Health News Blog provides coverage of current health news.

posted by admin on Apr 20

Ionce knew a strong, healthy grandmother, 72 years young, who lived an active life, driving her friends to club meetings and to the store, working part time, running errands for her sickly neighbors. One day she told me she had had a cold for three weeks; it simply wouldn’t go away. When it persisted, I insisted she be thoroughly checked out. The diagnosis was grim: leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells.

I visited her in the hospital every day, horrified at the rapid progress of the disease. This once-vibrant woman lay in bed, too weak to move, mouth agape, eyes dull. Shortly before she died she said to me, “I was so healthy. Why did I get sick?” Unable to answer her question, I turned away, tears in my eyes. I had no answers for her. Neither could I offer any help. It was especially painful because this woman was my mother.

Like many people of her generation, she never thought about health or illness. Health was something you took for granted— until you lost it. Today we have a different approach, taught to us by painful experience. We’re learning that health is a treasure to be guarded, a single, precious flower to nurture and protect. The good gardener is rewarded with a wonderful harvest of health and happiness.

Ironically, we can thank disease for forcing us to focus our attention on health. In my 28 years of practicing medicine I’ve seen scares come and go. Fears of tuberculosis and polio were replaced by fright over heart disease and cancer. A new scourge, herpes, came into the picture in the early 1980s. Herpes hysteria had hardly settled down before it was nearly swept aside by the panic over AIDS (acquired immune-deficiency syndrome) and other immune-system diseases. New diseases seem to be popping out of thin air. Some of them we learn to cure. Others we can’t.

The patients who come to my office every day are frightened. “What’s going to get me?” they wonder. A heart attack? Cancer? A stroke? Diabetes? Will I be crippled by arthritis or made helpless by Alzheimer’s disease? Will I wind up in a hospital or a rest home, unable to care for myself?

Recently, a very attractive 39-year-old businesswoman, the sales director for a national cosmetic company, sat in my office nervously rubbing one hand against the other. The divorced parent of a ten-year-old boy, she travels extensively on business.

“You know what it’s like, Dr. Fox,” she said. “You get to a city, you’re running around all day; at night you go to your hotel, and you’re lonely. So you’ve got a ‘boyfriend’ you see 10, 12 times a year, or maybe you meet someone at a hotel. I don’t jump into bed with any guy, but I’m not married and I get lonely on the road. But not any more. I’ve been getting away from that in the past six months. I’m so scared of getting sick, of catching something that will wreck my immune system. I don’t care how lonely I get, I’m not doing it anymore. Not until they figure out a way to protect you from all those diseases you can catch. Not just AIDS, but all of them.”

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posted by admin on Apr 2

Angiograms are just pictures of the inside of arteries. A small tube, or catheter, is fed from an artery in a leg or arm back up into the heart: Dye that shows up on X ray is released into the openings of the coronary arteries, and as it fills the arterial system the progress is watched by the cardiologist. The circulation of the heart can be seen in minute detail.

Coronary angiography can pinpoint the sites of narrowing of the coronary arteries, and can suggest areas suitable for bypass surgery. When the results are assessed together with echocardiography, a thal-lium-201 (or other radioisotope) scan, and PET, a complete picture of the problems of the heart is given. On the basis of that picture, the next step—treatment—will be decided.

These tests sound frightening, but they are not as bad as they seem, and the coronary unit staff will do their best to put you at your ease at every stage. These tests are important, and a full assessment of your particular problem cannot be made without them; so if you are offered them, please accept. They will help your doctors to make the best possible judgment about what is best for you. If you are a woman and are not offered these tests, you might inquire why.

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posted by admin on Apr 2

Apart from feeling better and looking better, what does regular exercise do for the heart?

It has been shown, and this is about the one point on which all the experts on heart disease do agree, that it reduces the risk of, or postpones the onset of, a whole series of diseases, including arthritis, rheumatism, disc trouble, diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary disease, stroke, and even depression and anxiety. And if you are overweight, it is the best way to lose the flab.

If you exercise regularly you are less likely to smoke and overeat. Your blood pressure falls and your heart beats more slowly and more efficiently at rest. When you exercise, the heart rate rises slower, to a lower peak, and returns to normal faster if you are a regular exerciser than if you are a couch potato. That means the supply-demand equation so often mentioned in this book is tilted to your benefit.

Exercising regularly also postpones the onset of old age. You can recognize old people who have exercised regularly by their straighter backs, their better neck movements, their more mobile joints and more bulky muscles. They are fitter mentally, too, being less depressed and less isolated from others.

