GOOD NEWS: Teenagers Are Getting More Exercise and Vegetables

16 Sep 2013 General Health, Weight Loss Program , , , , , , , ,

well_teens-tmagArticle

Teenagers are exercising more, consuming less sugar and eating more fruits and vegetables, a trend that may be contributing to a leveling off of obesity rates, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that aggressive anti-obesity messages aimed at children may be starting to make a difference, albeit a small one. The study was published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday.

Still, most teenagers were falling short of federal recommendations, which call for children to get at least an hour of physical activity daily, a central message of Michelle Obama’s signature “Let’s Move” campaign. The new data showed that most children engaged in an hour of exercise fewer than five days a week and spent more than two hours a day watching television, chatting online and playing video games.

The numbers also revealed something of an age and racial divide. Younger children had the highest levels of physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption. But as children got older, the frequency of eating junk foods and engaging in sedentary behaviors crept up, along with average body mass index, a crude measure of obesity.

Black and Hispanic adolescents lagged behind whites on almost every measure of progress, even after the researchers tried to take into account the influence of socioeconomic factors.

“In some ways you can interpret what we found positively by saying we’re beginning to bend the curve, and hopefully we’ll start seeing a downward trend in obesity,” said Dr. Ronald J. Iannotti, a study author and chair of the department of exercise and health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “But there’s large room for improvement.”

The study analyzed data from a national survey of tens of thousands of schoolchildren in grades 6 through 10, which was carried out once every four years from roughly 2001 to 2010.

Childhood obesity rates, which have more than doubled since 1980, rose slightly between 2001 and 2006, then leveled off by 2010, at roughly 13 percent. The proportion of those who were overweight also plateaued at around 17 percent.

Obesity tends to follow children into adulthood, raising the risk of heart disease and cancer as well as Type 2 diabetes, a disease that has also risen sharply among children.

In the past year, other studies have hinted at improvements in the obesity rate among younger children, with some even showing a decline in some cities. But little was known about the extent to which physical and dietary behaviors might have played a role.

The new study found that at the same time obesity and overweight appeared to level off, there were, on average, very slight increases in physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption and the eating of breakfast, another habit public health officials consider a marker of healthy behavior.

The opposite trend was seen for behaviors that are widely discouraged. The amount of time teenagers spent watching television fell from about three hours a day in 2001 to less than two-and-a-half hours by 2010. Teenagers also reported drinking slightly fewer soft drinks and eating less candy.

Boys overall reported more physical activity than girls, but they also watched more television and played more video games and ate fewer fruits and vegetables.

One expert who was not involved in the study, David B. Allison, the director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said it was impossible from the data to deduce a cause and effect, since any number of factors that could influence obesity rates may have changed over time.

“We should be very cautious about drawing any attributions about causes based on time trend data,” Dr. Allison said.

But Dr. Iannotti said the findings seemed to suggest a pattern. “I think the public health message is beginning to be accepted,” he said.

 

info by By ANAHAD O’CONNOR of The NY Times

 

 

Gut bacteria may be key to fighting obesity

6 Sep 2013 General Health, Weight Loss Program

Different kinds of bacteria that live inside the gut can help spur obesity or protect against it, according to new research from scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.

They transplanted intestinal germs from fat or lean people into mice and watched the rodents change.

And what they ate determined whether the good germs could move in and do their job.

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Thursday’s report raises the possibility of one day turning gut bacteria into personalized fat-fighting therapies, and it may help explain why some people have a harder time losing weight than others do.

“It’s an important player,” said Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, who also studies how gut bacteria influence health but wasn’t involved in the new research. “This paper says that diet and microbes are necessary companions in all of this. They literally and figuratively feed each other.”

The research was reported in the journal Science.

We all develop with an essentially sterile digestive tract. Bacteria rapidly move in starting at birth — bugs that we pick up from mom and dad, the environment, first foods. Ultimately, the intestine teems with hundreds of species, populations that differ in people with varying health. Overweight people harbor different types and amounts of gut bacteria than lean people, for example. The gut bacteria we pick up as children can stick with us for decades, although their makeup changes when people lose weight, previous studies have shown.

