Want millions of people to read your health records?

Technology just keeps marching on, and here’s another US import I hope we manage to avoid. Mega search engine Google has just got access to millions of prescription records as they announced a partnership between CVS/pharmacy, one of the largest pharmacy chains in the U.S. and Google Health.

Google Health currently allows people to import their medical records from over a dozen pharmacies, medical centers, and health insurance providers and once imported, you can review those records and keep them updated. So no more wondering just what prescription you need renewing because with a click of a mouse you can send it to your regular pharmacist to be filled. If you have bought your drugs from any of the major pharmaceutical chains Google now has all that information on record, but how confident are we that it cannot be hacked or accessed by others?

I can quite see how attractive it would be for an online supplier of non-prescription medicines to want your details so they send you attractive offers to buy online – and if they know what you are buying then they know what you are buying it for so any level of privacy or confidentiality could be breached. Medical insurers too could find it very useful to know what medicines you are regularly taking as it might affect your cover, or their liability.

Am I being paranoid or is Big Brother not only here but keeping an eye on my medicines?

Hope for vegetative patients

One of the most terrible decisions we can be faced with can be dealing with a patient in a vegetative state. New research now suggest that 40% of coma patients in such a condition may be misdiagnosed and only an estimated 20% of patients return, like the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, after his car crash in September, to fully functioning normality after serious brain injury.

Hope comes from Cambridge neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen who has instigated a groundbreaking neuroscientific research programme that is set to transform the prospects of diagnosis for long term vegetative state patients. He has devised a scanner that can reveal evidence of fluctuating levels of brain activation in such patients when offered visual stimuli such as family photographs. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, and a capacity to suffer and it is time to stop the tragic myth that a persistent vegetative state can reliably be diagnosed just by observing the patient. If Dr Adrian Owen’s pioneering work can help reduce that tragic 50% of misdiagnosed patients then he is to warmly encouraged and hopefully supported with plenty of grant money that I see too often wasted on pointless research.

Exercise moderately for best effect

You know that you need to exercise to stay healthy and lose weight, but if you are feeling guilty because you haven’t enough time, don’t want to ‘go for the burn’ or end up red faced, sweating and out of breath then take heart. You don’t need to exercise like a fast forward Jane Fonda video, in fact it is much better if you don’t.

Aerobic and/or cardiovascular exercise for at least an hour, four days a week is often recommended, but the best way to lose fat, build muscle, strengthen your heart and lungs, and add years to your life is with short duration, high intensity exercises.

Typical cardio and aerobic exercises can not only put you at risk for repetitive motion injuries, but can make your heart and lungs less resistant to stress. Exercising over a longer period means they get used to the routine and don’t have to work as hard so can actually shrink. A recent study showed that the muscle fibre of marathon runners actually had decreased and atrophied – in other words they had shrunk.

If you exercise to lose weight and look leaner, then be aware that those who train at low to medium intensity for long periods have a much higher body fat percentage and less muscle than people who train for strength with short duration, high intensity, interval-type exercises. Working out in short bursts of high intensity exercise will burn glycogen stored in muscles as fuel rather than fat. This then teaches your body to store more energy in the muscles and not as fat. This process helps you burn fat and get lean.

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that men and women who exercised at a higher intensity had lower blood pressure, lower triglycerides, higher HDL (good cholesterol) and less body fat. Plus, short bursts of high intensity exercise can also help you exceed your aerobic capacity, which increases your lung volume and lung capacity is the best predictor of longevity and absence of disease.

Back to that red-faced sweating, because when you push yourself to where you need to stop and pant, as with high intensity exercises such as a 50-yard sprint or a good set of calisthenics, you are asking your lungs to provide more oxygen than they are able to use at that time. This response signals your body to increase your lung volume. It is important because as you age, you lose lung capacity so that by the time you are 70, you will have lost 50% of your lung capacity. If you stick with high intensity, short duration exercise, you can prevent this from happening. But if you run marathons or do hour-long aerobics classes, you will make this loss even worse.

Ideal Workout? Really 10 to 20 minutes a day is ideal to strengthen your heart and lungs, and exercise so you work at a pace that gives them a challenge. You want to break a sweat, but not so intense that you can’t finish at least 10 minutes.

This is a simple routine you could try:

Run sprints, walk briskly on a treadmill, or cycle at high intensity for one minute and follow up with a period of recovery. During recovery slow down to an easy pace to give your body a chance to rest and recover. Repeat that sequence 5 times.

Do this outdoors if you can for maximum benefit and if you want to increase the degree of difficulty exercise on streets with an incline, or use your staircase.

Cholesterol screening for two year olds in the USA

Often in health matters we follow the USA, but this is one case where I sincerely hope we don’t. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is recommending cholesterol screening for children as young as two if there are weight issues or a family history of heart attacks or high cholesterol.

