The Week in Health and Fitness

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Welcome to this weeks Health and Fitness.

An ancient disease that has ravaged the world continues into the 21st century, taking its toll in lives. Tuberculosis is once again making headlines killing 1.8 million people as the world’s 7th most deadly disease. The disease is still epidemic in many parts of the world and is common opportunistic disease in HIV and AIDS patients.

As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time and in January it will be coming to you from Paris, Fr. for awhile. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.

This is an open thread.

More funds needed for TB tests, drugs, vaccines

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) – Health experts on Thursday called for more research funding to develop better diagnostic tests, vaccines and drugs for tuberculosis, which killed 1.8 million people around the world last year.

While diseases like AIDS and malaria can be diagnosed in minutes by applying a drop of blood to a rapid test kit, confirming active tuberculosis, or TB, is a laborious procedure.

It requires a patient to cough up sputum, which is smeared on a slide, stained and examined under a microscope.

And the 100-year-old test misses up to 70 percent of otherwise positive cases in some places, experts say.

In Africa, where the scourge of TB is most keenly felt, many people delay follow-up testing because of cost.

“A lot of people die before a TB diagnosis is even made,” Dr Jeremiah Chakaya of the Kenya Medical Research Institute told reporters at an international conference on lung health in Cancun, Mexico.

Internal Medicine/Family Medical News

Tuberculosis – a leading killer disease

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) – More than 2 billion people, or a third of the world’s total population, are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is now the world’s seventh-leading cause of death. It killed 1.8 million people worldwide last year, up from 1.77 million in 2007. It is one of three primary diseases that are closely linked to poverty, the other two being AIDS and malaria.

Risk of blood clots after surgery higher than thought

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The risk of blood clots following surgery is probably higher – overall, more than one clot per 50 surgeries — than previously thought, data from the UK’s Million Women Study suggest.

Blood clots can form when patients cannot move for significant periods of time, and for other reasons. Such clots can grow and travel to the lungs, where they can become life-threatening. Doctors can prescribe medications and compression stockings, among other measures, to prevent them.

Earlier studies have suggested that surgery ups the risk as much as 22 times. But in the current study, the risk of such blood clots in the first 6 weeks after inpatient surgery was nearly 70 times higher than it was for those who did not undergo surgery.

And the risk remained higher than average for at least 12 weeks after surgery, study co-author Dr. Sian Sweetland, from the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues note in the December 4th Online First issue of the journal the BMJ.

Excluding women who had already had a blood clot, as well as those with a history of cancer – which can increase the clotting risk – left almost 950,000 middle-aged subjects in the study. About 240,000 had surgery during the six years in which they were followed, and about 5,400 were admitted to the hospital for blood clots.

Another 270 women died of such clots, autopsies confirmed.

FDA seeks plan to curb opioid pain killer abuse

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. drug regulators asked on Friday for manufacturers of prescription pain medications to provide more specifics on an industry plan to curb growing abuse of morphine, methadone, oxycodone and other opioid drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration in February had asked manufacturers including Johnson & Johnson and King Pharmaceuticals to come up with a joint plan to deal with the public health problem, particularly involving slow release and long acting versions of the drugs. This is the first time the agency has sought to develop risk evaluation and mitigation strategy for an entire class of drugs.

At a Friday meeting, industry representatives told FDA they intended to develop a phased-in approach to deal with the problem. This could include a voluntary training program for doctors to better educate them about proper use of pain killers and government certification for prescribing of controlled substances.

Currently, a physician must be certified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to prescribe this class of drugs. Congress would have to approve any requirement for physician training to receive DEA certification.

Dutch AIDS case shows how virus spreads early

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Newly infected AIDS patients rarely know they have the virus and can continue their high-risk behavior just when they are the most infectious, Dutch researchers reported.

They said the case of a man freshly infected with the AIDS virus demonstrated the dangers of relying on quick HIV tests if patients have flu-like symptoms.

The 49-year-old man tested negative at an Amsterdam clinic using a standard quick test for the virus, but more sophisticated, time-consuming tests later showed the patient in fact did have a large amount of HIV in his blood, Henry de Vries of the University of Amsterdam and colleagues reported.

