Life Style

Heavy drinking may ‘increase skin cancer risk by more than half

Heavy drinking can increase the risk of developing the deadliest form of skin cancer by more than half, researchers have warned.

Downing three or four drinks a day does more than make us careless about getting sunburnt, it causes biological changes which make the body more sensitive to sun, they say.

Even one drink a day can raise the chance of getting melanoma by 20 per cent; for heavier drinkers the risk is raised by 55 per cent.

Researcher Dr Eva Negri said the mix of UV rays and alcohol damaged the body’s immune responses.

She added: ‘This can lead to far greater cellular damage and subsequently cause skin cancers to form.

‘This study aimed to quantify the extent to which the melanoma risk is increased with alcohol intake and we hope that, armed with this knowledge, people can better protect themselves.’

The warnings, published in the British Journal of Dermatology, are based on a review of 16 other studies and 6,251 cases of melanoma.

The researchers admit they do not know exactly how drinking increases the cancer risk. But they found alcohol is turned into a chemical called acetaldehyde soon after it is consumed and that makes the skin more sensitive to sunlight.

Leading dermatologist Prof Chris Bunker said: ‘Brits haven’t always been known for their moderation when it comes to either alcohol or the sun but this research provides people with further information to make informed choices about their health.’

Source: Metro news

 

Sibling relationships tied to children’s vocabulary skills

siblingsIn large families, young kids can’t always get a lot of individual attention from parents – but healthy interactions with an older sibling might help compensate for that, a new study suggests.

How older children interact with their siblings is tied to the younger children’s development, Canadian researchers found.

“The idea is that here is this effect of being in a large family where you don’t get that many resources, but if you get an older sibling that’s really attuned to your needs that would be a modifying effect,” Jennifer Jenkins told Reuters Health.

Jenkins is the study’s senior author and the Atkinson Chair of Early Child Development and Education at the University of Toronto.

Previous research had found that children from large families tend to score lower on vocabulary, IQ and other academic tests, compared to those from smaller families.

“That’s been pretty well examined that the larger the family, the less good the child’s skill in language and IQ,” Jenkins said. “It’s really thought of as a resource dilution.”

For example, if a couple has a second child, the attention they spent on their first child will then be split among both kids.

She cautioned that whatever effect a large family may have on a child is small, however.

To see whether an older sibling can possibly fill in for some of that diluted attention, the researchers used data from an existing trial that included families from Toronto with 385 young children who had a sibling at least four years older.

Mothers and older siblings were scored on how they interacted with the younger child.

For example, the researchers scored whether the older sibling or mother were sensitive to the younger sibling’s abilities and gave positive feedback.

The younger sibling’s vocabulary was also tested by having the child point to an object’s picture after its named was said out loud.

The researchers found that children with many siblings tended to score lower on the vocabulary test, compared to those who had smaller families.

Children from large families whose older siblings scored higher during the interaction, however, tended to score higher on the test than those whose older brother or sister scored lower during the interaction.

The association between an older sibling’s so-called cognitive sensitivity and the younger child’s score remained strong even when the researchers also accounted for traits that might have influenced the results, such as gender and age.

While the overall association may be small, Jenkins said many traits that are associated with similar cognitive delays are of a similar size.

“It’s multiple and multiple accumulating influences,” she said. “I think all of these small influences are worth paying attention to.”

Jenkins said the next step would be to develop a trial to test a program that encourages older siblings to have better interactions with their younger brothers and sisters to see if that improves the younger siblings’ cognitive abilities.

That, she said, would also help show that the older sibling’s interactions cause better outcomes in their younger brothers and sisters instead of just showing that the two are somehow linked – as this study does.

The study also has some limitations, including not knowing what kind of interactions the younger children’s other siblings have with each other.

Jenkins and her colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics on Monday that it’s also possible that the association is reversed and that the younger child’s abilities influence the type of interactions their older siblings have with them.

