Archive for the 'Health News' Category

The Daily Telegraph reported that drinking more than three cups of tea a day cuts the risk of a heart attack. The newspaper said that according to research, tea - with or without milk - may also strengthen bones.

It adds that the “beneficial effects on many biochemical effects in the body” are due to polyphenols, which are natural plant antioxidants in tea.

A review conducted in 2001 of 10 follow-up studies, found that the risk of heart attack was reduced by 11% when three cups of tea per day were drunk (237ml).

Other studies that have since been conducted showed similar results, with four studies demonstrating links between tea consumption and reduced risk of CHD death and risk factors.

Five studies investigating bone health suggested that tea had a ‘modest beneficial effect’ on bone mineral density, with most benefit seen in elderly women who drank four or more cups per day.

The clearest consistent evidence points to an association between tea consumption, in excess of three cups per day, and a reduced risk of myocardial infarction. There is no consistent evidence to indicate that tea drinking has detrimental effects on hydration, bone health, or iron status.

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Is some deafness avoidable? Hearing loss is usually accepted as an unavoidable side effect of aging, but new research suggests that lifestyle has a greater influence than previously thought.

According to the largest study on age-related hearing impairment done so far, the recipe for keen ears well into the senior years may be simple: stop smoking, stay slim, and have an alcoholic drink at least once a week [Link between hearing loss and tobacco smoke].

Our take-home message is that hearing loss up to a certain degree is preventable. Environmental factors are responsible for about 50% [of age-related deafness] and we now know which ones to avoid,” says Erik Fransen at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, noise exposure, known to destroy the sound-transducing hair cells in the inner ear, was the biggest risk. More surprising is the apparent effect of smoking and overeating [Treating hearing loss].

These factors have been suspected as potential causes of deafness, but it has been hard to separate them from the effects of cardiovascular diseases that are also frequently suffered by people who smoke and overeat. This study has been able to do just that.

For more information, visit: NewScientist

Australian researchers reported that aggressively treating diabetes does not prevent heart problems and deaths.

It’s the second large study, involving thousands of patients, to show no heart benefit from drastically lowering diabetics’ blood glucose levels. Experts said doctors should stick to the recommended target levels.

Heart disease is the cause of death for two-thirds of diabetics. Researchers tried pushing blood sugar down to near-normal levels to see if that would protect the hearts of high-risk patients with Type 2 diabetes.

But the Australian study showed no difference in the number of heart attacks, strokes and heart-related deaths between groups who got intensive or standard care. A U.S. study that was stopped earlier this year also showed no benefit and in addition reported an unexplained higher number of deaths among those who were aggressively treated.

Both studies are important contributions to the field but do not provide a definitive answer.

Instead of trying aggressive measures, experts say there should be more focus on other strategies known to lower heart risks — diet, exercise and medications such as aspirin, cholesterol-lowering statins and blood pressure drugs.

Source: MSNBC

For generations children have been urged to drink milk for strong. healthy bones and teeth.

New research from Southampton, UK, is taking this a step further, showing the link between drinking mild and reducing the risk of osteoporosis in later life.

The study, involved more than 12,500 non-pregnant women aged 20-34, recruited between 1998 and 2002 into the Southampton Women’s Survey.

The women underwent comprehensive assessment of diet, lifestyle and body measurements before, and for those who conceived (now around 3000 women), during pregnancy.

A subset of their children had measurement of bone mass at birth and four years old, and additionally the four year old children underwent similar assessment of diet, lifestyle, health and body measurements.

In this group of 250 children and their mothers, Dr Harvey and his colleagues used this information to determine what influences a child’s bone growth compared to that in other children in the group of the same age.

Bone mass peaks between the ages of 20 - 30 years. Babies and children who are underweight and undernourished are likely to have a lower bone mass in early adulthood than normal which would make them more vulnerable to osteoporosis in later life.

Scientists have found that consuming cocoa flavanols – naturally occurring compounds in cocoa – may offer a benefit to those affected by type-2 diabetes.

Poor blood vessel function is recognized as an early stage in the development process of cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis.

For more than 20 million Americans living with diabetes, these vascular impairments can eventually lead to heart disease and stroke, the cause of death for two-thirds of those who suffer from diabetes.

Despite good diabetes control and medical treatment, adults with the disease often continue to experience vascular dysfunction.

This has led scientists on a search for novel medical or nutritional options to improve the health and quality of life for people with diabetes.