Clearly, what you eat and how much you move are key to how much you weigh. But are those bacterial differences a contributing cause of obesity, rather than simply the result of it? If so, which bugs are to blame, and might it be possible to switch out the bad actors?

To start finding out, Washington University graduate student Vanessa Ridaura took gut bacteria from eight humans — four pairs of twins that each included one obese sibling and one lean sibling. One pair of twins was identical, ruling out an inherited explanation for their different weights. Using twins also guaranteed similar childhood environments and diets.

She transplanted the human microbes into the intestines of young mice that had been raised germ-free.

The mice who received gut bacteria from the obese people gained more weight — and experienced unhealthy metabolic changes — even though they didn’t eat more than the mice who received germs from the lean twins, said study senior author Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University’s Center of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology.

“This wasn’t attributable to differences in the amount of food they consumed, so there was something in the microbiota that was able to transmit this trait,” Gordon said in a statement. “Our question became: What were the components responsible?”

Then came what Gordon calls the “battle of the microbes.” Mice that harbored gut bacteria from a lean person were put in the same cages as mice that harbored the obesity-prone germs. The research team took advantage of an icky fact of rodent life: Mice are coprophagic — or eat feces — so presumably they could easily swap intestinal bugs.

What happened was a surprise. Certain bacteria from the lean mice invaded the intestines of the fatter mice, and their weight and metabolism improved. But the trade was one-way — the lean mice weren’t affected.

Moreover, the fatter mice got the bacterial benefit only when they were fed a low-fat, high-fiber diet. When Ridaura substituted the higher-fat, lower-fiber diet typical of Americans, the protective bug swap didn’t occur.

 

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Why? Gordon already knew from human studies that obese people harbor less diverse gut bacteria. “It was almost as if there were potential job vacancies” in their intestines that the lean don’t have, he explained.

Sure enough, a closer look at the mice that benefited from the bug swap suggests a specific type of bacteria, from a family named Bacteroidetes, moved into previously unoccupied niches in their colons — if the rodents ate right.

Robert W. Karp, a program director for genetics and genomics at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, told the New York Timesof the new study, “This is all weird and wonderful.”

How might those findings translate to people? For a particularly hard-to-treat diarrheal infection, doctors sometimes transplant stool from a healthy person into the sick person’s intestine. Some scientists wonder if fecal transplants from the lean to the fat might treat obesity, too.

But Gordon foresees a less invasive alternative: Determining the best combinations of intestinal bacteria to match a person’s diet, and then growing those bugs in sterile lab dishes – like this study could – and turning them into pills. He estimates such an attempt would take at least five more years of research.

“”In the future, the nutritional value and the effects of food will involve significant consideration of our microbiota–and developing healthy, nutritious foods will be done from the inside-out, not just the outside-in,” said Gordon.

 

2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Breast-Feeding Could Lower Breast Cancer Rates

10 Jun 2013 General Health, Well Woman , , , , , , ,

Breast-feeding isn’t only good for the developing infant: It helps mom out too.

A study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology on June 5 revealed that if people stuck with the recommended length of breast-feeding their newborn for at least one year, there would be 5,000 fewer cases of breast cancer, 54,000 fewer cases of hypertension and almost 14,000 less heart attacks in women each year. The researchers say low breast-feeding rates are racking up billions of dollars in health care costs each year.

“We know that 60 percent of women don’t even meet their personal breast-feeding goals, whether it’s three or four or six months,” author Dr. Melissa Bartick, assistant professor of medicine, said to TIME. “We need to do more to support women so they can breast-feed longer. There are thousands of needless cases of disease and death that could be prevented.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies are breast-fed exclusively for the first six months of life, and then have breast-milk supplementally given to them until they at least a year. Breast-feeding can continue as long as the mother, baby and physician feel it is appropriate. Solid food should only be introduced starting at six months of age, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently discovered that 40 percent of parents are giving their children solid food by the time they reach 4 months.