“Recent infections are characterized by a highly infectious phase and, if gone unnoticed, can have a large contribution to the ongoing transmission of HIV,” De Vries and colleagues wrote in the online journal Eurosurveillance.

“Healthcare providers should be aware of primary HIV infection and the pitfalls in its diagnosis.”

Study finds no brain tumor link with mobile phones

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A very large, 30-year study of just about everyone in Scandinavia shows no link between cellphone use and brain tumors, researchers reported on Thursday.

Even though mobile telephone use soared in the 1990s and afterward, brain tumors did not become any more common during this time, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some activist groups and a few researchers have raised concerns about a link between cellphones and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumors, although years of research have failed to establish a connection.

“We did not detect any clear change in the long-term time trends in the incidence of brain tumors from 1998 to 2003 in any subgroup,” Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society and colleagues wrote.

Hepatitis C drug fights virus in new way

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A drug that targets hepatitis C in an entirely new way was highly effective at suppressing the virus in chimpanzees and kept working for several weeks after the treatment stopped, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

The hope is that the drug — made by Danish company Santaris Pharma AS under the experimental name SPC3649 — could replace more toxic drugs as part of a cocktail to fight hepatitis C, said Robert Lanford of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas.

“As the study unfolded, just how well the drug worked became amazing to us,” Lanford said in a telephone interview.

Lanford, who has no financial ties to Santaris, regularly tests new hepatitis C compounds in chimpanzees, which are the only animals besides humans that are susceptible to the virus.

Hepatitis is blood-borne and damages the liver, causing chronic liver problems, liver cancer, cirrhosis and death.

Watching tumors on CTs can predict lung cancer

BOSTON (Reuters) – Small or slow-growing nodules discovered on a lung scan are unlikely to develop into tumors over the next two years, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The findings, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, could help doctors decide when to do more aggressive testing for lung cancer. They could also help patients avoid unnecessarily aggressive and potentially harmful testing when lesions are found.

Lung cancer, the biggest cancer killer in the United States and globally, is often not diagnosed until it has spread. It kills 159,000 people a year in the United States alone.

The work is part of a larger effort to develop guidelines to help doctors decide what to do when such growths, often discovered by accident, appear in a scan.

CT scans may predict survival in colorectal cancer

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Doctors may be able use an advanced X-ray called a CT scan to see whether patients with advanced colorectal cancer are responding to treatment with Avastin and chemotherapy, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Currently, there are no tools besides surgery to see if people with advanced colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver are responding to treatment with chemotherapy and Roche unit Genentech’s cancer drug Avastin.

And many patients with this advanced form of cancer are poor candidates for surgery.

Half of world’s ICU patients have infections: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Half of all patients in intensive care units around the world have infections, and more than 70 percent are being given antibiotics — a trend that could help more drug-resistant superbugs emerge, researchers reported on Tuesday.

Patients who had infections were more likely to die, especially of bloodborne infections known as sepsis, the survey of more than 13,000 patients found. They also spent more time in the ICU at greater expense to hospitals and patients.

But one of the biggest concerns was the widespread use of antibiotics in patients who were not infected — a practice that has been shown to lead to antibiotic resistance, when germs defy common drugs.

“Importantly, the incidence of sepsis is increasing, as is the number of consequent infection-related deaths,” Dr. Jean-Louis Vincent of Erasme University Hospital in Brussels, Belgium and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Marijuana Eases Spasticity in MS Patients

Studies Show Marijuana Extracts May Have Therapeutic Value for Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

Dec. 4, 2009 — Marijuana extracts may reduce spasticity symptoms in people with multiple sclerosis, a new study shows.

The review, by Shaheen Lakhan, PhD, and Marie Rowland, PhD, of the Global Neuroscience Initiative Foundation in Los Angeles, found that five of six published studies they analyzed reported a reduction in spasticity and an improvement in mobility in MS patients treated with marijuana extracts, available from dispensaries such as natures products.

Lakhan tells WebMD in an email that the extracts were administered orally. The reviewed studies included the use of cannabis extracts delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and cannabidiol, or CBD, in people with MS. Meaning MS sufferers may want to have a look into various cbd oil review articles.