In a subsequent controlled 30-day, double-masked clinical trial, adults with established diabetes who were medically controlled, drank either a flavanol-containing cocoa beverage or a low-flavanol control three times a day.

The cocoa beverages contained either 25 milligrams of cocoa flavanols (control) or 321 milligrams of cocoa flavanols (treatment) and were matched for calories, nutrients and other cocoa compounds such as theobromine and caffeine.

Researchers say, People who take aspirin to keep their blood pressure down will get more benefit if they take it at bedtime.

They say that the hormones and other chemicals the aspirin acts on are most active at night though blood pressure tends to drop at night.

While doctors often advise patients to take aspirin to help control their blood pressure, they generally do not give any advice about the time of the day.

“If you take the aspirin in the morning, it is not going to be effective because aspirin basically has an effect for fours hours or so,” Ramón C. Hermida of the University of Vigo in Spain said.

For the study, presented at a conference of the American Society of Hypertension, researchers looked at more than 240 people with a condition known as prehypertension over three months.

Some took aspirin in the morning, others at night and some not at all.

Their blood pressure was taken regularly during the study, and the researchers also kept track of physical activity.

Source: The New York Times

A new report from Perth’s Telethon Institute for Child Health Research has found a strong link between childhood ear infections and exposure to tobacco smoke.

In Aboriginal children, these ear infections typically start at a younger age, are much more common and more likely to result in hearing loss.

Up to 20 percent of children have more than three ear infections between 1 and 2 years of age.

If their hearing is damaged, it can seriously affect their educational outcomes and social circumstances in adulthood.

Key findings from the project include:

• Otitis media was diagnosed at least once in 74% of Aboriginal children and 45% of non-Aboriginal children.
• 64% of Aboriginal children and 40% of non-Aboriginal children were exposed to environmental tobacco smoke.
• If we eliminated exposure to tobacco smoke we estimate that we could reduce ear infections by 27% in Aboriginal children and 16% in non-Aboriginal children
• The impact of passive smoking in the home on ear infections was reduced if the children also attended day care.

These results highlight the importance of reducing children’s exposure to passive smoking, and this is particularly important for Aboriginal people where the rates of both smoking and otitis media are high.

A new study from University Hospitals Case Medical Center (UHCMC) finds that elderly patients – 75 years old and older– with malignant brain tumors are not treated as aggressively as patients between 65 and 75 years old.

Furthermore, the researchers find that if patients over 75 years old are treated aggressively, such as with surgery and radiation, they have better survival rates. The findings appear in the April issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery.

Using the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Medicare-linked database, the researchers led by Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan, Ph.D., of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals, looked at the records of 1753 patients who were treated for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and of 205 patients treated for anaplastic astrocytoma (AA) between 1991 and 1999.

GBMs are the most common malignant brain tumors in adults. AAs are less common, but are treated similarly to GBMs. Both have a poor prognosis, and as the American population ages, the incidence of these brain tumors is on the rise.

The researchers looked at whether patients received a biopsy only, surgery only, biopsy and radiation, surgery and radiation, or surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. These findings suggest that older patients with brain tumors do not receive the more aggressive, effective therapies and hence have worse survival.

According to the new report, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels not only are bad for your heart, they may also harm your eyesight.

According to background information in the report published in the May issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology, the two conditions appear to increase one’s risk for retinal vein occlusion, a condition that leads to vision loss.

It results from one or more veins carrying blood from the eye to the heart becoming blocked and causing bleeding or fluid build-up.

The Irish study found that people with high blood pressure had more than 3.5 times the risk of developing retinal vein occlusion than those without it.

People with high cholesterol levels had an approximately 2.5-fold higher risk of retinal vein occlusion.

According to the authors, those who treat patients with hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol should be as concerned with the health of the person’s eyes as they are with the health of the person’s cardiovascular system.

Source: Medline Plus

A 9 year old girl who went to hospital in central Greece suffering from stomach pains was found to be carrying her embryonic twin, doctors said Thursday.

The girl was examined by the Doctors at Larissa General Hospital and removed surgically a growth which they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long.

“The doctors could see on the right side that her stomach was swollen, but they could not suspect that this tumor would hide an embryo,” hospital director lakovos Brouskelis said. He old that the girl has made a full recovery.

Head of the hospital’s pediatric department, Andreas Markau, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord. He also said that the cases where one of a set of twins absorbs the other in the womb occurs in one of 500,000 live births.

Source: Yahoo