The World Health Organization recommends even longer breast-feeding, with complementary foods through a child is 2-years-old and beyond.

Though rates have increased in the U.S., only 45 percent of mothers are still breast-feeding at some level by six months, and only 23 percent continue on for one year.

It is recommended that women breast-feed because it provides protection for the babies, from the early “liquid gold” colostrums full of nutrients and antibodies produced at the end of pregnancy to the mature milk that has the right amount of fat, sugar, water and protein to nourish a healthy child. Breast milk is easier to digest, and the hormones and antibodies inside may help ward off diseases for the child.

Children who are breast-fed have lower rates of necrotizing enterocolitis, a gastrointestinal tract disease, respiratory infections, asthma, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, although the last factor was debated in a March 2013 study in JAMA. Some other studies have shown that breast-feeding can lower rates of type 1 diabetes and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) as well.

Mothers can also benefit from breast-feeding. In addition to helping mothers bond with their children and helping them save time from boiling milk, breast-feeding saves money. Formula and supplies cost about $1,500 a year, and breast-fed children get sick less often — which means less sick days for the parents.

In addition, breast-feeding has shown to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, ovarian cancer and postpartum depression in women.

The new study is a response to a 2010 study in Pediatrics, which Bartick was a lead author on, that looked at how low breast-feeding rates impacted children and subsequent costs to society. It revealed that about 900 babies would be saved if 90 percent of mothers breast-fed their children exclusively for the first six months of their lives. In addition, low breast-feeding rates leading to infant deaths leads to a societal cost of $13 billion, that study found. The figure was calculated from many factors including the potential wages lost by the children who did not grow up to be adults.

“We got a million inquiries saying, ‘That doesn’t include the women!’ We wanted a complete picture,” Bartick remarked.

Researchers from Harvard University used a model to simulate the lives of about 2 million U.S. women from the age of 15 to 70. They looked at outcomes for five diseases that are linked to lower rates if a mom breast-feeds: Breast cancer, premenopausal ovarian cancer, hypertension, heart attack and type 2 diabetes. They also looked at health care costs over their theoretical lifestimes.

The researchers factored in the current breast-feeding rate — about 25 percent of moms breast feed the entire recommended 12 months — and the ideal breast-feeding rate, which would be about 90 percent of mothers.

In addition to the lower adverse health events, they found out that if 90 percent of mothers breast-fed for a year it would cost $860 million less in health care fees. The study showed that the low rates of breast-feeding cost society $17.4 billion from maternal deaths before 70.

Experts are trying various methods to boost breast-feeding rates. A May 2013 study in Pediatrics showed that giving babies that lost a lot of weight minimal amounts of formula actually increased long-term breast-feeding rates. Ninety-five percent of mothers whose infants were given early limited formula (ELF) were still breast-feeding at three months at some level, compared to 68 percent of mothers who did not receive ELF.

 

– CBS News By MICHELLE CASTILLO

Girls Age Gets Bumped Up to Qualify for Lung Transplant

10 Jun 2013 Family and Internal Medicine, General Health

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Sarah Murnaghan now has two records in the official organ transplant database: one with her real birthday and one with a birthday to make the system treat her as a 12-year-old.

The 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl is dying of cystic fibrosis and won a federal court order Wednesday to sidestep a controversial transplant rule that had been preventing her from getting new lungs.

The Murnaghan family of Newtown Square, Pa., had been fighting a little-known organ transplant policy that had been effectively pushing its daughter Sarah to the bottom of the adult transplant waiting list because it mandated that adult lungs be offered to all adult patients before they could be offered to someone younger than 12 years old.

The family filed an emergency motion on Wednesday to prevent Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius from enforcing the policy. Sebelius said Tuesday that she would not make an exception for Sarah.