Exercise is particularly important for women. It helps to drive calcium into their bones, thus warding off the excesses of osteoporosis, the disease that causes tens of thousands of older women in the U.S. every year to have fractured hips. For these women, calcium loss from bones can be a serious problem after the menopause. Physically active women start off their menopause with a bigger store of calcium in their thigh and hip bones, so that any later loss of calcium, hopefully, is never so severe that these bones will break.

It is never too late to start exercising, for men or women. For more than twenty years now, heart attack survivors have been encouraged to exercise as soon as they have recovered from the experience. There have been some astonishing successes. Dr. Terrence Kavanagh, who ran a cardiac rehabilitation center in Toronto, encouraged his patients to start carefully, building up to a light jog for an hour at a time.

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posted by admin on Apr 2

You should now be convinced that you will benefit from losing your risk factors, although you may not be convinced that you can do it!

You have two obvious ways to reverse the process that is causing your angina. First, you can reduce the work done by your heart, thereby lessening the demand for oxygen and glucose, and second, you can improve the circulation in your coronary arteries so that they can deliver a better supply of oxygen and glucose. If you can do both together, so much the better.

There are three other, less obvious, options: First, you can make the blood flowing through the coronary arteries carry more oxygen; and second, you can make the blood less viscous, so that it flows more easily. Third, you can help to make the heart muscle work more efficiently, so that it needs less oxygen to do the same amount of work.

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posted by admin on Apr 2

The Finns were stung enough by their poor performance rates to do something about them. They started their North Karelia (the region between Finland and Russia) Project in 1972, and it is still continuing. The North Karelia health and social services departments combined in an onslaught on heart disease, with the specific aim of reducing blood pressure and the amount of saturated fats (mainly red meat and dairy products) in the diet. The mass media cooperated in the project. From 1974 to 1979, in North Karelia there was a 22 percent reduction in coronary heart disease deaths, compared with a 12 percent reduction in neighboring Kuopio, and an 11 percent reduction in Finland minus Kuopio and North Karelia. In 1982 the difference was still evident, showing that community-based programs giving a strong health message can work. However, the message has to be continued for each generation: more recent reports in the 1990s concerning Finland suggest that the current population is backsliding and that its heart disease rates are rising again.

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posted by admin on Apr 2

In the meantime, I told Jim he had to change his lifestyle. He had to stop smoking right away (he smoked ten cigarettes a day). He also had to eat less and change to a diet low in animal fats (his blood cholesterol level was slightly above normal). I suggested he switch to a Mediterranean diet, which means plenty of fruit and vegetables, seafood, and pasta. He could have the occasional glass of red wine in the evening with his meal, but he needed to avoid excess alcohol, red meats, and full-cream dairy products. I told him he should exercise as much as he could, up to the point of experiencing pain. Once he was in pain, he was always to stop immediately and rest until the pain subsided completely.

Jim was given nitroglycerine tablets to place under his tongue when the pain started, and even to use before he knew he was going for an energetic walk. He was also asked to take half of an aspirin a day, permanently. His blood pressure was on the high side, so he was given pills called beta-blockers to reduce it, and was asked to return to have it measured once a week for the next month or so.

After just one week, the change in Jim was astonishing. He was able to walk three times as far as he had previously, before the pain started, and the treadmill showed that he could tolerate much more exercise still. He lost a little weight, and his blood pressure had fallen into the normal range. In fact, Jim felt so much better that he asked if his impending operation was really necessary. I thought that it was, because he was still relatively young, and I was still worried about the narrowings in his coronary arteries.

Two months after he came in for the first time, Jim had his bypass operation. His arteries were ragged from a condition called atheroma, and he needed three different bypasses, using grafts from branches of an artery inside the chest wall, to get around the worst of the narrowed areas.

He recovered remarkably quickly from the surgery, and in the three years since his operation, he has never smoked a cigarette, he has maintained a normal weight, and has even started jogging. In fact, Jim aims to complete the Great Scottish Run—the annual half-marathon around the streets of Glasgow, which attracts some seven thousand runners—next year. I’m sure he will. He no longer has chest pains, even when he jogs. Since he lost the weight, his blood pressure has remained normal, and is now even on the low side, so that he has stopped his drugs, except for the aspirin, which he will take for the rest of his life.