“Siblings really play this very strong role in how kids come out,” Jenkins said. “I’d like people to think about those sibling relationships a little bit more and then how to strengthen them.”

Source: Reuters

 

New Child Car Seats May Protect Kids In Side Collisions

The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the first time ever, has announced its proposal on upgrading children’s car seats to survive a side collision, or “T-bone” crash. Under the new rules, child car seats sold in the United States, designed for kids weighing up to 40 lbs., would have to go through a rigorous side-impact test before they are authorized for vehicle use.

“Car seats are an essential tool for keeping young children safe in vehicles and have a proven track record of saving lives,” said NHTSA Acting Administrator David Friedman in the press release. “Today we continue to build on our extensive child seat safety program by adding side-impact crash protection for the first time.”

An NHTSA study has shown that many child death and injuries commonly occur in side-impact crashes. Typically, in these crashes, the car carrying children is stopped at an intersection — usually at a light or stop sign — and when the car begins to go through the intersection, it is struck in the side by a vehicle traveling at a greater speed on the cross street. Unrestrained children are found to be eight times more likely to sustain incapacitating injuries than children restrained in child safety seats. However, the agency believes designing child car seats to withstand side collisions will greatly reduce the number of deaths and injuries per year.

The feds’ proposed test will aim to simulate a T-bone crash where the front of a vehicle traveling 30 mph will strike the side of a small passenger vehicle traveling at 15 mph. The NHTSA chose these speeds because they are known to cover over 90 percent of side collisions seen not only in the U.S., but around the world.

Rather than using actual vehicles, the tests will include sleds because “the aim isn’t to test the crash worthiness of specific vehicles,” NHTSA officials said. The car seat will be positioned on the sled, with another sled ramming the side of the sled with the seat. The tests will use a to-be-developed side-impact 3-year-old child dummy, along with the NHTSA-approved 12-month-old dummy to accurately reflect the age groups of child car seat users.

“As a father of two, I know the peace of mind this proposed test will give parents,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, NBC News reported. “We all want to make sure our children’s car seats are as safe as possible, and today’s proposal will give parents and car-seat makers important new data on how car seats perform in side crashes.”

Installation and proper use of safety seats are vital in protecting children in motor vehicles. The NHTSA fact sheet says they can reduce up to 71 percent of fatalities for infants and 54 percent for toddlers. Acknowledging the importance of child vehicle safety, manufacturers like the Dorel Juvenile Group — the world’s largest car-seat maker — has begun to incorporate small, already-inflated air bags.

Some manufacturers are already taking steps to improve the protection afforded by their car seats in side-impact crashes. The Dorel Juvenile Group, the world’s largest car-seat maker, has been incorporating small, already-inflated air bags into some of their models to protect children’s heads from injury in side-impact crashes since 2009, Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the Columbus, Ind., company told The Associated Press. “Dorel is committed to side-impact protection,” she said.

The NHTSA proposed regulations will be open for the public to comment on for 90 days after they are published this week. These regulations will not be final until the agency reviews comments and answers any important issues that may arise upon discussions. The agency acknowledges this can take months and sometimes years, but they are hopeful the process will move quickly.

Car-seat makers would be given a three-year time frame to make any design changes necessary to pass the side-crash tests and abide to regulations if and when they are passed. The new child car seats could save five lives and prevent 64 injuries each year, the NHTSA estimates.

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests infants and toddlers ride in a rear-facing car seat until age 2 and then moved to a front-facing seat with a harness until at least age 4. They will then have to be placed into a “seatbelt-positioning booster seat until they’ve reached 4 feet, 9 inches tall and are at least 8 years old.” Children who outgrow their booster seats are recommended to continue to ride the back seat until they’re at least 13 years old.

Source: Medical daily

Google unveils ‘smart contact lens’ to help diabetics

Keeping blood sugar levels in check is an important part of life for diabetics, but this can be a daily struggle, involving pricking their fingers and taking blood samples. Now, Google may have a solution – in the form of a “smart contact lens” that measures glucose levels in tears.