But on Wednesday afternoon, Federal Judge Michael Baylson ordered Sebelius to stop enforcing the under-12 rule for Sarah “so that she can be considered for receipt of donated lungs from adults based on the medical severity of her condition as compared to the medical severity of persons over 12 in the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network system.” The order is effective immediately and will remain in effect unless the court rules otherwise at a preliminary injunction hearing on June 14.

The case prompted a second family at Sarah’s hospital – the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia – to sue to be considered equally on the adult lung waiting list, according to a complaint filed Thursday. Javier Acosta, an 11-year-old from in the Bronx who is dying of cystic fibrosis, has now been granted the same exception as Sarah, according to a statement from his lawyer at Pepper Hamilton LLP. Javier ‘s brother, Jovan, died at the age of 11 while waiting for a lung transplant, according to the complaint.

Eleven “priority 1” children under 12 years old are currently waiting for lung transplants, according to OPTN data compiled on May 24 for ABCNews.com. Nine under-12-year-olds awaiting lung transplants are categorized as “priority 2.”

This morning, Sebelius wrote a letter to the president of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network’s president to send him the signed court order.

In the letter, Sebelius wrote that she was aware that a duplicate organ candidate record was created for Sarah at 10:34 p.m. It explains that Sarah is still a priority on the pediatric list, but she will now also be considered as a 12-year-old.

“I appreciate your immediate attention to the court’s order,” she wrote.

But the clock is still ticking for Sarah. A judge could rule to reinstate the under-12 rule on June 14 at the preliminary injunction hearing.

If she doesn’t receive lungs by then, it’s not clear whether the duplicate organ candidate record will be deleted. A spokesman for HHS said he could not speculate on what might happen.

Bioethicist Art Caplan wrote on Wednesday that politicians and bureaucrats shouldn’t decide whether Sarah gets lungs because of the medical complexities of her case.

Speaking to ABCNews.com before the judge ruled in Sarah’s favor, he said he didn’t expect the Murnaghans to win because it would involve challenging the legitimacy of the entire organ transplant system. That is, unless lawyers could make a pure discrimination case. Otherwise, he said the effort was “doomed to fail.”

“I don’t think they have any other options to get her on the list,” Caplan told ABCNews.com Wednesday after the emergency motion was filed but before the judge ruled in Sarah’s favor. “Do I begrudge them the right or the effort to try to do what they can? No.

June 6, 2013
read full story here: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/judge-blocks-enforcement-age-rule-girl-awaiting-lung/story?id=19334516#.UbVyEODT022

A More Fit Family

13 May 2013 Family and Internal Medicine, General Health ,
Guide To a More Fit Family
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Are you wondering what you and your family are going to this summer? The most important thing is to keep yourselves active! Try these simple suggestions to getting in better shape:

  • Take the family to an activity that requires walking. Instead of going to a movie why not try a trip to the park, zoo, botanical gardens, museum exhibits or something similar. Make sure to pack healthy snacks for the day!
  • Plan family exercise excursions: jogging and walking around the neighborhood is a great idea, especially if you have family pets that you would like to take out.
  • Sign up for activities or classes at your local YMCA, gym or summer school sports programs. Many of these places offer family oriented activities.
  • Go grocery shopping together so you can get out of the house and teach your kids the importance of foods that fuel them after exercise.

 

Click link to read chart of 60 Minutes a Day: Where Kids Live, Learn & Play!

http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/midcourse/infographic.pdf

family-fitness-plan

For more information visit the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports

Source: www.fitness.gov

How to survive a worse-than-usual allergy season!

17 Apr 2013 Allergy Treatment, General Health

Allergy sufferers dread hearing the following words: “It’s going to be the worst allergy season ever!”

So, how is spring 2013 shaking out? Unfortunately, it’s true. This likely will be one the worst allergy seasons to date due to an explosion of powerful pollens brought on by climate change and increased greenhouse gases.

