What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D
Vitamin D promises to be the most talked-about and written-about supplement of the decade. While studies continue to refine optimal blood levels and recommended dietary amounts, the fact remains that a huge part of the population — from robust newborns to the frail elderly, and many others in between — are deficient in this essential nutrient.
If the findings of existing clinical trials hold up in future research, the potential consequences of this deficiency are likely to go far beyond inadequate bone development and excessive bone loss that can result in falls and fractures. Every tissue in the body, including the brain, heart, muscles and immune system, has receptors for vitamin D, meaning that this nutrient is needed at proper levels for these tissues to function well.
Studies indicate that the effects of a vitamin D deficiency include an elevated risk of developing (and dying from) cancers of the colon, breast and prostate; high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease; osteoarthritis; and immune-system abnormalities that can result in infections and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
Most people in the modern world have lifestyles that prevent them from acquiring the levels of vitamin D that evolution intended us to have. The sun’s ultraviolet-B rays absorbed through the skin are the body’s main source of this nutrient. Early humans evolved near the equator, where sun exposure is intense year round, and minimally clothed people spent most of the day outdoors.
“As a species, we do not get as much sun exposure as we used to, and dietary sources of vitamin D are minimal,” Dr. Edward Giovannucci, nutrition researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in The Archives of Internal Medicine. Previtamin D forms in sun-exposed skin, and 10 to 15 percent of the previtamin is immediately converted to vitamin D, the form found in supplements. Vitamin D, in turn, is changed in the liver to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the main circulating form. Finally, the kidneys convert 25-hydroxyvitamin D into the nutrient’s biologically active form, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, also known as vitamin D hormone.
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Wireless sensor watches blood sugar for diabetics
(Reuters) – Researchers have developed an implantable sensor that measures blood sugar continuously and transmits the information without wires — a milestone, they said, in diabetes treatment.
The device worked in one pig for more than a year and in another for nearly 10 months with no trouble, they reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
It takes the diabetes field a step closer to development of an “artificial pancreas” — a device that can replace natural functions to control how the body handles blood sugar.
And it would be handy for people who need to check blood sugar daily, such as patients with type 2 diabetes, the team at the University of California San Diego and nearby privately held GlySens Inc wrote.
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9 Surprising Facts About Your Stomach
By Colette Bouchez
WebMD Feature
Reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MD
From those burning, churning feelings that erupt whenever we eat our favorite foods, to the bloating that keeps us from zipping up our jeans, to the gas that can make us the most unpopular person in the elevator, our stomach can be the cause of some major inconveniences, if not some outright health concerns.
Still, experts say most folks know painfully little about how their stomach and their digestive tract operates — one reason that solving tummy troubles can seem much harder than it has to be.
“There are some very popular misconceptions concerning stomach health, most of which can really lead people astray on how to effectively deal with certain problems,” says Mark Moyad, MD, director of preventive and alternative medicine at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor.
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New health policy: encouraging friendships?
(Reuters) – Having good social relationships — friends, marriage or children — may be every bit as important to a healthy lifespan as quitting smoking, losing weight or taking certain medications, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University in Utah found.
They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy.
“A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at www.plosmedicine.org.
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For persistent fibroids, a less invasive option
(Reuters Health) – A procedure that stops the blood supply to fibroids could be a safe and effective alternative to hysterectomy for women whose fibroid symptoms won’t go away, according to a new study.
But some who get uterine artery embolization – which is less invasive, cheaper, and easier to recover from than a hysterectomy – might still eventually need a hysterectomy to relieve their symptoms, the results of the study in 150 women show.
Uterine fibroids are generally benign tumors that grow in the walls of the uterus. In an embolization procedure, a catheter filled with small particles is used to block off the vessels that supply blood to the fibroids. In a hysterectomy, fibroids are surgically removed from the body – along with the rest of the uterus. Embolization is performed by a radiologist, while hysterectomy is done by a patient’s gynecologist.
“Hysterectomy has the major advantage of really getting rid of the fibroids forever without any doubt, whereas embolization sometimes gets rid of the fibroids,” Dr. Klim McPherson, an obstetrician at the University of Oxford in the UK who was not involved with the study, told Reuters Health.
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Back pain? Alternative therapies may help
(Health.com) — Trent Northcutt, 42, a corporate executive in New York City, had been suffering from lower back pain and leg pain for about three years, to the point that he was “cautious about picking up the simplest thing,” he remembers.
When he finally sought help, his doctor recommended acupuncture right off the bat. Northcutt ended up having six treatments over about eight months. Now, he says, “I don’t have any back pain at all. I’m 100 percent good.”
More than 26 million Americans ages 20 to 64 suffer from ongoing back pain, according to the American Pain Foundation, and it’s one of the top reasons people visit a doctor. But many of those millions also discover the painful secret about back pain: This common condition can be surprisingly difficult to treat.
The lower back is a complex spot, with many potential sources of pain. Although surgery would seem to be a quick fix, in reality about 85 percent of people don’t need — and won’t benefit from — back surgery, says Dr. Anders Cohen, M.D., chief of neurosurgery at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in New York City.
That leaves plenty of room for alternative and complementary therapies, such as vitamins, acupuncture, and chiropractic therapy, that may help soothe the pain. “If I don’t see something unstable, something wrong with a disk or a bone, I use alternative therapies on a regular basis. It’s a central crux of my practice,” adds Cohen.
“There are some types of back pain that seem to be in the covering of the muscles or in the tissue connecting the muscle that are really difficult to treat,” adds Dr. James Bray, M.D., a sports medicine physician with Scott & White Healthcare, in Georgetown, Texas. “That’s where a lot of alternative therapies [such as acupuncture and chiropractic therapy] really excel.”
Acupuncture
One of the first and most effective recourses for people with chronic back pain is acupuncture. “We’ve had great success with acupuncture. It’s great for someone who gets pain that’s situated in the back or neck and is not radiating down the arms and legs so much,” says Cohen, who is a retired tennis pro. “I’ve had it myself, gotten up, and felt 75 percent better.”
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New therapies slow vision loss in diabetics
Researchers have found two new treatments that could slow the progression of vision loss in high-risk adults with type 2 diabetes. The vision loss, called diabetic retinopathy, is caused by damage to the blood vessels in the retina. In diabetics with retinopathy, the blood vessels can leak and causing the retina to swell. Abnormal new blood vessels can also develop which causes vision loss.
In the largest study of its kind to date, trial investigators followed 2,865 type 2 diabetics. Just under 50 percent of patients had mild retinopathy at the start of the trial. Over a four-year period, researchers took retinal photographs that recorded any changes in the blood vessels and the progression of retinopathy.
“Many people with diabetes have microvascular problems, which can result in problems with the kidneys and amputation of toes and feet, and the only place that you can directly observe the microvasculature is in the back of the eyes,” said Walter Ambrosius, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and principal investigator of the ACCORD Eye Study. “What we have seen in the eyes is potentially an indicator of what is happening in other parts of the body.”
Patients in the study were given three types of treatments. Therapy to control and normalize their blood sugar, treatments to control blood pressure and bring it within normal levels and a combination of lipid and fenofibrate therapy. Fenofibrates are cholesterol-lowering drugs that lower triglycerides-fat stored in the body–and raise HDL levels, also known as good cholesterol.
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Miscarriage tough on men, harder on women
(Reuters Health) – Many men suffer emotionally when their partner loses a pregnancy, new research shows. But they recover more quickly from their distress than women do, the study shows.
Not too long ago, experts thought that a man didn’t bond with his unborn child, and that miscarriages didn’t affect men. While several investigators have since reported that men also report feelings of loss, sadness, and helplessness, it’s not clear how severe their distress is, or how long it lasts.
To investigate, Dr. Grace Kong of Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong and colleagues followed 83 couples for one year after a miscarriage. They used two tests to gauge levels of psychological distress in both men and women: the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). None of the study participants had a history of mental illness.
Immediately after the miscarriage occurred, the researchers found, more than 40 percent of the men were suffering significant psychological distress, as measured by the GHQ-12. By three months, however, just 7 percent reported this level of distress, and at one year, 5 percent of the men did.
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After losing 175 pounds, woman challenged by setback
(CNN) — Last year, Karen Daniel was feeling great about her weight. She had gone from 375 pounds to 200 in 24 months.
She was working out nine times a week and thrilled to have turned her life around. She no longer had to purchase two seats on an airplane. She went hot-air ballooning for the first time.
Daniel, one of Fit Nation’s first success stories, said in February 2009, “Fit feels so good.”
That feeling didn’t last long.
Daniel started feeling bad after a trip to New York. She had a sinus infection, upper respiratory infection and bronchitis, she said recently from her home in Arizona. She started feeling better, but then got sick again. And healthy again. And sick again.
She went to two doctors who told her that her body was in “starvation mode,” she said.
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Hope Against Hepatitis C
New medicines are being developed that are expected to transform the care of patients with hepatitis C, making treatment far more effective and far less grueling.
The new drugs, which could start reaching the market as early as next year, could help subdue a virus that infects roughly four million Americans, most of them baby boomers, and 170 million people worldwide.
“I almost think this will be revolutionary, to be honest,” said Dr. Fred Poordad, chief of hepatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “We are chomping at the bit to try to treat as many patients as we can.”
About two dozen pharmaceutical companies are now pursuing drugs for hepatitis C, which an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently called “one of the largest pharmaceutical opportunities this decade.”
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