H1N1 News

More than 1,000 deaths in past week from H1N1: WHO

GENEVA (Reuters) – More than 1,000 deaths from the H1N1 swine flu virus were officially reported in the past week, a sharp rise which brings the global total to at least 7,826, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

More than half of the latest fatalities were reported by health authorities in the Americas region.

The winter flu season arrived early in the northern hemisphere this year and continues to be intense across parts of North America and much of Europe.

“In the United States and Canada, influenza transmission remains very active and geographically widespread,” the WHO said, adding that the disease now appeared to have peaked in all U.S. regions.

“In Canada, influenza activity remains similar but (the) number of Hospitalizations and deaths is increasing,” it said.

Swine flu kids getting faster drug treatment: U.S

More than 80 percent of U.S. children severely ill with H1N1 flu have been treated swiftly with antiviral drugs, a trend that could be saving lives, U.S. health officials said on Friday.

Public education campaigns about swine flu have translated into quicker and better treatment with Tamiflu, Roche AG and Gilead Sciences Inc’s influenza pill, they said.

Usually, at most 20 percent of children severely ill with influenza ever get treatment with Tamiflu or GlaxoSmithKline’s inhaled drug Relenza, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

“In this year it been over 80 percent. That means doctors are getting the message that severely ill children need to be treated,” Frieden told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Given within the first day or so of a fever, Tamiflu and Relenza can greatly reduce symptoms. A third drug in the same class, BioCryst Inc’s peramivir, has emergency authorization for intravenous use in the most severe cases.

Flu sends more Alaska Native Americans to hospital

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Native Americans in Alaska are more likely to be hospitalized with swine flu than whites in the state and the lack of running water in some areas may be a factor, researchers have found.

Health experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s four Anchorage hospitals and the state health department studied all known cases of H1N1 flu in the state to see if they could find any patterns.

One was striking — Alaska’s Native Americans were no more likely to die of swine flu, but were far more likely than whites to be sent to the hospital with severe symptoms, said the CDC’s Dr. Thomas Hennessy.

Staff at WHO headquarters get H1N1 flu shots

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization, which has been stressing the safety and importance of H1N1 shots, on Monday had its own staff vaccinated against the pandemic virus.

Employees wanting the swine flu jabs were taken from the WHO’s Geneva headquarters to a Swiss army barracks as part of Switzerland’s national vaccination plan against swine flu, WHO spokeswoman Kristen Kelleher told Reuters.

“About 1,000 staff members will have, or have had, access to the pandemic vaccine today,” she said. Those working in field response teams outside Geneva were vaccinated last week.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan was out of the country on Monday and her agency could not immediately say whether she had been vaccinated against the virus that she declared a global pandemic in June.

Muslim pilgrimage ends with handful of flu cases

DUBAI (Reuters) – The annual Muslim haj pilgrimage has ended without the major flu outbreak feared by some experts and with only five deaths from the H1N1 flu virus out of 73 recorded cases, the Saudi health minister said.

EU: no safety concerns as 10 million get H1N1 shots

LONDON (Reuters) – Some 10 million people across the European Union have now been vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu and so far no unexpected serious safety issues have been identified, the region’s drugs watchdog said on Thursday.

The most frequent adverse reactions have been fever, nausea, headache, allergic reactions and injection site pain, but these were mostly non-serious and had been expected, the European Medicines Agency said.

Women’s Health News

Soy may lessen risk of endometrial, ovarian cancers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who eat more soy-based foods than average may have less risk for certain cancers in the ovaries and the lining of the uterus, according to the combined findings of a few studies.

The uterine lining cancers – also known as endometrial cancer – and the ovarian cancer are all known to be affected by hormones such as estrogen, which are mimicked by compounds in soy. While some soy compounds that act like estrogen are linked to a higher rate of breast cancer, studies have suggested the opposite for endometrial and ovarian cancer.

The new report, in BJOG, An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, hints that odds of developing these cancers may be 40 percent lower among women who eat the highest amounts of soy-based foods.

