In Mice, Alzheimer's-Linked Protein Shows Promise Against MS

'modId':'mediasocialchromefriends','isPreLoad':0,'pageSize':12,'numFriends':null,'notificationCount':0,'property':'News','learnMorePath':'/activity-learn-more/','friendbarNotification':'0','friendbarRollup':'0','moduleConf':YAHOO.Media.Facebook.ModuleConf,'friendIdList':

View the Original article

Mobile phones help bolster Uganda's fight against HIV

"mod_id":"mediasocialchromepromos","facepile":1,"property":"news","learnmore_path":"/activity-learn-more/","moduleConf":YAHOO.Media.Facebook.ModuleConf

View the Original article

Sec'y Clinton lauds headway in battle against AIDS

"mod_id":"mediasocialchromepromos","facepile":1,"property":"news","learnmore_path":"/activity-learn-more/","moduleConf":YAHOO.Media.Facebook.ModuleConf

View the Original article

Lance Armstrong's Suit Against USADA Quickly Dismissed

'modId':'mediasocialchromefriends','isPreLoad':0,'enableMediaTabEvent':0,'pageSize':12,'numFriends':null,'notificationCount':0,'property':'News','learnMorePath':'/activity-learn-more/','friendbarNotification':'0','friendbarRollup':'0','moduleConf':YAHOO.Media.Facebook.ModuleConf,'friendIdList':

View the Original article

Parenthood Seems to Protect Against Catching Colds: Study

HealthDay – Fri, Jul 6, 2012 FRIDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) -- Parents are about half as likely to catch a cold as people without children, regardless of their preexisting immunity, a new study says.

The researchers said that unknown "psychological or behavioral differences between parents and nonparents" might help explain their findings.

"We found parenthood predicted a decreased probability of colds among healthy individuals exposed to a cold virus," study leader Rodlescia Sneed of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and co-authors reported.

For the study, the researchers examined information on 795 adults from three previous studies. Volunteers in the studies were given nose drops either containing rhinovirus, which causes the common cold, or a flu virus.

After being exposed to the virus, about one-third of participants developed a cold. The study found, however, that there was a 52 percent lower rate of colds among parents compared to volunteers who didn't have any children.

This protective effect increased along with the number of children parents had. And when parents didn't live with any of their children, their risk of having a common cold dropped even more -- to 73 percent lower than nonparents.

The study is published in the July issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Parents were less likely to catch a cold regardless of whether they had protective levels of antibodies, the study authors noted in a journal news release. Being married had no effect on the findings. However, the risk of colds was not lower for the youngest parents studied, those aged 18 to 23.

Psychological or behavioral factors could play a role in their findings, the investigators said.

The researchers also suggested that being a parent may improve the regulation of immune factors that are triggered in response to infection. More research is needed, they said, to explain how being a parent affects the body's response to the common cold.

"Our results, while provocative, have left room for future studies to pursue how various aspects of parenthood (

View the Original article

Medicaid official rules against Ind. abortion law

Indiana's decision to deny Planned Parenthood Medicaid funds because it performs abortions denies women the freedom to choose their health care providers, a federal hearing officer said.

The state had asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Chicago to reconsider its June 2011 ruling that found changes in Indiana's Medicaid plan unacceptable. But a hearing officer recommended in documents released Friday that a CMS administrator uphold the agency's initial decision.

The changes to Indiana's plan resulted from a 2011 law that would have made the state the first to deny the organization Medicaid funds for general health services, including cancer screenings. The law has been on hold while the dispute works its way through the courts.

The Indiana attorney general's office, which already is appealing a federal judge's order blocking the law, said it may also contest the panel's recommendation. The state had argued that the dispute should be decided administratively by the CMS, not in court.

"Because this is a recommendation, the Attorney General's Office has a chance to file an exception to it before the CMS administrator makes a final decision," the agency said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood of Indiana said it was gratified by the decision.

"Through its appeal, the State was continuing its attack on women's rights and attempting to restrict access to basic, lifesaving services such as Pap tests, breast exams, STD testing and treatment, and birth control," Betty Cockrum, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Indiana, said in a statement.

While Planned Parenthood officials had feared they might have to close some of the organization's 28 clinics in Indiana or suspend some services because of a loss of Medicaid funds, that has not happened so far. Cockrum has said about 9,300 women rely on Planned Parenthood for their health care.

Indiana had argued that Medicaid funds intended to help groups like Planned Parenthood provide general health care would indirectly subsidize abortions. The Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision named after the late Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., bans all federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.

The state also said Planned Parenthood could continue to receive Medicaid funding if it established separate fiscal entities for abortion and other health care. But CMS said such an option was premature.

