[ ]   [ ]   [ ]                        [ ]      [ ]   [ ]

NY Times Strands - maryte - Mar 29, 2024 - 8:39am
 
The Obituary Page - Antigone - Mar 29, 2024 - 8:21am
 
NYTimes Connections - maryte - Mar 29, 2024 - 8:20am
 
Wordle - daily game - maryte - Mar 29, 2024 - 8:15am
 
Photography Forum - Your Own Photos - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 29, 2024 - 6:15am
 
March 2024 Photo Theme - Many - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 29, 2024 - 6:11am
 
Photos you have taken of your walks or hikes. - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 29, 2024 - 6:09am
 
Breaking News - rgio - Mar 29, 2024 - 6:03am
 
Trump - haresfur - Mar 29, 2024 - 5:40am
 
Radio Paradise Comments - Coaxial - Mar 29, 2024 - 4:30am
 
Main Mix Playlist - R567 - Mar 29, 2024 - 4:08am
 
Ukraine - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 28, 2024 - 11:51pm
 
Vinyl Only Spin List - kurtster - Mar 28, 2024 - 9:27pm
 
Derplahoma! - Red_Dragon - Mar 28, 2024 - 5:11pm
 
Uploading Music - macadavy - Mar 28, 2024 - 4:18pm
 
Baseball, anyone? - zevon - Mar 28, 2024 - 4:17pm
 
Oldest Rock song on RP - johkir - Mar 28, 2024 - 4:07pm
 
USA! USA! USA! - R_P - Mar 28, 2024 - 3:28pm
 
Live Music - oldviolin - Mar 28, 2024 - 3:10pm
 
Orbiting Earth - oldviolin - Mar 28, 2024 - 2:19pm
 
YouTube: Music-Videos - oldviolin - Mar 28, 2024 - 2:17pm
 
• • • The Once-a-Day • • •  - oldviolin - Mar 28, 2024 - 2:13pm
 
Lyrics that strike a chord today... - oldviolin - Mar 28, 2024 - 2:06pm
 
Israel - R_P - Mar 28, 2024 - 2:03pm
 
Irony 101 - MrDill - Mar 28, 2024 - 12:21pm
 
RP automation with iOS Shortcuts App - pradler4kant - Mar 28, 2024 - 11:57am
 
Talk Behind Their Backs Forum - VV - Mar 28, 2024 - 11:27am
 
Bug Reports & Feature Requests - Beaker - Mar 28, 2024 - 9:30am
 
Business as Usual - black321 - Mar 28, 2024 - 8:09am
 
Outstanding Covers - thisbody - Mar 28, 2024 - 5:51am
 
Today in History - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 28, 2024 - 4:28am
 
Little known information...maybe even facts - haresfur - Mar 27, 2024 - 6:21pm
 
RightWingNutZ - R_P - Mar 27, 2024 - 3:48pm
 
Please Don't Post Here - Red_Dragon - Mar 27, 2024 - 11:02am
 
Motivational Office Cliches... - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 26, 2024 - 10:20pm
 
(Big) Media Watch - Red_Dragon - Mar 26, 2024 - 6:18pm
 
Solar / Wind / Geothermal / Efficiency Energy - islander - Mar 26, 2024 - 8:00am
 
Is there any DOG news out there? - Beez - Mar 26, 2024 - 7:24am
 
Food - Steely_D - Mar 26, 2024 - 1:41am
 
Frequent drop outs (The Netherlands) - kingen - Mar 25, 2024 - 2:43pm
 
China - R_P - Mar 25, 2024 - 11:59am
 
Musky Mythology - R_P - Mar 25, 2024 - 11:20am
 
Play history seems to indicate that I"m streaming 24/7, b... - jarro - Mar 25, 2024 - 10:44am
 
April 8th Partial Solar Eclipse - Coaxial - Mar 24, 2024 - 6:22pm
 
New Music - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 24, 2024 - 5:07pm
 
Dental Floss Tycoons, and other Montana Myths, Facts, and... - Red_Dragon - Mar 24, 2024 - 12:32pm
 
