Hundreds of thousands of low-income children suffering from dental disease, some with teeth rotted to the gum line, are presenting California school districts with a widespread public health problem.
Increasingly, dental health advocates are looking to schools to help solve the crisis. Several school districts, including Oakland Unified, are running innovative programs to provide dental care at no cost to students.
The study focuses on what these traumas mean for female veteran’s health: as noted, it concludes that women who have suffered a sexual assault in the military are nine times more likely to develop PTSD than female veterans with no history of sexual abuse. Female victims are also at much greater risk for a wide variety of other problems upon return: anxiety, depression, substance abuse and family troubles.Really don't think he adds much to the analysis other than righteousness, but I am reminded of this:
These results explicitly control for other factors that lead to PTSD. Contrary to many conservative talking points when Obama lifted the restriction on women in combat, the research cited in this study found that women handle combat-related stress just as well as men—military sexual trauma is a singular factor bumping up the prevalence of PTSD among women.
The Supreme Court oral arguments on marriage equality deserved all the attention they received — but it’s another case heard this week that will affect even more people over the course of their lifetimes. And it could cost Americans millions in prescription drug bills.If they spent as much time and money and cleverness on finding actual causes and cures...
The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.
Forget free will – many of us could be taking orders from the parasites inside our brains.
New research has found that the gut microbes of mice undergo drastic changes following gastric bypass surgery. Transfer of these microbes into sterile mice resulted in rapid weight loss. The study is described in a March 27 paper in Science Translational Medicine.Ummm, you've been altering our microbial populations all along. With low fat/ high carbohydrate food. Which makes the problem worse...
"Simply by colonizing mice with the altered microbial community, the mice were able to maintain a lower body fat, and lose weight -- about 20% as much as they would if they underwent surgery," said Peter Turnbaugh, one of two senior authors of the paper.
"Our study suggests that the specific effects of gastric bypass on the microbiota contribute to its ability to cause weight loss and that finding ways to manipulate microbial populations to mimic those effects could become a valuable new tool to address obesity," said Lee Kaplan, the other senior author of the paper.
It works by measuring bacteria balance in the gut, researchers say.I'm not sure they have the microbes or mechanism right, but this is good news for fat people. Maybe now they will stop cutting up our stomachs. They've been doing variations on that for a century- they used to cut out the colon or small intestine instead. Apparently, it also didn't help.
According to the findings, results from a standard breath test used to assess bacterial overgrowth in the gut can also tell doctors if you have a high percentage of body fat.
The microbiome, or the trillions of good and bad bugs that line your gut, can get out of balance. When bad bacteria overwhelm good bacteria, symptoms such as bloating, constipation and diarrhea may occur. The new study, appearing in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, suggests that this scenario may also set someone up for obesity.
Chronic infection with cold sores may affect thinking, especially in sedentary folks, study suggests.
Peter Scott, who has died aged 82, was a highly accomplished cat burglar, and as Britain’s most prolific plunderer of the great and good took particular pains to select his victims from the ranks of aristocrats, film stars and even royalty.Impulse control problems. Rigorous Righteousness. World Class Obsession.
The statistical difference is dramatic, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.Answer is in the comments.
Kasia Beaver, 33, suffers from a rare condition: She breaks out in hives, her eyes swell shut and her throat narrows whenever her heart beats too quickly. She has exercise-induced angioedema.So go outside for a while.
The new category will extend the scope of mental disorder classification by eliminating the requirement that somatic symptoms must be "medically unexplained" he explains. In DSM-5, the focus shifts to "excessive" responses to distressing, chronic, somatic symptoms with associated "dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, or behaviours."In the revision- Anyone who has physical symptoms of illness and doesn't have a medically explained reason is now qualified for psychoactive drug treatment. Cha Ching!!! It's the pot of gold at the end of the psychology rainbow.
His concern is supported by the results of the DSM-5 field trial study. Somatic symptom disorder captured 15% of patients with cancer or heart disease and 26% with irritable bowel syndrome or fibromyalgia, and had a very high false-positive rate of 7% among health people in the general population.
He points out that, previous DSM criteria "have always included reminders to clinicians to rule out other explanations before concluding that any mental disorder is present. But his suggestions to the DSM-5 work group that similar reminders should be included this time were rejected.
The study, the latest to confirm a rapid rise of antipsychotics prescribed among Medicaid-insured children, raises questions about America's health care system, says lead author Julie Zito, PhD, professor in the UM School of Pharmacy.Now that is terrifying.
"Many were diagnosed with behavioral rather than psychotic conditions for which they have FDA-approved labeling," says Zito. "These are often children with serious socio-economic and family life problems. We need more information on the benefits and risks of using antipsychotics for behavioral conditions, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, in community treated populations." Furthermore, use of antipsychotics in children with Medicaid coverage is five times that of children in the private sector -- a disparity in need of greater study.
In a case-control study in Australia, long-haul truck drivers who reported using caffeinated drinks to stay awake were significantly less likely to have crashes, reported Lisa Sharwood, PhD, of the University of Sydney in Australia, and colleagues in BMJ.
