Tag Archives: cancer

Avoid hearing loss: Check the decibels before entering a room

An estimated 26 million Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 have some form of hearing loss due to exposure to loud noise at work or at play. That’s partly because our suburban and urban lifestyle has gotten louder, due to things like city traffic, a screeching subway, a football game, a loud bar or restaurant, or leaf blowers in the suburbs.  Research has also shown that the now ubiquitous practice of listening to music through earphones increases the risk of hearing loss. Aside from damaging hearing, loud noises are also associated with stress and symptoms of stress like hypertension and cardiovascular disease. As the noise level has increased, we’ve grown accustomed to the higher decibels, so it’s become difficult to know what is normal and what is too loud. According to the National Institutes of Health, long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 decibels can cause hearing loss. The louder the sound, the shorter the time period before noise-induced hearing loss can occur. Regular exposure to more than one minute of 110 decibels or more risks permanent hearing loss. Less than 75 decibels is generally considered safe. Now to put that into perspective: Normal conversation is approximately 60 decibels, heavy city traffic can reach 85 decibels, stadium noise can roar to 120 decibels, a rock concert or symphony orchestra can reach 110 decibels, a snowmobile generates 100 decibels, and a movie hovers at 85 – but can have 100 decibel peaks. A good way of gauging high decibels is if you have to raise your voice to be heard by someone sitting or standing nearby; this is not uncommon in noisy restaurants, bars or at a concert. If the noise hurts your ears, it’s also a sign that it’s too loud. To get a more accurate reading on sound, you can download an app that can quickly measure decibels. “If you think something’s loud, you can pick up the phone and see just how loud it is,” said Dr. Annette Hurley, associate professor of communications disorders at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.   Walk into a restaurant, quickly test the decibels, and go somewhere else if it registers above 75. If you feel like being an advocate for all patrons, you can bring it to the attention of the restaurant owner, who may be able to lower the decibels simply by turning down the background music. If you’re going to a concert or other noisy venue, take earplugs to dampen the sound. Here are a few apps that Dr. Hurley recommends:  - dB Volume Meter - TooLoud? - deciBel It’s also a good idea to set maximum decibels on your personal listening device. If you’re trying to hear your music in a place that’s already noisy, it’s easy to inadvertently turn up the volume to damaging levels. Make sure it’s set below 85 decibels, recommended Dr. Hurley.Laurie Tarkan is an award-winning health journalist whose work appears in the New York Times, among other national magazines and websites. She has authored several health books, including “Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility.” Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/11/avoid-hearing-loss-check-decibels-before-entering-room/

Dr. Manny: FDA loss of control on Plan B not surprising

I told you so - the government is bamboozling us about Plan B. The Obama administration announced on Monday that it will now allow girls and women of all ages to purchase the Plan B pill without a prescription. This is exactly what I have been warning the American public about. I am now totally convinced that our current federal government loves confusion. When you have a single agenda, and many ways to spin it, the American public never gets a clear answer and that is exactly what has happened with the Plan B emergency contraception controversy. Just last week, a U.S. appeals court ruled that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must make only certain forms of the emergency contraception pill available to children of all ages, without a prescription.  In a confusing ruling, the court stated that while the two-pill version of emergency contraception could be sold over-the-counter to women of all ages, the one-pill version would still only be sold to women age 17 or older. The court did not explain its reasoning. One has to remember that the FDA first approved this form of over-the-counter contraception for women of all ages back in 2011. When that initial FDA ruling came out, there was a loud public outcry and restrictions were quickly put in place barring women under the age of 17 from purchasing these pills. But of course, that was just one spin on the story. In April, a New York judge ruled that restricting access to Plan B was inappropriate, forcing the FDA to reconsider their initial finding that emergency contraception should be available to children of all ages. And then, we got another spin on the story, as the FDA tried to lower the age limit for access to emergency contraception to 15 last month. There was another outcry and more criticism, because we know perfectly well that a 15-year-old may not have a clear understanding of how to utilize emergency contraception. Now, we see that the FDA will get to do what they wanted to do in the first place. How convenient. So, what’s the message here?

Vegetable fats tied to less prostate cancer spread

After being diagnosed with prostate cancer, men who eat a diet high in vegetable fats, such as those in nuts and olive oil, may be less likely to have their disease spread, a new study suggests. Researchers found that replacing some carbohydrates with those healthy fats was also tied to a lower risk of dying from any cause during the study. But the opposite was true for saturated and trans fats often found in meat and processed foods. “A lot of doctors will simply say, ‘Cut out fat,'” after a prostate cancer diagnosis, said Dr. Stephen Freedland, a urologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. But this study challenges that advice, said Freedland, who wrote a commentary on the findings. “It actually says, if you eat more fat, albeit the right kind of fat,… you're less likely to die of not only prostate cancer, but really of any cause, which really flies in the face of this ‘low-fat, low-fat, low-fat' mantra that we've been told for decades now,” he said. Researchers tracked 4,577 men who were diagnosed with localized prostate cancer during a large study of health workers beginning in 1986. Those men filled out questionnaires every four years on how often they ate or drank about 130 different types of foods and beverages. Over the next eight to nine years, 315 men developed lethal prostate cancer - cancer that spread to other parts of the body or killed them - and 1,064 died from any cause. Men who reported getting the highest proportion of their daily calories from vegetable fat - more than 21 percent - after their diagnosis were about one-third less likely to die during the study than those who ate the least vegetable fat. And they had a borderline lower risk of developing lethal cancer. On the other hand, men who ate a similar amount of animal fat tended to be more likely to die during follow up, from prostate cancer or anything else, than those who skimped on animal meat. Erin Richman of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues found that switching 10 percent of daily calories from carbohydrates to vegetable fat was linked to a 29 percent lower risk of lethal prostate cancer and a 26 percent lower chance of dying from any cause. But replacing 5 percent of those calories with saturated fat, or just 1 percent with trans fat, was tied to a 25 to 30 percent higher risk of death during the study period, according to findings published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. “The benefit was really when you were replacing refined carbohydrates with (things like) olive oil and nuts,” Richman said. She said vegetable fats contain antioxidants and may reduce inflammation in the body, thereby making it harder for cancer to spread. The American Cancer Society estimates about one in six U.S. men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime, and one in 36 will die of the disease. Because how animals are fed and how meats are cooked may both affect cancer risks associated with eating animal fats, Freedland said, “It becomes difficult to say, ‘Animals are bad; vegetables are good.' It's not that simple.” He recommends that men with prostate cancer cut out simple sugars and processed foods, as that is one of the easiest ways to get to a healthy weight. But not all fat should go. Richman agreed. “I think there's enough established benefit that you're not going to do any harm by adding nuts or olive oil,” she said.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/11/vegetable-fats-tied-to-less-prostate-cancer-spread/