Basketball - oldviolin - Mar 23, 2024 - 2:50pm
 
What Makes You Laugh? - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 23, 2024 - 1:54pm
 
Joe Biden - kurtster - Mar 23, 2024 - 11:17am
 
Technical Streaming Note for Nerdy RP DIYers - sjagminas1 - Mar 23, 2024 - 10:16am
 
Museum Of Bad Album Covers - Proclivities - Mar 23, 2024 - 8:56am
 
Other Medical Stuff - Antigone - Mar 22, 2024 - 3:06pm
 
Country Up The Bumpkin - oldviolin - Mar 22, 2024 - 11:06am
 
Pernicious Pious Proclivities Particularized Prodigiously - Red_Dragon - Mar 22, 2024 - 9:17am
 
Memorials - Remembering Our Loved Ones - Bill_J - Mar 21, 2024 - 8:54pm
 
Can you afford to retire? - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 21, 2024 - 2:15pm
 
Mixtape Culture Club - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 21, 2024 - 11:10am
 
What Did You See Today? - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 20, 2024 - 5:13pm
 
Annoying stuff. not things that piss you off, just annoyi... - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 20, 2024 - 4:31pm
 
Upcoming concerts or shows you can't wait to see - Antigone - Mar 20, 2024 - 3:10pm
 
Russia - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 20, 2024 - 11:44am
 
2024 Elections! - Lazy8 - Mar 20, 2024 - 7:26am
 
Economix - R_P - Mar 19, 2024 - 4:36pm
 
Name My Band - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 19, 2024 - 10:53am
 
Delicacies: a..k.a.. the Gross Food forum - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 19, 2024 - 10:12am
 
New Forum Member on "What Makes RP Great" - miamizsun - Mar 19, 2024 - 4:38am
 
Cache stopped working on old Android Phone - Eisenwindel - Mar 19, 2024 - 1:50am
 
Cryptic Posts - Leave Them Guessing - Bill_J - Mar 18, 2024 - 8:23pm
 
Damn Dinosaurs! - oldviolin - Mar 18, 2024 - 8:16pm
 
One Partying State - Wyoming News - geoff_morphini - Mar 18, 2024 - 3:58pm
 
Great guitar faces - skyguy - Mar 18, 2024 - 3:33pm
 
Despots, dictators and war criminals - R_P - Mar 18, 2024 - 12:41pm
 
Media Matters - thisbody - Mar 18, 2024 - 10:03am
 
NASA & other news from space - miamizsun - Mar 18, 2024 - 4:13am
 
MEALTICKET - drinpt - Mar 17, 2024 - 4:13am
 
Index » Radio Paradise/General » General Discussion » Other Medical Stuff Page: Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 49, 50, 51, 52  Next
Post to this Topic
Inamorato

Inamorato Avatar

Location: Twin Cities
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 20, 2008 - 7:15am

The year in weird science and myth-busting

Researchers debunk conventional wisdom about poinsettias, sugar and holiday suicides — and note that Coca-Cola can only do so much.


By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

Contrary to popular belief, poinsettias are not toxic to people or animals, suicides do not increase over the Christmas holidays, and sugar does not make kids hyperactive. Also, Wales winning the rugby grand slam does not influence the death of popes, and douching with Coca-Cola is not an effective contraceptive method.

Those are some of the conclusions of reports in the British Medical Journal's annual Christmas issue, a compilation of the weird and lighthearted papers its editors accumulate over the year. In a related vein, a report in the journal Lancet details the curious case of a woman who fainted every time she ate a sandwich.

The supposed toxicity of poinsettias has been a subject of warnings ever since the red and white flowers have been associated with the Christmas holiday, but numerous reports from poison control centers do not support the warnings, according to Drs. Rachel C. Vreeman and Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine. 

They reviewed nearly 900 calls to such centers reporting poinsettia consumption and found that none of the incidents resulted in serious illness and few produced any symptoms at all. Moreover, experiments with animals show no effects even at very high consumption, they found.

Similarly, researchers reviewed data on suicides in the United States for the last 35 years and found no increase before, during or after the holidays. In fact, despite widespread talk about winter gloom's effects on humans, they found that suicides peak in the summer and are lowest in winter. They conclude that people actually receive additional emotional and social support during the holidays, which decreases suicidal thoughts.

