Public Health
Falling in love is ‘more scientific than you think,’ according to new study by SU professor
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A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue is getting attention around the world. The groundbreaking study, “The Neuroimaging of Love,” reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.
Ortigue is an assistant professor of psychology and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology, both in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University.
Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.
Graco recalls 2 million baby strollers after 4 deaths
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Graco Children’s Products Inc, a unit of Newell Rubbermaid, is recalling about 2 million baby strollers sold before 2008 at major U.S. retailers, after four infants died of strangulation.
The news of the recall of the China-made strollers comes less than three weeks after Mattel Inc’s Fisher-Price recalled some 10 million toys and other items, renewing concerns about safety standards of infant products - a good chunk of which is made in low-cost centers like China.
The latest recall, made along with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, applies to Graco Quattro Tour and MetroLite strollers sold at retailers including Babies R Us, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart between November 2000 and December 2007.
Drug tests encourage unneeded transfusions: study
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Some doctors are ordering unnecessary and potentially risky blood transfusions for cancer patients in order to make them eligible for research studies, researchers said on Wednesday.
Dr. Jeannie Callum of the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto and colleagues uncovered the case of a young woman with advanced cancer whose doctor ordered a transfusion even though her hemoglobin level was not low enough to require one.
Tests of new drugs and other treatments often require volunteers to have blood values within certain limits, and the patient’s doctor was trying to alter hers to make her eligible for a study of a new drug.
Actor Tom Bosley of “Happy Days” dies: report
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Actor Tom Bosley, whose career spanned five decades and included his role as the father of a typical American family on popular 1970s TV comedy “Happy Days,” has died at 83, according to media reports on Tuesday.
Celebrity news website TMZ cited family members as saying Bosley died at his home in Palm Springs, California and recently he had been battling a staph infection.
A spokesman for Bosley was not immediately available for confirmation.
Polish bishops wade into IVF debate
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Bishops of Poland’s influential Roman Catholic Church have branded in vitro fertilisation (IVF) “the younger sister of eugenics” in a letter aimed at swaying lawmakers ahead of a parliamentary debate.
But their intervention, two weeks after the church condemned the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize for medicine to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, triggered an unusually sharp response from lawmakers who say the clergy should not meddle in politics.
“The in vitro method comes at great human cost. To give birth to one child ... many humans suffer death at different stages of the medical process,” said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.
Areva, Gabon launch plan to help ill uranium workers
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Gabon and French mining giant Areva have launched a health initiative to treat more than 1,000 former miners who fell ill after working in a uranium mine in the Central African nation.
The mine workers became ill after working in the COMUF mine, which produced more than 26,000 tonnes of uranium over 38 years and was controlled by Areva from 1986 until it closed down in 1999.
Production stopped due to falling uranium prices but Areva has since secured new permits to look for uranium in the region, in the south of Gabon.
Climate Change May Alter Natural Climate Cycles of Pacific
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While it’s still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.
El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki is a Japanese term for “similar, but different”).
Last year, the journal Nature published a paper that found climate change is behind this shift from El Nino to El Nino Modoki. While the findings of that paper are still being debated, this latest paper in Nature Geoscience presents evidence that El Nino Modoki drives a climate pattern known as the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).
Study warns that over-the-counter weight-reducing products can cause harm and may even kill
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The desire for a quick-fix for obesity fuels a lucrative market in so-called natural remedies. But a study of medical records in Hong Kong revealed 66 cases where people were suspected to have been poisoned by a “natural” slimming therapy. In eight cases the people became severely ill, and in one case the person died. The study is published today in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
The researchers looked at the ingredients in the 81 slimming products that these people had taken. They found 12 different agents that fell into five categories: undeclared weight-loss drugs; drug analogues (unlicensed chemical derivatives of licensed drugs); banned drugs; drugs used for an inappropriate indication; and thyroid hormones.
“People like the idea of using a natural remedy because they think that if it is natural, it will be safe. There are two problems here. Firstly not all natural agents are harmless, and secondly the remedies also contain potentially harmful manufactured drugs,” says Dr Magdalene Tang, who works at the Toxicology Reference Laboratory at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong.