One of the authors of the new analysis, Dr. Kwon Myung, at the National Cancer Center in Goyang, Korea, told Reuters Health that the data is too preliminary to draw any firm conclusions.

Immediate biopsy unnecessary for some breast lumps

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For breast lumps that can be felt with the fingers but look benign on ultrasound, an immediate biopsy may not be needed, particularly for some young women, researchers report.

Instead, the researchers write in the December issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology, a checkup six months later would be fine for such “palpable lesions.”

“Many palpable lumps that are solid (not a fluid filled cyst) on ultrasound undergo either needle or surgical biopsy, even when they appear benign on imaging,” Dr. Jennifer A. Harvey, who led the study, noted in an email to Reuters Health.

Mammogram radiation may put some women at risk

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Low-dose radiation from mammograms and chest X-rays may increase the risk of breast cancer in young women who are already at high risk because of family history or genetic susceptibility, Dutch researchers said on Tuesday.

They said high-risk women, especially those under 30, may want to consider switching to an alternative screening method such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which does not involve exposure to radiation.

“Our findings suggest that low-dose radiation increases breast cancer risk among these young, high-risk women, and a careful approach is warranted,” said Marijke Jansen-van der Weide of the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.

“I should recommend to be careful with radiation before 30 and to think about alternatives,” Jansen-van der Weide, who presented her findings at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago, said in a telephone interview.

Ultrasound effective at spotting breast cancers

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Breast ultrasounds found 100 percent of suspicious cancers in women under 40 who found lumps or other suspicious areas of the breast, offering a cheaper, less-invasive alternative to surgery or biopsies, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

They said targeted ultrasound — which examines just the area of the breast where a lump is identified — should become the standard of care for women under 40.

The findings may address some of the concerns raised by a federal advisory panel about breast exams done by women or doctors to investigate lumps or hot spots in the breast, which most often turn out to be harmless.

In a controversial set of recommendations issued last month, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that women not be taught to perform self breast exams because they often result in worry and expense for tests, biopsies and unnecessary surgery.

For some women, trans fats could be deadly For some women, trans fats could be deadly

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For women with heart disease, eating too many artery-clogging trans fats may increase their risk of dying suddenly from cardiac arrest, a new study suggests

Trans fats, found largely in commercially prepared baked and fried foods, have become notorious in recent years because they not only raise “bad” LDL cholesterol — as the saturated fats in meat and butter do — but also lower levels of heart-healthy HDL cholesterol.

High trans-fat intake has been linked to coronary heart disease, in which fatty plaques build up in the heart arteries, sometimes leading to a heart attack.

But whether trans fats raise a person’s risk of dying suddenly from cardiac arrest has not been clear.

Protecting Pregnant Women in Car Accidents

Most parents buckle children in car seats to protect them on the road. But how does a pregnant driver protect the child she is carrying?

States are not required to track fetal deaths when reporting accident data, but it is estimated that 300 to 1,000 unborn children die in car accidents each year. The car accident fatality rate for unborn children is about four times the rate for infants and children up to age 4. Car safety experts at Virginia Tech University, funded in part by Ford Motor Company, are trying to develop a computerized crash test model to determine how best to protect pregnant women and their unborn children during a collision. I spoke with Stefan Duma, Virginia Tech’s head of biomechanical engineering, about the research effort and what women can do now to stay safe. If an accident has occured when driving, it is always best to know how to file a claim after it’s happened.

Men’s Health

Many prostate cancers caught by screening won’t kill

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The number of prostate cancers diagnosed in UK men each year would jump from 30,000 to 160,000 if the country introduced population-wide screening for the disease, new research shows. However, many of those cancers are low-risk and may not lead to death.

Something similar happened in the United States in the mid-1990s, when giving men prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests to detect the disease became standard practice, Professor David E. Neal of the University of Cambridge, one of the new study’s authors, told Reuters Health.

“There was an epidemic of prostate cancer in America,” he said. “The number of cases virtually tripled in five years.”

Picture of the Penis

The penis is the male sex organ, reaching its full size during puberty. In addition to its sexual function, the penis acts as a conduit for urine to leave the body.

