Archive for the ‘Health news and issues’ Category

Your Health: New School Year Brings Rise in Head Lice Cases

As children return to the classroom for the beginning of a new school year, their risk of acquiring head lice increases dramatically. The incidence of head lice infestation peaks shortly after school starts, particularly among younger children.

Each year in the U.S., approximately 6 to 12 million children between the ages of 3 and 12 get head lice infestations.

Although it’s entirely possible for older students — and even adults — to acquire lice, the tiny, bloodsucking parasites are most commonly found in preschoolers and elementary school students. Children in these age groups tend to play together and have close, head-to-head contact, facilitating transmission.

The good news is that lice can’t fly through the air or leap across great distances; they merely crawl. Head lice are typically spread through direct contact with a person who has lice, or by using an infected individual’s personal belongings, such as a hat, hairbrush or headphones.

How can you know if your child has lice? Complaints of an itchy scalp and excessive head scratching are often the first signs.

If your vision is sharp, you’ll be able to see the tiny vermin and their eggs, also known as nits. A louse is about the size of a sesame seed, and it may be white, gray or reddish in color. Nits are even smaller, but if you look closely, you may be able to spot the silvery, tulip-shaped eggs.

If you spy what you think is a nit or a louse and can remove it easily, it’s probably something else, like a bit of dirt or a flake of skin. Lice keep their legs firmly wrapped around strands of hair, and nits are even more securely attached to individual hairs with a glue-like substance.

As easy as they are to acquire, lice can be just as difficult to eradicate. Once they’ve taken up residence on your child’s head, regular shampooing, combing and brushing won’t budge them.

In most cases, you can free your child of these unwelcome inhabitants by using an over-the-counter anti-lice shampoo exactly as directed. Many of these products contain pyrethrins, natural pesticides derived from the chrysanthemum plant.

Because pyrethrins don’t kill all of the nits, it’s often necessary to perform another treatment seven to 10 days after the first one. By that time, all of the eggs will have hatched.

Unfortunately, widespread use of many over-the-counter products has led to resistance among head lice. If over-the-counter shampoos don’t seem to do the trick, your doctor can prescribe products that may be more effective.

One of the newest anti-lice products available with a doctor’s prescription is a benzyl alcohol preparation marketed as Ulesfia Lotion. Applied to the hair and scalp in two applications, the lotion kills lice by suffocating them, rather than by poisoning them.

In years past, children with lice were sent home from school and allowed to return to the classroom only when their heads were completely free of lice and nits. New guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) discourage these “no-nit” policies, stating that children should be allowed to return to school as soon as they have received proper treatment.

Although head lice may cause anxiety or embarrassment, they do not transmit any diseases and are not considered a serious health threat. According to the new AAP policy statement, no child should miss valuable school time because of head lice.

After treating your child for lice, you’ve still got some work to do. You’ll need to check all the other heads in your family — including your own — and treat them if necessary.

You should also wash everything your child’s head may have come in contact with, including hats, pillows and blankets. To kill lice on clothes and bedding, it’s best to wash the items in hot water and then dry them for at least 20 minutes in a hot dryer.

All combs, brushes and hair accessories should be soaked in anti-lice shampoo or in hot, soapy water. To kill lice on items that can’t be washed easily, such as pillows and plush toys, simply place them in airtight bags for a few days. Deprived of a human host, head lice die within 36 hours.

Having lice doesn’t mean that your children are unclean or uncivilized; it simply means they’ve been exposed to someone or something harboring the pests. When it comes to choosing a suitable host, head lice don’t discriminate.

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Rallie McAllister, M.D. Is a family physician, speaker, and co-founder of www.MommyMDGuides.com, a website featuring child-raising tips from trusted doctors who are also moms. To find out more about Rallie McAllister, M.D., and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com

Sleep Problems? 10 Myths Debunked

By Stephanie Schorow, Special to Lifescript

Get eight hours of shut-eye a night. Drink milk before bedtime to fall asleep faster. Could Mom’s advice be wrong all these years? Separate fact from fiction with these 10 common sleep myths…

If you’re snoozing 12 or more hours a day, talk to your doctor. You could have depression or chronic fatigue syndrome. 

The average woman gets about 6.5 hours a night, says Donnica Moore, M.D., president of the Sapphire Women’s Health Group and a consultant for the National Sleep Foundation. And they’re “walking around with a chronic sleep deficit.”

 Spending another night tossing and turning in bed? So are 40 million Americans. 

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that 30% of adults have insomnia, most of them women. It’s no wonder that sleeping aids are a $20-billion industry and that Ambien is one of the top five prescriptions written in the U.S.

Sleep is as important to your health as eating right and exercising. It helps repair, refuel and refresh the body and mind. 

