Tag Archives: cancer

Dr. Manny Alvarez: Government must stop bamboozling Americans about Plan B

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. A U.S. appeals court ruled on Wednesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must make certain forms of the emergency contraception pill available to children of all ages, without a prescription. This is exactly what I have been warning the American public about. 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 a third spin on the story, as the FDA tried to lower the age limit for access to emergency contraception to15 in May. 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 an appeals court is forcing the FDA to do what they wanted to do in the first place. How convenient. And the final ruling is still unclear, after the court decided on Wednesday that while the two-pill version of emergency contraception can now be sold over-the-counter to women of all ages, the one-pill version will still only be sold to women age 17 or older. The court did not explain its reasoning. While there is still a lot of confusion about the ruling, it seems as though the FDA will ultimately get its way. So, what’s the message here? The polarizing health care agenda of this federal government is like a train without a stop and parents need to be aware of this. As I have said before, this is a medication. Yes, I know that it is safe – but it does have side effects. Side effects to Plan B can include, but are not limited to: migraines, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and blood clots. If this drug is available to young children, it might lead to problems including the misuse of the medication and the risk that children will utilize this as a regular form of contraception. Furthermore, it will exclude parents from the decision-making process. And in my opinion, parents can be very valuable in counseling children about proper behavior and doing the right thing. This is taking parents and caregivers out of the equation and inhibiting their ability to help their children live a healthy and happy life. America, we are being bamboozled. Wake up and pay attention.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/dr-manny-government-must-stop-bamboozling-americans-about-plan-b/

Nontoxic cancer therapy proves effective against metastatic cancer

The study, "The Ketogenic Diet and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Prolong Survival in Mice with Systemic Metastatic Cancer," was published online today in PLOS ONE. Led by Dominic D’Agostino, PhD, principal investigator in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the research shows the effects of combining two nontoxic adjuvant cancer therapies, the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in a mouse model of late-stage, metastatic cancer…

New gene that is essential for nuclear reprogramming

A group from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), headed by researcher Ralph P. Schneider, from the Telomeres and Telomerase Group led by María A. Blasco, publishes this week an article in Nature Communications on the discovery of a new gene called TRF1 that is essential for nuclear reprogramming. It is also known that TRF1 is indispensable for protecting telomeres, the ends of chromosomes. …

In-flight emergencies: Not as common as you think

Medical emergencies can occur at any time and that means, even while you’re on vacation or flying to your destination. But don’t be alarmed; you may be surprised as to how rare they are. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine investigated the outcomes of medical emergencies on commercial flights between 2008 and 2010.   They found that for every 1 million passengers, 16 emergencies occurred – in other words, one emergency for every 600 flights.   The most common emergencies included fainting at 37.4 percent, respiratory symptoms at 12.1 percent and nausea or vomiting at 9.5 percent.  Interestingly, cardiovascular events like cardiac arrest, and obstetric or gynecological issues each accounted for less than or equal to 0.5 percent.   The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandates that all aircraft carry an emergency medical kit.  These kits are required to have, among other things, aspirin tablets, nitroglycerine tablets, saline solution and epinephrine. These kits are designed to provide flight crew or on-board medical professionals with resources to treat ill passengers, after consulting a ground-based physician in a medical communication center.   According to the report, flights had to be diverted and land at a different destination in only 7.3 percent of the cases.  Often, the reason flights were able to continue to the original destination is because of the training of the flight crew, the supplies in mandatory medical kits and the presence of medical professionals on board.   Oxygen was the most commonly used treatment almost 50 percent of the time, followed by saline solution at 5.2 percent and aspirin at 5 percent. This study does a nice job quantifying the incidence of in-flight medical emergencies and the resulting treatments and providers.   Keep in mind that such medical emergencies are rare, but do occur daily given the vast amount of airline travel across the world.   Rest assured that traveling physicians and other medical professionals are often on board and able to help ill passengers; at minimum, the flight crew will have contact with a physician at an academic medical communication center to remotely aid in treatment.  Dr. David B. Samadi is the Vice Chairman of the Department of Urology and Chief of Robotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He is a board-certified urologist, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of urological disease, with a focus on robotic prostate cancer treatments. To learn more please visit his websites RoboticOncology.com and SMART-surgery.com. Find Dr. Samadi on Facebook.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/in-flight-emergencies-not-as-common-as-may-think/