Hearing officer Benjamin Cohen wrote that the Indiana law violated the federal requirement that individuals must have the freedom to obtain care from any qualified provider. Restricting that choice just because a care provider also offers non-covered care isn't allowed, he wrote.

Indiana asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago last August to lift U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt's June 24, 2011, preliminary injunction blocking parts of the abortion law. The court has not yet ruled.

Another federal appeals court ruled in May that Texas cannot ban Planned Parenthood from receiving state funds, at least until a lower court has a chance to hear formal arguments. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that there's sufficient evidence the state's law preventing Planned Parenthood from participating in the Women's Health Program is unconstitutional.

View the Original article

French smokers unite against curbs

"Employees smoke outside an auto plant in France in 2010. PSA announced yesterday the definitive closure of the Melun-Senart site in 2012, employing 390 people. French smokers have formed a lobby to "defend their rights" against what they perceive as unfair curbs imposed by the state, the group's leaders said Sunday. (AFP Photo/Olivier Laban-Mattei)" title

View the Original article

Fewer Stillbirths Among Pregnant Women Vaccinated Against Flu

Yahoo! News Search Search Web HomeVideoPhotosGMAYear in ReviewOddComicsTravelOpinionTrending NowVitalityWho Knew?WeatherU.S.U.S. VideoGMAEducationReligionCrimes and TrialsThe LookoutSept. 11LocalContributor NetworkYear in ReviewWorldWorld VideoMiddle EastEuropeLatin AmericaAfricaAsiaCanadaAustralia/AntarcticaThe EnvoyBusinessVideoExclusivesToday's MarketsStocksPersonal FinancePress ReleasesMarketplaceNewsmakersEntertainmentVideoClinton ConcertCelebrityTVMoviesMusicReviewsFashionBooksArtsTheaterDear AbbyComicsOdd NewsSportsVideoNFLMLBNBANCAAFNCAABSoccerCyclingNHLTennisGolfBoxingMotor SportsMMAExtremeTechBlogTech It UpBest in TechGadgetsWirelessAppleSocial MediaSecurityOpen SourceGamingAppsUpgrade Your LifePoliticsDestination 2012The TicketThe SignalRemake AmericaThe IssuesElection MapWhite HouseCongressThe CourtsWomen and PoliticsPress ReleasesVideoScienceScience VideoWeather NewsSpace / AstronomyAnimal / PetsDinosaurs / FossilsBiotechEnergyGreenHealthVideoWeight LossCancerSexual HealthMedications/DrugsParenting/KidsSeniors/AgingDiseases/ConditionsVitalityBlogsThe UpshotThe CutlineThe LookoutThe SideshowThe TicketAround the WorldKatie's TakePower PlayersThis Could Be BigNewsmakersTrending NowLocalPopular SearchKeywordNews Search Featured»VideosPhotosTrending NowKatie's TakeTech it up!VitalityWho Knew?Power PlayersRemake America   Discover Yahoo! With Your Friends

Explore news, videos, and much more based on what your friends are reading and watching. Publish your own activity and retain full control.

To get started, firstLogin with Facebook YOUR FRIENDS' ACTIVITY prev next

View the Original article

FDA Panel Votes Against New Use for Blood Thinner Xarelto

"background-image:url('http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/emYzL9d6anfTVuob39n9bQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTcwO3B5b2ZmPTA7cT04NTt3PTcw/http://l.yimg.com/os/152/2012/05/24/145211335-jpg_153429.jpg');" width

View the Original article

Poisoning at Afghan Girls School Proof that Violence Against Women Will Get Worse

This story comes from the Yahoo! Contributor Network, where individuals publish their unique perspectives on some of the world’s most popular websites.Do you have a story to tell? Become a Yahoo! contributor

COMMENTARY

View the Original article

Patients leaving hospital against advice fare worse

Reuters – 14 hrs ago NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Hospital patients who leave against medical advice may have an increased risk of being readmitted or dying within a month, a study at one New York medical center finds.

In the U.S., about 500,000 hospital patients a year sign themselves out against medical advice.

Studies have suggested that decision can be unwise: patients hospitalized for asthma, HIV or a heart attack, for example, have been found to have an increased risk of readmission when they leave contrary to doctors' recommendations.

But the new study, reported in the American Journal of Medicine, suggests patients are also at increased risk of dying within 30 days of leaving against medical advice.

Researchers found that of 84,000 patients treated at their medical center, those who left against doctors' advice were more likely be readmitted within the next month: one-quarter of them ended up back in the hospital, versus 11 percent of patients who went home after a planned discharge.

They were also twice as likely to die: 1.3 percent died during the month after leaving the hospital, compared with 0.7 percent of patients with a planned discharge.

"That's the really sobering finding," said lead researcher Dr. William N. Southern, of Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

"These patients are not only at greater risk of readmission," he said, "they are also more likely to die in the next 30 days."

