Public Health

GMO-free Cheerios coming soon to grocery shelves

General Mills says some Cheerios made without genetically modified ingredients will start appearing on shelves soon.

The Minneapolis-based company said Thursday that it has been manufacturing its original-flavor Cheerios without GMOs for the past several weeks in response to consumer demand. It did not specify exactly when those boxes would be on sale.

Original Cheerios will now be labeled as “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients,” although that it is not an official certification. The labels will also note that trace amounts of GMO ingredients could be present due to the manufacturing process, said Mike Siemienas, a company spokesman.

The change does not apply to any other Cheerios flavors, such as Apple Cinnamon Cheerios or Multi Grain Cheerios.

“We were able to do this with original Cheerios because the main ingredients are oats,” said Siemienas, noting that there are no genetically modified oats. The company is primarily switching the cornstarch and sugar to make the original Cheerios free of GMOs, he said.

The change comes after the group Green America started a campaign called GMO Inside asking General Mills to make Cheerios GMO-free. The group noted in a statement that its campaign prompted fans to flood the Cheerios page on Facebook with comments on the topic.

Todd Larsen, Green America’s corporate responsibility director, said in a statement that the move is “an important victory in getting GMOs out of our food supply and an important first step for General Mills.”

As for other varieties of Cheerios, Siemienas said they are harder to make GMO-free because they are made with ingredients such as corn.

There has been little scientific evidence showing that foods grown from engineered ingredients are less safe than their conventional counterparts. But consumers have expressed concerns about the long-term impact they could have.

Source: One news story

Trebling tobacco tax ‘could prevent 200 million early deaths’

Trebling tobacco tax globally would cut smoking by a third and prevent 200 million premature deaths this century from lung cancer and other diseases, researchers said on Wednesday.

In a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists from the charity Cancer Research UK  (CRUK) said hiking taxes by a large amount per cigarette would encourage people to quit smoking altogether rather than switch to cheaper brands, and help stop young people from taking up the habit.

As well as causing lung cancer, which is often fatal, smoking is the largest cause of premature death from chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure.

Tobacco kills around 6 million people a year now, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and that toll is expected to rise above 8 million a year by 2030 if nothing is done to curb smoking rates.

Richard Peto, an epidemiologist at CRUK who led the study, said aggressively increasing tobacco taxes would be especially effective in poorer and middle-income countries where the cheapest cigarettes are relatively affordable.

Of the 1.3 billion people around the world who smoke, most live in poorer countries where often governments have also not yet introduced smoke-free legislation.

But increasing tobacco tax would also be effective in richer countries, Peto said, citing evidence from France, which he said halved cigarette consumption from 1990 to 2005 by raising taxes well above inflation.

“The two certainties in life are death and taxes. We want higher tobacco taxes and fewer tobacco deaths,” he said in a statement. “It would help children not to start, and it would help many adults to stop while there’s still time.”

While smokers lose at least 10 years of life, quitting before age 40 avoids more than 90 percent of the increased health risk run by people who continue smoking. Stopping before age 30 avoids more than 97 percent of the risk.

Governments around the world have agreed to prioritise reducing premature deaths from cancer and other chronic diseases in the United Nations General Assembly and in the WHO’s World Health Assembly in 2013.

They also agreed to a target of reducing smoking by a third by 2025.

The CRUK analysis found that doubling the price of cigarettes in the next decade through increased taxes would cut worldwide consumption by about a third by that target, and at the same time increase annual government revenues from tobacco by a third from around $300 billion to $400 billion.

This extra income, the researchers suggested, could be spent on boosting health care budgets.

Peto noted that the international tobacco industry makes about $50 billion in profits each year, saying this equated to “approximately $10,000 per death from smoking”.

“Worldwide, around half a billion children and adults under the age of 35 are already – or soon will be – smokers, and many will be hooked on tobacco for life. So there’s an urgent need for governments to find ways to stop people starting and to help smokers give up,” said Harpal Kumar, CRUK’s chief executive.

