Month: January 2014

Lack of outdoor play said to hurt children’s development

Teachers, parents and health officials in southern Ontario say kids today simply don’t know how to play outside.

“We’re not talking about structured play. We’re talking about free unstructured play out of doors,” said Sharon Sheshlia, a health and physical education consultant for the Greater Essex County District School Board. “When I was growing up and when I was raising my own children it was ‘go outside and play. Here are your boundaries … and don’t come in until I call you or the street lights come on.’

“So, the kids developed imagination, played with kids in the neighbourhood and developed problem solving skills. They did that on their own and it wasn’t taught.”

Children vulnerable to smartphone, tablet addictions Get your kids to go outside in the winter! CBC’s Live Right Now

Sheshlia said modern neighbourhoods don’t encourage outdoor play.

“In some suburban areas, you’re lucky if you have a sidewalk,” she said. “You don’t see kids outside anymore. It’s a desert. Every year, there’s less and less.”

The Ontario Ministry of Education has provided school boards additional funding for “outdoor education” for the past two years.

This funding goes to all publicly funded school boards. It is to be used to provide students with outdoor education experiences and learning such as camping, hiking, biking, rope climbing courses and visits to nature centres

The focus is on structured outdoor learning activities led by adults. Sheshlia said children lack the ability to play freely and unstructured.

The Ontario Ministry of Health recommends children between the ages of one and five get 60 minutes of unstructured play every day.

“Physical activity is very important for the healthy development of your child during the first six years of life. It is even more important in the first three years of life when brain development is accelerated,” the ministry says on its website. “As children get older, physical activity plays a key role in their ability to learn and it improves cognitive function, concentration, self-esteem, social skills and mood.”

Public schools in Windsor-Essex are phasing out traditional playgrounds, with their slides and monkey bars. They will be replaced with “naturalized playgrounds” which include large hills, walking paths and grass mazes.

The City of Windsor, meanwhile, had planned on selling 17 parks it deemed “surplus.” The plan was put on hold.

Although, the city is still looking to sell South Tilston Park in west Windsor and Long Park in the east end.

“Form follows function. If you design it, they will come,” Sheshlia said.

Sheshlia said parents today have a perception that the world is no longer safe.

“There’s a fear factor with parents. Even though the statistics don’t bear out that things are any worse or bad,” she said. “Things are getting better as far as crime statistics go.”

Technology partly blamed

Sheshlia said technology also deters kids from playing outside.

“The internet is a time waster. It sucks kids in,” she said.
Joey Tremblay, 10, spends an average of two hours each day playing video games at his Windsor, Ont., home.

“I like playing video games more than outside because you get to do whatever you want,” Tremblay said.

His dad, Michael Tremblay said the time spent inside and playing video games is affecting his son’s behaviour.

Michael Tremblay said it affects his son’s ability to socialize and share. He would like to see his son go outside and play a game of tag.

Sheshlia said kids who don’t play outside don’t learn to socialize, share or problem solve.

“Their problem-solving and decision making skills aren’t being developed as much. They may not have their negotiating skills developed to their full extent,” she said.

According to the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, 90 per cent of Canadian children are gaming and six out of 10 households have a gaming console.

Joey Tremblay said he “sometimes” puts up a fight when he’s asked to go outside and play and that he “would cry” if his dad took video games away.

“There’s been days where it’s taken me two hours to get him out the door to play with his friends,” Michael Tremblay said.

Michael Tremblay is a gamer, too.

“I’m being a bit hypocritical. So what I try to do is, do my gaming when he’s in bed so it doesn’t look like dad’s gaming 24/7,” he said.

Technology’s reach stretches all the way down to newborns today.

Source: cbc news

Gene therapy reverses blinding eye disease

An experimental therapy for a blinding eye disease showed early – and surprising – promise when it improved the vision of patients in an early trial that was only supposed to test its safety, doctors reported Wednesday.

The experimental gene therapy not only stopped the steady degeneration of the patients’ vision, but appears to have reversed some of the damage. And the effects have lasted two years in one case, British researchers report in the Lancet medical journal.

Wayne Thompson of Staffordshire in Britain saw the stars for the first time in years after being treated in April.

“One night in the summer, my wife called me outside as it was a particularly starry evening. As I looked up, I was amazed that I was able to see a few stars,” Thompson, 43, said in a statement.

“I hadn’t seen stars for a long, long time,” he added.