The exact reasons are not certain, Southern told Reuters Health.

Patients who signed out against medical advice tended to have a shorter hospital stay than patients with a planned discharge.

"So it may be that they aren't staying long enough to complete a course of treatment," Southern said in an interview. "But it may also be that they are not getting the follow-up care they may need."

The bottom line, according to Southern, is that people should be aware of the risks of leaving the hospital early.

That does not mean they have to follow "doctor's orders."

"Refusal of care is a patient's fundamental right," Southern said.

But, he added, patients do not always sign out because they don't want treatment. Often, it's for a personal obligation like work or caring for a family member.

The findings are based on 84,000 patients treated at Montefiore Medical Center between 2002 and 2008. That included 3,544 patients who signed out against medical advice.

Patients who checked out early were different from their counterparts in other ways too. For example, they were more likely to have a history of substance abuse or psychiatric conditions or to be on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor.

But even when the researchers accounted for those differences, as well as factors like age and race, patients who left the hospital against advice still had twice the risk of dying.

Of course, the specific risks to any one person would depend on the illness being treated, overall health and other factors. "Our findings suggest that whatever your baseline (death) risk is -- whether it's high or low -- it would be twice as high if you leave the hospital against medical advice," Southern said.

A limitation of the study, though, is that it reflects a single medical center -- one located in a high-poverty area of New York. Southern said it's not known whether the results would be the similar at all hospitals.

But he said the findings do give hospital staff something to communicate to patients. Until now, it had not been clear whether discharge against medical advice was associated with death risk specifically.

"Now we know that it is," Southern said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JcvCbG American Journal of Medicine, online April 17, 2012.

View the Original article

Lower-Dose Radioiodine Effective Against Thyroid Cancer

HealthDay – 3 hrs ago WEDNESDAY, May 2 (HealthDay News) -- People with thyroid cancer are often given a radioactive iodine treatment to wipe out stray cancer cells, a treatment that comes with its own health risks.

Now, two new studies find that a safer, lower dose of radioactive iodine is just as effective as the higher dose at getting rid of any such cells that remain after surgery.

The research also found that patients were just as likely to have their thyroid shrunk away if they took a drug called Thyrogen (thyrotropin) as if they underwent thyroid hormone withdrawal -- which leads to fatigue, pain and weight gain -- before embarking on the radioiodine treatment.

The two studies, published in the May 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, compared low- and high-dose radioactive iodine in a total of more than 1,000 patients. The participants, from Britain and France, also received either Thyrogen or thyroid hormone withdrawal as part of the therapy.

In either study, the researchers found that patients who received the low-dose (30 millicuries) of radioactive iodine in combination with Thyrogen were just as apt to have their remaining thyroid cells mopped up -- with fewer side effects -- than patients who received higher-dose (100 millicuries ) radioiodine along with either Thyrogen or hormone withdrawal.

However, the researchers say they plan on monitoring the patients for several years to see if rates of cancer recurrence are similar in the different groups.

"We try to give the lowest possible effective radiation dose so that we cure the current cancer, but we do not increase the risk of producing a second cancer resulting from the radiation itself," explained Dr. Ujjal Mallick, an oncologist at the Northern Centre for Cancer Care in Newcastle upon Tyne, in England, and lead author of the UK study.

Radioactive iodine has been associated with increased risk of a number of cancers, particularly leukemia, as well as short-term side effects such as nausea.

"Our study shows that clinicians can consider low-dose radioactive iodine in selected patients that have up to a four-centimeter tumor in the thyroid gland that has not spread outside the neck and have been operated on by expert surgeons," Mallick said.

The number of people diagnosed with thyroid cancer has been on the rise in the past decade, and there will be more than 56,000 new cases in the United States in 2012, according to the American Cancer Society's estimate. The disease, which is highly curable if caught early, affects more women than men, with patients tending to be diagnosed in their 40s and 50s.

The new studies suggest that, "we can spare a lot of young patients by using low-dose radioactive iodine," Mallick said.

However, Dr. David Cooper, an endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that patients under 45 probably can probably avoid radioactive iodine altogether if their tumors are small (less than 2 centimeters) and the cancer has not spread to other parts of their body. Cooper was not involved in the new studies.

In fact, some of the low-risk patients in the current studies might not have needed radioactive iodine treatment at all, Cooper said.

"The chance that a person with low-risk thyroid cancer is going to come back in a year or two with recurrence is no different whether they got radioactive iodine or not," Cooper said.

In low-risk cases, the whole point of radiation treatment is more about getting rid of the normal tissue, which makes monitoring patients for recurrence easier, and less about wiping out disease, which surgery usually takes care of, Cooper said. However tests are usually sensitive enough to pick out recurrence even in patients who do not receive radiation to help eliminate their thyroid.