Compared with drivers who did not take caffeinated products, drivers who said they consumed caffeinated substances for the purpose of staying awake had a 63% reduced likelihood of crashing after adjusting for age, distance driven, hours of sleep, night driving, and breaks taken, Sharwood's group found.
CVS Caremark has put its employees on notice that they need to reveal their weight or pay a monthly $50 penalty.Just pointing out the obvious- CVS makes it's profit by selling prescription drugs. If everyone did this-
“Avoid the $600 annual surcharge,” CVS warns its employees who use the company’s health insurance plan. They’ve been told they are required by May 1 to show up to a doctor for an annual WebMD Wellness Review and submit to tests for blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass and body weight.
“Going forward, you'll be expected not just to know your numbers - but also to take action to manage them,” the CVS policy states.
A staggering 1 in 3 seniors dies with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, says a new report that highlights the impact the mind-destroying disease is having on the rapidly aging population.It's a freakin nightmare.
In theory, this quote actually originated somewhere. In practice it is impossible for us to know. JohnClonts
For the first time, scientists have transplanted neural cells derived from a monkey's skin into its brain and watched the cells develop into several types of mature brain cells, according to the authors of a new study in Cell Reports. After six months, the cells looked entirely normal, and were only detectable because they initially were tagged with a fluorescent protein.This experiment uses dopamine cells, but is the same process Dr. Merkle is using to make Orexin cells.
When Dollars for Docs first launched in 2010, ProPublica spoke with several of the dozens of doctors who had earned more than $200,000 from their speaking and consulting work for drug companies. Now, with records from more companies and more years of data, we’ve identified 22 doctors who’ve earned at least $500,000 since 2009 — including one, Jon Draud, who was paid more than $1 million.Scroll down to this guy: Lawrence DuBuske
... Half are psychiatrists, including three of the top four earners.
Drugs in clinical trial would qualify for approval if people at very early stages of the disease subtly improved their performance on memory or reasoning tests, even before they developed any obvious impairments. Companies would not have to show that the drugs improved daily, real-world functioning.Thanks for the money for nothing!
“This is really a huge advance,” said Dr. Eric Siemers, senior medical director for the Alzheimer’s disease team at Eli Lilly & Company. “Kudos to the F.D.A.”
For its expanded study, the team studied 137 mummies including Egyptians, Peruvians, Aleutian Islanders and ancestors of the Pueblo people in the American Southwest. Diets ranged widely from group to group. The Peruvians, for example, grew corn, potatoes and beans while Aleutian Islanders ate sea urchins, seals, otters and whales.That's an unsubstantiated conclusion. Only a third of mummies show evidence of atherosclerosis. Shut up.
With these findings, researchers now say that the underlying cause of heart disease may depend less on diet and lifestyle than previously thought.
"This disease is an inherent part of human aging," said Dr. Randall Thompson, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, who led the study.
"Much of what we think we know is wrong," said Dr. L. Samuel Wann, study author and director of cardiology at the Wisconsin Heart Hospital in Milwaukee.
“Trials with positive results are twice as likely to be published as trials with negative results,” Goldacre says. And the results of withheld drug study results can be fatal; for example, over 80,000 US users of the diabetes drug Rosiglitazone have died of heart failure, a fact that Goldacre links to repressed data that emerged in early trials. Meanwhile, aggressive television and print marketing, including manufacturer-sponsored training (par for the course for physicians around the globe), misleads health professionals about the merits and risks of treatment. Equally troubling is the provenance of drugs that haven’t been linked to fatalities: thanks to legislative loopholes, a drug simply has to be shown to be better than nothing in order to make it to market. Goldacre’s accounts of these and other realities make Bad Pharma a galvanizing, compulsively readable exploration of how the medical industry is failing us—and why we need good medicine now more than ever.
The new analysis found these drugs offered only a small benefit in relieving symptoms of depression and little or no benefit in improving patients' quality of life or ability to function. The drugs did, however, have some unwelcome side effects such as restlessness, sleepiness, weight gain and some abnormal lab test results such as increased cholesterol levels, the researchers reported.Two for two. Antidepressants aren't very helpful either.
Spielmans suggested that some of the trials they looked at may have tried to boost the perception of the effectiveness of the drug and downplay its side effects. "Studies were sometimes designed in a biased manner that may have slanted the results," Spielmans said. "Data were sometimes reported in a way that likely made the drugs appear more effective than they actually were." In addition, he said, the researchers found that some side effects were tucked away on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's website and in clinical trial registries rather than being reported in the published medical journal reports of the studies.