Revealing their prototype, which has been in the works for the past 18 months, Google X lab members and project co-founders Brian Otis and Babak Parviz write through their company blog that many of they people they have talked to “say managing their diabetes is like having a part-time job.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), diabetes affects 347 million people worldwide, and in 2004 alone, 3.4 million people died as a result of high fasting blood sugar.

This highlights the importance of monitoring blood glucose levels in diabetics, which the Google X project team aims to tackle.

Aside from mortality, Otis and Parviz note that uncontrolled blood sugar increases risks for damaging the eyes, kidneys and heart.

And because glucose levels can change suddenly with normal activities, such as exercising, eating or sweating, the team says that “round the clock” monitoring is imperative.

Lens employs tiny chips, sensors and an antenna
Though some diabetics wear glucose sensors embedded under their skin, Otis and Parviz say they still need to prick their finger, resulting in many diabetics checking blood glucose levels less often.

So how did the team decide on a contact lens to measure glucose levels?

Google’s smart contact lens
The ‘smart contact lens’ uses tiny chips and sensors, and a miniature antenna to measure glucose levels in tears.

They write that previously, scientists have looked into using bodily fluids, such as tears, to track glucose levels, but the difficulty has been in the fact that tears are not easily collected.

This led the Google X team to try using tiny chips and sensors, as well as an antenna “thinner than a human hair,” to measure tear glucose with better accuracy.

They have come up with a prototype smart lens, which looks very much like a normal contact lens with lines around the outside.

Embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material is a tiny wireless chip and glucose sensor. Otis and Parviz report they are testing prototypes that can produce one reading per second.

‘Early days,’ in promising tool for diabetics
The project members say they want the lens to alert the wearer when glucose levels are getting out of control, so they are looking into using miniature LED lights that could light up as a warning.

“It’s still early days for this technology,” they write, but they add that they have already completed several clinical research studies to help refine the prototype, with the hope that their lens could one day help diabetics manage their condition.

Though Otis and Parviz say they are working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), there are still many more steps to take before the technology can be used by diabetics – a process which will likely take a further 5 years for the lens to reach consumers.

The Google X team is currently looking for partners and experts to join the project and develop apps for the lens.

But Otis and Parviz are passionate about their project. They write:

“We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation is declaring that the world is ‘losing the battle’ against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot.”

Several developments have occurred recently in the field of wearable monitoring devices. A team from Taiwan unveiled their tooth sensor that monitors oral activity, while researchers from the University of Pittsburgh presented their calorie-counting eButton, which uses a low-power central processing unit (CPU), a random-access memory (RAM) communication interface and a Linux or Android operating system to measure portion size.
In diabetes news, researchers in Denmark recently suggested that type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease and other studies have suggested eating more fiber and following a Mediterranean diet could reduce risks of developing diabetes.

Source: Medical News today

 

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

Woman finds bird skull inside package of frozen spinach

Sarasota, Florida woman who claims she found a bird’s skull inside her package of frozen chopped spinach. And it’s not the kind of thing that maybe looks sort of like a bird skull. It’s the kind of thing that absolutely can’t be confused for anything other than a bird’s skull.

she was making appetizers for a New Year’s Eve party when she discovered the bird’s noggin. She had microwaved the bag and drained it. When Brogan noticed a big chunk, she figured it was just some leftover greens that hadn’t properly defrosted, so she put it aside and didn’t think twice. It wasn’t until the next day that Madeline realized what it really was.

She told the station, “”I picked it up and started pulling the spinach off it and realized there were two eyeholes, and it was a little skull. I ate that eye, or someone did.” Barf.

Brogan says she’s not angry over the matter. On their part,“We did receive communication from the customer through our customer care department, which was shared with our corporate quality assurance team. They are working through the details with the customer and the supplier. We have not received any additional complaints and believe this is an isolated incident.”

