By MyHealthNewsDaily.com

Members of the military exposed to blasts in combat can develop the same brain disease as professional athletes who experience multiple concussions, a new study suggests.

Researchers found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in the brains of all four deceased U.S. military veterans they examined. The men were exposed to blasts or to multiple concussions during combat.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease previously seen mainly in professional athletes, including boxers, hockey players and football players. It is usually caused by repeated blows to the head, but results from the new study suggests that exposure to a single blast equivalent to that of a improvised explosive device (IED) can result in CTE. The condition causes symptoms such as impaired learning and memory, and has been linked with suicide, the researchers said.

"Our study, for the first time, shows military personnel that have experienced blast exposure exhibit CTE that's basically indistinguishable from the athletes we've looked at," said study researcher Patric Stanton, a cell biology professor at New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y.

The findings indicate that brain injuries with different causes — concussions and exposure to blasts — may trigger the same disease in the brain, Stanton said.

The link between CTE and suicide can be seen in the case of former National Football League star Dave Duerson, who committed suicide last year. An examination of his brain after his death revealed he had CTE, as he suspected. CTE has also been suspected of playing a role the suicide of NFL player Junior Seau earlier this month.

The new findings suggest that blasts on the battlefield may lead to suicidal thoughts in veterans, Stanton said. Blasts may be a factor in the recent rise in military suicides, he said, and researchers should investigate this..

Degenerative brain disease
The researchers analyzed the brains of four male military veterans, ages 22 to 45 (CTE can be diagnosed only after death). Three of the men had been exposed to at least one blast from an IED, and two of them had concussions earlier in life. One soldier experienced four concussions throughout his life, although he was not exposed to a blast.

All the men had symptoms such as headaches, irritability, difficulty sleeping, depression and short-term memory loss.

One man died from a brain aneurysm, one from a brain hemorrhage and one from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The fourth man inhaled foreign material while under the influence of pain medication and later died from lung complications. About two years had passed between their last brain injury and their death.

The researchers also examined the brains of three football players, a professional wrestler and four men of similar ages with no history of blast exposure or concussions.

Signs of CTE were seen in the brains of the military veterans and the professional athletes. One characteristic of CTE is abnormal deposits of a protein called tau, which can kill brain cells, Stanton said.

Mouse model
It can be difficult to say whether CTE was definitely caused by a blast, by previous events in a person's life, or a combination of both, Stanton said.

To study CTE in a more controlled environment, the researchers created a mouse model and simulated blasts from an IED.

The rapid movement of air that occurs after an explosion may play the biggest role in causing blast-related brain injuries, Stanton said. This blast wind can be stronger than the winds of a hurricane, and can rapidly shake the head back and forth, compressing the brain, Stanton said.

About two weeks after exposure to a simulated blast, the mice showed learning and memory problems. These problems were averted when the animals' heads were prevented from moving during the blast, the researchers said.

The findings provide a new pathway for developing methods to prevent blast-related brain injuries, the researchers said.

The study is published today (May 16) in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Study experiments were conducted by researchers at Boston University, New York Medical College and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System.

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Should high school kids get a genetic test for the risk for Alzheimer’s disease before they’re allowed to play football? Two prominent scientists who study both Alzheimer’s and the traumatic brain injury suffered by some football players raise that ethically charged question in an editorial out Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

We all carry a gene called APOE which comes in three forms. If we carry one copy of the form called E4, it triples our lifetime risk for Alzheimer’s. About 10 percent of the U.S. population falls in that category. If we have two copies of E4, the lifetime Alzheimer’s risk is 15 times greater. About 2 percent of us have that genetic makeup.

Although the connection between APOE E4 and Alzheimer’s risk has been known for years, few have suggested it as a screening tool because there’s no known way to prevent the mind-robbing disease. But, now as scientists want to test drugs as early as possible as potential methods of preventing Alzheimer’s, APOE is getting more attention, as are brain scans and other techniques that might determine who is at risk.

At the same time, scientists have been finding that football players, boxers and soldiers suffering blast injuries are more likely to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the form of dementia that can follow a brain injury -- if they have one or two copies of the E4 version of APOE.