Other common beliefs are also not supported by fact, they said. Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive. 

The ill-mannered behavior, the authors wrote, was "all in the parents' minds."

Other myths that have been disproved: Not wearing a hat causes one to lose excessive body heat, and eating at night makes you more likely to pack on the pounds. Also, they found, there is no consistently effective cure for a hangover.

Coca-Cola douches for pregnancy prevention were a part of folklore in the 1950s and 1960s, before the contraceptive pill. People thought that the acidity of the soda would kill sperm and that the classic Coke bottle provided a convenient "shake and shoot" applicator.

Dr. Deborah Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine had previously reported that Coke can impede the mobility of sperm in a test tube. But further study, she said, shows that sperm get to the cervical canal so quickly that postcoital spritzing is ineffective.


For it to work, she wrote, the soda would have to be put in the vagina before sex, "but that would undoubtedly be messy."

(Full story)

 

If I had known that in high school, it would have spared my girlfriend the ludicrous experience of climbing into a laundry room basin with a soda bottle following a broken condom episode!   {#Lol}


jadewahoo

jadewahoo Avatar

Location: Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 18, 2008 - 10:13am

 hippiechick wrote:

Male circumcision lowers cervical cancer risk: study


By Maggie Fox, Health
and Science Editor
Posted 2008/12/17 at 4:41 pm EST

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2008 (Reuters) — Three studies published on Wednesday add to evidence that circumcision can protect men from the deadly AIDS virus and the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

 
Oh, yeah... let's find new ways to justify male genital mutilation. Real smart. The transmission of both of these aforementioned diseases are preventable by the use of condoms.


hippiechick

hippiechick Avatar

Location: topsy turvy land
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 18, 2008 - 9:52am

 romeotuma wrote:


That's a relief...

 
The trend is to not have your baby boys circumcised, so here is a case for doing so.

hippiechick

hippiechick Avatar

Location: topsy turvy land
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 18, 2008 - 8:21am

Male circumcision lowers cervical cancer risk: study


By Maggie Fox, Health
and Science Editor
Posted 2008/12/17 at 4:41 pm EST

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2008 (Reuters) — Three studies published on Wednesday add to evidence that circumcision can protect men from the deadly AIDS virus and the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

A boy cries during circumcision at Beni Messous Hospital in Algiers in this file photo from September 26, 2008. Circumcision is compulsory for Muslim boys under the Sharia law (Islamic Law). REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

Related Topics

The reports in the Journal of Infectious Diseases are likely to add to the debate over whether men — and newborn boys — should be circumcised to protect their health and perhaps the health of their future sexual partners.

Dr. Bertran Auvert of the University of Versailles in France and colleagues in South Africa tested more than 1,200 men visiting a clinic in South Africa,

They found under 15 percent of the circumcised men and 22 percent of the uncircumcised men were infected with the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is the main cause of cervical cancer and genital warts.

"This finding explains why women with circumcised partners are at a lower risk of cervical cancer than other women," they wrote in their report.

A second paper looking at U.S. men had less clear-cut results, but Carrie Nielson of Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues said they found some indication that circumcision might protect men.

The circumcised men were about half as likely to have HPV as uncircumcised men, after adjustment for other differences between the two groups.

PREVENTING AIDS

In the third report, Lee Warner of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues tested African-American men in Baltimore and found 10 percent of those at high risk of infection with HIV who were circumcised had the virus, compared to 22 percent of those who were not.

"Circumcision was associated with substantially reduced HIV risk in patients with known HIV exposure, suggesting that results of other studies demonstrating reduced HIV risk for circumcision among heterosexual men likely can be generalized to the U.S. context," they wrote.

Studies supporting circumcision to reduce HIV transmission had all been done in Africa and U.S. studies were less clear.

Dr. Ronald Gray of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues said they found the reports encouraging.

"In the United States, circumcision is less common among African American and Hispanic men, who are also the subgroups most at risk of HIV," they wrote in a commentary.