But before you lose precious sleep over not getting enough shut-eye, find out how much you really need or if a Scotch or sleeping pill is better to get you to Snoozeville. Here’s the truth behind 10 common sleep myths:

1. Everyone needs at least eight hours of sleep a night.

 

False! Eight is not the magic number. Some women thrive on only seven hours; others need more to feel refreshed, according the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes better sleep. In fact, studies show that those who sleep seven hours may live longer than those getting eight or more hours, says Gregg D. Jacobs, M.D., an insomnia specialist at the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Massachusetts and author of Say Goodnight to Insomnia (Holt Paperbacks).Too much sleep is linked to chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes, he says. 

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/mem95n and

http://link.reuters.com/nem95n ; New England Journal of Medicine, August 19, 2010. 

BOSTON (Reuters) – The slow, flowing movements of tai chi are better for relieving pain and other symptoms of fibromyalgia than conventional  stretching exercises, doctors reported on Wednesday.

The improvements continued throughout the three months of lessons for 33 volunteers receiving the movement and breathing exercises, study leader Dr. Chenchen Wang of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston said in a telephone interview.

“Week by week they changed. The pain and depression improved, and a lot of people were depressed,” said Wang, whose study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“They feel better. People said it changed their life. Only two or three feel it didn’t help.”

Although they said the study should be repeated with a larger group to see if, for example, the enthusiasm of the instructor played a role, Dr. Gloria Yeh and her colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston said it might be time to give tai chi a chance.

“Aside from reductions in pain, patients in the tai chi group reported improvements in mood, quality of life, sleep, self-efficacy and exercise capacity,” Yeh’s team wrote in a commentary in the same journal.

“The potential efficacy and lack of adverse effects now make it reasonable for physicians to support patients’ interest in exploring these types of exercises, even if it is too early to take out a prescription pad and write ‘tai chi,’” they wrote.

Fibromyalgia, which may affect 200 million people worldwide, is difficult to diagnose and hard to treat, with no clear guidelines for symptoms that include pain, fatigue, stiffness and sleep difficulties.

There is evidence that it may be caused by a heightened sensitivity to pain.

Patients often turn to alternative therapies such as tai chi, yoga, acupuncture or massage.

Tai chi originated as a Chinese martial art that focuses on slow, graceful movements, breathing and relaxation in an effort to move a hypothetical energy throughout the body.

Volunteers in the tai chi group took 60-minute classes twice a week for three months from a tai chi master and were encouraged to practice at least 20 minutes per day.

Another group got health lectures and stretching classes, comparable to what people do when they wake up in the morning. “This was not real exercise,” Wang said. Further tests comparing exercise to tai chi are planned.

To assess the effectiveness of both treatments, the Wang team used several assessment tools, including one that measured fibromyalgia symptoms on a 100-point scale. The people taking tai chi saw their scores improve by an average of 28 points, compared to a nine-point improvement in the stretching group.

Researchers should test the technique with a larger group for a longer period, compare different styles, and see if it is better than other forms of exercise, such as yoga, Yeh said.

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/mem95n and

http://link.Reuters.com/nem95n 

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FURTHER INFORMATION AND LINKS

New England Journal of Medicine, August 19, 2010.

Relief for Fibromyalgia Pain: a Dose of Tai Chi ‎

By Deborah Kotz Some 5 million Americans, mostly women, have fibromyalgia, a condition that causes pain in the muscles, ligaments, and tendons. …

FDA Raises Concerns About Fibromyalgia Drug ‎ – Wall Street Journal – 183 related articles »

By Linda Childers, Special to Lifescript 

Your doctor has told you to lower cholesterol. So what’s your next step? Diet and lifestyle changes, experts say. Here are ones that work… 

High cholesterol is one of the biggest risk factors for heart disease. Yet many adults – 50%, according to a 2007 Baylor College study – don’t take the proper steps to reduce their levels. 

Their inaction can be dangerous. Prevention of heart disease is crucial because about two-thirds of women who have a heart attack don’t fully recover, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

If you’re at high risk for heart disease, prescription statins, like Lipitor or Crestor, are effective and commonly prescribed. 

But for women with a low risk, diet and lifestyle changes are enough to lower cholesterol levels, especially if you have no other cardiovascular disease risk factors, like high blood pressure or diabetes, says Rita Redberg, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. 

How to get started? For starters, if you smoke, quit, Redberg says. Then try these 11 smart strategies to lower your cholesterol.

1. Supplement smartly

Many doctors and patients say natural supplements help lower cholesterol and improve overall heart health. 

So why don’t more physicians prescribe them?

“Doctors tend to promote what they learned in medical school,” says Thom Lobe, M.D., who has authored more than 200 books and studied with former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D.

“Most doctors take few courses in alternative medicine, so they just aren’t aware of many of these supplements and their health benefits,” he says.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The information leaflets pharmacies give to customers along with their prescriptions vary widely in their content, and may often be difficult for people to read and understand, according to a new study.

The findings, researchers say, argue for a standard approach to generating the pharmacy leaflets, including oversight by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As it stands, the information on prescription-drug labels is regulated by the FDA, but the information leaflets dispensed by pharmacies are not. Private publishing companies provide the content for the leaflets, and then pharmacies — or their computer software vendors — determine the formatting of the leaflets, which includes picking and choosing what drug information to include or leave out.