Neurologist Dr. Sam Gandy of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York and Alzheimer’s researcher Dr. Steven DeKosky of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, conducted a poll of 49 colleagues. By a 2 to 1 decision their fellow scientists said it is not yet appropriate to test high school students, and by a 3 to 1 ratio they opposed testing military recruits. But few of the scientists dismissed the ideas out of hand.

As the evidence of a connection mounts, testing may become more of an imperative.

There are obvious, enormous ethical difficulties. Telling a 14-year-old that he or she faces an increased lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s could lead to unknowable future strains on individuals and families, as well as a lifetime of difficulty in getting health and life insurance. But if scientists learn how to intervene to prevent the Alzheimer’s, or if the evidence of increased risk from sports or on the battlefield becomes overwhelming, the question may be asked more often.

Robert Bazell is NBC's chief science and medical correspondent. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @RobertBazellNBC.

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By Judith Graham
Kaiser Health News

Doctors assess patients' breathing, heart rate and blood pressure routinely at office visits. Soon, they may be adding body mass index to that list too.

Tracking this measure – an indicator of whether someone is obese or overweight – as if it were a vital sign at medical checkups is among a new set of strategies recommended for battling obesity, a concern that some experts predict will affect 42 percent of adults by 2030.

Although professional medical societies have said for years that physicians should monitor patients' body mass index, most doctors fail to do so. For example, a 2006 survey of family physicians found that fewer than half checked BMIs for children over the age of 2, even though 71 percent knew this has been recommended.

Just over 40 percent of adult patients in commercial HMOs had documented BMI measurements in 2009 and 2010, according to a survey by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an organization that evaluates health plans. That figure falls to 12 percent for patients in commercial PPOs, a more common type of plan.

The Institute of Medicine last week called for the medical profession and health insurers to become more rigorous in their approach in a report proposing an anti-obesity campaign that would involve every part of society, from individuals and families to schools, communities, workplaces, the food industry and the media.

Pointing to the more than 90 million children, teens and adults counted as obese, well-established links to medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and arthritis, and annual healthcare expenses exceeding $190 billion, the report urged comprehensive and sustained action.

For physicians, monitoring body mass index – a ratio of height to weight – is at the top of the list of priorities because it's the best way to identify people who have a weight problem. (Adults are counted as obese if they have a BMI of 30 or higher; children if their BMI is at the 95 percentile or higher for kids of the same age and sex.)

"We need to normalize the process of obesity screening and lifestyle counseling so they're usual and people expect this," said Dr. Sandra Hassink, a member of the panel that prepared the IOM report and director of the Obesity Initiative at Nemours, a pediatric health system in four states.

Medical groups call for change
Groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended regular BMI checks for years. Several health care systems also have embraced the practice. Kaiser includes BMI as a "vital sign" in electronic medical records for nearly 9 million members, and it is planning to do the same for physical activity, another contributor to the obesity epidemic, said Ray Baxter, the plan's senior vice president for community benefit and health policy.

(Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

So why the problem? Many harried physicians are unprepared to advise people about how to change their behaviors, unconvinced they have time to do so, and therefore look skeptically at screening, said Dr. Robert Kushner, clinical director of the Comprehensive Center on Obesity at Northwestern University.

If doctors are overweight themselves, they're less likely to recognize the issue in their patients, research shows. What's more, doctors aren't trained in medical school to handle weight issues. They also often aren't convinced obesity treatments work, and many believe there aren't good community programs to which they can refer patients.

"The question is, how many programs are out there for primary care doctors to refer to in the community, and answer is – not many," said Dr. Ned Calonge, a Colorado physician who is the immediate past chairman of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Northwestern is tackling a part of that by weaving instruction in "lifestyle medicine" throughout all four years of a new medical school curriculum being introduced this August.

Another significant problem has been a historic lack of reimbursement from insurers for obesity screening and counseling. That changed last year for seniors, when Medicare said it would cover up to six months of weight loss counseling for obese beneficiaries as part of a package of new preventive services. Nearly 13 million Medicare members are thought to be obese.

Meanwhile, new preventive services guidelines from the government call for all insurance plans to cover obesity screening and counseling without charge to patients.

