Doctor HealthHealth Tips

It appears that stroke patients who receive both intravenous thrombolysis - a minimally invasive treatment that dissolves abnormal blood clots - and endovascular interventions - such as drugs and implanting medical devices - are much more likely to recover and have lower chances of dying, according to new research by the Zeenat Qureshi Stroke Research Center at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Read the rest of this entry »

Exercise Tip for Parents No. 8: Be a Role Model

Whether they admit it or not, kids look to their parents as role models.

“What you do has a huge effect on what they do,” says Chipko, who works with youth from 9 to 18.

If you’re a couch potato, you may pass that trait on to your children. On the other hand, if kids grow up in a family where they walk the dog, hike, or go for bike rides, they will emulate that behavior, says Keller.

“When trying to teach kids discipline,” says Chipko, “you as a parent should have some as well.”

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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A study published in the Journal of American Medical Association Tuesday found Viagra is effective at combating sexual dysfunction in depressed women, Agence France-Presse reported.

Viagra’s effect in women has been disappointing, but a new small study finds those on antidepressants may benefit from taking the little blue pills.

The research involving 98 premenopausal women found Viagra helped with orgasm. But the benefits did not extend to other aspects of sex such as desire, researchers report in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

“For women on antidepressants with orgasm problems, this may provide some wonderful relief,” said psychologist Stanley Althof, director of the Center for Marital and Sexual Health of South Florida in West Palm Beach, who was not involved in the study. “But it will not improve their desire or arousal.”

Antidepressants can interfere with sex drive and performance even as the drugs help lift crippling depression. Switching drugs or reducing the dose can help. But many people, men and women, stop taking them because of their sexual side effects.

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SYDNEY, Australia — Two men were arrested Friday and charged with 230 sex offenses police said they committed during prayer sessions with a woman who believed one of the men could cure her of a religious curse.

The men, aged 61 and 38 years, are highly regarded members of Sydney’s Greek Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox communities, New South Wales state police said in a statement. Officials declined to release their names.

The 61-year-old man claimed to be a spiritual mentor who could speak to angels, remove curses and banish evil spirits, police said. After telling the 30-year-old woman she had been cursed, he charged her money to remove the evil and then repeatedly assaulted her over a period of four years, police said.

The 61-year-old was charged with 151 sexual offenses, and the 38-year-old charged with 79 sexual offenses, police said.

At a press conference Friday, Fairfield Police Acting Superintendent Gary Bailey declined to discuss details of the alleged assaults.

“I have never seen anything as bizarre as this or as callous as this before,” he said.

The woman told authorities she believed she and her family had been cursed by a member of the Greek community and that they would suffer terrible consequences including death and illness unless the curse was removed. Police said she attended numerous prayer sessions with the men at various hotels in Sydney between 2001 and 2005, during which she was blindfolded and sexually assaulted.
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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Rising food prices around the world are likely to drive poor women to trade sex for basic goods like fish and cooking oil, raising the risk of new AIDS infections, U.N officials said on Monday.

Delegates at a major AIDS conference in Mexico cited the cases of fisherwomen in the Pacific and women in Kenya desperate for food being forced to sell their bodies, adding to concerns of a new twist in the spread of the deadly pandemic.

"Food is such a basic need that you can see people really going to great lengths," said Fadzai Mukonoweshuro of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in southern Africa.

Climbing food prices — due to increased use of biofuels, the growing demand for grains to feed a booming Asia, droughts and market speculation — caused 50 million more people to go hungry last year compared to the year before, the United Nations said.

"That might lead to various distress responses, one of which on the part of women is having transactional sex to feed their kids," Stuart Gillespie of the International Food Policy Research Institute said.

"Recent studies in Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania have shown associations between acute food insecurity and unprotected transactional sex among poor women," he said.

Overfishing of tuna in the Pacific has forced Papua New Guinea fisherwomen to abandon their smaller craft and join the crew of larger boats, where they trade sex for food scraps, the officials and delegates said.