He said the study, which examined 63 research papers on the causes and consequences of tobacco use in many different countries, showed tobacco taxes are “a hugely powerful lever”.

They are also potentially a triple win, Kumar said, cutting the number of people who smoke and die from their addiction, reducing the health care burden and costs linked to smoking and at the same time increasing government income.

Source: NDTV

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

Thicker brain sections tied to spirituality: study

For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain, a new study hints.

Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said religion or spirituality was “important” to them versus those who cared less about religion.

“Our beliefs and our moods are reflected in our brain and with new imaging techniques we can begin to see this,” Myrna Weissman told Reuters Health. “The brain is an extraordinary organ. It not only controls, but is controlled by our moods.”

Weissman, who worked on the new study, is a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University and chief of the Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology department at New York State Psychiatric institute.

While the new study suggests a link between brain thickness and religiosity or spirituality, it cannot say that thicker brain regions cause people to be religious or spiritual, Weissman and her colleagues note in JAMA Psychiatry.

It might hint, however, that religiosity can enhance the brain’s resilience against depression in a very physical way, they write.

Previously, the researchers had found that people who said they were religious or spiritual were at lower risk of depression. They also found that people at higher risk for depression had thinning cortices, compared to those with lower depression risk.

The cerebral cortex is the brain’s outermost layer made of gray matter that forms the organ’s characteristic folds. Certain areas of the cortex are important hubs of neural activity for processes such as sensory perception, language and emotion.

For the new study, the researchers twice asked 103 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 how important religion or spirituality was to them and how often they attended religious services over a five-year period.

In addition to being asked about spirituality, the participants’ brains were imaged once to see how thick their cortices were.

All the participants were the children or grandchildren of people who participated in an earlier study about depression. Some had a family history of depression, so they were considered to be at high risk for the disorder. Others with no history served as a comparison group.

Overall, the researchers found that the importance of religion or spirituality to an individual – but not church attendance – was tied to having a thicker cortex. The link was strongest among those at high risk of depression.

“What we’re doing now is looking at the stability of it,” Weissman said.

Her team is taking more images of the participants’ brains to see whether the size of the cortex changes with their religiosity or spirituality.

“This is a way of replicating and validating the findings,” she said. “That work is in process now.”

Dr. Dan Blazer, the J.P. Gibbons Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, said the study is very interesting but is still exploratory.

“I think this tells us it’s an area to look at,” Blazer, who was not involved in the new study, said. “It’s an area of interest but we have to be careful.”

For example, he said there could be other areas of the brain linked to religion and spirituality. Also, spirituality may be a marker of something else, such as socioeconomic status.

Blazer added that it’s an exciting time, because researchers are actively looking at links between the brain, religion and risk of depression.

“We’ve seen this field move from a time when there were virtually no studies done at all,” he said.

Weissman said the mind and body are intimately connected.

“What this means therapeutically is hard to say,” she added.

Source: Reuters

Doctors Spend Very Little Time Talking About Sex With Teens

A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics has revealed that many doctors spend very little time discussing sex with their teenage patients – if they do at all. According to Counsel and Heal, researchers from Duke University analyzed the audio recordings of 253 annual doctors’ visits for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17

A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics has revealed that many doctors spend very little time discussing sex with their teenage patients – if they do at all.

According to Counsel and Heal, researchers from Duke University analyzed the audio recordings of 253 annual doctors’ visits for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17. They found that the doctors discussed sex in only 65 percent of the visits, with the conversations lasting an average of 36 seconds. In the other 35 percent of visits, the topic of sex wasn’t brought up at all.

The study’s authors argue that such limited exchanges won’t help meet the “sexual health prevention needs of teens.”

“It’s hard for physicians to treat adolescents and help them make healthy choices about sex if they don’t have these conversations,” said lead author Stewart Alexander, associate professor of medicine at Duke. “For teens who are trying to understand sex and sexuality, not talking about sex could have huge implications.”

The study also revealed that only 4 percent of the teenage patients had prolonged discussions about sex with their doctors. Additionally, the female patients were twice as likely as their male counterparts to spend more time talking about sex.