Jim is the model patient. Once his illness was spelled out for him, he determined to look after himself. He was not only doing it for himself, but for his wife and two children. As a self-employed man still in his forties, he knows only too well that they might be left alone, with very little behind them financially, if he were not to heed the warnings of his heart.

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posted by admin on Mar 24

The American Cancer Society recommended recently that mean age 50 or older should get an annual blood test in order to detect prostate cancers as early as possible.

The recommended blood test measures a substance known as prostate specific antigen (PSA). When the prostate is enlarged, PSA levels—secreted by the gland—are elevated. Medical experts say that’s a sign which may mean cancer.

The new American Cancer Society recommendation says that PSA testing should be done along with a digital rectal examination every year on men over 50. However, screening should begin at a younger age in blacks or those men who have a strong family history of prostate cancer.

According to the Cancer Society, almost 80 percent of all prostate cancers are diagnosed in men 65 or older. And the Society is recommending the PSA testing even though mass screening for prostate cancer has not been shown to reduce the number of deaths from the disease.

Nasal Spray Warning For Men With Enlarged Prostates

Some men with enlarged prostates may experience complications when using decongestant nasal sprays. Researchers say that some of the most commonly used nasal sprays can cause urinary retention in men who suffer from moderate prostate enlargement.

The researchers recommend that such men consult their doctors before using decongestant nasal sprays to combat a cold.

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posted by admin on Mar 24

1) Sleeping pills— once again, read the product packaging carefully. You’ll find that over-the-counter sleep aids are approved by the FDA “for occasional use only”. According to some experts, many people try to “anticipate” insomnia by taking a sleeping pill just in case a sleepless night is in store for them. This kind of usage, according to the experts, can lead to psychological dependency.

Most sleeping pills generally contain antihistamines, usually used to treat allergies. Used in sleeping pills, antihistamines can produce such side effects as nausea; vomiting; dizziness; fatigue; dryness of the mouth, nose and throat; and double vision, and are best used on an infrequent basis.

2) Codeine cough medicine— while codeine is a relatively safe drug, some people who take large quantities can become nauseated and constipated. Other people can develop a tolerance to those unpleasant side effects, and become addicted to codeine. Such an addiction is serious and requires treatment under the supervision of a doctor.

3) Eye drops— if you use eye drops three or four times a day for several weeks, you may suddenly find that you need them every few hours to alleviate eye redness. That’s because, when you try to stop, your eyes tend to get redder than they were before you first started using eye drops.

According to many ophthalmologists, the best way to quit using eye drops is to stop, cold-turkey. The doctors admit that it will take up to a month for your eyes to get back to normal, but continued use would only exacerbate the condition. Occasional use of eye drops is fine, but overuse can lead to problems.

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posted by admin on Mar 24

Both sun and wind can drain your skin of its moisture. Air conditioning can also be a problem because when air is cooled and its humidity level sinks too low, moisture quickly evaporates from your skin. Here are some measures you can take to fight dryness and keep your skin both soft and supple:

1) Use a humidifier when your air conditioner is on in order to help boost the air’s moisture level.

2) Don’t take long, hot baths. Such baths will induce a great amount of water loss through sweating. Take quick showers and warm sponge baths instead.

3) Either cut down on soap when you bathe or switch to a moisturizing soap like Vitabar in the Vitabath Plus formula.

4) Use a rich lotion or cream on damp skin after showering, to seal in moisture.

5) Use an emollient-rich sunscreen. Two such sunscreens are Vaseline Intensive Care’s Moisturizing Sunblock and Coppertone’s Moisturizing Sunblock Lotion.

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posted by admin on Mar 24

This is a fat-soluble vitamin which actually encompasses a group of related substances, including ergocalciferol (also known as vitamin D2) and cholecalciferol (vitamin D3) which play several important roles in the body. Vitamin D helps regulate the balance of calcium and phosphate, helps form bones and teeth, and aids the absorption of calcium from the intestine.

The body needs only small amounts of vitamin D, which can be provided by a balanced diet and normal exposure to sunlight. A deficiency of vitamin D may lead to low blood levels of calcium and phosphate, which results in a softening of the bones. In children this condition is known as rickets— in adults, it is called osteomalacia.

The best dietary source of vitamin D is fortified milk. Other good sources include butter, cheese, margarine, oily fish, liver, eggs, fortified cereals and breads, and cod liver oil. Normal exposure to sunlight is the non-dietary source. The recommended dietary allowance of vitamin D is 5 to 10 mcg.

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