Such "fish for sex" deals are also common in Kenya on the shores of Lake Victoria, where women fish traders meet incoming boats and sleep with fishermen for a favorable price.

Experts at the conference, a biennial gathering of global medical experts and government officials, also said malnutrition increased the risks for people already infected with AIDS, experts added.

HIV drugs can upset the stomach if taken without food and AIDS patients, many also infected with tuberculosis, need more nutrients and calories. Without enough food they are more likely to die, said Martin Bloem, chief nutritionist at the World Food Program.

Soaring food and other commodity prices might hinder the fight against AIDS.

"We really need to watch this very carefully. We are in a situation of rising oil prices, rising food prices and at the same time the cost of AIDS is going up along with new infections," said Kevin De Cock, director of the anti-AIDS program at the World Health Organization.

Attacking both hunger and the disease at the same time can bring special challenges. In Zimbabwe, some villages will reject food aid if they think it is destined for AIDS patients, claiming it is contaminated, Mukonoweshuro said.

The human immunodeficiency virus infects 33 million people globally, half of them women, and kills 2 million annually.

by Alistair Bell and David Storey

Antonio Zadra, PhD, asked 109 women and 64 men to keep a dream diary for two to four weeks. Participants were about 30 years old, on average.

According to Zadra, only two other studies have probed the frequency and content of sexual dreams, and both of those studies were done more than 40 years ago.

In Zadra’s study, participants jotted down every dream they had, whether it was sexual or not. All in all, they noted 3,564 dreams. Of those dreams, 292 included sexual content.

“Sexual intercourse was the most common type of sexual content, followed by sexual propositions, kissing, and fantasies,” Zadra writes.

For men and women alike, sexual dreams accounted for 8% of all reported dreams. Zadra also notes that “masturbation accounted for approximately 6% of both male and female sexual dreams and an orgasm was experienced in approximately 4% of all sexual dreams.”

However, there were some gender differences in sex dreams.

By Miranda Hitti

“Men’s sexual dreams were more likely to take place in public or unknown settings, to have the dreamer initiate sexual contact, and to involve unknown characters or multiple partners,” Zadra writes, adding that “gender differences in the content of everyday sexual dreams may reflect people’s waking needs, experiences, attitudes, and concerns with respect to sexuality.”

His findings were presented today in Minneapolis at Sleep 2007, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

In a significant shift in strategy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control recently recommended that tests for HIV be extended to all patients entering hospitals and clinics in the U.S. The CDC also recommended that doctors begin offering routine voluntary HIV tests to patients between 13 and 64.

It is estimated that of the more than 1 million people in the U.S. with HIV and AIDS, about 25% are unaware they have HIV. The new strategy is aimed at discovering these cases before HIV develops into AIDS. It is also hoped these measures will curb the spread of the disease since these 250,000 people are carriers who unknowingly infect others.

This marks a departure from the previously followed strategy of testing only people in high risk categories.

This policy change will also involve a shift away from the promotion of abstinence and condom use to prevent the spread of the disease, towards more emphasis being placed on testing for HIV status and early treatment.

According to a spokesperson for the CDC, what explains this change in policy is that drugs now exist that can prevent the development of AIDS from HIV. Early detection can therefore result in early treatment. In the past early detection did not necessarily mean much since there was very little that could be done for someone infected with HIV.

It is also hoped that early detection will result in less transmission of the disease. A recent CDC survey found that sexually-active adults altered their sexual behavior patterns after they were diagnosed with HIV. They were less likely to engage in unprotected sexual activity, in many cases opting for a condom or for not engaging in sex at all.

Drug companies and makers of oral tests stand to benefit significantly from this change of emphasis. It is expected that tests which are now administered at hospitals and clinics will soon be available over the counter. People interested in testing themselves will be able to do it at home. This should result in a significant increase in sales of HIV testing kits.