That might sound like a good health preventive, except that the response if high cholesterol is found is to recommend statin drugs, not dietary changes. Statins work by blocking the action of a certain enzyme in the liver which is needed to make cholesterol. Proponents say there is growing evidence that the first signs of heart disease show up in childhood – which is true – but their claim that cholesterol-lowering drugs, called statins, may be their best hope of lowering their risk of early heart attack is much more controversial.

Dr. Jatinder Bhatia, a member of the AAP nutrition committee, has said that “The risk of giving statins at a lower age is less than the benefit you’re going to get out of it”. A statement that is seriously undermined when he went on to say that there is not “a whole lot” of data on pediatric use of cholesterol-lowering drugs. So how on earth can he recommend it foThe use of statins in adults is currently under debate, so why on earth promote a drug that has been shown to actually cause heart problems in healthy subjects? Last year, US researchers at the University of Illinois examined the effects of the statin drug Lipitor on subjects with no history of heart problems. After taking the drug for three to six months, some subjects showed deterioration in at least one marker for heart function, and a smaller number were found to have deterioration in three different heart function markers. Natural Alternatives|:

Statins have been heavily promoted to reduce cholesterol, but there are plenty of healthy alternatives instead. CoQ10, artichoke leaf, red yeast rice and sugar cane are all being used to reduce cholesterol and if you have a history of heart disease in your family, or are concerned about your cholesterol levels – or those of your children – then these are some other things you can try:

* Follow a low-glycaemic diet (low processed carbohydrates), which lowers cholesterol

* Eat foods containing high levels of beta-sitosterol, found in most plants, especially soybeans, as they can reduce cholesterol by at least 10 per cent

* Take omega-3 fatty-acid supplements, preferably with vitamin B6

* Eat a high-fibre diet based on vegetables, fruits and nuts and oat bran, apple pectin and psyllium are especially helpful

* Try blue-green algae supplements; they contain large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids which may reduce cholesterol

* Garlic lowers cholesterol so cook frequently with it

Sour cherries have a sweet effect

One fruit I particularly love are dark, sweet cherries, but for maximum health effect it is the tart, sour, cherries that bring most benefit. Available as juice or powder, not suitable for eating raw, they have powerful antioxidant qualities but a new benefit has just been announced by researchers from the University of Michigan.

They have found that regularly including tart cherries in the diet can reduce the symptoms of metabolic syndrome and the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms including high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high fasting blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol and obesity (particularly around the stomach). The study found that cholesterol levels and stomach fat were both reduced in the trial and, more importantly perhaps, that the cherries were found to reduce inflammation at a systemic level. Our body’s natural response to injury is inflammation as it seeks to heal the affected part, but as I mentioned in last week’s Health News, chronic inflammation has been linked to increased risk for many diseases including depression.

If you are interested in finding out more, or for the name of your local stockist or ordering online, then a good website is www.cherryactive.co.uk or call them on 08451 705 705

More proof that attitude is all you need for healthy ageing

Those who have heard me speak about healthy living know I often quote the statistic that optimists live on average 7.5 years longer than pessimists – so it pays to be cheerful. Now some new research has shown that the children of parents who live to be 100 are on average more outgoing, agreeable, and less neurotic. As children usually inherit both longevity and personality traits from their parents it seems your attitude not only increase your own lifespan, but those of your offspring as well.

The research was done at New England Centenarian Study at Boston University Medical Center and their chief finding was that long life was linked to being more outgoing, sociable and friendly. With those attitudes people are able to manage stress better, and your ability to successfully do that definitely improves your health and your longevity. Less outgoing and more neurotic or nervous people in the study were found to be less able to handle stress than the more cheerful subjects. This unique study is the first to study the children of centenarians and from a questionnaire they measured qualities such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Children is not quite accurate as the average age of the participants was 75, not unusual in parents around 100 years old. The women participants rated higher on the agreeableness scale, but on all other factors men and women scored equally. It has been observed in previous research that centenarians tend to have sunny dispositions, which is just as well as who wants to be miserable for 100 years?

In Okinawa, it is known that these particular Japanese people live longer than their countrymen and Nobuyoshi Hirose, an expert on ageing, put it down to the fact that they are all likeable, sociable people. Plus we know that eating less meat and having a strong sense of purpose in your life also increases your life expectancy – and the quality of it

Short of emigrating, just do what you can to keep cheerful and be as sociable as you can – and never mind if your children think it’s undignified!

Oh really? Stressed parents have kids with cavities

You know how I love the way scientists like to tell us the blindingly obvious and then couch it in terms of a great discovery? Well, here’s one I found earlier on one of my health forums. A team of scientists from The Ohio State University looked at the stress levels of parents whose young children either had no cavities or so many cavities that the children had to be anaesthetized before they could be treated.

I know you will find this hard to believe, but apparently the researchers found a correlation between the parents’ status, education levels, income, and their stress levels. So those who were single parents on a low income were more stressed than two parent families with a good income and that the higher the parents’ stress level was, then the greater number of cavities the children had. Could that be down to poor diet because of a low income I wonder? Their final conclusion – which is a real breakthrough – is that when the parents could afford to get their childs teeth seen to by a dentist their own stress levels went down. Their ‘suggestion’ is that dentists need to find ways to help low income families afford their services so they can reduce their stress levels – oh really?

Health Warning On Pistachios

As a pleasant and healthy snack, pistachios are very popular – perhaps more in the USA than in the UK but they are to be found in many a store cupboard. There is now a current and serious health warning after pistachios were found to be at risk for ongoing potential for salmonella contamination at a US manufacturing plant in California. They had previously recalled two million pounds of pistachios after a previous alert, but the FDA has now stepped in and they have now recalled their entire 2008 crop of roasted pistachio nuts. There have been no reported deaths or serious illnesses so far, but the FDA has advised consumers as a precautionary measure not to eat pistachios until the suspect nuts can be tracked down in the food chain. This is a lengthy job as they are not only sold whole but also to various manufactures to be included in their products such as trail mix and manufactured desserts.

The main imports into the UK come from America, so if you have bought some recently and want to check if they have been cleared then there is a website at www.PistachioRecall.org which has a database of pistachio nuts and pistachio products that are not affected by the recall and are presumed safe.

Folic acid can boost birth weight for healthier babies

I mentioned a few weeks ago the benefits of Omega-3 for premature babies and now there is further help to boost your baby’s birth weight by over 60 grams – and this is very good news for their long-term health. The British Journal of Nutrition has reported that supplementing the mother’s diet with of 400 micrograms of folic acid during the pregnancy is important for two reasons:

The prime reason is that babies with a low birth weight (defined as less than 5lb 8oz) have an increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, ADD and depression later in life and sadly their number is increasing. Secondly, being underweight indicates that they have not had their maximum growth potential in the womb as this is dependent on their receiving the correct balance of nutrients during the pregnancy and folic acid has an essential role to play in the normal production of protein, lipids and DNA. Taking the supplement while already pregnant was seen to result in a 40 per cent lower risk of having a child with low birth weight and in fact was even more marked in women having their second child as when they supplemented before conception they saw a 240g higher birth weight compared with first time mothers who didn’t take folic acid at all.

It is recommended in the UK that women take a 400 microgram folic acid supplement daily from the time of conception to the 12th week of pregnancy, in order to cut the rate of neural tube defects such as spina bifida. This is in addition to the 200 micrograms of folate that should be obtained from a healthy diet from sources like brown rice, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, peas, and – interestingly – low calorie beer. Unfortunately, it seems that more than 90 per cent of women looking to start a family don’t have anywhere near this amount and so potentially are putting their children’s’ future health at risk.

Depression triggered by chronic inflammation

It’s well known to doctors that patients with chronic inflammation, such as that linked to coronary heart disease or rheumatoid arthritis, are more likely than others to become depressed. Some pro-inflammatory drugs, such as interferon-alpha, which is used to treat Hepatitis C and a cancer known as malignant melanoma, also induce symptoms of depression in a significant number of patients, as does treatment with antibiotics.

What they haven’t known is why, but now researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered that IDO (indoleamine 2,3 dioxygenase), an enzyme found throughout the body and long suspected of playing a role in depression, seems to act as a molecular switch and is in fact essential to the onset of depressive symptoms sparked by chronic inflammation.

The researchers knew that infection causes immune cells to produce cytokines, signaling proteins that help the body fight infection. These proteins also activate IDO in the body and brain. IDO degrades the amino acid tryptophan, which is the precursor of serotonin, a brain chemical known to positively influence mood. The researchers suspect that the metabolites produced when IDO degrades tryptophan are in some way promoting depression and this opens the way to research further into how to inhibit this behaviour and pre-empt depression.

For years, no one considered that an infection somewhere in the body could affect the brain, but we now know that the immune system is a sensory organ and is perfectly adapted to ‘see’ infectious agents. It then communicates that information to the brain so proving that there is a clear link between the immune system and the nervous system.

If you have a tendency towards depression, it can help to know how to combat any potential downward spiral if you have a chronic infecitopn, or are taking antibiotics. St John’s Wort is helpful to many, as is taking additional B complex and vitamin C to both help the immune system and help mood elevation. Keeping the immune system healthy and strong is a priority with a good diet, low sugar intake, regular cupuncture and herbs such as Echinacea to keep on top of any potential down swings.

« Previous Page — Next Page »