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Speaking of which, a new unanticipated benefit of fizzy soft drinks seems to have been discovered. What could this be, you ask? Treating, non-surgically, a phytobezoar, an uncommon but potentially dangerous condition.
A phytobezoar occurs when undigested plant matter such as seeds or fibers gets trapped in the stomach or intestines, sometimes causing bowel blockage. And it turns out there's an odd, but tasty treatment for this: Coca-Coca.
The next time you go for your routine check-up, you may be asked a new question: How many minutes per week are you active or getting exercise?
If we weren t infuriated before reading Dr. Marc Siegel s latest column arguing against making the flu vaccine mandatory for health care workers, we certainly are now. (Dr. Siegel is an associate professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Medical Center).
This flu season is turning out to be a whopper. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino on Wednesday declared a public health emergency after city residents came down with 700 confirmed cases 10 times more than all of last season.
Now that a full year has passed since the abortive attempt by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration s Commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, to make the morning-after pill available to anyone over-the-counter (OTC), what is the status of this plan?
H.I.V. positive patients who smoke lose more years to smoking than to the virus itself, a new Danish study suggests.
Approximately one in eight teenagers have had, at some time in their lives, persistent suicidal thoughts or ideation, and about a third of them had made an attempt at suicide, the first nationwide study found.
Although this year soda has received much criticism for its high sugar content and suspected adverse health effects, diet soda has been a target of flawed criticism as well. Last year, for instance, a flawed study tied the consumption of diet soda to diabetes. Unfortunately, the study authors neglected to control for the weight of the subjects. Once this factor was considered, the correlation disappeared.
You may remember the story we published in Dispatch on November 29, about protection from the pertussis vaccine fading over time. Well here is yet another reason to consider going out to get the booster as an adult. A whooping cough epidemic has broken out in Vermont and as of last week, 522 cases of pertussis have been reported across the state.
Yesterday we informed readers that although Olympic athletes tend to live longer than the general population, similar health benefits and longevity could be achieved by all of us through routine physical activity.
New recommendations from the American Cancer Society say that older current or former heavy smokers may want to talk to their physician about getting a yearly low-dose CT scan (also called spiral CT scans) of the chest to help detect lung cancer.
Nonrefractive vision loss, caused by conditions including diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration, is a type of vision loss that cannot be corrected with glasses. Studies have shown this problem to be on the rise in people under 40, as has the prevalence of diabetes. Could the two be connected?
It s been a year since Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius squashing the Food and Drug Administration s plan to make the morning after pill available over-the-counter, and ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross still isn t happy about it.
In-office eye scans that assess thinning of the retina may help doctors predict the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study suggests.
The study, published in Neurology, involved 164 people with MS, including 59 who had no disease activity. All participants underwent eye scans that measured thinning of a portion of their retinas every six months for approximately 21 months. MRI brain scans of the study participants had been performed previously.
Men who take vitamin C supplements are at higher-than-average risk of developing kidney stones, a new study from Sweden suggests.
The analysis included 907 men who said they took regular vitamin C tablets and more than 22,000 who didn't use any nutritional supplements.
We d also like to give a hat-tip to Caroline Scott-Thomas, whose article on genetic engineering is online at FoodNavigator.
In it, Scott-Thomas discusses how we must remember that genetic engineering is an issue of technology and should not be an ideology.
Many more individuals with diagnosable mental disorders are smokers as compared to the rest of the population. It turns out that mentally ill adults in the United States smoke cigarettes at a rate 70 percent higher than adults without mental illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman isn t content just to scare people on food issues he s now branched out into other topics. Today he writes in The Cosmetics Wars, about how American consumers are purportedly covering their faces, lips and hair with a long list of toxins.
Some 400 hair dyes and lipsticks contain lead ¦ you might not want to kiss your kids if you re wearing lead-tainted lipstick, Bittman warns.
The next time you see a hedgehog crossing the street, make sure to stay away. There have been seven cases of hedgehog-related salmonella infection reported by the Washington State Department of Health, one being fatal. Poor little varmint.
But if you do happen to come into contact with a hedgehog, maybe on your daily commute to work, make sure to wash your hands after handling. And of course, always wash your pet hedgehog s cage to avoid spreading the bacteria in your house.
Patients with multivessel coronary artery disease fare better when they receive coronary artery bypass graft surgery CABG - (substituting a healthy artery or vein from the body for the blocked coronary artery and requiring open-heart surgery with bypass), as opposed to percutaneous cardiac interventions PCI - (a non-surgical procedure involving stenting of the coronary arteries via angioplasty, passing a catheter through an artery to the heart). PCI does not require opening the chest and putting the patient on heart-lung bypass.
Although screening for and effective treatment of cervical cancer makes it one of the most preventable types of cancers, it still causes 275,000 deaths each year, 85 percent in developing countries. And this number is predicted to reach 430,000 by 2030. With the 2006 launch of the first vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), an infection that causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases, the death toll has the potential to be reversed, especially if girls in low and middle-income countries can be immunized. (A second vaccine was approved in 2007).
A study published this week in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism presented compelling data showing that the consumption of neither high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), nor sucrose (table sugar) at levels consistent with average daily consumption increased liver or muscle fat in humans.
Neurostimulation should likely be offered to patients with Parkinson s disease earlier than it is, a new study suggests. Neurostimulation is sometimes called deep brain stimulation. For Parkinson s patients, the process involves implanting tiny microelectrodes in the brain to deliver stimulation pulses to the tissue. Then, an electrical pulse generator (PG) generates stimulation pulses, which is connected to the electrodes via microwires.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is telling a White House doctor who worried about his weight to shut up. Dr. Connie Mariano, the White House physician from 1992 to 2001, told CNN she d like to see Christie run for president but fears he d die in office.
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