Doctor HealthHealth Tips

I don’t know about you but I spent most of my youth worshiping the sun, eating foods I wasn’t supposed to and never wondering about what tomorrow would bring. Now that I am older, I realize how much I should have valued my younger days.

Let’s face it…we all want to look young forever. I sometimes wish I could start at 90 and go backwards, enjoying the fruits of my youth but the wisdom of my age.

In this article, I decided to give tips for healthy skin as the years come upon you. Read the rest of this entry »

Calcium and vitamin D supplements may do more than strengthen bones in older women. These vital nutrients may also help younger, active women reduce their risk of stress fractures.

To illustrate that point, many bone health experts refer to a recent study of more than 5,200 female U.S. Navy recruits that found that women who didn’t take additional calcium and vitamin D were about 25 percent more likely to suffer a stress fracture than women who took the vitamin and mineral combination.

“The most common time for a stress fracture is when you’re increasing your exercise levels — when you’re going from doing nothing to doing a whole lot. It’s too much, too fast, and the bone can’t handle it,” explained Dr. Sabrina Strickland, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in sports medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.
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Consuming increasingly higher doses of powdered milk may help children with milk allergies overcome their condition, a new study suggests.

In the double-blinded, placebo-controlled study of milk immunotherapy, all 12 children receiving milk powder daily significantly increased their tolerance of milk after four months, from no more than 40 milligrams to at least 2,540 milligrams (2.5 ounces). Meanwhile, the seven children receiving a placebo powder showed no improvement.

The findings were published in the Oct. 28 print edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and Duke University.

“Our findings suggest that oral immunotherapy gradually retrains the immune system to completely disregard or to better tolerate the allergens in milk that previously caused allergic reactions,” study senior investigator Dr. Robert Wood, director of Allergy and Immunology at Hopkins Children’s, said in a hospital news release. “Albeit preliminary and requiring further study, these results suggest that oral immunotherapy may be the closest thing yet to a true treatment for food allergy.”

Children regularly consuming milk powder had more milk antibodies in their blood, and were better able to tolerate milk than those on the placebo. As a result, the researchers recommended that these children continue consuming milk daily to maintain and further build their resistance.

The researchers aren’t sure what would happen if the children stopped consuming milk regularly. “It may very well be that this tolerance is lost once the immune system is no longer exposed to the allergen daily,” Wood said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that food allergies in children have risen 18 percent in the last decade, with 3 million children in the United States having at least one food allergy. Being allergic to milk is the most prevalent one.

Most food allergies are managed through simple avoidance of the trigger foods in hope that the child will outgrow the allergy.

“Given that the quality of life of a child with a food allergy is comparable to the quality of life of a child with diabetes, we urgently need therapies that go beyond strict food avoidance or waiting for the child to outgrow the allergy,” Wood said.

Wood said further research is necessary, so parents and caregivers should not try oral immunotherapy without medical supervision.
By HealthDay

Postmenopausal women who have lost interest in sex may be able to bring their libidos back to life with a testosterone patch, according to new research published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine.
However, the use of the male hormone to boost sex drive in women may not be risk-free. Out of the 814 women in the study, four women who were taking testosterone developed breast cancer, but none of the women on placebo did. It’s not clear whether this was a statistical blip or a warning sign that excess testosterone could cause or spur the growth of a malignancy. Some women also reported excess hair growth, although none stopped using the hormone for this reason.
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Cold weather conjures up many images: snowball fights, cuddling by the fireplace, drinking hot cocoa.

Perhaps the image of an inspired workout is best left for sunnier days — which is why you are lacking the motivation to get out from under the warm covers actually do anything, much less exercise.

No worries, though, FOXNews teamed up with Manhattan’s Crunch Fitness and New York City’s WPLJ 95.5 FM to put together an invigorating winter workout playlist.

Hopefully, these songs will have you burning a steady stream of calories by the end of December, so that you can toss back an extra glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve without the guilt.

1. Song: “Rock ‘N Roll Train”
Artist: AC/DC

Why it’s great: “This is No. 1 in 29 countries,” said WPLJ’s Race Taylor, who hosts the “Afternoon Drive” show. “It’s classic vintage AC/DC with a twist for the modern era. If you are pumping anything, this should motivate you.”