"Thus, circumcision may afford an additional means of protection from HIV in these at-risk minorities."

But they noted that the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine circumcision for newborns.

"As a consequence of this AAP decision, Medicaid does not cover circumcision costs, and this is particularly disadvantageous for poorer African American and Hispanic boys who, as adults, may face high HIV exposure risk," Gray and colleagues wrote.

"It is also noteworthy that circumcision rates have been declining in the U.S., possibly because of lack of Medicaid coverage."

Medicaid is the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Thirty-three million people globally are infected with AIDS, which has no cure and no vaccine. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world, with 20 million people in the United States infected. It causes cervical cancer, which kills 300,000 women globally every year.



(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 17, 2008 - 5:10pm



The Virtues Of Going Barefoot...

As we age, or gross motor (GM) coordination tends to decline, which leads to decreased mobility, a loss of balance, and a risk of falling...  one cause of this is wearing shoes, because over time, the identical sensation from our shoes dulls the sensory input from our feet...  shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brains...

if we go barefoot, our brains will receive many different kinds of input as we walk over uneven surfaces...  shoes are a flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are artificial and flat...  this leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control...

people may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady themselves, and by resorting to these compensations instead of exercising the sensory input abilities of people's bare feet, they hasten their decline...

for example, as people age, they tend to look down while walking, because they are not getting much information from the stunted sensory tools in their feet...  this sensory compensation with vision causes even more decline in sensory input from sheathed feet...  go barefoot when you can, people...  feel your way with your bare feet, because this will develop the sensory map for each foot, instead of letting it waste away... 




kctomato

kctomato Avatar



Posted: Dec 15, 2008 - 6:57am

 romeotuma wrote:


Scabies


Seems I heard somewhere that sniffing glue helps

musik_knut

musik_knut Avatar

Location: Third Stone From The Sun
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 13, 2008 - 5:57pm

 hippiechick wrote:

Well, no duh! Women have known this for several years. I took HRT for almost 10 yrs, but the smallest dose I could get away with, because I started asking women that I knew had breast cancer if they took HRT, and most of them had.

So, what about birth control pills? And what about the ones that stop women from menstruating? More hormones?
 

hc,
Does appear to be a study of the obvious. But in medicine, there is often a trailing period between what is thought on the street and what is shown in a study.
In my opinion, birth control pills quite possibly play a role in women who without any obvious physical or physiological reasons, can not become pregnant or tend to lose their pregnancies in above normal numbers. Has there been a study on that since bc pills first hit the public? I don't doubt we're poisoning ourselves: a hormone for this, an antibiotic for that. Then there's the stuff we dump in our food chain, the goodies we feed our cattle and the like.

mk...
hippiechick

hippiechick Avatar

Location: topsy turvy land
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 13, 2008 - 5:51pm

 musik_knut wrote:
New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.

Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.

It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."

Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.

Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.

So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.

"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.

Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.

The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro - estrogen and progestin - or dummy pills.

This part was halted when researchers saw a 26% higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.

But that was an average over the 5½ years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.

They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.

Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"Bush's popularity may be 50% on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.

In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.

Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41% in 2003, the year after the main results made news.

In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70% since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.

The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.

"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.

"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk - a 200% increase - for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say. Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26% meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.

"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.

"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.

A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.



 
Well, no duh! Women have known this for several years. I took HRT for almost 10 yrs, but the smallest dose I could get away with, because I started asking women that I knew had breast cancer if they took HRT, and most of them had.

So, what about birth control pills? And what about the ones that stop women from menstruating? More hormones?

musik_knut

musik_knut Avatar

Location: Third Stone From The Sun
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 13, 2008 - 5:47pm

New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.

Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.

It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."

Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.

Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.

So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.

"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.

Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.

The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro - estrogen and progestin - or dummy pills.

This part was halted when researchers saw a 26% higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.

But that was an average over the 5½ years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.

They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.

Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"Bush's popularity may be 50% on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.

In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.

Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41% in 2003, the year after the main results made news.

In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70% since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.

The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.

"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.

"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk - a 200% increase - for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say. Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26% meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.

"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.

"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.

A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.


hippiechick

hippiechick Avatar

Location: topsy turvy land
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 9, 2008 - 8:43am

 romeotuma wrote:

 

Attacking Alzheimer's with Red Wine and Marijuana

By Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune - Turning Research Into Solutions
Posted December 8, 2008.

Two new studies point to a wonderful way to ward off Alzheimer's disease and other forms of age-related memory loss.

Two new studies suggest that substances usually associated with dulling the mind — marijuana and red wine — may help ward off Alzheimer's disease and other forms of age-related memory loss. Their addition comes as another study dethrones folk remedy ginkgo biloba as proof against the disease.

At a November meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., researchers from Ohio State University reported that THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, may reduce inflammation in the brain and even stimulate the formation of new brain cells.

Meanwhile, in the Nov. 21 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, neurologist David Teplow of the University of California, Los Angeles reported that polyphenols — naturally occurring components of red wine — block the formation of proteins that build the toxic plaques thought to destroy brain cells. In addition, these substances can reduce the toxicity of existing plaques, thus reducing cognitive deterioration.

Together, the studies suggest scientists are gaining a clearer understanding of the mechanics of memory deterioration and discovering some promising approaches to prevention.

Previous research has suggested that polyphenols — which are found in high concentrations in tea, nuts and berries, as well as cabernets and merlots — may inhibit or prevent the buildup of toxic fibers in the brain. These fibers, which are primarily composed of two specific proteins, form the plaques that have long been associated with Alzheimer's disease.

UCLA's Teplow and his colleagues monitored how these proteins folded up and stuck to each other to produce aggregates that killed nerve cells in mice. They then treated the proteins with a polyphenol compound extracted from grape seeds. They discovered the polyphenols blocked the formation of the toxic aggregates.

"What we found is pretty straightforward," Teplow declared. "If the amyloid beta proteins can't assemble, toxic aggregates can't form, and, thus, there is no toxicity." If this also proves true in human brains, it means administration of the compound to Alzheimer's patients could "prevent disease development and also ameliorate existing disease," he said. Human clinical trials are upcoming.

At Ohio State, researchers led by psychologist Gary Wenk are studying the protective effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, commonly known as THC. They found that administering a THC-like synthetic drug to older rats performed better at a memory test than a control group of non-medicated elderly rodents.

In some of the rats, the drug apparently lowered inflammation in the hippocampus — the region of the brain responsible for short-term memory. It also seems to have stimulated the generation of new brain cells.

"When we're young, we reproduce neurons and our memory works fine," said co-author Yannick Marchalant, another Ohio State psychologist. "When we age, the process slows down, so we have a decrease in new cell formation in normal aging. You need those cells to come back and help form new memories, and we found that this THC-like agent can influence creation of those cells."

Wenk added two cautionary notes to his report. First, to be effective, any such treatment along these lines would have to take place before memory loss is obvious. Second, the researchers still have much work to do.

"We need to find exactly which receptors are most crucial" to the generation of new brain cells, he said. This discovery would "ideally lead to the development of drugs that specifically activate those receptors."

In the meantime, should aging baby boomers who are worried about old-age mental impairment light up a joint? Wenk was cautious in his answer, no doubt because marijuana is suspected to be harmful to health in other ways.

"Could people smoke marijuana to prevent Alzheimer's disease if the disease is in the family? We're not saying that, but it might actually work," he said. "What we are saying is it appears that a safe, legal substance the mimics those important properties of marijuana can work on receptors in the brain to prevent memory impairments in aging. So that's really hopeful."



 
I can still remember my kids' names, so it must work for me!


meower

meower Avatar

Location: i believe, i believe, it's silly, but I believe
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 10:22am

 romeotuma wrote:


I never said white noise is a cause— I said it was a major contributor to triggering autism...  things like autism are so complex that it is unlikely there is a single cause, but a complex combination of factors... here, I will quote directly from a hard copy of the book—

During the critical period BDNF turns on the nucleus basalis, the part of our brain that allows us to focus our attention — and kees it on, throughout the entire critical period...

