Family effort needed to rein in childhood obesity
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Governments and food manufacturers are introducing new measures in the fight against childhood obesity because of growing public alarm about the issue, but some experts say these efforts will ultimately fail until a widespread, family-driven approach is taken.
About a third of children are now overweight, and 15 percent are obese, the highest the prevalence rates have ever been, according to the American Obesity Association. The AOA defines being overweight or obese as a Body Mass Index (BMI) at or above the 85th or 95th percentile, respectively, for children of the same age and sex.
Anesthetists address challenge of obese patients
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Very obese people about to undergo surgery need special attention and equipment, which has prompted the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland to develop guidelines for these situations.
“Treating morbidly obese patients poses extra challenges for anaesthetists,” Dr. Alastair Chambers, the chair of the working group that drew up the guidelines, said in a statement.
Diets high in choline may increase risk for colorectal polyps
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Contrary to expectations, diets high in the nutrient choline were associated with an increased risk of some colorectal polyps, which can—but do not always—lead to colorectal cancer, according to a study published online in the August 7 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Major food sources of choline include red meat, eggs, poultry, and dairy products. Choline is involved in a biochemical process known as one-carbon metabolism. Studies have shown that people with increased intake of other nutrients required for one-carbon metabolism, such as folate, are at a decreased risk for colorectal polyps. This is the first study to examine the association between choline and colorectal polyps.
Miniature Implanted Devices Could Treat Epilepsy, Glaucoma
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Purdue University researchers have developed new miniature devices designed to be implanted in the brain to predict and prevent epileptic seizures and a nanotech sensor for implantation in the eye to treat glaucoma.
Findings will be detailed in three research papers being presented at the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society’s Sciences and Technologies for Health conference from Aug. 23-26 in Lyon, France.
Link identified between Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma
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UK scientists have shown for the first time that key proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease are also implicated in glaucoma, the major cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. Research carried out at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and funded by the Wellcome Trust has also shown that novel drugs being trialled for Alzheimer’s disease which target this protein may be used to treat glaucoma.
The research team has developed a new technology for visualising nerve cell damage in the retina, known as Detection of Apoptosing Retinal Cells. Using this technology, they demonstrated that the protein beta-amyloid, which causes the so-called “plaque” lesions in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, also leads to nerve cell death in the retina. The research is published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Bullying tied to mental health problems later
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Boys who bully or are victims of bullies may have a higher risk of mental health disorders as young men, a study published Monday suggests.
The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, are based on a group of 2,540 boys Finnish boys. At age 8, the boys were asked whether and how often they bullied other children, were targets of bullying, or both. Parents and teachers also answered questions about any psychiatric symptoms the boys had.
Caffeine may slow cognitive decline in older women
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Several cups of coffee or tea per day seem to slow the loss of brain cells in elderly women, but caffeine has no effect on dementia itself, according to results of a new study.
Dr. Karen Ritchie, a scientist at INSERM U888 in Montpellier, France, and her associates followed 2,820 men and 4,197 women, age 65 or older, and free of dementia. The team assessed the participants’ caffeine consumption in terms of 100-milligram “units”; one cup of coffee was considered to contain 100 mg of caffeine and tea, 50 mg.
Neuro symptoms in pregnancy rarely stroke-related
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Neurological symptoms that occur during pregnancy are rarely caused by a mini-stroke, or “transient ischemic attack” (TIA), but instead are usually associated with migraine with “aura,” according to a report in BMC Medicine.
Aura refers to symptoms that may precede the onset of a migraine (and also seizures), such as seeing flashing lights or temporary vision loss.
New Studies Indicate Age is Important in Hormone Therapy Use
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Five years ago this summer the National Institutes of Health’s stopped early a major portion of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a large and ambitious study to address the most common causes of death, disability and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women.
One part of the WHI sought to determine whether hormone therapy has a positive or negative impact on cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. The estrogen-plus-progestin hormone therapy trial for women with their uteruses intact was stopped in July 2002 after investigators found that the associated health risks of the combination hormone therapy outweighed the benefits.
Integrated system, rapid transfer offers lifeline for heart attack victims
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Heart attack patients received lifesaving treatment quickly when hospitals and communities used an integrated, rapid transfer system to get patients to a facility equipped to perform artery-opening procedures, according to a report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Our aim was to develop a standardized system of heart attack care, which included timely access to artery-opening treatment for patents presenting to either the major hospital with a cardiac catheterization lab or to any one of 30 community hospitals without a cath lab,” said Timothy D. Henry, M.D., lead author of the report and a cardiologist at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minn. Abbott Northwestern Hospital is a 619-bed hospital with a cardiac catheterization lab equipped to treat heart attack patients with the artery-opening procedure called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), also known as angioplasty. A major heart attack is when a complete blockage occurs in a coronary artery.
Shorter heart health programs just as effective in saving lives
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Secondary prevention programs for coronary heart disease that contain less than 10 hours contact with health professionals and those provided by family doctors are just as effective in saving lives as more expensive, longer and more specialized hospital-based alternatives, according to cardiovascular researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Dr. Alexander Clark, an associate professor in the U of A Faculty of Nursing and Alberta Heritage Investigator, is lead author on an article published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation.
The matrix of autism
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Autistic children are doubly stigmatized. On the one hand, they are often dismissed as “low functioning” or mentally retarded, especially if they have poor speaking skills as many do. Yet when autistics do show exceptional abilities—uncanny visual discrimination and memory for detail, for example—their flashes of brilliance are marginalized as aberrations, mere symptoms of their higher order cognitive deficit. They often earn a dubious promotion to “idiot savant.”
The theoretical justification for this view is that prototypical autistic skills are not true intelligence at all, but really just low-level perceptual abilities. Indeed, in this view autistics are missing the big picture because they are obsessed with the detail.
Kids often get unapproved drugs for sleep problems
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Doctors commonly prescribe drugs to children and teens with sleep difficulties that are not approved for use by patients in these age groups, a new study shows.
Eighty-one percent of physician visits for sleep problems by children and teens ended in a prescription for some type of medication, most commonly a drowsiness-promoting antihistamine or a sedative, Dr. Sasko D. Stojanovski of The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy in Columbus and colleagues found.
No race disparities found in rheumatoid arthritis
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Though some research has suggested there are racial differences in the severity of rheumatoid arthritis, a new study finds that the disease seems to affect men similarly regardless of race.
Researchers found that among 573 male veterans in their mid-60s with rheumatoid arthritis, white and African-American men had similar measures of disease severity. The exceptions were that black men tended to have less tenderness in the joints and fewer rheumatoid nodules—growths under the skin usually seen in more-advanced cases of rheumatoid arthritis.
Colon cancer a disease of hormone deficiency, Jefferson team finds
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Researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson in Philadelphia have found new evidence suggesting that colon cancer is actually a disease of missing hormones that could potentially be treated by hormone replacement therapy.
Reporting August 1, 2007 in the journal Gastroenterology, clinical pharmacologist Scott Waldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, and his co-workers showed that GCC – guanylyl cyclase C, a protein receptor on the surface of intestinal epithelial cells for two hormones, guanylin and uroguanylin, can suppress tumor formation. These hormones regulate the growth of intestinal epithelial cells.