Men’s Foot and Nail Care

What to buy for a man’s feet.

Most men don’t give their feet much attention. Until a fiery, itchy case of athlete’s foot flares up, that is. Or a gnarly-looking callus or corn appears just before a big race. Or someone near and dear takes one look at a crusty toenail and says, “Yuck.”

Feet, like hands, don’t require a lot of maintenance. But by stocking your medicine cabinet and gym bag with a few items, you can keep them healthy and decent looking.

Pediatric Health

Number of kids in daycare may affect asthma risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The more other children toddlers are exposed to at day care, up to a certain point, the lower their risk of developing asthma, new research shows.

The findings provide more evidence to support the “hygiene hypothesis,” or the idea that early exposure to immune system stimuli like germs and animals — and other kids –can help ward off asthma, the study’s lead author, Dr. Matthew Gurka of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, told Reuters Health.

But right now, he added, the findings shouldn’t be used to guide parents’ decisions on whether or not to put their children in group day care. “Parents shouldn’t stress about this,” he said.

Measles deaths drop by 78 pct but resurgence feared

LONDON (Reuters) – Global deaths from measles fell by 78 percent between 2000 and 2008 thanks largely to mass childhood vaccination campaigns, but experts say death rates may rise again if complacency allows immunization efforts to lag.

About 164,000 died from measles in 2008 down from 733,000 in 2000, according to the U.S.-based Measles Initiative, which groups several organizations including the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization.

Vaccinating nearly 700 million children against measles with large-scale immunization programs and increased routine vaccination coverage, has prevented an estimated 4.3 million measles deaths in less than a decade, the group said.

But it said southeast Asia, which it said includes India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, lagged behind the global trend, with measles deaths falling only 46 percent between 2000 and 2008.

Chickenpox vaccine may protect kids from shingles

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Children who get vaccinated against chickenpox may have a lower risk of developing shingles, a painful rash caused by the chickenpox virus, U.S. researchers said on Friday.

A study of more than 170,000 children 12 and under who got Merck & Co Inc’s chickenpox vaccine between 2002 to 2008 found only 122 cases of shingles or 1 case in 3,700 children who got the vaccine, an unexpectedly low rate, the team reported in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

Shingles, sometimes called herpes zoster, is a painful recurrence of the chickenpox virus, which can lurk in the body for a lifetime. The infection usually starts with a rash on the face or body, and causes pain, itching or tingling.

“The message to parents and pediatricians is: vaccinating your child against the chickenpox is also a good way to reduce their chances of getting herpes zoster,” said HungFu Tseng, a research scientist and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, California.

FDA staff urge more antipsychotic review in kids

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. drug reviewers recommended that regulators further study the effects in children of a group of medicines known as atypical antipsychotics, a report released on Friday said.

Food and Drug Administration staff said a recent study of health insurance claims found children treated with the drugs “were much more likely to experience an adverse metabolic effect than adults, and the likelihood was directly correlated with age.”

Metabolic effects can include abnormal weight gain, diabetes and increases in cholesterol and blood pressure.

“Although observational studies have limitations … this provocative hypothesis should nonetheless be subject to some further evaluation by the agency,” staff in the FDA’s division of pharmacovigilance wrote in an October 14 memo.

U.N.: $24 billion could slash infant, maternal deaths

LONDON (Reuters) – Maternal deaths in developing countries could be slashed by 70 percent and newborn deaths cut by nearly half if investment in family planning and pregnancy care was doubled, the United Nations said Thursday.

A U.N.-backed report said investments in family planning and birth control would boost the effectiveness spending on pregnancy and newborn health care, suggesting investing in both together could achieve “dramatic” results.

“Investing in a handful of basic health services, like family planning and routine delivery care, can save millions of women and babies,” said Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute, a think-tank which studies reproductive health and which released the report with the U.N Populations Fund (UNFPA).

Physically active boys are smarter, study hints

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Jocks get new respect in a large Swedish study that suggests physically active teen boys may be smarter than their couch-potato counterparts.

The findings, the investigators say, have important implications for the education of young people. Increasing, not decreasing, physical education in schools can not only slow the shift toward sedentary lifestyles but, by doing so, reduce risk of disease and “perhaps intellectual and academic underachievement,” they concluded.