And insurers are expanding childhood obesity programs following a 2010 recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that endorsed comprehensive weight management programs for youngsters at least 6 years old. Previously, the task force supported BMI screening but not weight loss programs.

Seeking evidence-based programs
For the insurance industry, the challenge now is providing evidence-based programs that can be introduced on a broad scale.

UnitedHealth Group is promoting "Join for Me," a year-long behavioral modification program piloted with the YMCA of Greater Providence, R.I., in which youngsters 6 to 17 years old, accompanied by a parent, learn about healthy eating and exercise in a group led by a coordinator.

"Doctors are in short supply" and it makes sense to conduct intensive behavioral change programs in the community, not in their offices, said Dr. Deneen Vojta, senior vice president of UnitedHealth's Center for Health Reform & Modernization. For overweight and obese adults, the company is looking at offering a version of the Diabetes Prevention Program, a well-studied intensive intervention that has been shown to help people lose weight.

WellPoint has taken a different approach, choosing to work through doctors and with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an organization that's trying to convince health plans to offer more comprehensive coverage for obesity counseling and treatment. The alliance asks participating plans to offer four visits with a child's primary care doctor and four visits with a dietitian if the youngster is found to be overweight or obese. So far several plans, including WellPoint, Aetna, Humana and Highmark, Inc., have signed up, and 2.4 million children are covered.

WellPoint recently launched a limited pilot study of this type of benefit in California and is learning what physicians need and members want before deciding whether to roll it out more broadly, said Harvinder Sareen, clinical program director for the insurance company.

Insurance companies and some self-insured employers are also exploring the use of financial incentives -- cash payments or reduced premiums or deductibles – to motivate members to keep their weight in check and to adopt other lifestyle changes. One program at UnitedHealthcare offers members up to $250 for reaching a BMI of 25 or less, and similar incentives for not smoking and lowering cholesterol and blood pressure.

"Is there coverage [for obesity] is yesterday's conversation. Today's conversation is how to design coverage to encourage people to use it and continue using it," said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group.

Others disagree that coverage for obesity counseling is adequate.

"The problem is there's no real incentive for the insurance industry to pay for better prevention and treatment, because the costs are immediate while the benefits are long-term," said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the new Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children's Hospital, Boston. "Although reducing the prevalence of obesity is one of the most profitable investments the healthcare system could make, it doesn't make a lot of sense for individual plans when families change policies every three to five years."

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A test to determine if you are infected with HIV should be made available over-the-counter, a federal advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended. 

Having a home test kit available would seem to be a good idea for cutting down on new cases. About 1 in 5 people with HIV don't know they are infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and could be passing the virus on to others.

And early treatment seems to help diminish the virulence of HIV so a home test kits sounds like a better idea.  And given that it was just recently announced by another FDA advisory panel that the drug Truvada ought to get the FDA’s blessing as a way to prevent HIV transmission, would seem to be a great idea.

But is an HIV home test kit really a great idea? On the whole yes, but, there are some big ethical holes facing home testing.

First, there is no mandatory counseling to go along with the test. You can get some counseling by phone if you want it but you do not have to do so. Shouldn’t counseling be mandatory? After all, if you test positive don’t you need to hear some information about getting medicine fast, telling sexual partners, changing any risky behavior you are engaged in and what to do if you are pregnant or have a serious disease?  When you test at home shouldn’t you have to contact someone who can tell you the facts you need to know?

Having a home test kit for HIV is a bit like relying on a bathroom scale in the battle against obesity. Both tests can tell you important information. That information may well save your life. But, unless someone discusses the significance of the test result with you telling you what can be done to battle the problem, there is a pretty good chance you will either say “Thank goodness I did not test positive” and keep doing whatever it is you are doing even if it is bad for you --  or test positive and say “I have a problem and I am so ashamed or frightened I won’t do anything at all about it.”

There is another problem facing the home HIV test kit.  It is not 100 percent accurate. A negative result can occur by error, misusing the test or because the infection is too recent to register. A positive result needs reconfirmation by a blood test.

