healthy living for women + their families
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is an often misunderstood and underdiagnosed condition that affects about 15.3 million people in the United States.
No one remedy works for all patients, so there’s a great medical need to develop new therapies for IBS, Andrew Mulberg, M.D., a gastroenterologist with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said in one of the agency’s “Consumer Update” articles.
Have you been told by your doctor that you need surgery? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of older Americans have surgery each year.
Your primary care doctor may suggest a surgeon to you, and your state or local medical society can tell you about your surgeon’s training. Try to choose a surgeon who operates often on medical problems like yours.
Racial and ethnic minorities who get implantable devices to treat heart failure derive the same survival benefit as white patients, new research shows. But non-white patients are getting the devices at a much lower rate.
The study, one of the largest to compare the survival benefits of the devices by race and ethnicity, looked at 15,000 patients from 167 medical practices across the U.S. The findings are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Here’s another addition to our Third Age video collection. Press play to start learning.
By Sherrie Campbell, PhD
It is often the assumption that if you go to therapy that you have serious problems you cannot manage on your own and there is something fundamentally wrong with you. In reality, if someone is attending therapy, the person tends to be on the healthier side of self-love and self-awareness. Because seeing a therapist is stigmatized many people who want to seek help, either often they don’t, or they keep their therapy private so they do not invoke judgment.
Spanish researchers have found the strongest proof yet that inhibition of a gene could be used to fight cancerous tumors.
Research led by the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Barcelona, found that the inhibiting mutations of the Myc gene could be accomplished via the drug Omomyc. That inhibitor was designed by Laura Soucek, Principal Investigator of VHIO´s Mouse Models of Cancer Therapies Group.
The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
MS can happen to just about anyone.
The central nervous system disorder affects your brain and spinal cord. But it spares the nerves and muscles that lead away from the spinal cord. Nearly 350,000 people in the United States have MS.
MS is a long-term illness. Infection-fighting white blood cells enter the nervous system and cause injury by stripping off the myelin sheath that protects nerves. When this happens, the nerves cannot conduct electricity as well as they should. This causes symptoms.
In a new study, researchers found that more than half of elderly patients in a hospital emergency room were either malnourished or at risk of malnutrition.
Additionally, more than half of the patients who were malnourished hadn’t been diagnosed with the condition.
Researchers focused on patients 138 65 and older who were seen at the University of North Carolina hospitals over an eight-week period. The patients were not cognitively impaired or critically ill. None of them lived in a nursing home or skilled nursing facility.
Here’s another video from our Third Age collection. Press play to start learning.
By Mayo Clinic Staff
Do you know how to be happy? Or are you waiting for happiness to find you?
Experts are developing a genetic computer model that may eventually predict whether a patient going to suffer from a mental illness, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
The researchers, from the University of Texas, Arlington; the University of Illinois; and the Beijing Genomics Institutes in Wuhan, China, published their findings in the journal Biomed Research International.
Researchers are progressing in the development of a more effective treatment of osteoporosis, a widespread and serious health problem in the U.S.
The investigators, from the UCLA School of Dentistry, are working on a treatment that both slows down the destruction of bone and promotes bone formation.
The researchers found that a growth factor, Wnt4, which is secreted in the bone marrow, prevented bone loss in mice with osteoporosis. Wnt4 does that by blocking a signaling pattern that would otherwise promote inflammation.
How your bladder functions every day can tell you a lot about your overall health. How often you urinate during the day and during the night, the color of your urine and whether you can “hold it” all provide clues to health conditions that don’t involve your urinary system.
“Eighty percent of the causes of bladder problems are related to conditions outside of the bladder,” says urologist Raymond Rackley, MD. These can include problems with the nervous or cardiovascular systems, Rackley says.
So what should you look out for?
Osteoarthritis, the degeneration of joint cartilage, is age-related. Most cases involve stiffness in the knee, hip and thumb joints. But while it is a painful condition, osteoarthritis doesn’t necessarily limit your from physical activity. In fact, the right kind of exercise can improve the condition.
Projects involving gas drilling, including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be subject to public-health and community analysis before they begin, an expert panel says.
The panel called for groundwater and air quality testing before, during, and after the drilling, saying that the analysis is a key component of guaranteeing the safety of communities near the drilling site.
Editor’s note: If you ever thought getting a colonoscopy was the only way to screen for colon cancer, you’re wrong. Here, the experts from the Mayo Clinic explain what the choices are:
WHAT IS YOUR DOCTOR’S APPROACH TO COLON-CANCER SCREENING?
Make sure that you’re comfortable with the colon cancer screening test your doctor recommends. If your doctor specializes in a particular test but you’d rather have another test, express your wishes. If necessary, your doctor might offer a referral to someone trained in the test with which you feel most comfortable.
Researchers have discovered more about a breast-cancer gene that could be as important as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in determining a woman’s likelihood of getting breast cancer.
An international team of 17 researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, said that the gene, PALB 2, could be a candidate to be “BRCA 3.” They said that women with the gene have an average one in three chance of developing breast cancer by the age of 70.
The findings were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Although it’s been known for a while that PALB2 was l
By Meriflor Toneatto
Everyone has a relationship with money, but for women, it’s much more fraught with emotion.
When we avoid and ignore those emotions, we allow them to quietly guide our decision-making – which inevitably holds us back.
Understanding our emotions, fears and doubts about money and how they affect our behavior can help us heal them so we can experience financial and personal freedom. For women, money is an emotional currency. It’s tied to our sense of self-worth and self-confidence, and our feelings of safety and security.