SurvivorLink: Online tool helps child cancer survivors maintain healthy lives

Ansley Riedel was just 10 months old when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) – a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She immediately began radiation and chemotherapy, undergoing treatment up until she was a little older than 3-and-a-half years old.  Then, after receiving a second bone marrow transplant from her 4-month-old baby brother in July of 1991, Riedel reached the goal that every cancer patient hopes to achieve: Remission. “We celebrate what we call my second birthday,” Riedel told FoxNews.com, regarding the special occasion. Nearly 21 years later, Riedel is doing better than ever – but she hasn’t forgotten her time spent in the hospital so many years ago.  Though she was only a toddler at the time, her bout with cancer ultimately inspired her to become a nurse in order to help others like herself. “I remember a lot of the clinic visits – the routine of going to the clinic, getting labs, some of my hospital stays,” Riedel said. “I remember my nurses a lot, which is why I chose to become a nurse.  They were really like my first group of friends that I got to know really well.” While Riedel was ultimately able to turn her cancer into a source of inspiration, post-cancer life has still had its fair share of difficulties. The radiation treatment Riedel underwent at such a young age has had a lasting impact on her health. Between the ages of 10 and 14, Riedel had to receive daily shots of growth hormone because her development had been stunted by treatment.  She also takes a daily medication for low thyroid function – something her doctors speculate may have been affected by radiation. “There’s a lot of unknown because I was so young,” Riedel said. “I have to be pretty careful with my teeth.  The radiation kind of damaged my permanent teeth, so I’m more susceptible to cavities.  I see more of a specialist for my regular cleanings. My roots were damaged and I couldn’t have braces because of that.” The health setbacks Riedel has had to face are not uncommon for cancer survivors.  While radiation and chemotherapy are meant to kill fast-growing cancer cells, they can also damage healthy cells in the heart, kidneys, lungs and more in the process. “Obvious problems cancer survivors have are endocrine (issues), growth hormone deficiency, low thyroid, problems beginning puberty and fertility,” Dr. Lillian Meacham, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the Cancer Survivor Program at the Aflac Cancer Center in Atlanta, told FoxNews.com.  “They can have…problems related to scarring of the lungs or damage to the heart muscle.  We have to be vigilant about almost every organ to be sure that we are looking out for these problems, mainly because we want to preserve quality of life and decrease health care costs.” For children diagnosed in the 1960s with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is the most common form of childhood cancer, the chance of survival was only 10 percent. Fortunately, chances of survival have increased to 80 percent today. Therefore, finding ways to help cancer survivors maintain a healthy lifestyle post-cancer is an ever increasing necessity. To address this need, Meachem and others at the Aflac Cancer Center have created SurvivorLink, an online tool that aims to improve cancer survivors’ quality of life.  According to its website, SurvivorLink hopes to increase awareness about the long-term health needs of child cancer survivors, as well as create a patient portal, which will provide patients with easy access to all their relevant health information. “When kids come to the survivor clinic, we give them a Survivor Health Care Plan – which details what they need throughout their lives to stay healthy,” Meachem said. “They can upload that into this website, so let’s say they move to North Carolina or Montana, they can share their documents to new health care providers.  It’s like having an electronic chart they carry with them at all times.” Riedel is currently in the process of filling out her patient profile on SurvivorLink, and she said she likes how it is specifically tailored to her own personal needs. “One of the good things about SurvivorLink is it’s based on your diagnosis and based on your protocol.  Depending on how much chemo you had, it will tell you specifically that for this one chemo, these are the big side effects and long term things that can result.” As someone who is still actively involved in health care, Riedel is very passionate about increasing knowledge and communication among cancer survivors and their health care providers.  For her, easy access to information is essential for a long and healthy life. “The main message is just to get informed and get help if you need to – but really be an advocate for yourself,” Riedel said. “If you take care of yourself, then other people are going to be more willing to work with you.” Click for more on SurvivorLink.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/survivorlink-online-tool-helps-child-cancer-survivors-maintain-healthy-life/

More research needed on anesthesia’s impact on brain, study shows

Surgical anesthesia’s impact on the brain has long been debated, and even anesthesiologists have admitted the effects of these drugs on humans is not clearly understood. “Anesthetics have been somewhat of an enigma; nobody knows how they really work, and we basically use them in thousands of patients every day,” study author Dr. Andreas Loepke, a physician and researcher in the department of anesthesiology at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told FoxNews.com. Concerns have been raised among anesthesiologists like Loepke over previous research indicating that exposure to anesthesia may increase the rate of cell death in the brains of young animals. And now, a new study in mice published in Annals of Neurology indicates that anesthesia seems to kill off younger neurons more often than older neurons – regardless of the age of the animal.  Researchers have not yet studied the impact of anesthesia on human brain cells. “You can’t section a human brain,” Loepke said. “…But if it were occurring in humans, we would predict that anesthetics affect neurons in patients of all ages.” Loepke and his colleagues examined the rates of cell death in the brains of mice exposed to anesthesia for six hours. They focused particularly on the dentate gyrus region of the brain, which helps control learning and memory. “We found something very interesting, in that cell death occurred in the spot where the dentate gyrus forms new neurons,” Loepke said. The root cause and impact of anesthesia-related cell death is unknown, and the study’s authors said more research needs to be done.   “During development, (we) form twice as many neurons as we need as an adult. The brain needs to be pruned back to properly function,” Loepke said. “So it’s currently unknown whether anesthesia kills neurons that would have been eliminated anyways from the brain or neurons later needed for vital function.”   Loepke added that human studies of older adults have indicated that some people do experience memory problems after undergoing anesthesia, which can be short-term or long-term.  Whether this is caused by anesthesia or by the body’s reaction to pain or surgery remains unclear. “The need for surgery could be a marker for these problems occurring – (or the) inflammatory response to the body from the surgery. These have all been found to alter neurons,” Loepke said. Loepke and his colleagues hope to go on to study the effect of anesthesia in humans using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. But until more research is done, Loepke urged people not to worry too much. “Patients need to make sure they get the surgery they need, because putting off the surgery could put you at more risk (than the anesthesia),” Loepke said.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/more-research-needed-on-anesthesias-impact-on-brain-study-shows/