Another concern is that a home test kit can be used surreptitiously. The screening test relies on a simple swab of the gums. Someone could get your DNA while you are sleeping or under false pretense or even from a toothbrush.  You might get tested without your knowledge or consent.

It is still true that finding ways to let people know they are infected is better than doing nothing. Home testing will cut the rate of infection and that is good. Still, to get the most out of home testing it is important that someone from outside the home be involved in discussing the results.

What do you think about an at-home HIV test? Tell us on Facebook.

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By David Morgan
Reuters

WASHINGTON - A U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel of outside experts concluded that OraSure Technologies Inc's over-the-counter, in-home HIV test is reasonably safe and effective for determining whether someone has the AIDS virus.

The 17-member FDA advisory committee voted unanimously that the drug's ability to prevent new HIV infections and provide HIV-positive people with access to medical care and social services outweighed the risks of false results.

Tuesday's recommendations will now be considered by agency regulators as they determine whether the product, known as the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test, should be approved as the first-ever over-the-counter, completely in-home HIV test.

Advocates say the in-home test would provide a new and potentially powerful strategy for attacking an U.S. HIV epidemic that has infected nearly 1.2 million people and increases by 50,000 new cases each year.

Trading in OraSure's shares was halted for the FDA meeting after closing on Monday at $9.10.

The company said it would expect the product to retail for less than $60, if approved and marketed over the next the several months.

Panel members urged OraSure to undertake post-marketing studies to ensure that the test is available to under-served populations in a manner that would link those who use the kit to the healthcare services including confirmatory tests at professional settings.

A home version of the professionally administered OraQuick Advance test, the new product is an oral swab rapid test that produces results within 20 minutes. The test should not be taken until 90 days after an individual last had an risky behavior.

FDA officials said the OraQuick In-Home test showed a high degree of effectiveness in detecting HIV infection. But some research data suggested the test lacked sufficient sensitivity to avoid false negative results.

False negatives are of particular concern because they could lead HIV-positive individuals to take fewer precautions, raising the danger that they will engage in unprotected sex.

Some panel members argued for strongly worded labeling about false results and procedures to link those who telephone a company hotline with questions with healthcare professionals.

U.S. health officials told the panel that home-testing could help get needed healthcare to HIV-positive individuals earlier. At present, only 62 percent of those with HIV are linked to the healthcare services and just 28 percent have access to drugs capable of suppressing the infection.

The panel heard overwhelmingly supportive public testimony from more than two-dozen witnesses including HIV activists, black community representatives and public health experts, some of whom received money and other assistance from OraSure.

The witnesses urged the panel to back the test as a means of eliminating HIV's public stigma, a main barrier to testing, by making the home test just another item that can be purchased at a local pharmacy along with aspirin or condoms.

Whitney Engeran of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a Los Angeles-based group that provides care for nearly 170,000 HIV patients, said the potential ability to break down the stigma outweighed the product's shortcomings. "The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good," he said.

One witness, who represented healthcare providers, urged the FDA to withhold approval until further study can raise the test's accuracy to a level more in line with those administered in clinics and other professional settings.

Last week, another FDA panel recommended regulatory approval for Gilead Sciences Inc's HIV drug, Truvada, as the first pill treatment for protecting uninfected individuals. 

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President Obama's pronouncement last week in favor of same-sex marriage has no legal effect on employers’ decisions on whether to offer benefits to workers’ domestic partners, but some advocates believe it could reinforce a decade-long trend toward coverage.

Last year, 52 percent of all employers offered domestic partner health benefits, with the percentage varying widely by region and industry, according to a nationally representative sample of about 3,000 employers surveyed by benefit consultant Mercer.  That’s up from 31 percent in 2010.

 The biggest factors driving that change are employers’ views on whether such benefits help them attract and retain desirable workers.

 "Employers started doing this because they felt they needed to be competitive in the labor market, just like with other benefits," said Paul Fronstin of Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.  "I don’t see that changing."

 The Village Voice newspaper in New York is credited with being the first private employer to offer workers domestic partner benefits in 1982.  In 1995, Vermont became the first to offer coverage to state workers.

 "There’s been a steady growth for a long time," says Joan Smyth, a partner at Mercer.  In the early days, some employers worried that adding coverage for domestic partners could make their costs skyrocket by attracting people with higher-than-average health risks, she said, but "that did not happen."