There should also be a rise in HIV treatment drugs as hundreds of thousands of people learn they have HIV and begin treatment with anti-HIV drugs. Currently anti-HIV drugs account for about $6-billion in sales in the U.S. That number should increase dramatically if the new testing procedures prove to be effective.

Some argue that as in so many areas within the health industry, efforts aimed at prevention will be replaced by promises of a quick cure brought to us compliments of the incredibly influential and increasingly invasive drug companies.

By Rick Hendershot

In one of the most promising developments in more than 20 years, scientists claim that drugs used to control HIV/AIDS in patients may also be effective in preventing the disease in the first place.
The drugs in question are tenofovir (Viread) and emtricitabine, or FTC (Emtriva), sold in combination as Truvada by Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead is the California company best known for inventing Tamiflu.
Previous research has been aimed at finding a vaccine against HIV/AIDS, with the intention of conditioning the immune system against the disease. But these drugs work differently. They simply keep the virus from reproducing, and have already been used successfuly by health care workers to prevent them from being infected by the virus carried by patients.
This approach to fighting HIV/AIDS has been tempting researchers for many years, but has only recently become feasible as preventative drugs have been developed that are safe for non-infected persons to take. Previous drugs had unreasonable effects for uninfected persons.
That situation changed when Tenofovir came on the market in 2001. Tenofovir is powerful and safe, and it only has to be taken once a day. It also does not interact with other medicines or birth control pills, and manifests less drug resistance than other AIDS medications.
Monkey studies show exciting results
A major study by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta, Georgia involved six macaques. The monkeys were given a combination of Tenofovir and FTC and then administered a deadly combination of monkey and human AIDS viruses. They were given the viruses in rectal doses to simulate contact between gay men.
Each was given 14 weekly exposures of the virus, and none of the monkeys became infected. In a control group which did not receive the drugs, all but one got the disease, normally after just two exposures.
The scientists then stopped giving the drugs to the test group to see if the prevention was only temporary. The results were equally impressive. None of the monkeys contracted the disease. “We’re now four months following the animals with no drug, no virus. They’re uninfected and healthy,” reported a CDC researcher.
Now other research teams are pushing to have this drug combination tested on humans. A $29 million CDC study of drug users in Botswana will now be switched to this new drug combination.
Another study of 400 heterosexual women in Ghana by the Family Health Initiative, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is studying the effects of tenofovir alone.
But several other studies have failed to materialize because studies of this nature immediately raise suspicions that scientists are using local people as guinea pigs. The fear is that they will intentionally expose the test subjects to the virus.
The cost of tenofovir and Truvada also make testing difficult. In African countries condoms are now liberally donated by companies, aid groups, UN agencies, and western governments. While the drugs are relatively cheap, the cost remains an impediment.
Nevertheless researchers have been reinvigorated by the stunning results out of Atlanta, and new tests are going ahead in pockets of interest around the world.
Article Source: Health Guidance

A social marketing campaign urging gay and bisexual men in San Francisco to get checked for syphilis has been linked to an increase in syphilis tests.

Cartoons advocating the tests were placed in a gay newspaper, and poster-sized reproductions were posted on the streets, on bus shelters, on Webs sites and in gay bars.

The researchers, led by Katherine Ahrens of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, conducted two surveys — one at six months and one at 2.5 years after the campaign had begun. Gay and bisexual men were asked whether they were aware of the cartoons and about their sexual health.

Ahrens and colleagues found the men who were aware of the cartoons were more likely than those unaware to have been tested recently for syphilis and to have greater knowledge about it. This effect was sustained for almost three years, according to evaluations published in PLoS Medicine.

“The social marketing campaign was effective in augmenting syphilis testing and increasing syphilis awareness and knowledge in the San Francisco gay and bisexual community,” say the authors. “This effect might have contributed to decreased syphilis incidence in 2005.”