_ Breakthrough in Fighting Skin & Lung Cancers By Sondra Forsyth article Researchers at UCLAΓÇÖs Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center are reporting promising treatment milestones for patients with deadly skin and lung cancers who are being treated with an experimental drug called MK-3475.
_ Is It Too Hot For Your Health? By Jane Farrell article Almost every summer, thereΓÇÖs a deadly heat wave in some parts of the country. Excessive heat isnΓÇÖt safe for anyone, especially for older people or those with health problems. But exactly what dangers are you facing and how can you protect yourself? HereΓÇÖs some advice from the National Institute on Aging: Your body is always working to keep a balance between how much heat it makes and how much it loses. Too much heat causes sweating.
_ 5 Facts To Know About Depression By Jane Farrell article Depression, a serious and potentially life-threatening condition, affects 14.8 million American adults, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The percentage of seniors who have the disorder varies from less than 1 percent to 5 percent, the CDC says. But the percentage rises sharply to 11.5 percent among elderly hospital patients to 13.5 percent among those who have home health care. The condition is complex and multi-faceted, encompassing both physical and mental symptoms, and for a patient or caregiver itΓÇÖs essential to know as much as possible about it.
_ Metformin Lengthens Lifespan By article Metformin, the world's most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows aging and increases lifespan. That is the finding of Wouter De Haes and colleagues at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and reported in June 2014 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to a release from the university, the researchers teased out the mechanism behind metformin's age-slowing effects: the drug causes an increase in the number of toxic oxygen molecules released in the cell and this, surprisingly, increases cell robustness and longevity in the long term.
_ Top Ten Facts About Ticks By Jane Farrell article Lyme disease ΓÇô and the ticks that transmit the uncomfortable, potentially serious condition ΓÇô seem as inevitable a part of summer as sizzling hot days. But you can protect yourself. The first rule: Know your enemy. Here, from a producer of insect repellents, are ten things you might not know about these annoying insects. 1. Tick bites and tick-borne diseases are completely preventable There's really only one way you get a tick-transmitted disease and that's from a tick bite.
_ 3 Simple Things You Can Do Today to Feel Better TomorrowΓÇ¿ By Jane Farrell article By Dr. Frank King Imagine youΓÇÖre a spider with just one leg. You put forth immense effort to try to haul yourself around and not only does it wear you out, itΓÇÖs frustrating and you donΓÇÖt get far. It gets a bit easier with two legs and easier still with four legs. But itΓÇÖs not till you have all eight legs that you can really dance. The eight legs represent Eight Essentials we need for optimum mental, physical, and spiritual health:
_ Vision Health Toward a Cure for Dry Eye By Jane Farrell article Dry eye syndrome, a condition that is especially prevalent in women as they age, happens when the quantity of tears is no longer sufficient to lubricate the eyes. A burning sensation is typical and impaired vision including damage to the cornea may result. In search of a cure, researchers led by Kara Maki Ph.D. at the Rochester Institute of TechnologyΓÇÖs School of Mathematical Sciences in New York are testing computer simulations that map the way tears move across the surface of the eye. The study was published on May 6th 2014 in the journal Physics of Fluids.
_ How Long Should Hep C Treatment Last? By Jane Farrell article As new treatments for hepatitis C virus (HCV) are approved, biomedical scientists are exploring their mechanisms and what they reveal about the virus. An online publication in May 2014 in Hepatology is the first to report real-time tracking of viral decay in the liver and blood in 15 patients with HCV.
_ Digestive Health Possible Breakthrough for IBD Tx By Jane Farrell article A microRNA cluster believed to be important for suppressing colon cancer plays a critical role in wound healing in the intestine, according to researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The findings could provide a fresh avenue for investigating chronic digestive diseases and for potentially repairing damage in these and other disease or injury settings. A release from the medical center quotes Dr. Joshua Mendell as saying, "We identified a novel role for microRNAs in regulating wound healing in the intestine.
Organize Your Kitchen For Healthy Eating By article By Andrea Cespedes, PT, Yoga Instructor, Chef A pledge to focus on healthy eating will do you no good if you still have cheese curls and chocolate chip cookies calling to you from your pantry. Sound familiar?
_ Clot-Busting Can Help or Harm Stroke Patients By article Johns Hopkins researchers say they have developed a technique that can predict with 95 percent accuracy which stroke victims will benefit from intravenous, clot-busting drugs and which will suffer dangerous and potentially lethal bleeding in the brain. Reporting online May 15th 2014 in the journal Stroke, the Johns Hopkins team says these predictions were made possible by applying a new method they developed that uses standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to measures damage to the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from drug exposure.
_ Healthy Diet & Nutrition The Importance of Prebiotics and Probiotics By Sondra Forsyth article By Sondra Forsyth Both prebiotics and probiotics are essential components of a healthy diet. Prebiotics are indigestible carbohydrates that act as food for probiotics, which contain live bacteria. Together, they help promote the growth of the good bac- teria in your intestines and maintain your gut’s ecosystem. When a food contains both substances, it is called synbiotic: a synergistic combination of the two. Prebiotics
_ 10 Common Cancer Treatment Myths By Jane Farrell article By Mayo Clinic Staff As advances in the treatment of cancer have increased, you may have discovered more opportunities to learn the facts about this disease. Yet some misleading ideas about cancer treatment still persist. Timothy J. Moynihan, M.D., a cancer specialist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., helps debunk some of the most common misconceptions about cancer treatment and explains the truth. Myth: A positive attitude is all you need to beat cancer.
_ Mental & Emotional Health May Is Mental Health Month: WhereΓÇÖs Your Sanity? By article By Dr. Claudia LuizΓÇ¿ΓÇ¿ Everybody is overwhelmed and nobody is afraid to talk about it. Historically speaking, we are more sophisticated than ever emotionally; we are highly aware of what we feel, and we can talk about it. If we don’t feel better, it’s only because our methods for dealing with what we feel are still so antiquated. It’s just the same-old, same-old: try to be better, get inspired to change. But it doesn’t’ work. ΓÇ¿ ΓÇ¿
_ ΓÇ£Pre-crastinationΓÇ¥ Appears to Be Common By Jane Farrell article Putting off tasks until later, or procrastination, is a common phenomenon — but new research suggests that “pre-crastination,” hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible, may also be common. Thestudy, published in May 2014 in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people often opt to begin a task as soon as possible just to get it off their plate, even if they have to expend more physical effort to do so.
Tools To Take Charge Of Your Cancer Survivorship By blog Most major cancer centers today offer a survivor care plan to organize your diagnosis, treatment and follow-up plan. It will soon be a standard of care to provide treatment summaries and survivorship care plans to all cancer patients. The primary components of a plan include: Diagnostic tests performed and results; including tumor site, stage, grade and other biomarker information.
Vision Health Plugging Blood Vessels to Save Vision By article The growth of malformed blood vessels that can burst is a leading cause of vision loss in North America. Retinopathy and retina degeneration are associated with premature birth, with diabetes, and with increasing age. Now a new drug approach has been developed by a research team led by Dr. Andras Nagy at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto for safer clean-up of deformed blood vessels in the eye. The study was published in May 2014 in EMBO Molecular Medicine.
_ A Lab in Your DocΓÇÖs Pocket By Jane Farrell article When you have blood work done during a physical exam, you have to wait several weeks for the results because your doctor sends the sample to a lab for analysis. That’s not a problem if you’re healthy and simply getting a routine checkup but if you have worrisome symptoms, both you and your physician would benefit from knowing very quickly whether something is amiss.