The District of Columbia and almost half of states currently offer benefits to domestic partners or same-sex spouses of state workers, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign.  

Same-sex partners of federal workers are not eligible for coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHB) because the Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, defines marriage as a legal union between a man and woman, the FEHB website says. That law is being challenged and may well end up before the Supreme Court.  The Obama administration has said it will not defend the statute.

In the Mercer survey, coverage of same-sex partners was most common in the West, with 79 percent of large employers offering such benefits. It was least common in the South, at 28 percent.  Big differences were also noted within industries.  Among manufacturing firms, for example, the coverage rate ranged from a high of 96 percent for pharmaceutical companies to 18 percent for machinery and heavy equipment makers.

Public sector jobs had a lower rate of coverage, averaging 26 percent across state, county and municipal workers, the Mercer survey found.

While Smyth at Mercer doesn’t think the president’s pronouncement will sway employers, the Human Rights Campaign’s state legislative director Sarah Warbelow has a different take.

"Hearing the president supports this as well makes this even easier for corporations to get on board," says Warbelow, adding that 58 percent of Fortune 500 companies currently offer domestic partner benefits. Some of those companies limit those benefits to same-sex couples, while others include domestic partners of opposite sexes.

The climate remains volatile, particularly for state and municipal employees. What, for example, will happen in states like North Carolina that passed a ban on same-sex marriage and have municipalities that offer domestic partner benefits to government workers?

With last week’s vote in North Carolina, there are at least 31 states that bar gay marriage.

In North Carolina, attorneys for cities such as Carrboro and Chapel Hill are still evaluating whether they can continue to offer domestic partner benefits, according to reports from the area’s local NBC television affiliate.

"We have employees asking us, 'What's going to happen?' These are people who otherwise wouldn't have health care, children who wouldn't have health care," Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt told NBC-17 in Raleigh, N.C.

Court decisions in other states with similar laws have split on whether domestic partnership benefits can be retained for state or municipal workers, says Warbelow.

Meanwhile, private-sector employers must contend with a confusing array of state laws governing the types of unions residents may enter.

Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to allow same-sex couples to marry, for example, while an additional nine allow civil unions or domestic partnerships, which offer many, if not all of the same legal protections as marriage. 

While many employer health programs are exempt from state law because they are self-insured, some employers buy coverage from insurers that are subject to state rules.

Employers who buy coverage from insurers in those states must follow that state’s law, even if the employees live another state, Smyth says.  

A separate Mercer report out last week gave an example set in Virginia: "Ellen and Sue live in Virginia, which doesn’t permit same-sex marriage. Ellen works in Washington, D.C., and is covered by a group health insurance policy issued in D.C., which must cover same- and opposite-sex spouses equally. Ellen and Sue marry in D.C., even though they live in Virginia. Ellen may add Sue to her health coverage because they are lawfully married and covered by a D.C. policy."

Employers are "focused on this right now and are watching" the changing political landscape to make sure they are in compliance with the rules, says Smyth. "They need to be really careful that they know the laws."

Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. Our stories appear in media outlets nationwide and on our website, www.kaiserhealthnews.org.

By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

Colonoscopies could be made a bit more comfortable for people if they involved lying in a CT scanner, rather than being probed with an endoscope, and at the same time didn't require drinking upward of a gallon of laxative fluid beforehand — current requirements that most consider unpleasant.

A new type of "virtual colonoscopy" that uses CT scans to construct images of the colon, as well as to virtually "clean" the organ, was just as effective as a standard colonoscopy in finding colon polyps 1 centimeter or larger in size, a new study finds. Most polyps, or growths on the lining of the colon, are benign, but some can turn cancerous.

"The subtraction of the laxative can only make what's already an attractive test even more attractive," said Dr. Durado Brooks, director of prostate and colorectal cancer at the American Cancer Society, who was not involved with the study.

The discomfort of colonoscopies may deter some people from getting screened, said study researcher Dr. Michael Zalis, an associate professor of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

If this laxative-free, CT scan type of virtual colonoscopy becomes an option for colon cancer screening, Zalis said, it could increase the number of people who get screened, and thus reduce the number of deaths from the disease.