In his new book, Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care , David S. Jones narrates the history of two of American medicine’s highest-profile treatments for heart disease: coronary artery bypass grafts and angioplasty. Each intervention, promising lifesaving relief, was embraced with enthusiasm by cardiologists and cardiac surgeons—and both techniques often do provide rapid, dramatic reduction of the alarming pain associated with angina. Yet, as Jones painstakingly explains, it took years to show whether the procedures prolonged lives; in both cases, subsequent research deflated those early hopes. The interventions—major procedures, with potentially significant side effects—provided little or no improvement in survival rates over standard medical and lifestyle treatment except in the very sickest patients. From his detailed study, Jones draws broader conclusions about the culture and practice of modern medicine.I like this bit-
“The gap between what patients and doctors expect from these procedures, and the benefit that they actually provide, shows the profound impact of a certain kind of mechanical logic in medicine,” he explains. “Even though doctors value randomized clinical trials and evidence-based medicine, they are powerfully influenced by ideas about how diseases and treatments work. If doctors think a treatment should work, they come to believe that it does work, even when the clinical evidence isn’t there.”This seems to have been common throughout medical history. I keep coming up with stories like this in my research on mental illness. A whole lot of time and money has been wasted and patients are killed because Doctors Refuse To Consider The Possibility They Might Be Wrong Even In The Face of Objective Evidence.
My guess- low fat dieting has been imported to the urban areas. Those girls are learning western nutrition in their schools now.The sisters’ deaths shattered their family and have struck a chilling chord for the residents of Mazar-i-Sharif, a city increasingly marked by the despair of its young women. For many, the deaths have come to symbolize a larger crisis: an intensifying wave of suicide attempts.Although the government says it does not collect data on these cases, the city’s main hospital says it has been overwhelmed, with three or four such patients coming in every day, up from about one or two a month a decade ago.The number of attempts has grown with such speed that the head of investigations for the police, Col. Salahudin Sultan, says he can no longer follow up on them.“We don’t have the time or resources to investigate these,” he explained. “We would hardly get anything else done.”
With all our boasted scientific advancement, our therapeutics is simply a pile of rubbish. While a few hobbies are literally ridden to death more rational plans of treatment based on the principles already worked out for us are but scantily utilized. The diet, the digestion, the chemical composition of food stuffs, the metabolism of water, the cause and treatment of constipation not by purgatives but by rational and natural methods, the physiology of sleep and the pathology of insomnia, all need to be especially studied in relation to their application to the insane.
Charles Hill, President of the American Medico-Psychological Association. 1907
That uncertainty poses a challenge for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is considering an AS03-containing vaccine for use in the event of an H5N1 bird flu epidemic. Like Pandemrix, which has not been approved in the United States, it is made by GSK and is almost identical in structure.Yes that's nice, but guess who the "premier Narcolepsy expert" is working for...
A 14-member panel of advisors to the FDA voted unanimously in November to recommend the vaccine to protect against bird flu. The panel considered early studies from Europe showing an increase in the number of narcolepsy cases but concluded that the potential benefit of the vaccine outweighed the risk.
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Since then, however, new data, including the study results from Britain, suggest the scale and strength of the narcolepsy link could be greater than first thought. At least one committee member would like the FDA to reconvene the panel.
Storm's a-comin'! There's a solar storm heading for Mars. I'm going back to sleep to weather it out. http://apne.ws/13HBAz7
What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide? The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called orexin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad.Because Narcolepsy doesn't kill you, it makes you want to die.
Back in the day, I helped those geeks do subject determination on search terms. Figure out what people were looking for. They've improved the algorithm a bit. Very cool.The researchers first identified individual searches for the terms paroxetine and pravastatin, as well as searches for both terms, in 2010. They then computed the likelihood that users in each group would also search for hyperglycemia as well as roughly 80 of its symptoms — words or phrases like “high blood sugar” or “blurry vision.”They determined that people who searched for both drugs during the 12-month period were significantly more likely to search for terms related to hyperglycemia than were those who searched for just one of the drugs. (About 10 percent, compared with 5 percent and 4 percent for just one drug.)
A health insurance plan must pay for an anorexic woman's residential treatment under a court ruling that remains intact after the U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to consider the insurance plan's appeal.I am trying to decide if this is positive or negative.
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The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in a June 2012 ruling that a state law, the California Mental Health Parity Act, required Blue Shield to pay. The law states that coverage must be provided for treatment of severe mental illnesses.
Overall, our results definitely demonstrate the expression of OXA and OX1R in the human prostate, and suggest an active role for them in the metabolism of the gland.Serum orexin-A level decreases in policystic ovarian syndrome.
The serum OXA levels were lower in the women with PCOS compared to the control group. The serum OXA levels were correlated negatively with systolic blood pressure, the Ferriman-Gallway score and LH and free testosterone levels.
In the largest study of its kind, scientists have revealed for the first time ever that five major psychiatric disorders actually share common genetic risk factors. The five fairly distinct conditions include attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, autism, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia. Not only were these conditions connected, but many were related through variations in just two genes, which are responsible for encoding calcium channels in the brain.Guess which microbe's virulence is dependent on calcium levels...
Regardless of having better oral health practices, such as brushing and flossing, and visiting the dentist more frequently, postmenopausal women in general tend to experience more tooth loss than men of the same age.They say you should quit smoking.