Suggested workout: “Any AC/DC song should be used to lift some major, heavy weights,” said Marc Santa Maria, regional group fitness director at Crunch. “They just make you wanna kick butt and pump that weight.”
2. Song: “So What”

Artist: Pink
Why it’s great: “This is great to bust out your rock moves and blow raspberries at the end,” Taylor said. “And, it’s probably the best use of the word ‘tool’ in a song. You wouldn’t think it, but Pink really does love her ex-husband.”

Suggested workout: “This song is hot,” Santa Maria agreed. “All attitude for stairmaster or a high-incline treadmill walk. We’re talking incline 15 power walk time.”

3. Song: “Keeps Getting Better”

Artist: Christina Aguilera

Why it’s great: “This song says it all,” Taylor said.

Suggested workout: “Picture doing 100’s or teasers in your Pilates mat class to this song,” Santa Maria said. “Keep your breaths steady and your abs as fierce as Christina’s voice.”

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The hardest-to-treat form of tuberculosis kills half the people who get it, according to a South Korean study that is one of the few to track survival rates from the condition called extensively drug-resistant TB.

Tuberculosis is an infectious bacterial disease typically attacking the lungs. Increasing numbers of cases of TB that defy standard medical treatment are appearing worldwide.

The study tracked 1,407 patients with two categories of TB: multidrug resistant TB, or MDR-TB, which resists at least one of the two main TB drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, which defies nearly all drugs used to treat TB.

Forty-nine percent of those with XDR-TB died compared to 19 percent of patients with ordinary MDR-TB, researchers led by Dr. Tae Sun Shim of Asan Medical Center in Seoul wrote on Thursday in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The patients were diagnosed between 2000 and 2002 and were followed for up to seven years, the researchers said. About 5 percent of the patients had XDR-TB.

D’Arcy Richardson of the Seattle-based nonprofit group PATH, which supports public health efforts in about 70 nations, called the findings important. But she noted XDR-TB patients today likely would get more aggressive drug treatment than was given to the patients tracked in this study.

“We have so little information on XDR-TB to begin with,” Richardson, who wrote a commentary with two other TB experts accompanying the study, said in a telephone interview.

Cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis are being recorded around the world at the highest rates ever, with parts of the former Soviet Union especially vulnerable, the U.N. World Health Organization said this year.

Such cases account for about 5 percent of the 9 million new TB cases annually, the WHO said. It said that 489,139 MDR-TB cases emerged in 2006, and about 40,000 were XDR-TB.

There has been scant scientific data on long-term survival rates from XDR-TB.

“We know that it’s a very big problem in Eastern Europe. We know it’s a very big problem in Asia, particularly in India and China, where they don’t necessarily have large percentages of MDR and XDR but because of the size of the population with TB we have significant numbers,” Richardson said.

TB killed 1.7 million people worldwide in 2006, the WHO said. It can be spread by breathing in air droplets from a cough or sneeze of an infected person.
by Julie Steenhuysen

In a puzzling twist, women who have a history of migraine headaches are far less likely to develop breast cancer than other women, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

The study is the first to look at the relationship between breast cancer and migraines and its findings may point to new ways of reducing a woman’s breast cancer risk, they said.

“We found that, overall, women who had a history of migraines had a 30 percent lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who did not have a history of such headaches,” said Dr. Christopher Li of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, whose findings appear in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

Li said the reduction in risk was for the most common types of breast cancers — those driven by hormones, such as estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by estrogen, and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by progesterone.

Hormones also play a role in migraines, a brutal type of headache often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and heightened sensitivity to light and sound. Women are two to three times more likely than men to get migraines.

While it is not exactly clear why women with a history of migraines had a lower risk for breast cancer, Li and colleagues suspect hormones are playing a role.

“Women who have higher levels of estrogen in their blood have higher levels of breast cancer,” Li said in a telephone interview.

And he said migraines are often triggered by low levels of the hormone estrogen, such as when estrogen levels fall during a woman’s menstrual cycle.

Women who get migraines “may have a chronically lower baseline estrogen. That difference could be what is protective against breast cancer,” Li said.

For the study, Li and colleagues analyzed data from two studies of 3,412 post-menopausal women in the Seattle area, 1,938 of whom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and 1,474 of whom had no history of breast cancer. Women in the study provided information on their migraine history.

They found women who had reported a clinical diagnosis of migraine had a 30 percent reduced risk of developing hormonally sensitive breast cancers.