“It is still too early to know if the gene therapy treatment will last indefinitely, but we can say that the vision improvements have been maintained for as long as we have been following up the patients, which is two years in one case,” says Dr. Robert MacLaren of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford, who leads the research team.

“In truth, we did not expect to see such dramatic improvements in visual acuity and so we contacted both patients’ home opticians to get current and historical data on their vision in former years, long before the gene therapy trial started. These readings confirmed exactly what we had seen,” he added in a statement.

The men taking part in the trial all have choroideremia, a genetic disease that causes vision to start breaking down when patients are still children. The defective gene, called CHM, is on the x chromosome, so it almost exclusively affects males – females have an extra x chromosome that usually makes up for any lost function. It causes about 4 percent of all cases of blindness, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The condition breaks down various parts of the retina, the reflective tissue at the back of the eye that collects light and images. The gene therapy approach uses a virus to carry a corrective gene directly into the retina.

Gene therapy itself has a mixed record – it’s harder than scientists thought to safely deliver new genes into the body. And there is no guarantee that the patient’s cells will accept the new gene and use it.

But the eye is a good place to try, in part because doctors can see the effects in real time, and also because one eye can be treated and the other eye used to compare results.

“I think that this is a very important study,” said Dr. Richard Weleber, professor of ophthalmology who is leading a team at Oregon Health and Science University trying gene therapy to treat Usher Syndrome.

MacLaren’s trial was meant to be a stage 1 safety trial, designed simply to show that the treatment did no harm. But the six patients in the trial said they noticed improvements quickly.

“This has huge implications for anyone with a genetic retinal disease such as age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa, because it has for the first time shown that gene therapy can be applied safely before the onset of vision loss,” MacLaren said.

He says nine patients have now had one eye treated with the gene therapy in operations at the Oxford Eye Hospital. The patients had varying degrees of vision loss, but MacLaren thinks the best course will be to treat people when they are young, before much damage has been done.

“If we were able to treat people early, get them in their teens or late childhood, we’d be getting the virus in before their vision is lost,” he said. “If the treatment works, we would be able to prevent them from going blind.”

Weleber, who says his own gene therapy trial is moving along but who could not release details, says MaCLaren’s surgical technique may have helped the therapy work more successfully. MacLaren’s team lifted an area called the macula to deliver the engineered viruses directly into the tissue that needed correcting.

Last year, researchers reported success against a different genetic disease causing blindness , one called Leber congenital amaurosis. But even though the patients’ vision improved, the eye continued to deteriorate.

“Each type (of genetic disease) needs to be tested separately,” Weleber said.

Gene therapy also works to some degree against blood cancers and immune diseases.

Last year, doctors reported they had successfully treated the first children in the U.S. for severe combined immune deficiency or SCID, sometimes known as “bubble boy” disease. Like choroideremia, SCID is caused by a mutated recessive gene, meaning children must inherit a defective copy from each parent to show symptoms.

Gene therapy has helped 26 of 59 two patients with a form of cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia go into remission after a type of gene therapy treatment that programmed immune system cells to hunt down and kill the leukemia cells. And last year doctors reported 24 people with acute lymphocytic leukemia got at least temporary remission after gene therapy.

Source: nbc news

Feeling too skinny may lead to depression, drugs

You may not be as skinny as you think you are. Teenagers who think they are too skinny when they actually have a healthy weight are at greater risk of being depressed, says a study.

“Teenage boys who feel they are underweight and report being the victim of bullying are also more likely to use steroids and feel depressed than other boys their age,” according to the findings reported by the American Psychological Association.

Also, boys who inaccurately see themselves as overweight are also more likely to be depressed than boys who think they are of average weight, added the study published in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.

“Teenage girls tend to strive for zero size whereas teenage boys tend to emphasise a more muscular body type. We found that some of these boys who feel they are unable to achieve that often unattainable image may be taking drastic measures,” said Aaron Blashill, staff psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty member at Harvard Medical School.

The research was based on two large, nationally representative samples of teenage boys in the US.

The first sample included 2,139 boys who were about 16-years old in 1996 at the beginning of the study and were followed for 13 years.

The second data came from a 2009 nationally representative survey of 8,065 ninth- through 12th-grade boys in the US.

“Doctors working with depressed teenage boys, particularly those who think they are underweight and/or bullied based on their appearance, should be mindful of the possibility of steroid use,” Blashill suggested.

“Cognitive-behavioural therapy has proven to be effective for body image concerns and could be helpful for boys considering using or already using steroids,” the study said.

Source: Business standard

Chilly winter can affect the eyes too

Chilly winter can affect the eyes too

A dry-eye condition caused by cold winds evaporates the tears, which could partially affect vision and cause constant eye pain.

Blurred vision, scratching and burning sensation and irritation in the eye – these are not minor irritants in your daily routine but might be the pointers to a condition called the dry-eye syndrome which plagues many people during an extreme winter.

According to doctors, even though a person’s entire body might be covered up as a protection against the chilly winter winds, there is one part that is always exposed: the eyes.

The surface of the eye is covered with a thin layer of liquid known as the tear film, which is essential for its health. A dry-eye condition caused by cold winds evaporates the tears, which could partially affect vision and cause constant eye pain.

“Occurrence of dry-eye syndrome is very common during the winter season because of the cold, dry outdoor air and dry indoor heat,” Sanjay Dhawan, director of ophthalmology at Fortis Hospital, told IANS.

Dhawan said when there is insufficient lubrication in the eye, the conjunctiva (the white part of the eye) becomes much less moist than normal.

He said this causes severe pain, discomfort and inflammation of the conjunctiva and cornea of the eye, due to inadequate tear secretion.

It is a common problem faced by both men and women above 50.

“Sometimes it becomes severe as this abnormality may result in disruption of the ocular (eye) surface, causing difficulty in vision,” Dhawan said.

The other symptoms of the eye problem include a persistent watery discharge and irritation if one is using contact lenses.

“If menopause occurs at an early age, then the chances of developing dry-eye syndrome during the winter gets increased even among middle-aged women,” Dhawan said, adding that at an initial stage, it may seem like a minor irritation but can become potentially serious.

According to Kinshuk Biswas, opthalmologist at Gurgaon’s Columbia Asia Hospital, the condition could also be a result of constant use of a computer.

“Dry-eye syndrome is caused by the low humidity factor during winter which leads to evaporation of the lubricant in the eyes. Another contributing factor for this condition is the use of a computer and continuously looking at the screen for long,” Biswas told IANS.

To prevent this condition, one should use eye drops (as prescribed by a doctor) three-four times a day.

One could also close the eyes for half-a-minute while sitting in front of the computer screen to bring moisture back to the eyes, Biswas said.

Listing out the preventive steps, Dhawan said patients should wear sunglasses to protect the eyes from the cold wind, while artificial tears – also known as tear substitutes – should be applied at least four times a day.

If the condition aggravates, use lubricating ointment at bedtime and run a humidifier to put moisture back into the air.

Also, lay a warm, damp washcloth across your eyelids for a couple of minutes, drink extra fluids and use a hot- or cold-air humidifier, Dhawan said.

According to the American Association of Ophthalmology, approximately 3.2 million women and 1.7 million men over the age of 50 suffer from chronic dry eyes.

Source: Khaleej times

Brain Injuries May Raise Risk of Early Death

People who have suffered a traumatic brain injury appear to have a much higher risk of dying prematurely, a new study suggests.

These risks include having another brain injury, being assaulted and suicide. The risks are even higher for those with a psychiatric or drug abuse problem, the researchers added.

“After a traumatic brain injury, patients have a threefold increased risk of dying prematurely,” said lead researcher Dr. Seena Fazel, a Wellcome Trust senior research fellow in clinical science at the University of Oxford in England.

“Fifty percent of the early deaths are due to either accident or suicide or being assaulted,” he said. “That seems to be related to psychiatric illness and substance abuse.”

The study found that 61 percent of these patients had psychiatric or substance abuse problems, Fazel said. In some cases, these problems were present before the injury, while some developed after the injury, he added.

The dangers of developing psychiatric or drug abuse problems after an injury may be caused by a variety of factors, including biological and social changes.

These risks might be a particular problem for soldiers and athletes who have had a traumatic brain injury, Fazel suggested.

“A large number of vets have suffered traumatic brain injuries, and we know a lot of vets are dying from suicide. Traumatic brain injury may be one of the factors that increases their risk,” he said.

Fazel believes that after a traumatic brain injury, patients need to be monitored for risk factors that may put them at risk for dying prematurely.

“Some of these problems, like psychiatric illness and substance abuse, can be treated,” he said.

While the study found an association between traumatic brain injury and early death, it did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

The report was published online Jan. 15 in JAMA Psychiatry.

One expert said he thinks certain personality traits play a part in the phenomenon.

“The people that are dying earlier have personality characteristics that make them vulnerable to have brain injury,” said Dr. Robert Robinson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa and author of an accompanying editorial.

“These people are being injured because they’re impulsive and thrill-seeking. These vulnerable personality characteristics are getting them not only into their first head injury, but into a subsequent head injury and that’s causing this premature death,” he said.

Another expert agreed.

“It makes sense that people who suffer a brain injury are more likely to repeat behavior over time, and have more injuries and be at risk for premature death,” said Dr. Jamie Ullman, director of neurotrauma at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.

“A lot has to do with behaviors that would get them involved in injuries in the first place. We need to focus on the underlying behaviors that have resulted in these injuries, and see if these behaviors can be modified after the injury,” she said.

Source: web md

Alcohol consumption – 80,000 yearly deaths in the Americas

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Alcohol consumption is the direct cause of nearly 80,000 deaths in the Americas each year, according to a new study.

Published in the journal Addiction, the study analyzed yearly mortality rates from 16 countries in North and Latin America. The researchers focused on deaths that were specifically attributed to alcohol, meaning death would not have occurred without some form of alcohol consumption.

“Our purpose was to obtain more detailed information about alcohol mortality from countries in the region,” study co-author Dr. Maristela Monteiro, senior advisor on alcohol and substance abuse for the Pan American Health Organization, told FoxNews.com. “There are statistics from all these countries, but very few regions have specific alcohol mortality data, meaning [the information] we used usually is not reported or not collected.”

After combing through each country’s death statistics, Monteiro and her co-author Dr. Vilma Gawryszewski found that, between 2007 and 2009, alcohol was a ‘necessary’ cause of death for an average of 79,456 cases each year in North and South America. The researchers found that the biggest causes of these deaths included liver disease and alcohol poisoning.

“One important thing we knew from the medical literature but we also found in our data is that alcohol consumption is a cause of premature mortality,” Gawryszewski said. “The highest rates are among people in early age [dying before] the life expectancy in their countries.”

The countries with the highest rates of alcohol-related deaths were mostly in Central America, including El Salvador (27.4 out of 100,000 deaths each year), Guatemala (22.3 out of 100,000) and Nicaragua (21.3 out of 100,000).

Overall, men accounted for 84 percent of alcohol-necessary deaths, though the male-to-female ratio varied from country to country. In El Salvador, the risk of a man dying from an alcohol-necessary cause was 27.8 times higher than that of a woman, while in the United States and Canada, the risk was 3.2 times higher.

There were also differences in age groups for alcohol mortality between countries. In Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica and the U.S., the highest mortality rates occurred in individuals between 50 and 69 years of age. In Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela, the highest mortality rates were seen in individuals between 40 and 49 years of age.

While these statistics may seem concerning on their own, Monteiro and Gawryszewski maintain their findings reveal that the overconsumption of alcohol is an even bigger issue than previously thought.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Monteiro said. “Of course there are many more alcohol-related deaths from injuries, traffic accidents, violence, and also chronic conditions – where alcohol has a role but is not the only cause. But the data does not cover that. We’re only getting the most severe cases.”

With this in mind, the researchers argue that more needs to be done to control the amount of alcohol individuals consume in North and South America.

“We know how to reduce mortality – with population-based policies, controlling availability and increasing price,” Monteiro said. “We need to prevent people from getting to that stage where you have alcohol dependence or you die.”

Source: Fox news

Half kg hairball removed from girl’s stomach

Doctors have removed a mass of impacted hair weighing half a kg from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl in China’s Henan province.

Doctors at the First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Science and Technology in Luoyang, Henan province, surgically removed the hairball from the stomach of the girl Jan 11

The mother of the girl in Luoyang was shocked when doctors revealed the reason why her daughter had been inexplicably losing her long hair and weight over the past year.

Doctors said the girl suffers from pica, a pathological disorder where a person develops an appetite for clay, dirt, chalk or other similar substances that are considered socially unusual to eat.

A CT scan taken at the hospital revealed that the mass of 30 cm long clump occupied 70 percent of the girl’s stomach.

“The mass of hair was shaped like her stomach and is solid,” said Chen Ye, deputy director of gastrointestinal tumor surgery department at the hospital.