Dr. H. Georg Kuhn and colleagues from the Institute of Medicine at the University of Gothenburg wanted to know if aerobic (cardiovascular) fitness and muscle strength were associated with brain power and future socioeconomic status.

Heavier kids tend to underestimate their size

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Children are generally pretty good at estimating their true body size but heavier kids, and particularly girls, seem more prone to underestimating their body size, research from the UK suggests.

Three investigators at University College, London asked 205 boys and 194 girls, 7 to 14 years old, to match their body size to one of seven numbered images of similarly aged boys and girls. The images ranged in body size from very thin to very heavy. They also asked the youngsters privately to describe their body size, giving them choices of too thin, just right, or too fat.

Actual measurements showed that 16 percent of the kids were underweight, just over 13 percent were overweight, 5 percent were obese, and the rest were at a healthy weight.

Mental Health

Loneliness Can Be Contagious

Lonely People Have a Way of Making Others Feel the Isolation, Researchers Say

By Bill Hendrick

WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Dec. 1, 2009 — Loneliness can spread like a contagious disease, new research indicates.

Lonely people tend to share their loneliness with others, and their feelings of isolation and despair rub off on friends, neighbors, spouses, and even acquaintances, researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The team of researchers, led by John T. Cacioppo, PhD, of the University of Chicago, followed 5,214 participants of the Framingham Heart Study from 1971 to 2001. Cacioppo and colleagues studied data on individuals in a second generation of the study.

Depression, peers top influences on youth violence

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Kids who are depressed and have delinquents for friends may be the most likely to lash out violently at others, according to a new study in The Journal of Pediatrics.

The amount of time a youth spent watching violent TV or playing violent video games didn’t have anything to do with whether he or she would commit violent acts in real life, Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson of Texas A&M University and his colleagues found.

Ferguson and his team also found that while kids whose parents were psychologically abusive to their intimate partners were more likely to engage in violence, being exposed to a parent’s physical abuse of a partner wasn’t a factor.

Overall, the researchers found, the factors that did increase the risk of violent behavior had pretty small effects. Based on the findings, they say, future research should probably look at groups of risk factors, rather than focusing on a single one.

Teen internet addicts more apt to self harm: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Adolescents who are addicted to the internet are more likely than non-addicted teens to engage in self-injurious behaviors like hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, or pinching or burning themselves, according to a study released Thursday.

Researchers surveyed 1,618 adolescents between 13 and 18 years old from the Guangdong Province in Southeast China about their self-injurious behaviors and gave them a test designed to gauge internet addiction.

While only about 10 percent of the students surveyed were moderately addicted to the internet, and less than 1 percent were severely addicted, those students were 2.4 times more likely to have self-injured one to five times in the past 6 months than students with normal internet habits, Dr. Lawrence T. Lam from University of Notre Dame, Darlinghurst, New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues found.

Additionally, the moderately-to-severely internet-addicted students were almost five times more likely than non-addicted students to have self-injured six or more times in the past 6 months, they report in the journal Injury Prevention.

Geriatric Health

Constipation: an early sign of Parkinson’s?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People with a history of constipation may be at increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease down the road, research hints.

In a study, Dr. Walter A. Rocca at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues found a history of constipation about two times more frequent in a group of men and women with Parkinson’s disease than in an age-matched group of men and women who did not have the disease.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative brain disease that causes body tremors, rigid muscles, and difficulty walking and talking. The disease alters the body’s autonomic nervous system, which controls spontaneous body processes such as heart rate, digestion, salivation, and bowel function.

Fitness

Phys Ed: How to Prevent Stress Fractures

Stress fractures are one of the more pernicious injuries in sports, afflicting the experienced and the aspiring, with no regard for competitive timing. Last year, Tiger Woods managed to win the U.S. Open despite suffering from stress fractures in his left leg (as well as other leg and knee injuries), while the great British marathoner Paula Radcliffe struggled through the Beijing Olympics Marathon on a leg barely recovered from a stress fracture, one of several she’s suffered. The International Association of Athletics Federations, the world governing body for track and field, recently described stress fractures, with a kind of grim resignation, as “the curse of athletes.”