Source: all news

Cholesterol linked to Alzheimer’s protein, unclear why

Patterns of “good” and “bad” cholesterol usually associated with heart risks also predicted the levels of Alzheimer’s-related beta amyloid protein seen in the brains of study participants.

“One of the important themes emerging from dementia research over the past 15 years is that there are intriguing connections between vascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease,” Bruce Reed, who led the research, told Reuters Health by email.

Reed is a professor and associate director of the University of California Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

“It has become increasingly clear that what have been traditionally thought of as vascular risk factors – things like hypertension, diabetes and elevated cholesterol – are also risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease,” Reed said.

In previous work, Reed and his colleagues found a connection between overall vascular risk and levels of brain amyloid.

“Amyloid deposition is important because it is widely believed by scientists to be a key event that initiates a chain of events that eventually, years later, results in the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease,” Reed said.

“There was also previous work in cell cultures and with animals that suggested that cholesterol plays an important role in promoting the deposition of amyloid in the brain,” Reed said.

For the new study, published in JAMA Neurology, the researchers examined the cholesterol levels of 74 elderly people who had normal to mildly impaired cognitive function. Researchers also measured brain deposits of beta amyloid protein with positron emission tomography (PET scanning).

They found that on average, participants who had higher levels of the “bad” LDL cholesterol and lower levels of “good” HDL cholesterol also had higher levels of amyloid in the brain.

Elevated LDL-cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular disease while high levels of HDL-cholesterol are thought to protect against heart disease.

“We think this is a very important finding, but as with all novel findings it needs to be replicated,” Reed said. “Assuming that the basic pattern is found in other groups of patients, it is urgent that we try to understand the mechanism(s) behind this finding.”

“Cholesterol in blood and cholesterol in brain are separate ‘pools,’ walled off from one another by the blood brain barrier. We measured cholesterol in blood. So that is one question that needs to be answered – how do cholesterol levels in blood and in brain influence each other,” Reed said.

“And in the brain, it is not entirely understood how changing cholesterol levels might reduce amyloid deposition. We are very interested in the idea that higher HDL (‘good’) cholesterol levels may help the brain more efficiently clear the toxic amyloid at an early stage,” Reed said.

“If those questions were understood we could begin to think about how to change cholesterol levels so as to prevent the buildup of amyloid,” Reed added.

In other studies, some researchers have found evidence that LDL cholesterol-lowering drugs, such as statins, might offer some protection against Alzheimer’s disease, but the results have been inconsistent.

Reed’s team didn’t see any associations between current use of cholesterol medication by the participants and their amyloid levels.

In their report, Reed and his coauthors caution that the study does not prove cholesterol is directly affecting amyloid deposition. For instance, they write, unhealthy cholesterol could be linked to vascular damage, such as small strokes, and those micro-injuries could be the reason for the protein deposits.

He encourages people to follow the advice of their doctor and try to achieve the cholesterol guidelines set by the American Heart Association.

“A remarkable number of people who are alive now will live into their 80s or beyond – the period of highest risk for Alzheimer’s. This study is one more piece of evidence that what we do now can shape our health positively in those years,” Reed said.

Source: ABS CBN news

Shocking – 2 year old gives birth to own twin

boy gives birth

A two-year-old Chinese boy named Xiao Feng was admitted to hospital to undergo an operation to “give birth” to his twin. The boy was suffering from breathing difficulties and his stomach was extremely swollen.

Following X-rays and MRI scans, doctors at the hospital confirmed that Feng was in fact carrying the undeveloped fetus of his twin inside his stomach. He was rushed to the operating room for emergency surgery to remove it.

The case known as cryptodidymus, or conjoined twins, is extremely rare, if not unprecedented in the world of medicine. the unborn fetus measured around 10 inches in width and was fully formed in terms of its spine and limbs.

It is just as well that the boy was admitted to the hospital. The parasitic twin growing inside him took up as much as two thirds of Feng’s stomach and if left untreated could have lead to his death.