The laxative-free method was not as effective as a standard colonoscopy in finding polyps smaller than 1 centimeter, but polyps of this size are less likely to cause cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health. The new findings must be confirmed by larger studies before the test is put into practice, Zalis said.

The study is will be published Tuesday (May 15) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

No laxative required

Each year, there are about 120,000 new cases of colon cancer in the United States, and 50,000 people die from the disease,Zalis said.

Several methods are available to screen for colon cancer, including blood and fecal tests. But the "gold standard" is the colonoscopy, and the type most commonly performed is the optical colonoscopy, which uses a fiber optic tube with a light and camera to examine the internal surface of the colon. Another method, computed tomographic colonography (CTC), uses images produced by CT scans to indirectly view the colon. Both methods require patients to drink a laxative the day before their procedure.

More than 90 percent of colon cancer screening is done with colonoscopies or the blood tests, Brooks said.

In the new study, 604 people ages 50 to 80 who were eligible for a colonoscopy received the new test — a laxative-free CTC. Participants were required to eat a low-fiber diet for two days before the procedure, and to ingest small doses of a contrast agent that labeled their stool so that it was distinct from the colon on an X-ray. About five weeks later, the same patients were given an optical colonoscopy.

The laxative-free CTC correctly identified 91 percent of people with polyps 1 centimeter (10 millimeters) or larger. The results for the optical colonoscopy test were similar; it identified 95 percent of people with polyps of this size.

However, the colonoscopy was better at finding smaller polyps: it correctly identified 76 percent of people with polyps 0.6 centimeters or larger, while laxative-free CTC identified 59 percent of people with polyps of this size.

Three cases of colon cancer were diagnosed in the study. These cases were detected by both screening methods.

Participants said the laxative-free method was more comfortable and easier to prepare for than the colonoscopy. Sixty-two percent said the laxative-free method was their preferred method of screening.

Not a 'game changer'?

While laxative-free screening might increase the number of people who get colon cancer screening, "I don’t think it will be the big game changer that [the authors] suggest," said Dr. John Monson, chief of the division of colorectal surgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in New York, who was not involved in the study.

There are many reasons people do not get screened for colon cancer besides the requirement of a laxative, Monson said. For instance, some find other aspects of the test not agreeable, and others may be frightened to know the results, he said.

All virtual colonoscopies have a disadvantage in that, if polyps are found during the test, a follow-up colonoscopy is needed to remove them, Monson said. In addition, while polyps larger than 10 millimeters confer the greatest risk of colon cancer, most doctors do not feel comfortable leaving behind polyps that are 0.6 centimeters in size, Monson said.

CTC is currently considered an accepted method of screening by the American Cancer Society, but not by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force.

The ACS recommends that people who get virtual colonoscopies be re-screened in five years; those who get optical colonoscopies are recommended to wait 10 years between tests.

Zalis said laxative-free CTC might first be offered to people who have only a moderate risk of colon cancer (those 50 and older without a family history of the disease, or other risk factors, such as inflammatory bowel disease). Some people may also be unable to have a colonoscopy, for instance, if they cannot be sedated for a medical reason.

While CTC uses X-rays, the dose is much lower than that required for a CT scan used to diagnose disease, Zalis said. A study published in 2005 published in the journal Gastroenterology concluded the cancer risks associated with exposure to radiation from CTC are small.

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By Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna

Researchers from the University of Munich recently reported that they were able to awaken an 82-year-old woman who’d been in a persistent vegetative state by using injections of her own immune cells.

The woman, who had suffered a stroke, had been cared for at home by her family and a home health nurse -- for nine long years.

Then her doctors proposed an experimental new treatment, offering to give the octogenarian intramuscular injections of her own immune cells, specially activated in the laboratory to produce substances thought to modulate brain activity.

Remarkably, after starting the weekly injections, the patient began to respond to commands and even regain some movement in previously weakened limbs. She opened her eyes and turned toward people entering the room, grabbed the hands of her grandchildren (with both hands) and looked at them, and would voluntarily move her tongue when her teeth were brushed.