“Migraines are typically most severe among pre-menopausal women,” Li said. “This study was all post-menopausal women.”

He said that suggests the protective effect seen in women who get migraines may have a lasting effect at reducing breast cancer risk.

“While these results need to be interpreted with caution, they point to a possible new factor that may be related to breast-cancer risk,” Li said in a statement.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide, with an estimated 465,000 deaths annually, according to the American Cancer Society.
By: Reuters

Hot flushes, night sweats or painful joints may be good news for women taking hormone-based drugs for breast cancer — it may mean their tumors are less likely to return, researchers said on Thursday.

Women with any of these menopause-like symptoms after taking AstraZeneca’s breast cancer drug Arimidex or generic tamoxifen were 30 percent less likely to have their cancer return over the next nine years, they found.

“The treatment is designed to starve potential cancers of estrogen and these symptoms mean that there are lower levels of estrogen in the body,” said Jack Cuzick, an epidemiologist at Cancer Research UK, who led the study published in the journal Lancet Oncology.

“But it is too early to say whether having these symptoms is essential for the treatment to be effective. At the moment all we can say is that the symptoms indicate the likely success of the treatment.”

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide, according to the American Cancer Society. The group estimates about 465,000 women died of breast cancer globally in 2007, and 1.3 million new cases were diagnosed.

Declining death rates from breast cancer in developed countries have been attributed to early detection through mammography screening and to improved treatment.

The researchers looked at some 4,000 post-menopausal women treated with either Arimidex, known generically as anastrozole, or the older cancer drug tamoxifen. Arimidex is one of a newer class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors that cannot be taken by women not yet through menopause.

Women who reported hot flushes, night sweats or painful joints within three months of treatment were more likely to remain free of their cancer and these early side effects may also help doctors more effectively target future treatment.

“Our main message is: No pain, no gain,” Ivana Sestak, a Cancer Research UK researcher who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

Sestak added the researchers do not know why some women responded differently but believe genetics is the likely explanation because every person metabolizes the drugs that cause a drop in estrogen differently .

By Reuters

8 tips for staying active when you have kids.

Parents and exercise are not usually words you see in the same sentence. From the moment you step on the physical and emotional roller coaster known as parenthood, your needs often must come second to the needs of your children. Exercising, as a parent, becomes a much more ddifficult task.

This is true whether you’re in the throes of sleep-deprivation with a newborn or stay busy driving your children from school to soccer practice, tennis matches, and piano lessons. Even people who had a strong commitment to exercise before having children will struggle to find consistent time to stay fit once they become parents.

Being a parent “wreaks havoc with your schedule,” says Betsy Keller, PhD, professor of exercise and sports sciences at Ithaca College.

Indeed, a recent study from the University of Pittsburgh confirmed that new parents really are more sedentary than singles or married couples without children. The study tracked physical activity levels of more than 800 young adults for more than two years. It found that while physical activity declined among all participants during that span, it took the biggest hit among new parents.

That’s despite the fact that new parents often feel like they are always on the go, says researcher Ethan E. Hull, MEd, an exercise physiologist candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

“The priorities of a family just change,” says Hull. “The focus isn’t with your friends, it isn’t with yourself, it isn’t with your spouse; it’s with that child. Your own physical activity just isn’t as important as the attention you’re giving that child.”

But when it comes to abandoning physical activity, you’re not just hurting yourself, say experts.

“Now that you have kids, you want to be around for the kids,” says Jon Chipko, a certified strength and conditioning coach from Montclair, N.J. “You want to be healthy, to be able to play with them, to be around when they get older.”

Time constraints, lack of sleep, and selflessness are all perfectly valid excuses for the short term, says Hull. But, he warns, be careful how much time you let go by.

“It’s easy to sit on the couch,” Hull says. “It’s not easy to get out and exercise. [But] down the road, if parents have lost all this physical activity for years, they’re not going to snap back.”

Whether you are a mom or a dad, a parent of a newborn or a teenager, here are some effective ways to incorporate exercise back into your life and fight the tendency to become more sedentary.

Zinc is the number-one nutritional deficiency in U.S. children, according to a Tufts University study. More than 50 percent of poor children and 30 percent of non-poor children, ages 1-5, get less than 70 percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance of zinc. The study shows that of 16 key nutrients, more children were deficient in zinc than in any other nutrient. Zinc deficiency has been implicated as a factor in: