Public Health
Electronic cigarettes have gained considerable popularity over the past few years - for most they are another form of the nicotine patch, and a way to curb harmful cigarette smoking but critics contend they make smoking cool.
No one thinks they are cool, they are in Google Glass territory among the public, just a moment away from leading to insults, so research instead focuses on the well-documented health benefits of smoking less versus any possible risks.
Governments want to regulate them to generate revenue so the onus is on the industry to try and prove they are safe, an impossible task.…
Diverticulitis was once the refrain of a Saturday Night Live skit but it isn't funny to people who have it.
A paper in Quality of Life Research has interviews with diverticulitis patients and it confirms that many suffer psychological and physical symptoms long after their acute illness has passed.
As they age, most people develop diverticulosis, a disorder characterized by the formation of pouches in the lining of the colon. More than 50 percent of people over 60 have the condition, but the pouches usually don't cause any problems. Occasionally, however, the pouches become…
A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials on the effects of tree nuts for metabolic syndrome found a "modest decrease" in blood fats known as triglycerides and blood sugars compared to those who ate a control diet.
Tree nuts are such things as almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, coconuts, hazelnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, walnuts, pine nuts and pistachios and appear to help reduce two of the five markers for metabolic syndrome, a group of factors that raise the risk for heart disease and other health problems such as diabetes and strokes, a…
Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) finds that the younger a woman is when she goes on her first diet, the more likely she is to experience several negative health outcomes later in life.
Dieting is very common among girls and young women; however, people often fail to consider the long-term consequences of weight-loss diets, particularly in those who begin dieting at a young age. A team led by Dr. Pamela Keel from Florida State University asked college women in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012 to report their dieting and…
Running was once a big health fad. Like red wine and chocolate on the miracle side, or wheat and sugar on the panic side, mainstream media is happy to build up fads so they can tear them down later.
Modern stories revolve around people dropping dead from running but you are a lot less likely to die running, even if for only a few minutes a day at slow speed, than you are sitting around eating Doritos.
Exercise is well-established as a way to prevent heart disease and it is an important component of an overall healthy life, but it is unclear whether there are health benefits below the level of…
The first systematic analysis of hepatitis E virus (HEV) transmission by blood components indicates that about 1 in 3,000 donors in England have HEV in their plasma. The findings suggest that around 1,200 HEV-containing blood components (eg, red cells, platelets, and fresh frozen plasma) are likely to be transfused every year in England.
The study retrospectively screened 225,000 individual blood donations collected in south east England between Oct, 2012 and Sept, 2013 for HEV RNA. 79 donors were found to be currently infected with genotype 3 HEV (that can spread directly from animals…
In some patients, the chronic inflammatory skin diseases psoriasis and eczema are so similar that dermatologists have had to examine tissue samples but a team of researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now analyzed the molecular processes that occur in both diseases and discovered crucial differences.
This has enabled them to develop a diagnostic procedure which in practice enables psoriasis and eczema to be reliably differentiated from one another on the basis of only two genes.
Psoriasis is a non-contagious, inflammatory skin…
I used to have some anger issues, but now they're gone.OK, that's a lie. They're not gone, but they visit often.
At least not until Friday morning when I got up at 7 to see myself on CBS This Morning. I was mega-pissed after that.
A weed killer called 2,4-D was the subject of testimony before Congressional committee the day before. Leading the charge to have it banned was the Environmental Working Group, which was doing their typical routine of trying to scare people into doing something or other using fear tactics, based either on bad science, or no science at all. It often works.…
We
know the effects of childhood traumas like abuse and neglect on later
substance abuse. But what impact does second hand trauma have? A
study published in the August issue of the journal Addiction shows that when a child under age 15 is exposed to a
family member’s trauma (e.g. a parent or sibling being the victim of violent
assault or a parent’s cancer diagnosis), that child has approximately twice the
risk of struggling with drug and alcohol problems 6 years later.
The data comes from 1.4 million children born in Sweden
between 1984 and 1995. Researchers used codes from the Swedish…
Eating probiotics regularly may modestly improve your blood pressure, according to a new review of none studies examining blood pressure and probiotic consumption in 543 adults with normal and elevated blood pressure.
Probiotics are live microorganisms naturally occurring bacteria in the gut thought to have beneficial effects; they have recently been a nutrition trend and common sources are yogurt or dietary supplements.
"The small collection of studies we looked at suggest regular consumption of probiotics can be part of a healthy lifestyle to help reduce high blood pressure, as well…