Causes of weight loss

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Depressed Teens Who Respond to Treatment Less Likely to Abuse Drugs

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Health Tip: Help Prevent Heart Disease

HealthDay – 54 mins ago (HealthDay News) -- You can't control all risk factors for heart disease, but living a healthy lifestyle and taking medication prescribed by your doctor can help prevent many of its dangerous risk factors.

The Womenshealth.gov website suggests these steps to help reduce your risk of heart disease:

Maintain healthy cholesterol and blood pressure.Quit or avoid smoking and drinking too much alcohol.Take steps to control diabetes.Maintain a healthy body weight.Get plenty of regular exercise and adhere to a regular sleep schedule.Control conditions such as sleep apnea and metabolic syndrome.

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Many Kids on Medicaid Don't See Dentist: Study

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Ritual in Some Jewish Circumcisions Raises Risk of Herpes Infection: Report

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Boy Scouts to Consider Lifting Gay Ban

"PHOTO: Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout from Iowa, delivers 275,000 signatures to the Boy Scouts at their National Annual Meeting in Florida, May 30, 2012." title

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Targeting the Brain's Appetite Control Switch

Scientists in search of the control switch for the brain’s dinner bell have a new clue. Researchers studying mice at Columbia University Medical Center found that when they messed with a certain protein that is found in the brains of mice – and humans – the rodents’ appetite and metabolism changed.

Dr. Domenico Accili, the leader of the study, whose findings were published today in the journal Cell, said the protein seems to be intimately involved in regulating food intake, and provides an intriguing target in the never ending search for a drug to regulate how much people eat.

The protein, called Gpr17, controls how the brain’s cells respond to insulin, one of the chief hormones involved in hunger and metabolism. When Accili and his team injected a drug to activate GPr17, the rodents’ appetites increased; injecting a chemical to turn Gpr17 off made the mice eat less.

Accili said controlling this protein in the brains of humans may be more than just a pipe dream. Many drugs currently on the market work by acting on the family of proteins to which Gpr17 belongs. The difference is those drugs, such as asthma medicines and blood thinners, don’t cross from the bloodstream into the brain.

“If we were able to tweak those medications so they cross into the brain, they could probably have positive effects against weight gain and help us control appetite,” Accili said.

Accili said his team would work next on redesigning the drugs they injected into the rodents’ brains so that they cross from the bloodstream into the brain.

Dr. Charles Clark, a professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said knowing more about this protein would no doubt help scientists learn more about appetite control in the brain and may even lead to the development of new drugs to fine-tune feelings of hunger. But overcoming hunger’s deep-rooted spot in human evolution won’t be so easy.

”Control of weight is too integral and too important

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Child CT scans could raise cancer risk slightly

Children who get several CT scans have a slightly higher chance of brain cancer and leukemia in later life, though the risk is still small and probably outweighed by the need to get the test, researchers reported.

The use of CT scans has risen rapidly since they were introduced 30 years ago. For children, they're used to evaluate head, neck or spine injuries or neurological disorders.

International researchers studied nearly 180,000 patients under age 22 who had a CT scan in British hospitals between 1985 and 2002. They followed those patients until 2008. They found 74 of them were diagnosed with leukemia while 135 had brain tumors.

The scientists didn't measure the number of scans, which were mostly of the head, but looked at data measuring radiation doses from the scans. That's because the amount of radiation received by body parts such as the brain and bone marrow depends on the age and size of the patient.

The children who later developed leukemia or brain tumors were compared to a group of people who got a very low dose of radiation to the same parts of their bodies.

"CT scans are very useful, but they also have relatively high doses of radiation, when compared to X-rays," said Mark Pearce of Newcastle University, the study's lead author, at a press briefing Wednesday. He said CT scans were warranted in most situations but more needed to be done to reduce the amount of radiation.

Pearce and colleagues concluded the risk of brain tumors was tripled if children had two to three scans and the risk of leukemia was tripled with five to 10 scans. But he emphasized these were rare diseases and that the higher risk was still small. The risk of leukemia in children is about 1 in 2,000, so having several CT scans would bump that up to about 1 in 600.

"This (risk) is important, but the CT scan may be even more important," said David Spiegelhalter, of the University of Cambridge. He was not connected to the research.

"A judgment has to be made," he said in a statement.

The researchers noted that modern CT scanners give off about 80 percent less radiation than the older machines used in the study. Even at low doses, the radiation can damage genes that may increase the patient's risk of developing cancer later.

The study was paid for by the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the U.K. Department of Health. It was published online Thursday in the journal Lancet.

In the U.K., laws already require radiation from medical scans be kept as low as possible. In the United States, the government is pushing manufacturers to design new scanners to minimize radiation exposure for the youngest patients. And it posted advice on the Internet urging parents to speak up when a doctor orders a scan

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More suspected cases in UK Legionnaires' outbreak

Saturday, June 9, 2012

CDC: Older teens often text behind the wheel

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CT scans in childhood increase cancer risk: study

"A youth undergoes a CT Scan at a hospital. Children exposed to multiple CT scans could be up to three times likelier to contract cancer of the blood, brain or bone marrow later in life, according to research published Thursday. (AFP Photo/)" title

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