This means allergy sufferers will endure a double-blow this spring as the pollen season is already here, and will last four weeks longer, into mid-fall. Additionally, since many were exposed to early tree pollens this winter (because it was so mild), we all have to be “re-introduced” to those pollens this spring as the weather warms up.

This can mean more significant itchiness, sneezing and stuffiness associated with seasonal allergies.

What does all this mean for you? How can you be pro-active in this pre-allergy season?

To fight allergies, the best defense is a good offense.  Follow these seasonal allergy survival tips to get you ready for the onslaught of pesky pollens about to visit your eyes and nasal passages.

• Start early. Many allergy medications work best when started before the symptoms begin.

• Know the pollen count. During peak pollen periods, stay inside if you can. Use air conditioning as a weapon – it can help filter out allergy busting pollens.

• Be a ‘movie star.’ Wear oversized sunglasses to block airborne seasonal pollens and molds from entering your eyes and lids that cause uncomfortable redness, itchiness, watery eyes, and puffiness, too.

• Wear a hat. Preferably a wide-brimmed one.  This will block out pollen, and for extra safety, skip the hair gel and spray. These act like a “pollen magnet,” especially when planning extended periods of time outdoors on high-pollen days.

• Stay clean. By showering nightly, you’ll rinse pollen from your hair and skin to get a good night’s sleep.  Also, change your clothing before entering the bedroom to reduce pollen transfer into your personal “breathable” space.

 

By: Dr. Clifford Bassett
FoxNews.com

http://www.unitedallergyservices.com/how-to-survive-a-worse-than-usual-allergy-season/

Woman Pregnant After Uterus Transplant

17 Apr 2013 General Health, Well Woman

The first woman to receive a uterus from a dead donor is now pregnant, her doctors announced in Turkey.

Doctors waited 18 months after Derya Sert’s uterus transplant in August 2011 before they implanted an embryo on April 1 using Sert’s own egg.  Sert, a 22-year-old homemakers, is now about two weeks pregnant, her doctors at Akdeniz University Hospital in Antalya  announced Friday.

“She is doing just fine at the moment,” Dr. Mustafa Unal said in a written statement to Agence France-Presse. The baby will be born  through  cesarean section, according to the news agency.

Sert was born without a uterus, but her ovaries were intact, according to a hospital press release. The condition affects one in 5,000 women, according to the hospital.

Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a senior medical contributor at ABC News, said doctors could detect the pregnancy early because they closely monitor the pregnancy hormone,  human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, in in-vitro fertilization patients. When  hCG  rises to  a certain level, it indicates pregnancy, she explained.

Although Sert’s ovaries provide hormones, she may need additional “hormonal support,” Ashton said, but it’s not exactly clear what Sert can expect in the coming months.

“Since there is scant medical literature on this, the risks for pregnancies is unknown,” she said.

Source: ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/04/15/woman-pregnant-after-uterus-transplant/

Breast Cancer Treatment Takes Toll on Heart

18 Mar 2013 Cancer Treatments, General Health, Well Woman , , , , ,

Radiation therapy has value in breast cancer, but the benefit comes at the price of an increased risk of ischemic heart disease later, researchers reported.

In a population-based case control study, the risk of major coronary events rose after radiation therapy by a mean of 7.4% for every gray (Gy) of exposure to the heart, with no apparent threshold, according to Sarah Darby, PhD, of the Clinical Trial Service Unit in Oxford, England, and colleagues.

The increase in risk was greatest in the first 5 years after radiotherapy but persisted for at least 2 decades, Darby and colleagues reported in the March 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In addition, women with preexisting cardiac risk factors had greater absolute increases in risk, the researchers reported.

“Clinicians may wish to consider cardiac dose and cardiac risk factors as well as tumor control when making decisions about the use of radiotherapy for breast cancer,” Darby and colleagues concluded.

The study – among 2,168 breast cancer survivors in Sweden and Denmark — is a wake-up call for physicians, commented Jean-Bernard Durand, MD, of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“We have to be extra vigilant with women, making sure we assess them. We make sure they’re on correct medicines and we make sure they gain all of the benefits from surviving breast cancer,” he told MedPage Today.