Source: Yahoo news

Tech-infused bed called x12 monitors heart rate, eases snoring

If you think a bed that adjusts how firm or soft the mattress is is innovative, get this—now your bed can monitor your heart rate and sleep patterns, too.

If you think a bed that adjusts how firm or soft the mattress is is innovative, get this—now your bed can monitor your heart rate and sleep patterns, too.

Select Comfort, maker of the Sleep Number bed, revealed their latest product at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Time.com reported.

The x12 bed has a wireless connection that allows built-in sensors to track your sleep patterns, monitor your heart rate and study your sleep movement. If you have a partner who snores, you can hit the Partner Snore button to tilt the head section of your partner’s side of the bed upward by six degrees – just enough to help them stop snoring.

You can also review your data in the morning with the connected app to see your sleep score – and compare it to your partner’s score.

This tech-savvy bed goes on sale February 8 for $8,000 for the queen-size version.

Source: news.nom

Anti-smoking efforts have saved 8 million American lives

Anti-tobacco efforts have saved 8 million lives in the 50 years since the publication of a landmark Surgeon General report, “Smoking and Health,” a new analysis shows.

The 1964 report, which concluded that tobacco causes lung cancer, led to a sea change in American attitudes toward smoking. Smoking rates have plunged 59% since then, falling from 42% of adults in 1964 to 18% in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By avoiding tobacco or quitting the habit, people have gained nearly two decades of life, according to the analysis, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

An American man’s life expectancy at age 40 has increased by an average of nearly eight years, and a woman’s by nearly 5½ years, since 1964. About one-third of those gains come from decreased tobacco use, the analysis says.

“Tobacco control has been described, accurately, as one of the great public health successes of the 20th century,” CDC director Thomas Frieden writes in an accompanying editorial.

Twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., now ban smoking in indoor public places. As smoking rates have declined, so have the incidence rates of many cancers. About 40% of the decline in men’s overall cancer death rates, in fact, is due to the drop in tobacco use, according to the American Cancer Society.

Tobacco damages virtually every part of the body, Frieden says, causing one-third of heart attacks. Smoking increases the risk of 14 kinds of cancer, including acute myeloid leukemia and tumors of the mouth, esophagus, stomach and pancreas, according to the American Cancer Society. About 443,000 Americans die from smoking-related illnesses every year.

Nearly 18 million Americans have died from tobacco just since the Surgeon General report was published, according to the new analysis, led by Theodore Holford of the Yale University School of Public Health.

Tobacco killed 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. If current trends continue, tobacco will kill an additional 1 billion in the 21st century, the group estimates.

Frieden notes that smoking remains a major health challenge. Nearly one-third of non-smokers are still exposed to secondhand smoke, either at home or at work. Images of smoking are still common on TV and in movies. Tobacco taxes are too low in many parts of the country, making cigarettes affordable for both adults and kids. And although most smokers say they want to quit, few of them receive proven treatment, such as counseling and medication, which together can double their odds of kicking the habit, he writes.

A spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company declined to comment.

David Sylvia, a spokesman for Altria, the parent company of tobacco giant Philip Morris USA, says his company’s goal today is simply to make current smokers aware of its brands, and it has no interest in attracting new smokers.

“Adults should have the ability to choose to purchase a legal product,” Sylvia says. “We want to make sure that when adult, current smokers are choosing their brand, they think about our brand.”

Source: USA Today

3D brain maps on iPhone guide doctors during surgeries

Many brain surgeons in developing countries look to their smartphones for guidance, and luckily for them, phones have started fulfilling this role in part, thanks to the thousands of 3D brain images, produced by Dr. Albert Rhoton at the University of Florida, that are freely available online.

“I’ve had young surgeons from Africa, Brazil and other countries tell me they’re pulling the images into the operating room, Live Science quoted Rhoton, head of the Neuro-Microanatomy Lab at the University of Florida’s McKnight Brain Institute, as saying.