Online health services need tighter rules: report
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Online health information and disease-risk tests can mislead, confuse and create needless anxiety, and governments should do more ensure the people who use them know what they are buying, UK experts said on Tuesday.
A report by a British medical ethics group said private DNA tests may be “medically or therapeutically meaningless” and could give false results or information that is “unclear, unreliable or inaccurate.”
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics called on the government to set up an accreditation scheme for providers of online health records, and for DNA testing and body scanning services to be better regulated to help protect consumers.
New osteoporosis guidelines: Osteoporosis Canada
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Comprehensive new guidelines from the Osteoporosis Canada aimed at preventing fragility fractures in women and men over the age of 50 are published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj100771.pdf.
“Fragility fractures, the consequence of osteoporosis, are responsible for excess mortality, morbidity, chronic pain, institutionalization and economic costs,” writes Dr. Alexandra Papaioannou, McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences with coauthors. “They represent 80% of all fractures in menopausal women over age 50 and those with hip or vertebral fractures have substantially increased risk of death post-fracture.”
Fewer than 20% of women and 10% of men with fragility fractures receive interventions to prevent future fractures, writes co-author Dr. Bill Leslie, University of Manitoba.
Michael Douglas near end of throat cancer treatment
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Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas has almost completed a grueling eight weeks of chemotherapy and radiation to treat advanced throat cancer, his publicist said.
Douglas, 66, has one more treatment left this week and then “no further treatments are scheduled,” publicist Allen Burry told People magazine.
“He’s really happy about it ending,” Burry added.
How Republicans could block healthcare reform
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Republicans could keep their promises to stop healthcare reform even if they cannot repeal it, simply by blocking legislation needed to pay for it, one expert argued on Wednesday.
Control of one house of Congress could give the Republicans power to cripple the law, creating “zombie legislation,” healthcare expert Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution wrote in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Healthcare reform is President Barack Obama’s signature policy.
Americans’ life expectancy continues to fall behind other countries’
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The United States continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance—obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities, and homicide—are not to blame, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published today as a Health Affairs Web First. The study, by Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied at Columbia University, looked at health spending; behavioral risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. and 12 other nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom).
While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries. Fifteen-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the US have fallen relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years. Forty-five year old U.S. white women fared the worst—by 2005 their 15-year survival rates were lower than that of all the other countries. Moreover, the survival rates of this group in 2005 had not even surpassed the 1975 15-year survival rates for Swiss, Swedish, Dutch or Japanese women. The U.S. ranking for 15-year life expectancy for 45-year-old men also declined, falling from 3rd in 1975 to 12th in 2005, according to the study, “What Changes in Survival Rates Tell Us About U.S. Health Care.”
When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries.
UC San Diego Helps Soaring Number of Community Members Suffering from Hunger
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As a result of the difficult economic climate, hunger is at an all time high in San Diego. At the University of California, San Diego, students, staff and faculty are doing their part to help feed the community by participating in the Colleges Rock Hunger contest Oct. 6 – 22, hosted by the San Diego Food Bank. The nonprofit agency handed out 15.3 million pounds of food this past fiscal year, a 56 percent increase from the 9.1 million pounds two years earlier. According to the Center on Hunger and Poverty, today over five million Californians are hungry or live in fear of hunger.
Approximately 74,000 college students from UC San Diego, California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of San Diego (USD) are competing in the contest to meet the huge increase in demand for food from community members affected by layoffs, bankruptcies and other economic woes. Their combined donations will be the first official contribution to the 2010 San Diego Food Bank Holiday Food Drive. This is the third year that the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego has sponsored the drive.
This is a great opportunity for UC San Diego to showcase our dedication to service,” said Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. “Washington Monthly ranks UC San Diego the number one university in the nation based on UC San Diego’s positive impact on our country.
400 Nigerian children dead from lead poisoning-MSF
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Some 400 children in northern Nigeria have died since March from lead poisoning linked to illegal mining by residents for gold, and thousands more remain at risk, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The Dutch arm of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) reported the new toll, up from 160 deaths last June, and is treating a further 500 children in its four clinics, a U.N. spokeswoman said. Most victims are under age five.
“The lead pollution and intoxication crisis in Zamfara state is far from over,” said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
