A drink a day is good for the heart: Lancet

LONDON: Here's a perfect excuse to go out for a drink tonight — a tipple a day keeps the doctor at bay, say researchers. A new study, published in 'The Lancet' journal, has found that people who down a drink or two daily are not only healthier, they also possess a lower risk of developing heart disease than those who abstain from alcohol.

In fact, for some people this risk could be reduced by as much as a quarter, the study says, boosting that far from damaging health, modest drinking will improve it. The study also revealed that low alcohol intake can actually improve blood cholesterol levels and reduce other important compounds in blood linked to inflammation; it is this process that may help protect heart and blood vessels from clogging up, the 'Daily Express' reported.

The study is actually a review of 84 researches into alcohol and deaths from heart disease. In the study, the researchers at the Calgary Institute for Population and Public Health in Canada showed that a drink a day reduced the risk of heart disease by between 14 and 25%. It also reduced the risk of dying from heart disease by a quarter and of having a stroke by 2%.

Read more: A drink a day is good for the heart: Lancet - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/A-drink-a-day-is-good-for-the-heart-Lancet/articleshow/7560002.cms#ixzz1EqY6Pio7

Don't Stop Chiropractic Treatment

New Study Confirms That Maintenance Care Delivers!

 By Frank in Cost-Effectiveness, on January 26th, 2011 at 2:36 pm

This new, single blinded placebo controlled study, conducted by the Faculty of Medicine at Mansoura University, conclusively demonstrates that maintenance care provides significant benefits for those with chronic low back pain.

BACKGROUND: Spinal manipulation (SMT) is a common treatment option for low back pain. Numerous clinical trials have attempted to evaluate its effectiveness for different subgroups of acute and chronic LBP previously, but the efficacy of maintenance SMT in chronic non-specific LBP has never been studied.

In this study, 60 patients with chronic, nonspecific LBP lasting at least 6 months were randomized into 3 groups:

1. One third of them received 12 treatments of sham SMT over a one-month period.

2. One third of them received 12 treatments of SMT during a one-month period, with no follow-up care during the next nine months, and

3. One third of them received 12 SMT visits during the first month, followed by “maintenance” SMT every two weeks, for the next nine months.

To determine any difference among these 3 care groups, researchers measured pain and disability scores, generic health status, and back-specific patient satisfaction at baseline, and at 1-month, 4-months, 7-months, and at 10-months

RESULTS: Patients in manipulative groups (groups 2 & 3) experienced significantly lower pain and disability scores than the sham group at the end of the first 1-month period.

At the 10-month follow-up, only the maintenance group maintained improvements in pain and disability, while the group that only received 1-months care had reverted to their pretreatment pain and disability levels.

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first medically managed trial that clearly demonstrates that maintenance care provides significant benefits to those who suffer from chronic low back pain.

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This study re-confirms Descarreaux’s virtually identical 2004 JMPT study, which concluded that “This experiment suggests that maintenance spinal manipulations after intensive manipulative care may be beneficial to patients to maintain subjective post-intensive treatment disability levels”.

It also confirms the findings of Dr. Ron L. Rupert, in his ground-breaking JMPT article, titled: 
Maintenance Care: Health Promotion Services Administered to US Chiropractic Patients Aged 65 and Older, Part II which found that:

“The cost of health care for patients receiving MC in this study was far less than that for patients of similar age in the general population, despite the doubling of physician visits (medical plus chiropractic). The greatest difference in health care costs with patients receiving MC was in the areas of nursing care and, especially, hospital care. This reduced need for hospital and nursing home services has recently been corroborated by the research of Coulter et al..” [22]

You may also want to review the Wellness and Chiropractic Page for more information on this topic.

SOURCE: Does Maintained Spinal Manipulation Therapy for Chronic Non-specific Low Back Pain Result in Better Long Term Outcome?
Spine (Phila Pa 1976). 2011 Jan 17. [Epub ahead of print]

Developmental Disability More Common in Vaccinated Boys

Hepatitis B triple series vaccine and developmental disability in US children aged 1-9 years 

Authors: Carolyn Gallagher^a; Melody Goodman^a

Abstract This study investigated the association between vaccination with the Hepatitis B triple series vaccine prior to 2000 and developmental disability in children aged 1-9 years (n = 1824), proxied by parental report that their child receives early intervention or special education services (EIS). National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2000 data were analyzed and adjusted for survey design by Taylor Linearization using SAS version 9.1 software, with SAS callable SUDAAN version 9.0.1. The odds of receiving EIS were approximately nine times as great for vaccinated boys (n = 46) as for unvaccinated boys (n = 7), after adjustment for confounders. This study found statistically significant evidence to suggest that boys in United States who were vaccinated with the triple series Hepatitis B vaccine, during the time period in which vaccines were manufactured with thimerosal, were more susceptible to developmental disability than were unvaccinated boys.

Diet free of processed foods reduced symptoms of ADHD

According to this new study published in Lancet, a restrictive diet free of processed foods significantly reduced symptoms of ADHD in 78% of children 4-8 years old. The 5-week study found with 100 subjects also found that upon re-introduction of problem foods into the diet, 63% experienced a relapse in ADHD symptoms.