Durand noted that in the U.S., women are much less likely than men to receive preventive cardiovascular care; changing that would help to mitigate the risk highlighted by Darby and colleagues.

“Follow their cholesterol, watch for diabetes, manage their blood pressure – all those things can be done to lower their risk of a cardiovascular event,” he said.

The study also highlights the importance of good post-cancer follow-up, he said.

Doctors “have an opportunity to intervene in a young woman and really change the course of her life rather than wait for an event and try to change the course of her life when she’s older,” Durand said.

Radiotherapy for early-stage breast cancer has been shown to reduce both recurrence and death, the researchers noted, but the effect of incidental exposure to the heart has not been clear.

They looked at women with breast cancer who had radiotherapy between 1958 and 2001, including 963 women with major coronary events and 1,205 controls.

Case patients had no recurrence of the breast cancer or incidence of any other cancer before they suffered a major coronary event, defined as myocardial infarction, coronary revascularization, or death from ischemic heart disease.

Controls were matched for country of residence, age at diagnosis, and year of diagnosis, and also had not had a recurrence of their breast cancer or any new malignancy.

Of the major coronary events among women in the study, 44% occurred less than 10 years after the breast cancer diagnosis, 33% occurred in the next decade, and the remaining 23% occurred still later.

The average dose to the heart was 6.6 Gy for women with left breast tumors, 2.9 Gy for those with cancer in the right breast, and 4.9 Gy overall.

While the rate of events rose by 7.4% per Gy of exposure, the rate varied with time — 16.3% in the first 5 years after exposure, 15.5% in the second 5 years, 1.2% in the second decade, and 8.2% in later years.

The only tumor characteristic that significantly affected the risk was location, as women with left breast tumors were more significantly likely to be case patients (P<0.001).

The rate ratio for women who had a history of ischemic heart disease, compared with those who did not, was 6.67 (95% CI from 4.37 to 10.18). Rate ratios were also elevated for women with other circulatory diseases, diabetes, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as smokers.

The researchers cautioned that few of the women in the study were under 40, so the results may not apply directly to that age group.

In an accompanying editorial in the journal, Javid Moslehi, MD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston commented that the findings may be the “tip of the iceberg.”

“In addition to ischemic cardiac disease,” he wrote, “radiation therapy has been associated with other cardiac conditions, including pericardial disease, peripheral vascular disease, cardiomyopathy, valvular dysfunction, and arrhythmias.

Those diseases were not part of the study, nor were those associated with some forms of chemotherapy, he noted.

One implication for practice, he argued, is that the time to look at cardiovascular issues is at the time of breast cancer diagnosis and before treatment starts.

Source: written by Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today

Published: March/2013
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner
Interview with Dr. Jean-Bernard Durand of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

This will make it all better

1 Oct 2010 Family and Internal Medicine, General Health, Pain Management , , , , , ,

It’s been awhile since we last talked so I am going to bring you up to date on what’s new at Doctors Clinic Houston. For those of you that are feeling dizzy and woozy (not silly) Doctors Clinic Houston has a specialist in to treat Vertigo. and for those of us that are suffering with stress, pain in your arms or legs, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, chest pain, fatigue, high cholesterol, asthma; if you are a smoker or ex-smoker, or noticing swelling in the lower extremities, we are offering Cardio-Pulmonary Test. So come on in or call for direction 713.981.8184.

Well, just maybe it’s not what you’re eating

3 May 2010 Food Safety News, General Health, Weight Loss Program , , , , ,

Have you ever had one of those months when no matter what exercise you did or how many miles you walked, the pounds did not melt away? Well, maybe it’s not only the amount of calories; the carbohydrates, or the fats that are in the foods you are eating, you may need some medical assistance. We have 6 weight loss nurses available to answer your questions so call us today or make an appointment to visit with one of our doctors…and see how jealous your friends will become when you lose the weight.

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