As a result, leaflet information about the same drug, provided by the same publisher, can vary widely from pharmacy to pharmacy, explained Dr. Carole L. Kimberlin, one of the researchers on the new study.

In their study, Kimberlin and her colleagues at the University of Florida, Gainesville, found a “great deal of variance” among leaflets for two common drugs — the blood-pressure drug lisinopril (Prinivil, Zestril) and the diabetes medication metformin (Glucophage, Fortamet and others) — dispensed at 365 U.S retail pharmacies.

The leaflets ranged in word count from about 30 to 2,500 — with, not surprisingly, the longer ones being most likely to contain all the information that is recommended by the FDA. (Though the agency has no power to regulate the leaflets, it has set a guidance document with standards that all pharmacy medication leaflets should strive to provide.)

But even though the longer leaflets provided more information, few came close to meeting all of the FDA standards. Three percent of lisinopril prescriptions came with leaflets that met at least 80 percent of the “usefulness criteria” the researchers adapted from the FDA standards; the same was true of just one metformin prescription.

In general, Kimberlin told Reuters Health, the biggest shortcoming was in the leaflets’ readability. On average, leaflets from all pharmacies met less than half of the criteria for “comprehensibility/legibility.”

For example, Kimberlin said, the content should be written at sixth- to eighth-grade reading level, but only 10 percent of lisinopril and 6 percent of metformin leaflets met that standard.

Too-small fonts, large blocks of text with little white space between lines, and general clutter — many leaflets also contained ads or store coupons, for example — were other issues with formatting, the study found.

“There was a lot of distracting information,” Kimberlin said, noting that this makes it more difficult for consumers to dig out the key points on the safe and effective use of the drug.

Important information was also sometimes entirely absent. For example, although about 90 percent of the leaflets provided all the serious side effectsof the two drugs, nearly one-third of metformin did not mention the potential for drug-drug interactions.

According to Kimberlin and her colleagues, the findings point to a need for uniform consumer medication information, with “explicit guidance and regulatory authority through the FDA.”

Back in 1995, the FDA was poised to do that, but Congress stopped the agency from taking that authority. The current findings, Kimberlin’s team writes, indicate that “private sector initiatives to provide useful (consumer medication information) have failed.”

For now, consumers can take their own steps to make sure they have the key information they need for any new prescription. Basically, Kimberlin said, they need to ask their doctors and pharmacists questions.

“Make sure you know what the drug is for, and how to take it,” she advised.

That, Kimberlin noted, includes knowing whether the new prescription is safe to take along with any other products a person may be using — including over-the-counter medications and herbs or other “alternative” remedies.

She said that patients should also be aware of a drug’s potential side effects and what to do if they arise, as well as how to monitor their new medication’s effectiveness.

With lisinopril and metformin, for example, at-home blood pressure checks and blood sugar monitoring, respectively, will help patients and their doctors know whether the drugs are working.

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/qyk35n Archives of Internal Medicine, August 9/23, 2010.

Lauren Ellman of Temple University in Philadelphia and colleagues say exposure during pregnancy to certain immune proteins — such as those produced in response to the flu — raises the risk of giving birth to offspring who develop brain alterations associated with schizophrenia.

The study, published in the journal Schizophrenia Research, finds a direct correlation between structural brain changes among offspring diagnosed with schizophrenia and increases in maternal levels of a protein produced by the immune system called interleukin-8.

“Now, it appears that the damaging effects to the fetus are related to these maternal responses to infection during pregnancy rather than to the infections themselves,” Ellman says in a statement.

However, Ellman says not all of the children of mothers showing an increase in the immune protein developed brain alterations.

Ellman and colleagues looked at archived blood samples drawn during the 1950s and 1960s from a group of 12,000 pregnant women whose pregnancies along with their offspring were tracked.

Copyright 2010 by United Press International

Election outcomes affect suicide rates

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (UPI) — Suicide rates can increase among people who back losers in elections unless they live in areas where lots of others also backed the loser, U.S. Researchers say.

Lead author Richard A. Dunn of Texas A&M University and Timothy J. Classen of Loyola University Chicago say researchers have long thought people who are less connected to others are more likely to commit suicide. The researchers analyzed suicide rates at a state level from 1981-2005 and found suicide rates decreased when a majority of voters in a region supported the national election winner.

The study, scheduled to be published in the September issue of Social Science Quarterly, finds suicide rates decreased even more dramatically in states where the majority of voters supported the election loser — 4.6 percent lower for males and 5.3 lower for females.

“Sure, supporting the loser stinks, but if everyone around you supported the loser, it isn’t as bad because you feel connected to those around you,” Dunn says in a statement. “In other words, it is more comforting to be a Democrat in Massachusetts or Rhode Island when George W. Bush, a Republican, was re-elected than to be the lonely Democrat in Idaho or Oklahoma.”

Copyright 2010 by United Press International