Background   The effects of a restricted elimination diet in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have mainly been investigated in selected subgroups of patients. We aimed to investigate whether there is a connection between diet and behaviour in an unselected group of children.

Methods   The Impact of Nutrition on Children with ADHD (INCA) study was a randomised controlled trial that consisted of an open-label phase with masked measurements followed by a double-blind crossover phase. Patients in the Netherlands and Belgium were enrolled via announcements in medical health centres and through media announcements. Randomisation in both phases was individually done by random sampling. In the open-label phase (first phase), children aged 4—8 years who were diagnosed with ADHD were randomly assigned to 5 weeks of a restricted elimination diet (diet group) or to instructions for a healthy diet (control group). Thereafter, the clinical responders (those with an improvement of at least 40% on the ADHD rating scale [ARS]) from the diet group proceeded with a 4-week double-blind crossover food challenge phase (second phase), in which high-IgG or low-IgG foods (classified on the basis of every child's individual IgG blood test results) were added to the diet. During the first phase, only the assessing paediatrician was masked to group allocation. During the second phase (challenge phase), all persons involved were masked to challenge allocation. Primary endpoints were the change in ARS score between baseline and the end of the first phase (masked paediatrician) and between the end of the first phase and the second phase (double-blind), and the abbreviated Conners' scale (ACS) score (unmasked) between the same timepoints. Secondary endpoints included food-specific IgG levels at baseline related to the behaviour of the diet group responders after IgG-based food challenges. The primary analyses were intention to treat for the first phase and per protocol for the second phase. INCA is registered as an International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial, number ISRCTN 76063113.

Findings   Between Nov 4, 2008, and Sept 29, 2009, 100 children were enrolled and randomly assigned to the control group (n=50) or the diet group (n=50). Between baseline and the end of the first phase, the difference between the diet group and the control group in the mean ARS total score was 23·7 (95% CI 18·6—28·8; p<0·0001) according to the masked ratings. The difference between groups in the mean ACS score between the same timepoints was 11·8 (95% CI 9·2—14·5; p<0·0001). The ARS total score increased in clinical responders after the challenge by 20·8 (95% CI 14·3—27·3; p<0·0001) and the ACS score increased by 11·6 (7·7—15·4; p<0·0001). In the challenge phase, after challenges with either high-IgG or low-IgG foods, relapse of ADHD symptoms occurred in 19 of 30 (63%) children, independent of the IgG blood levels. There were no harms or adverse events reported in both phases.

Interpretation   A strictly supervised restricted elimination diet is a valuable instrument to assess whether ADHD is induced by food. The prescription of diets on the basis of IgG blood tests should be discouraged. 

Nutrient Depletion Charts

Find out which nutrients are depleted by a particular drug. By supplementing, you can get the best of both worlds.

The following pages identify which nutrients are depleted by specific types of drugs.   You will also want to refer to the Nutrient–Drug Interaction Page to explore many other interactions.   The principal benefit of this page is that they list “brand names” for drugs as well as their “generic” names.   You will also find value at the Drug-Nutrient Interactions & Depletions Page.   Sadly, this site doesn't sort drugs by their brand name... for example, you'd need to know that Zoloft was actually called Sertraline if you wanted complete information. 

This section was compiled by Frank M. Painter, D.C.

Click Here to go to Charts 

Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

Illustration by Jacob Thomas

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.

But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Gallery: Medical Breakthroughs: The Good and the Bad

Breakthroughs and Breakdown

It’s a disturbing view, with huge im-plications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his role as one of medicine’s top mythbusters. “People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.

This is Ioannidis’s moment. As medical costs hamper the economy and impede deficit-reduction efforts, policymakers and businesses are desperate to cut them without sacrificing sick people. One no-brainer solution is to use and pay for only treatments that work. But if Ioannidis is right, most biomedical studies are wrong.

In just the last two months, two pillars of preventive medicine fell. A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. (Pfizer, which makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk factors is complicated”). In November a panel of the Institute of Medicine concluded that having a blood test for vitamin D is pointless: almost everyone has enough D for bone health (20 nanograms per milliliter) without taking supplements or calcium pills. Cost of vitamin D: $425 million per year.

Click to Read Entire Article

Medical Errors Kill 15,000 Medicare Patients a Month

Medical Errors Kill 15,000 Medicare Patients a Month

 By Frank in Iatrogenic Injury, on January 28th, 2011 at 5:38 pm

SOURCE: AOL Health

A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General reveals that 13 percent of Medicare patients in the U.S. experience an adverse event each month in American hospitals, and some 15,000 of them die as a result. [1]

The news is startling, particularly since the report points out that 44 percent of adverse incidents occurring in hospitals are avoidable. And all-together, these adverse events are costing Medicare more than $300 million a MONTH.

Kevin K. Golladay, regional inspector general for evaluation and inspections with OIG thinks hospitals need to have greater incentives to reduce errors and adverse events, and the OIG report suggests that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services could perhaps create this incentive by denying payment for conditions acquired while in the hospital setting.