Merzenich's work on the critical period and BDNF helped him develop a theory that explains how so many different problems could be part of a single autistic whole.  During the critical period, he argues, some situations overexcite the neurons in children who have genes that predispose them to autism, leading to the massive, premature release of BDNF.  Instead of important connections being reinforced, all connections are.  So much BDNF is released that it turns off the critical period prematurely, sealing all these connection in place, and the child is left with scores of undifferentiated brain maps and hence pervasive developmental disorders.  Their brains are hyperexcitable and hypersensitive.  If they hear one frequency, the whole auditory cortex starts firing...

If the BDNF release was contributing to autism and language problems, Merzenich needed to understand what might cause young neurons to get "over excited" and release massive amounts of the chemical.  Several studies alerted him to how an environmental factor might contribute.  One disturbing study showed that the closer children lived to the noisy airport in Frankfurt, Germany, the lower their intelligence was.  A similar study on children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, found that the closer their floor was to the highway, the lower their intelligence...

White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.

 
sorry I reread your post.  I'm gonna look more at the book. 

(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 10:21am

 meower wrote:

i skimmed it, and will look more intently later, but it seems to me that this guy isnt saying that white noise is a cause of autism (and I didnt see anything about lower IQ's of kids) but that white noise is a factor in why it is hard  for these kids to process language. 
Big Difference no?
 

I never said white noise is a cause— I said it was a major contributor to triggering autism...  things like autism are so complex that it is unlikely there is a single cause, but a complex combination of factors... here, I will quote directly from a hard copy of the book—

During the critical period BDNF turns on the nucleus basalis, the part of our brain that allows us to focus our attention — and keeps it on, throughout the entire critical period...

Merzenich's work on the critical period and BDNF helped him develop a theory that explains how so many different problems could be part of a single autistic whole.  During the critical period, he argues, some situations overexcite the neurons in children who have genes that predispose them to autism, leading to the massive, premature release of BDNF.  Instead of important connections being reinforced, all connections are.  So much BDNF is released that it turns off the critical period prematurely, sealing all these connection in place, and the child is left with scores of undifferentiated brain maps and hence pervasive developmental disorders.  Their brains are hyperexcitable and hypersensitive.  If they hear one frequency, the whole auditory cortex starts firing...

If the BDNF release was contributing to autism and language problems, Merzenich needed to understand what might cause young neurons to get "over excited" and release massive amounts of the chemical.  Several studies alerted him to how an environmental factor might contribute.  One disturbing study showed that the closer children lived to the noisy airport in Frankfurt, Germany, the lower their intelligence was.  A similar study on children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, found that the closer their floor was to the highway, the lower their intelligence...

White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.




meower

meower Avatar

Location: i believe, i believe, it's silly, but I believe
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 9:59am

 romeotuma wrote:


Sure...  here's the best reference to it online that I can find—

from The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge which is also available at the RP link to Amazon...

 
i skimmed it, and will look more intently later, but it seems to me that this guy isnt saying that white noise is a cause of autism (and I didnt see anything about lower IQ's of kids) but that white noise is a factor in why it is hard  for these kids to process language. 
Big Difference no?

(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 9:56am

 meower wrote:

can you cite this please?  thanx 
 

Sure...  here's the best reference to it online that I can find—

from The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge which is also available at the RP link to Amazon...


meower

meower Avatar

Location: i believe, i believe, it's silly, but I believe
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 9:45am

 romeotuma wrote:


Please put my p.s. in my quote on your response, honey...  although many children are genetically susceptible to autism, new research has indicated that white noise, which is constant background noise from machines, can be a major contributor to triggering autism...  also, children in general who are exposed to white noise, for example kids who live close to airports or expressways, have lower intelligence...  the white noise over stimulates the auditory cortex...  this scrambles neurons...

 
can you cite this please?  thanx 

hippiechick

hippiechick Avatar

Location: topsy turvy land
Gender: Female


Posted: Dec 8, 2008 - 9:17am

 romeotuma wrote:



I posted this earlier under the forum on autism, but I am putting it here, too, because it is so significant...  this program helps all children raise their I.Q. significantly... basically, the program trains the brain to fire more neurons simultaneously, which accelerates perception, concentration, and storage of data— it requires less mental energy to learn something, so speed and retention improve...

this can help anybody...  I am gonna try it out myself early next year... I need all the help I can get...

Fast ForWord

p.s.  You can order this online thru the Radio Paradise link to Amazon—  just go to the home page for RP...

 
Scientific studies have shown that they can make great strides with children with autism/retardation by starting to work with them at birth. It's a wonderful breakthrough.

(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 7, 2008 - 9:03am



Silencing growth inhibitors could help recovery from brain injury...

Silencing natural growth inhibitors may make it possible to regenerate nerves damaged by brain or spinal cord injury, finds a study from Children's Hospital Boston. In a mouse study published in the November 7 issue of Science, researchers temporarily silenced genes that prevent mature neurons from regenerating, and caused them to recover and re-grow vigorously after damage.

Because injured neurons cannot regenerate, there is currently no treatment for spinal cord or brain injury, says Zhigang He, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurology at Children's and senior author on the paper. Previous studies that looked at removing inhibitory molecules from the neurons' environment, including some from He's own lab, have found only modest effects on nerve recovery. But now He's team, in collaboration with Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Children's, demonstrates that re-growth is primarily regulated from within the cells themselves.

"We knew that on completion of development, cells stop growing due to genetic mechanisms that prevent overgrowth," explains He. "We thought that this kind of mechanism might also prevent regeneration after injury."

The key pathway for controlling cell growth in neurons, known as the mTOR pathway, is active in cells during development, but is substantially down-regulated once neurons have matured. Moreover, upon injury, this pathway is almost completely silenced, presumably for the cell to conserve energy to survive. He and colleagues reasoned that preventing this down-regulation might allow regeneration to occur.

He and his team used genetic techniques to delete two key inhibitory regulators of the mTOR pathway, known as PTEN and TSC1, in the brain cells of mice. After two weeks, the mice were subjected to mechanical damage of the optic nerve. Two weeks post-injury, up to 50 percent of injured neurons in the mice with gene deletions of PTEN or TSC1 survived, compared to about 20 percent of those without the deletions. And of the surviving mutant mice, up to 10 percent showed significant re-growth of axons, the fiber-like projections of neurons that transmit signals, over long distances. This re-growth increased over time.

Although this study used genetic techniques, He notes that it may be possible to accomplish the same re-growth through pharmacologic means. "This is the first time it has been possible to see such significant regeneration by manipulating single molecules," says He. "We believe that these findings have opened up the possibility for making small-molecule drugs or developing other approaches to promote axon regeneration."

While such long-distance regeneration of axons has not been seen before using other techniques, it is still unknown whether these regenerating axons can restore function, He adds.  The research group is now looking at axon regeneration after spinal cord injury and given the current availability of specific PTEN inhibitors, the researchers hope that these and similar small-molecule inhibitors of the mTOR pathway will lead to future neural regeneration therapies.

Source: Children's Hospital Boston


(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Dec 2, 2008 - 11:11am



Pruritus
is an itch or a sensation that makes a person want to scratch.

Pruritus can cause discomfort and be frustrating. If it is severe, it can lead to sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression. The exact cause of an itch is unknown. It is a complex process involving nerves that respond to certain chemicals like histamine that are released in the skin, and the processing of nerve signals in the brain. Pruritus can be a part of skin diseases, internal disorders, or due to faulty processing of the itch sensation within the nervous system.

Who gets pruritus?

There are many skin diseases like urticaria (hives), varicella (chicken pox), and eczema which may have itching associated with a rash. Some skin conditions only have symptoms of pruritus without having an obvious rash. Dry skin can itch, especially in the winter, with no visual signs of a rash.  Some parasitic infestations such as scabies and lice may be very itchy. Itchy, pigmented moles may be a sign of a malignant change.  Pruritus may be a manifestation of an internal condition. The most common example is kidney failure. Some types of liver disease like hepatitis, thyroid disease including both hyper (too much) and hypo (too little) thyroid hormone levels, some blood disorders such as lymphomas, iron deficiency anemia, polycythemia vera, multiple myeloma, and neurologic conditions such as pinched nerves and post herpetic neuralgia can cause itch. Infectious diseases like HIV can cause severe itching.

How is pruritus diagnosed and treated?

Often the dermatologist will be able to diagnose these conditions with an examination; however, to determine a specific cause of the itch, a blood test, skin scraping, or biopsy may be needed to help make the diagnosis. If the itch is due to a skin disease such as hives or eczema, treatment of the skin disease, itself, with prescription topical medications and/or oral antihistamines generally relieves the itch. If the itch is secondary to an internal disease, patients may require treatment of the disease, oral medication, or occasionally ultraviolet light therapy to relieve the itch.

Sometimes, the dermatologist will prescribe a cooling topical lotion or cream and/or an oral medication to relieve the itch.Pruritus is often disrupting and difficult to control but usually responds well to treatment. While a specific identifying cause for the itch may not be found, an appropriate work-up to exclude internal disease should be completed.

Although there are many causes for pruritus, some basics apply to most treatments:

When bathing or showering, use tepid or lukewarm water.
Use mild cleansers with low pH.
Rinse soap film off completely, pat the skin lightly, and immediately apply a moisturizing lotion or cream after bathing.
Wear light, loose clothing.
A cool work or domestic environment can help reduce the severity of itching.
For itchy conditions where blistering or weeping of the skin is present, such as chicken pox or poison ivy, a cool oatmeal bath or topical drying agents such as calamine lotion can be helpful.

To learn more about pruritus, call toll free (888) 462-DERM (3376) to find a dermatologist in your area.




(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Nov 24, 2008 - 10:38am



Here is something to be very excited about—

doctors have come up with a possible cure for type 1 diabetes...  it is a combination of two cancer drugs— "The drugs - imatinib (marketed as Gleevec) and sunitinib (marketed as Sutent) - were found to put type 1 diabetes into remission in 80 percent of the test mice and work permanently in 80 percent of those that go into remission."

They show that remission to be permanent, which basically means it is a cure...  this treatment could be available to humans as soon as a year from now...  if you know any people with type 1 diabetes, pass on this data to them so they can research it...

 
(former member)

(former member) Avatar

Location: hotel in Las Vegas
Gender: Male


Posted: Nov 17, 2008 - 8:26am



NYT Editorial

Who Should Take a Statin?
Published: November 17, 2008

A large new study seems to suggest that millions of people with low cholesterol could benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins. That would be a boon for some drug companies, but whether it would be good for all patients remains an open question.  The study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, involved some 17,800 patients with normal or low levels of the bad form of cholesterol but high levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP, which is often a measure of inflammation in artery walls. Half were given the statin Crestor, made by AstraZeneca; the other half received a placebo.

The benefits of the statin were so striking that a monitoring board stopped the trial in midcourse so that the placebo group could get the medicine, too. Those who got the statin had 54 percent fewer heart attacks, 48 percent fewer strokes and 20 percent fewer deaths from all causes. The participants included men 50 and older and women 60 and older with no history of heart disease or high cholesterol. But they all had high levels of CRP, and many had such other risk factors as high blood pressure, obesity and smoking. Whether the statin helped because it reduced normal cholesterol to even lower levels or because it reduced CRP levels is not clear.

Some 16 million to 20 million Americans take statins to reduce bad cholesterol, but some experts believe the new study suggests several million more should probably take statins as well.  Before rushing ahead it will be crucial to establish who might really benefit. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, where the study was published, stresses the importance of establishing the long-term safety of drastically lowering cholesterol levels before committing patients who have no clinical signs of disease to decades of drug treatment. Participants who took Crestor also had a worrisome increase in diabetes.

The results must also be evaluated in the light of two potential conflicts of interest. The lead investigator stands to benefit from a patent involving the use of CRP to evaluate the risk of cardiovascular disease, and AstraZeneca financed the study whose results it is now trumpeting as "dramatic."  Given that half of all heart attacks and strokes occur in people whose cholesterol is not considered high, it seems likely that there is a group of people with normal cholesterol who could benefit by taking statins. The task ahead for the writers of medical guidelines is to define just who those people might be.


Page: Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 49, 50, 51, 52  Next