Although she’d been on a feeding tube for years, her swallowing reflex even began to return.

The implications of her awakening are truly astounding.

As a neurosurgeon who treats patients with traumatic brain injuries and serious strokes on a daily basis, I'm too often presented with a patient, who despite our team's best efforts, fails to awaken from a coma.

Sometimes the combination of time, patience and a tireless family results in a patient who wakes up six months after their injury. Other times, though, they don't -- primarily because no treatments are available to change the outcome for patients in persistent coma. But perhaps this new research will change that. 

According to the article, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Case Reports, the doctors manipulated the patient’s own cells to somehow restore some brain function nine years after a devastating stroke, a claim few physicians can make.

Their results also suggest that injections of these sorts of cells might even be effective in patients who have recently suffered brain injury.

This news is especially significant since, despite decades of research in neuroscience and behavioral medicine, no therapies have emerged in the last 50 years that systematically reverse coma in patients that have suffered significant strokes or traumatic brain injuries. However, the last decade of neuroscientific research has produced a wealth of data regarding neural responses to injury and potential routes to neuronal rehabilitation and even restoration.

Modern medicine is quite good at rehabilitating patients who are awake but disabled from their brain injury. Specifically, physicians and physiatrists in the field of rehabilitation medicine do a superb job at retraining the mind to rewire around injury and compensate for functions that have been lost.  However, modern medicine still has yet to come up with a solution for patients who do not wake up. That’s why this research is so intriguing.

But these new findings also bring up a host of questions:

Could anything else have possibly explained the patient’s improvement? Were there side effects or potential complications to the treatment? Are there plans to test this treatment in a randomized fashion with a large number of patients?

All of these questions need to be considered before an experimental treatment can be considered for wider use. Until then, this research most certainly qualifies as fringe medicine.

It also reopens the debate regarding the care of patients in coma.

For example, is a person really alive if they are unable to meaningfully interact or comprehend the outside world? How you answer that question is a topic of much controversy, as it brings in religion, politics, medicine and culture (the Terri Schiavo case is a perfect example of how complicated -- and heated -- this issue can become). 

Another pertinent question: Is being alive the same thing as being human, a sentient being? If it isn’t, how do you reconcile the societal cost of medical care for persons who are alive but no longer awake? How do you reconcile the human cost? Does your answer to these questions change if there is a treatment that offers a tiny chance of improving the patient’s comatose condition?

In reality, the vast majority of patients in long-term deep coma or persistent vegetative state do not get better despite treatment. Even the 82-year-old woman who was "reawakened" by the use immune cells injections later died after aspirating her food and developing pneumonia.

However, research aimed at protecting or even restoring brain tissue from permanent damage after injury is always welcomed. It may demand further study, but for now, it offers a glimmer of hope to patients and their families.

Dr. Rohan Ramakrishna is a chief resident in neurological surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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This, finally, may explain our cultural obsession with zombies: Long after dark, millions of Americans basically become one.

Without warning, they suddenly rise from their silent, supine states then roam aimlessly, eyes open and mouths sputtering gibberish.

About 8.5 million U.S. adults -- or 3.6 percent of the grownup population -- have taken at least one sleepwalking jaunt during the past year, according to research released today by the Stanford University School of Medicine. That figure, calculated via a survey of nearly 20,000 people, means there are far more nocturnal wanderers than scientists previously suspected.

“It’s something, we were thinking, that was not frequent among the general population. And here, big surprise, it is,” said Dr. Maurice Ohayon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and lead author of the paper. A previous report done a decade ago in European adults showed that 2 percent of that population were sleepwalkers. “It’s astonishing.”

The finding offers American doctors their first, solid sleepwalking benchmark, Ohayon said. Earlier speculation on how often the phenomenon occurred were based on anecdotal clinical reports as well as court cases and media tales of people who had gone sleep-driving, sleep-shopping or sleep-eating. Typically, those more sensational examples were linked to Ambien use.

But Ohayon and his colleagues found no significant link between prescription sleeping pills and increased sleepwalking. What they did discover: Folks who take certain anti-depressants (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are three times more likely to also take a snoozy stroll than the general population, and people who swallow over-the-counter sleeping pills have a higher likelihood of experiencing sleepwalking episodes at least twice a month month.