A path to lower-risk painkillers: Newly-discovered drug target paves way for alternatives to morphine

Now, new research from the University of Michigan Health System and a major pharmaceutical company has identified a novel approach to moderate and severe pain therapy that paves the way for lower dosage painkillers. The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Drugs such as hydrocodone (the main ingredient of Vicodin) and oxycodone (Oxycontin) are often the best options for the treatment of moderate to severe pain for patients facing medical conditions ranging from a wisdom tooth extraction to cancer. The drugs bind to specific molecules (opioid receptors) on nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to prevent the feeling of pain…

Men with prostate cancer should eat healthy vegetable fats, study suggests

By substituting healthy vegetable fats — such as olive and canola oils, nuts, seeds and avocados — for animal fats and carbohydrates, men with the disease had a markedly lower risk of developing lethal prostate cancer and dying from other causes, according to the study. The research, involving nearly 4,600 men with non-metastatic prostate cancer, could help with the development of dietary guidelines for men with the disease. While prostate cancer affects millions of men around the world, little is known about the relationship between patients’ diets following their diagnosis and progression of the disease…

Men with prostate cancer should eat healthy vegetable fats

By substituting healthy vegetable fats — such as olive and canola oils, nuts, seeds and avocados — for animal fats and carbohydrates, men with the disease had a markedly lower risk of developing lethal prostate cancer and dying from other causes, according to the study. The research, involving nearly 4,600 men with non-metastatic prostate cancer, could help with the development of dietary guidelines for men with the disease. While prostate cancer affects millions of men around the world, little is known about the relationship between patients’ diets following their diagnosis and progression of the disease. …

Master regulator in cancer metastasis discovered

The transformation of sedentary, specialized cells into wandering, invasive, and unspecialized cells is called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which is central to metastasis. EMT is a multistage process, which is accompanied by a fundamental change in cell morphology and number of genetic programs. The molecular processes that govern EMT, however, are still poorly understood. Main Switch Found The research groups of Prof. …

WHO: MERS coronavirus has potential to cause pandemic

The World Health Organization on Monday urged health workers around the world to be on the alert for symptoms of the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS), which has the potential to circle the globe and cause a pandemic. The United Nations agency, which issued new, long-awaited guidance to countries on influenza pandemics, said the world was also in the same “alert phase” for two human strains of bird flu - H5N1, which emerged a decade ago, and H7N9, first detected in China in March. “We are trying to find out as much as we can and we are concerned about these (three) viruses,” Andrew Harper, WHO special adviser for health security and environment, told a news briefing on its new scale for pandemic risk. The interim guidance, to be finalized later this year, incorporates lessons from the 2009/2010 pandemic of H1N1 swine flu, which caused an estimated 200,000 deaths, roughly in line with annual seasonal flu. Having been adjusted to include the notion of severity when assessing risk, the new scale has just four phases against six previously and is intended to give countries more flexibility in judging local risks. “International concern about these infections is high, because it is possible for this virus to move around the world. There have been now several examples where the virus has moved from one country to another through travelers,” the WHO said of MERS, which causes coughing, fever and pneumonia. Travelers have carried the virus to Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Infected people have also been found in Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. “Consequently, all countries in the world need to ensure that their healthcare workers are aware of the virus and the disease it can cause and that, when unexplained cases of pneumonia are identified, MERS-CoV should be considered.” MERS-coronavirus, a distant relative of SARS that emerged in Saudi Arabia last year, has been confirmed in 55 people worldwide, killing 31 of them. Forty cases occurred in Saudi Arabia, many in a hospital in the eastern province of al-Ahsa. “The overall number of cases is limited but the virus causes death in about 60 percent of patients,” the WHO said, reporting on a week-long mission of international experts to Saudi Arabia that ended on Sunday. “So far, about 75 percent of the cases in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have been in men and most have occurred in people with one or more major chronic conditions.” But the source of the MERS virus remained unknown, it said. Clusters of cases have occurred in families and health facilities, indicating a limited capacity to spread among people in close contact with an infected person, it said. All countries in the Middle East should urgently intensify disease surveillance to detect any MERS infections, it said. The WHO has not yet drawn up advice for Travelers ahead of the annual haj pilgrimage in October, which draws millions of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/10/who-mers-coronavirus-has-potential-to-cause-pandemic/