Twins are formed when an egg splits following fertilization. Conjoined twins are formed when the egg itself fails to fully separate.

The foetus was 20cm wide and had developed a spine, fingers and toes. It had grown so much that it was taking up almost two-thirds of the boy’s stomach, doctors said.

The rare case of conjoined twins, known as cryptodidymus, is the case is extremely rare and possibly unprecedented in medicine, the Inquisitr reports. Conjoined twins form when the fertilised egg fails to separate completely.

Source: hi5 buzz

Stroke: warning signs of this silent killer

Many warning signs may indicate a stroke. Depending on the function of the part of the brain being affected, the person suffering the stroke may become paralyzed, blind or unable to speak.

if you experience any of these major stroke warning signs: act immedicately

Sudden loss of speech
Slurred speech
Sudden loss of vision
Blurry or double vision
Sudden paralysis
Sudden weakness
Sudden dizziness
Sudden, severe headache, often accompanied by neck stiffness and vomiting.

What are the first signs of a stroke?
In severe cases, a person suffering from a stroke may become paralyzed, blind or unable to speak. But in other cases, signs may be more subtle. You should act quickly… call 9-1-1 right away and get the person to an emergency department … at the first signs of a stroke.

Why is fast action so important?
For every minute brain cells are deprived of oxygen during a stroke, brain damage increases. The chances for survival and recovery improve when treatment begins within the first few hours of stroke warning signs – often when a thrombolytic agent or “clot buster” medication is given within the first three hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.

Source: Union Hospital

 

CDC issues warning about painful virus from mosquitoes

A virus that causes pain so severe that patients lie groaning in bed for days has come to the Western Hemisphere and travelers should take precautions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautions.

Chikungunya virus has been confirmed in 10 people on the French side of St. Martin in the Caribbean, and it’s very likely to end up in the United States, CDC says. The virus is carried by the same mosquitoes that spread dengue virus — Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, more commonly known as the Asian tiger mosquito. Both have been making inroads into the U.S.

“Microbes know no boundaries, and the appearance of chikungunya virus in the Western hemisphere represents another threat to health security,” CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a statement. “CDC experts have predicted and prepared for its arrival for several years and there are surveillance systems in place to help us track it.”

Chikungunya is not usually deadly, but it can cause a very bad headache, joint pain, rash and fever. Its name in the Makonde language, spoken in Tanzania and Mozambique in Africa, means “that which bends up,” because patients are often contorted with pain.

Chikungunya has been spreading out of Africa into the Indian Ocean region, Asia and Europe in recent years. So far, only 109 travelers have carried it into the U.S. and it hasn’t spread. But West Nile virus, also carried by mosquitoes, came to the U.S. in 1999 and is now established across North America.

A study last year predicted that it’s possible a single, infected person could start an outbreak of Chikungunya in New York once Asian tiger mosquitoes become more common in the city.

“CDC estimates that about 9 million U.S. residents travel to the Caribbean each year. Given that volume of travelers, chikungunya could occur more frequently in returning U.S. mainland travelers if the virus expands in the region,” the agency said in a statement.

“Infected travelers could then cause local transmission of the virus in the United States if mosquitoes bite infected people and then bite other people.”

Travelers to St. Martin should take extra care to protect themselves from mosquito bites, CDC says. They should use insect repellent, wear long sleeves and pants, and use air conditioning and screens on windows and doors to keep mosquitoes out.

“Travelers returning from the Caribbean who experience fever and joint pains as well as other symptoms of chikungunya (e.g., headache, muscle pains, or rash) should seek medical care, and health care providers should be on the alert for possible cases,” CDC says. And any patients should take care not to get bitten by more mosquitoes—which could carry the virus to other people.

There’s no vaccine and no specific treatment for chikungunya.

Source: Nbc news

Why more boomers are getting cataract surgery at a younger age

 

On the morning I got cataract surgery, my ophthalmologist joked it was his “young day,” since all his surgical patients were under 70.

I’m 43. I first noticed the haziness in my left eye about this time last year and thought it was a dirty contact. A few months later, I went to my doctor and got a huge shock.

My doctor appeared just as surprised – partly because of my age at the time, 42, and partly because I showed no sign of a cataract at an exam just six months earlier.

Only one percent of all cataract surgery patients are as young as me, according to Dr. David Chang, clinical spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. But many more people in their 40s probably have cataracts already forming in one or both eyes and just don’t know it yet.

A cataract is a clouding of the eye’s lens. It’s the most common cause of blindness in the world — and it’s also a normal part of aging. More than 3.3 million such surgeries are performed in the country each year, said Chang, who described it as “the most common operation performed anywhere on the body.” And a recent study by the Mayo Clinic indicates an increasing number of people are having cataract surgery — and are doing so at “younger” ages. The study, which examined cataract surgeries done from 2005 to 2011 in Minnesota’s Olmsted County, found that about 20 percent of those surgeries were in patients younger than 65.

By age 80, more than half of all Americans either have a cataract or have had cataract surgery, according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute.

“When does it happen? Well, we could say it’s pretty common in our 50s, but there are plenty of people who have a full head of hair in their 70s. There are also a lot of people who get bald spots or start to see their hairlines recede in their 30s,” said Chang, chairman of the cataract guidelines committee for the AAO.

It took about a year from the time I first noticed hazy vision to when I finally scheduled my surgery. In between, I often felt my left eye was looking through a dirty, Vaseline-smudged window. Since it is most notable in bright light, the cataract was a nuisance when I played with my kids outdoors or drove them around on sunny days. While at the beach last summer, I felt like I was looking through a sand storm.

Shortly afterward, I had reached my annoyance threshold. That’s a similar trait doctors see among their “younger” patients, whose active lifestyles make them less willing to put up with a cataract’s inconvenience, said Dr. Rosa Braga-Mele, who chairs the cataract clinical committee of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery.

While the majority of cataract patients are in their 70s and 80s, Braga-Mele said she recently noticed an increase in patients between 50-65 – a range reflecting the heart of the baby boomer population, a generation living longer and less tolerant of any hurdle to their independence.

“Whereas my grandmother or even my mother might have waited until she was in her 80s because she didn’t really need her vision for what she was doing … the baby boomer population, the minute their vision starts to drop, says, ‘Well, this isn’t normal, I can’t do my job. There has to be a solution to help me function at the level I’m used to functioning at,” she said.

That was the case for Katie Roberts. At 37, she is far younger than any Boomer, but she understands why many of them would elect to have surgery as early as possible. The Morgan Hill, Calif., firefighter has had cataract surgery on both of her eyes; she was 32 when she had the first procedure.

Unlike my cataract — which had no physical cause or genetic disposition — the ones Roberts developed were a side effect from steroid medication she received in her 20s for an eye disease, pars planitis. When she first showed signs of a cataract, she initially thought she was experiencing a flare-up. Once she got the correct diagnosis, she ended up getting surgery about a month later.

“Because I have to drive a fire engine and drive at night, with lots of lights and everything going on, I got it done as soon as it was bothering me, just enough to where I was aware of it,” she said.

Dr. Bonnie An Henderson, a clinical professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, hasn’t seen the average age of her patients dip, but she believes several factors may explain why more people are having surgery. One reason is the proliferation of cell phones, computers and tablets over recent years.

“Patients may detect even a small decrease in their visual function earlier than before,” Henderson said.

In addition, diagnostic tools are more sophisticated than they were a generation ago, making it easier for ophthalmologists to evaluate and diagnose cataract severity, she said.

All doctors agree there isn’t a specific time when surgery is needed to remove cataracts. One person may not find it a bother, while someone else with the same rate of progression may find it completely disruptive.

I clearly remember the advice my doctor gave me about when to give him the green light for surgery.

“There’s no magic number when you have to get it done,” he said. “It’s whenever you’re ready to cry ‘Uncle.’”

Source: Today health