Read Whole Story Here

Lack of Insurance = Death for the not wealthy

Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults

Andrew P. Wilper, MD, MPH, Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, Karen E. Lasser, MD, MPH, Danny McCormick, MD, MPH, David H. Bor, MD, and David U. Himmelstein, MD

The United States stands alone among industrialized nations in not providing health cov- erage to all of its citizens. Currently, 46 million Americans lack health coverage. Despite re-peated attempts to expand health insurance, uninsurance remains commonplace among US adults.

Health insurance facilitates access to health care services and helps protect against the high costs of catastrophic illness. Relative to the uninsured, insured Ameri- cans are more likely to obtain recommended screening and care for chronic conditions and are less likely to suffer undiagnosed chronic conditions3 or to receive substandard medical care.

Numerous investigators have found an as- sociation between uninsurance and death. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that 18314 Americans aged between 25 and 64 years die annually because of lack of health insurance, comparable to deaths because of diabetes, stroke, or homicide in 2001 among persons aged 25 to 64 years.

 The IOM estimate was largely based on a single study by Franks et al. However, these data are now more than 20 years old; both medical therapeutics and the demography of the uninsured have changed in the interim.

We analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III). NHANES III collected data on a representative sample of Americans, with vital status follow-up through 2000. Our objective was to evaluate the relationship between uninsurance and death.

Read Whole Article

Cell Phones and Brain Tumors: 2010 Update 

Health risks associated with cell phones and other radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are not as debated as was the case a few years ago.  Each year the adverse effects associated with cell phone use becomes clearer.  There are over 4.6 billion cell phones in use today and that number is rapidly growing. Much of the increase finds cell phones in the hands of the children and adolescents who, because their nervous systems are not fully developed, are most vulnerable to brain tumors.

Recent research has shed more light on the relationship between cell phone use and the development of brain neoplasms.  Although there is still some debate related to the level of exposure, that debate has been limited to other issues.  This last year a number of studies were published that presented similar findings to what the following paper concluded, “The very linear relationship between cell phone usage and brain tumor incidence is disturbing and certainly needs further epidemiological evaluation.  In the meantime, it would be prudent to limit exposure to all sources of electro-magnetic radiation.”  Another similar study stated that “Individuals who begin exposure at younger ages are more vulnerable. These data indicate that the existing standards for radiofrequency exposure are not adequate. While there are many unanswered questions, the cost of doing nothing will result in an increasing number of people, many of them young, developing cancer.”

A review and critique of two important recent studies (Hardell and Interphone) suggests that, due to some bias in the research designs, the risk of brain tumors is actually greater than has been previously reported.  “For the time being, evidence collected in epidemiological studies points rather to an underestimation of risk from mobile phone use and less bias in the Hardell studies as compared to those of the Interphone group that are affected by selection and possibly also by misclassification bias.”  One problem with earlier epidemiological studies is the lack of data.  With time and the capturing of better data we will know more as there is still no definitive long term use data available. 

With the dramatic increase in the use of cell phones it is speculated that we will likely see a marked rise in brain tumors over the next decade.   (Click link see all articles)

Alcohol Doesn't Actually Kill Brain Cells

Recently, I've felt like everything that I learned in grade school is a lie. The Triceratops might not have existed, Pluto isn't a planet, and now this: alcohol doesn't actually kill brain cells. Yes, that's right. Alcohol neither kills nor prunes the little party of punctilious petri specimens we have in our heads. I recently read Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen Braum, and came across this nugget: "... alcohol does many things to the brain, one thing it clearly doesn't do is wipe out neurons indiscriminately." So I turned to a quick survey of reputable sources and, what do you know, there seems to be enough research to back it up. Furthermore, it's old news:

 "... one thing people who drink socially probably don't need to worry about is sacrificing brain cells in the process. The research indicates that adults who drink in moderation are not in danger of losing brain cells."
— The New York Times

"Even in alcoholics, alcohol use doesn't actually result in the death of brain cells."
— Discovery Health

Really, though, all those times I held back for fear that one more beer bong would render me a festering idiot, spitting and muttering monosyllabic phrases like Homer Simpson, I could have drank myself, well, the same? It boggles the mind. Actually, it erases the mind. We all know that despite the salvation of brain cells, binge drinking reduces our ability to remember—this is good or bad depending on your perspective and the exact contents of those potential memories. It especially makes learning difficult. (Is that why drunken people often seem impervious to direction and consolation?) From Braum:

 ... [R]esearch shows that alcohol—even at very low doses—disrupts the cellular machinery most widely believed to underlie our ability to form new memories.

It bears noting that there are other dangers at play. Excessive drinking can further impair brain function and result in neurological disorders, but the message is loud and clear. Whilst we may unlearn those precious memories of youth, we thankfully can forget that any such unlearning has ever occurred in the course of a few drinks and return to the ignorance of more innocent times when Triceratops battled Tyrannosaurus Rex and Pluto was more than Disney's dawdling dog.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2011/01/good-news-alcohol-doesnt-actually-kill-brain-cells/70082/