The research, led by Mallick and his colleagues, involved 421 patients at 29 centers in the U.K. who had thyroid cancer that had not spread outside the neck. The other study looked at 684 patients in France who had small thyroid tumors that had not metastasized (spread) beyond the neck.

All of the patients had undergone surgery to remove the bulk of their thyroid gland and were receiving thyroid hormone therapy to replace the natural thyroid hormone.

In both studies, researchers found that the rates of effective thyroid reduction in the months after treatment were similar in both the low- and high-dose groups.

Mallick and his colleagues found that about 84 percent of patients who received low-dose radioactive iodine along with Thyrogen had undetectable levels of thyroid tissue six to nine months later, compared with about 90 percent in the high-dose-plus-Thyrogen group and about 88 percent in the high-dose-plus-hormone-withdrawal group.

In addition, the rates of common side effects of radiation such as neck pain and nausea were higher in the high-dose group than in the low-dose group.

"These studies are not all that earth shattering" because smaller studies have shown that low-dose therapy is effective, Cooper said. "However these studies add something because they involve hundreds of people that were monitored carefully."

Many doctors in the United States are already using Thyrogen for thyroid ablation because patients feel awful during the weeks of thyroid hormone withdrawal leading up to radioactive iodine therapy, Cooper said.

However, a major problem with radioactive iodine treatment in the United States is that doctors use it in patients outside of the 2009 American Thyroid Association recommendations, which state that radioiodine should be used for certain people with tumors larger than 1 centimeter that have other properties, such as invasiveness, Cooper said. (Cooper was the lead author of these recommendations).

The current studies could help doctors at least see that a large dose of radioactive iodine is not necessary, Cooper said.

For his part, Mallick said, "In our hospital, we are going to start to implement the low-dose radioactive iodine for patients who match the criteria in the study."

He and his collaborators are about to start a new trial comparing low-dose with no radioiodine to see if radiation is necessary in selected low-risk patients after surgery. "This will answer a question that has plagued clinicians for several decades," he said.

More information

To learn more about radioactive iodine, visit the American Cancer Society.

View the Original article

Vitamin E in diet protects against many cancers, study suggests

ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2012) — Next time you need to choose between vegetable oil and margarine in that favorite recipe, think about your health and reach for the oil.

See Also:Health & MedicineCancerProstate CancerBreast CancerColon CancerVitaminLeukemiaLiving WellReferenceVitamin EB vitaminsVitamin DHealth benefits of tea

While the question of whether vitamin E prevents or promotes cancer has been widely debated in scientific journals and in the news media, scientists at the Center for Cancer Prevention Research, at Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, believe that two forms of vitamin E -- gamma and delta-tocopherols -- found in soybean, canola and corn oils as well as nuts do prevent colon, lung, breast and prostate cancers.

"There are studies suggesting that vitamin E actually increases the risk of cancer and decreases bone density," says Chung S. Yang, director of the center. "Our message is that the vitamin E form of gamma-tocopherols, the most abundant form of vitamin E in the American diet, and delta-tocopherols, also found in vegetable oils, are beneficial in preventing cancers while the form of vitamin E, alpha- tocopherol, the most commonly used in vitamin E supplements, has no such benefit."

Yang and colleagues, Nanjoo Suh and Ah-Ng Tony Kong, summarized their findings recently in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. In a Commentary, "Does Vitamin E Prevent or Promote Cancer?"

the Rutgers scientists discuss animal studies done at Rutgers as well as human epidemiological studies that have examined the connection between vitamin E and cancer.

Yang says Rutgers scientists conducting animal studies for colon, lung, breast and prostate cancer found that the forms of vitamin E in vegetable oils, gamma and delta-tocopherols, prevent cancer formation and growth in animal models.

"When animals are exposed to cancer-causing substances, the group that was fed these tocopherols in their diet had fewer and smaller tumors," Yang says. "When cancer cells were injected into mice these tocopherols also slowed down the development of tumors."

In researching colon cancer, Yang pointed to another recently published paper in Cancer Prevention Research indicating that the delta-tocopherol form of vitamin E was more effective than other forms of vitamin E in suppressing the development of colon cancer in rats.

This is good news for cancer research. Recently, in one of the largest prostate cancer clinical trials in the United States and Canada, scientists found that the most commonly used form of vitamin E supplements, alpha-tocopherol, not only did not prevent prostate cancer, but its use significantly increased the risk of this disease among healthy men.

This is why, Yang says, it is important to distinguish between the different forms of vitamin E and conduct more research on its cancer preventive and other biological effects.

"For people who think that they need to take vitamin E supplements," Yang says, "taking a mixture of vitamin E that resembles what is in our diet would be the most prudent supplement to take."

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

View the Original article