Energy drinks no better than caffeine, study suggests

Despite the “special blend” of ingredients, energy drinks work no better than ordinary caffeine at helping us pay attention, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers examined participants' brain activity while they performed a task designed to require attention. Specifically, the researchers looked at how fast the brain responded to a change in letters appearing on a computer screen. Before the task, participants consumed 8 ounces of either water, water with caffeine, or water containing the energy drink 5-Hour Energy. The caffeinated drinks were adjusted so that they had the same amount of caffeine per pound of participants' body weight, and all drinks were colored blue. During the task, participants who drank the caffeinated drinks had faster brain responses, compared with those who drank plain water. But there was no difference in brain activity between those who consumed caffeinated water, and those who consumed 5-Hour Energy. More from LiveScience “A lot of people take the energy drinks because they think they have that extra boost over caffeine,” said study researcher Chelsea Benham, a student at Centre College in Danville, Ky. But the study shows “there's really no difference,” Benham said. In terms of boosting attention, a cup of coffee “would do you just as well,” if it had the same amount of caffeine as an energy drink, she said. A 2-ounce bottle of 5-Hour Energy contains about 215 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of about two cups of coffee. An advantage of 5-Hour Energy is that it contains a concentrated amount of caffeine — people need to consume a larger volume of coffee to get the same amount of caffeine. However, there has been concern over the safety of energy drinks in general because of their ability to deliver high doses of caffeine in such a concentrated form. Last year, the FDA said it had received reports of health problems linked with 5-Hour Energy, including heart attacks and death, although the reports do not prove that the energy drink was the cause of these problems. Some health experts have been concerned about the combination of compounds in energy drinks, and are calling for more research to determine what amount is safe to consume. Energy drinks can contain chemicals such as guarana, taurine, L-carnitine, ginseng and yohimbine. In the new study, researchers also did not find a difference in participants' physical reaction times (on a test that involved clicking a computer mouse when a particular letter appeared on a screen), regardless of whether they consumed a caffeinated or non- caffeinated drink. Benham said this may have been because the test took only 20 minutes. Over a longer period, she said she suspects there would be a difference. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Washington, D.C., on May 26. Benham conducted the work with her adviser, KatieAnn Skogsberg, an assistant professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at Centre College. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/energy-drinks-no-better-than-caffeine-study-suggests/

Woman paralyzed after mosquito bite

A British woman was temporarily paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for four months after being bitten by a mosquito in Australia, the Sun reported. Days after being bitten, Natasha Porter, a 23-year-old from West Sussex, England, was unable to lift her arms. Soon after that, she was paralyzed from the neck down. Initially, doctors suspected Porter was having an allergic reaction. But Porter was eventually diagnosed with a condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome, which doctors believe was triggered by the mosquito bite, according to Nature World News. The syndrome causes the body’s immune system to attack itself. “I was so scared,” Porters said. “I remember feeling guilty, because I knew I was going to have to call my parents. I was thinking, ‘How do I call them up and say I might be dead in a few hours?’” Gradually, Porter began to regain feeling and has now made a full recovery – and plans to continue travelling the world. “I don't want to waste any time anymore, and I hope I have become a better person. I just want to live as much as I can, spend as much time with my friends and family, just enjoying my life,” Porter said. Click for more from The Sun. Click for more from Nature World News.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/woman-paralyzed-after-mosquito-bite/

New app provides health info straight from doctors

Being in the dark about your health can be very unsettling, so people often turn to the Internet for answers. But sometimes, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction on web sites. To help people get better answers to their biggest health questions, two physicians developed a free new app called iTriage. The app’s content is written by a team of doctors and health professionals, and the information available on the app has been reviewed by Harvard Medical School, according to iTriage’s web site. The app includes tools to check symptoms, explore possible causes, research medications and even find a doctor. Additionally, a section on the app called My iTriage allows users to store their personal health records and insurance information. The iTriage app is a useful tool, but if you’re sick, be sure to seek professional help. For more information go to iTriageHealth.comsource : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/new-app-provides-health-info-straight-from-doctors/

Scientists find potential new clues for identifying breast cancer risk

Dr. David Gilley’s laboratory at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis and Dr. Connie Eaves’ laboratory at the BC Cancer Agency’s Terry Fox Laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, collaborated to determine how telomeres are regulated in different types of normal breast cells. …