“I’ve seen her put hair in her mouth but I thought she was just playing and didn’t think much about it,” said the girl’s mother, who sought treatment when she discovered a lump in her daughter’s stomach two weeks ago.

Chen advised parents to pay close attention to their children’s behaviour and recommend timely treatment after any such discovery.

Source: Zee news

Doctors remove large cockroach from man’s ear

A man in Australia had to be rushed to hospital in terrible pain after a large cockroach crawled into his ear as he slept, and an attempt to suck it out with a vacuum cleaner failed.

Medical treatment initially only caused the inch-long insect to burrow further into the head of Hendrik Helmer.

The unwelcome invader was eventually extracted by a doctor with forceps, but only after Helmer had endured the unpleasant sensation of it being in the “throes of death-twitching.”

His ordeal began in the early hours of Wednesday morning when he was woken by a sharp pain in his right ear, according to Australian TV.

He said: “I was hoping it was not a poisonous spider … I was hoping it didn’t bite me.”

Source: Fox news

Positive thinking may increase effectiveness of migraine drugs

Headache_Use

Boston researchers recruited 66 migraine patients in an attempt to quantify how much of their pain relief came from a medication and how much was due to what’s called the placebo effect, the healing power of positive belief.

More than 450 headaches later, they reported Wednesday that it’s important for doctors to carefully choose what they tell patients about a powerful medicine – because the message could help enhance its benefits, or blunt them.

“Every word you say counts, not only every gram of the medication,” said Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk, who led the new study with a team at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

Here’s how it worked. First, the patients who suffer regular migraines agreed to forgo pain relievers for several hours during one attack, recording their symptoms for comparison with later headaches.

Then for each of their next six migraines, the patients were given a different pill inside an envelope with a different message. Sometimes they were told it was an effective migraine drug named rizatriptan, a positive message. Other times they were told it was a placebo, a dummy pill, suggesting no benefit. Still other times they were told the pill could be either one, a neutral message.

Sometimes the doctor’s message was true – they were told they got rizatriptan and they really did. Sometimes it was false because researchers had secretly switched the pills.

Mixing up the possibilities allowed researchers to tease out how the same person’s pain relief differed from migraine to migraine as his or her expectations changed.

Of course the real migraine drug worked far better than the dummy pill. But remarkably, people who knew they were taking a placebo still reported less pain than when they’d left their migraine untreated, the researchers found.

The surprise: Patients’ reports of pain relief more than doubled when they were told the migraine drug was real than when they were told, falsely, that it was a fake, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

In fact, people reported nearly as much pain relief when they took a placebo that they thought was the real drug as they did when they took the migraine drug while believing it was a fake.

“The more we gave a positive message to the patient, the bigger the placebo effect was,” Kaptchuk said.

He said that effect probably isn’t purely psychological, saying the ritual of taking a medication may trigger some subconscious memory that could leave people feeling better even if they knew they’d taken a fake drug.

Scientists have long known that some people report noticeable improvements in pain and certain other symptoms when they’re given a placebo, which can be a sugar pill or sham surgery or some other benign intervention. Some studies even have documented that a placebo actually can spark a biological effect.

But scientists don’t know why the placebo effect works or how to harness its potential benefit.

The new research is an interesting attempt to answer some of those questions, at least for one kind of pain, said Dr. Mark Stacy, vice dean for clinical research at Duke University Medical Center, who wasn’t involved with the work. And learning how much of an impact it makes could help design better studies of new drugs, to ensure the phenomenon doesn’t skew the results, he added.

For now, it shows “the power of positive thinking may be helpful in taking care of your migraine,” he said

Source: airing news

Birth control through surgery

Birth control through surgery

Laparoscopic tubal ligation is an elective surgery performed on women who want to prevent pregnancy.

The surgeon begins by making a tiny incision near the bellybutton, and another just above the pubic bone.

Carbon dioxide is administered through a tube in the upper incision. This inflates the abdominal cavity, allowing the surgeon to clearly see and work around your internal organs.

Next, a lighted instrument called a laparoscope is placed through one of the incisions.

The laparoscope projects images of the inside of the abdomen, onto a monitor.

The fallopian tubes are grasped with surgical instruments to close them off, using the cutting, tying, blocking, or sealing technique.

After the carbon dioxide is released from the abdomen, the incisions are closed with dissolving stitches.

For most women, recovery usually takes less than a week.

Source: Fox news