As a training tool for surgical residents, Dr. Rhoton’s image library has grown into the world’s largest collection of 3D brain images. Physicians from across the globe now use the detailed anatomical images to train residents, prepare for surgeries and even guide them while performing surgeries.

Dr Rhoton said the images are their small contribution to making what is a delicate, awesome experience for neurosurgery patients more accurate, gentler and safer.

Rhoton has collected images of brain anatomy for as long as he’s been teaching surgery 50 years ago and began moving to 3D technology 25 years ago.

However, only recently did he realize how smartphones and online downloads could expand the reach of his educational tools. Two and a half years ago, Rhoton and his colleagues began working with the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) to make the brain images and videos available on iTunes University free of cost.

Even before the iTunes U venture, Rhoton had shared his brain images with hospitals and universities as a visiting instructor.

The 3D images show the detailed structure of various sections of the brain, with blood vessels and nerves color-coded in bright red and blue. The colors make the details of neural anatomy clearer than in the normal, grayish brain matter.

Rhoton and the residents he instructs have built up the library over decades, performing careful dissections and transferring the images they obtain to 3D photography and video.

The iTunes U content is engineered to be usable across device platforms, from iPhones to laptops to 3D television.

Rhoton’s work earned him the 2011 Surgeon of the Year award from the journal World Neurosurgery.

Seeing how surgeons have used the images during actual surgeries, Rhoton and AANS next hope to feed the brain maps directly into endoscope screens used in surgery

Source: Ani news

 

Lung cancer scans urged for some smokers, not all

Certain current or former heavy smokers should start getting yearly scans for lung cancer to cut their risk of death from the nation’s top cancer killer, government advisers said Monday — even as they stressed that the tests aren’t for everyone.

The long-anticipated decision by the influential U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says these CT scans of the lungs should be offered only to people at especially high risk: those who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years or an equivalent amount, such as two packs a day for 15 years — and who are between the ages of 55 and 80.

That’s roughly 10 million people, but not all of them qualify for screening, said task force vice chairman Dr. Michael LeFevre, a University of Missouri family physician. Even those high-risk people shouldn’t be scanned if they’re not healthy enough to withstand cancer treatment, or if they kicked the habit more than 15 years ago.

Lung cancer kills nearly 160,000 Americans each year. Smoking is the biggest risk factor, and the more and longer people smoke, the higher their risk. Usually, lung cancer is diagnosed too late for treatment to succeed, but until now there hasn’t been a good means of early detection.

The newly recommended screening could prevent as many as 20,000 deaths a year, LeFevre said — if it’s used correctly.

That estimate assumes good candidates seek the scans. There’s no way to know if people at the highest risk will, or if instead the overly anxious will flood testing centers.

Screen the wrong people, “and we could see more harm than good,” LeFevre cautioned. “There’s a lot of room for what I would call people exploiting the recommendation. I can imagine a street-corner imaging center advertising to invite people in.”

Why not screen younger or lighter smokers? There’s no data to tell whether they’d be helped. Lung cancer is rare before age 50, and the major study that showed screening could save lives enrolled only heavy smokers starting at age 55.

But screening isn’t harm-free. A suspicious scan is far more likely to be a false alarm than a tumor, LeFevre noted. Yet patients may undergo invasive testing to find out, which in turn can cause complications.

Moreover, radiation accumulated from even low-dose CT scans can raise the risk of cancer. And occasionally, screening detects tumors so small and slow-growing that they never would have threatened the person’s life.

While screening clearly can benefit some people, “the best way to avoid lung cancer death is to stop smoking,” LeFevre added.

The task force proposed the screenings last summer but published its final recommendation Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. That clears the way for insurers to begin paying for the scans, which cost between $300 and $500, according to the American Lung Association.

Under the Obama administration’s health care law, cancer screenings that are backed by the task force are supposed to be covered with no copays, although plans have a year to adopt new recommendations.

Source: Yahoo news