But studies published in this month’s issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise offer hope that, at least for runners, simple alterations in their stride or in the strength of their legs might reduce their risk for the most common type of stress fracture.

Nutrition/Diet/Healthy Recipes

Fatty acids in diet affect ulcerative colitis risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People who eat lots of red meat, cook with certain types of oil, and use some kinds of polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA)-heavy margarines may be increasing their risk of a painful inflammatory bowel disease, a study in more than 200,000 Europeans shows.

These foods are high in linoleic acid and the study have found that people who were the heaviest consumers of this omega-6 PUFA were more than twice as likely to develop ulcerative colitis as those who consumed the least.

Dr. Andrew Hart of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and his colleagues also found that eating more eicosapentaenoic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and fish oils, was associated with a lower risk of the disease.

While people need a certain amount of linoleic acid to survive, Hart noted in an interview with Reuters Health, excess amounts are taken up into the lining of the colon, and if they’re released, they can promote inflammation. Omega-3 fatty acid, he added, does the opposite. “It basically dampens down inflammation,” he explained.

Turkey (or Chicken) Soup With Lemon and Rice

his comforting soup is inspired by a Middle Eastern chicken soup. It’s great with or without leftover turkey – don’t hesitate to pull turkey stock from the freezer and make it with just vegetables and rice.

2 quarts turkey stock or chicken stock

4 celery stalks, with leaves, thinly sliced

2 leeks, white part only, cleaned and sliced

4 garlic cloves, green shoots removed, thinly sliced

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Juice of 1 to 2 lemons, to taste

1/2 pound zucchini, sliced

2 cups shredded leftover turkey (optional)

1/2 cup basmati rice, cooked

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1. Bring the stock to a simmer, and add the celery, leeks, garlic, salt, pepper and lemon juice. Simmer gently for 30 minutes. Add the zucchini and leftover turkey, if you have it, and simmer for another 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the rice and the cilantro. Taste and adjust seasonings, and serve.

Yield: Serves six.

Advance preparation: You can make this a day ahead, but don’t add the cilantro until just before serving.

Stracciatella With Spinach

This light, classic Roman soup may be all you want to eat for a few days after Thanksgiving. It’s traditionally made with chicken stock, but why not use turkey stock instead?

1 1/2 quarts chicken or turkey stock

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

2 large or extra large eggs

1 1/2 tablespoons semolina

1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan (1 1/2 ounces)

1 6-ounce bag baby spinach, or 1 bunch spinach, stemmed, washed, dried and coarsely chopped

1. Place the stock in a large saucepan or soup pot. Remove 1/3 cup and set aside. Bring the rest to a simmer. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper. If there is any visible fat, skim it away.

2. Beat the eggs in a bowl, and stir in the 1/3 cup of stock, the semolina and the cheese.

3. Stir the spinach into the simmering stock, then drizzle in the egg mixture, scraping all of it in with a rubber spatula. Stir very slowly with the spatula, paddling it back and forth until the little “rags” form. Taste, adjust seasoning and serve at once.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: The stock can be made months ahead and then frozen, or four days ahead and then refrigerated.

Ravioli or Tortellini in Broth

There are many different kinds of freshly made ravioli available, and this is a great way to present any of them. I prefer this approach over a tomato sauce, because a reduced broth doesn’t have a strong flavor that competes with the ravioli filling. This is an easy way to put together an elegant meal.

1 quart turkey or chicken stock

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 pound prepared tortellini or ravioli

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

1. Place the turkey stock in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce to 2 cups. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Keep at a simmer while you cook the tortellini or ravioli.

2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and salt generously. Add the tortellini or ravioli, and cook as directed. Drain and toss with the olive oil and parsley, then distribute among four wide soup plates.

3. Ladle the broth over the pasta, and top with a spoonful of Parmesan. Serve, passing the remaining Parmesan at the table.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: You can reduce the stock ahead of serving and refrigerate for three or four days, or freeze for six months.

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    • TMC on December 5, 2009 at 14:14
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