we know surprisingly little about how the well-being effects of choral singing are brought about.

“These findings suggest that feeling part of a cohesive social group can add to the experience of using your voice to make music. Further research could look at how moving and breathing in synchrony with others might be responsible for creating this effect.”

Mr Stewart presented the findings at the annual meeting of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology in York.

Source: Zee News

New affordable way to stabilize haemoglobin discovered

A research team has found a way to stabilize hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier protein in the blood, a discovery that could lead to the development of stable vaccines and affordable artificial blood substitutes.

The new approach by UConn research team involves wrapping the polymer poly (acrylic acid) around hemoglobin, protecting it from the intense heat used in sterilization and allowing it to maintain its biological function and structural integrity.

In addition to having potential applications in the stabilization of vaccines and development of inexpensive artificial blood, the stabilizing polymer also allows vaccines and other biomedical products to be stored for longer periods without refrigeration. It could also have applications in biomaterials, biosensors, and biofuels.

‘Protein stability is a major issue in biotechnology,’ says Challa V. Kumar, UConn professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the primary investigator on the project. ‘What we’ve done is taken this protein molecule and wrapped it up in a polymer chain in order to stabilize it. In thermodynamics terms, we have restricted the entropy of the denatured state of the protein and stabilized it beyond our expectations.’

‘The system also exhibits a high degree of reversibility. The protein can be denatured and renatured many, many times. This is the very first example of its kind in the literature of all protein science. No one has ever been able to achieve this kind of stability for proteins.’

As part of its research, the team chose to examine the feasibility of using hemoglobin as an artificial blood substitute. Hemoglobin, when extracted from blood, breaks down and is toxic in its pure form.

Since hemoglobin is the critical oxygen carrier protein in blood, Kumar and his team are looking at ways of stabilizing hemoglobin in its natural form so that it retains its activity and stays harmless when administered as a transfusion agent. This could lead to a new substitute for human blood, which is frequently in short supply. Blood shortages are expected to get worse in coming years, as more and more people in the world are likely to need blood transfusions, Kumar said

Source: Health India