Brand names for anti-depressants in the SSRI category include Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro and Celexa. Non-prescription sleep aids linked to increased sleepwalking by the Stanford team contained diphenhydramine. Products laced with that chemical include 40 Winks, Simply Sleep, Sleep-Eze, Sominex, Unisom Sleep, Advil PM, and Tylenol PM, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

Chronic sleepwalking also runs (rambles?) within certain families, Ohayon learned: Nearly one-third of individuals who often do it can point to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts or siblings who have a history of shuffling while slumbering.

To assess the sleepwalking rate in America, Ohayon and his Stanford colleagues used phone interviews conducted with 19,136 randomly selected individuals from 15 states. The participants offered baseline information on their mental health, medical histories and use of medications. They were quizzed on the frequency of any sleepwalking episodes as well as whether they had ever suffered any inappropriate or possibly perilous behaviors while asleep.

What's more, participants were asked if they'd sleepwalked when they were kids and if any family members were known to take unintended, nighttime strolls. In addition to the more more than 3 percent of the U.S. population who sleepwalk chronically, the researchers found that 29.2 percent of the test sample had gone sleepwalking at least once during their lives. 

photaigraphy

Robert Budd, a personal trainer from Southern California, takes sleeping strolls about once a month, as do almost all the men in his family.

Personal trainer Robert Budd figures he sleepwalks about once a month. When he gathers with his kin, sleepwalking lore is a common topic: while seemingly in dreamland, his grandfather once urinated in a friend’s drawer, his uncle often meandered the decks of navy boats, and his dad dismantled tents and ceiling fans.

“All the boys in the family do it,” said Budd, who operates a gym called PHYZYKS in Encinitas, Calif. “I've done it since I was a kid. I would walk out the door and my parents had to grab me and get be back inside. The commonality with my family and myself is it seems to happen when we’re really tired, really drained. When you really need sleep, that’s when you get up and sleepwalk.”

Budd has sleepwalked out of a tent at the Grand Canyon (on the floor, not near the rim). His friends spotted him heading off alone -- apparently wide awake -- but he remembered nothing the next day. While dozing, he once packed for a vacation, even remembering his toothbrush. And there was the night he tried to climb out a second-floor window only to be stopped by the woman who is now his ex-wife.

Was that intended exit possibly symbolic, even for a sleeping man? “It might have been,” Budd said with a laugh.

“It drives my girlfriend drives nuts because sometimes we have conversations and she doesn’t know if I’m awake. Like, I can’t be accountable in the middle of the night.”

Sleepwalkers typically have their eyes open and may speak, making detection tricky. But Ohayon isn’t certain, he said, if they are actually seeing what’s in front of them or if sleepwalkers’ brains have simply mapped out their homes in their minds, allowing them not to bump into walls or furniture. He is sure they’re not dreaming, though, because sleepwalking coincides with a period of “slow-wave sleep” or SWS when brain activity is diminished.

During another sleep phase called REM (rapid eye movement), brain neurons are firing as if a person is awake. This is when you dream. A mechanism within the brain blocks stirring and shifting when you’re in REM sleep, Ohayon said.

“During slow wave sleep, you can move,” he added. “This is an old function of our brain, (possibly a evolutionary leftover). You know, when birds fly, they can sleep with one half of their brain, while the other half is analyzing the flight.

“That is why you see the bird going for thousand of kilometers without any problem. They sleep when they fly.”

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By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

Smoking marijuana may improve some symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a new study suggests.

Patients with multiple sclerosis in the study had less muscle tightness, also called spasticity, and less pain after they smoked marijuana, compared with after they took a placebo.

Spasticity is a common symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS) and can cause exaggerated reflexes, spasms and problems walking. Existing medications can ease spasticity, but they cause side effects, and not all MS patients are helped by them.

However, patients in the study experienced short-term decreases in their abilities to pay attention and concentrate after they smoked marijuana. Patients also reported feeling "high" after smoking marijuana, and two patients withdrew from the study because they felt uncomfortably high.

More research is needed to confirm the findings and to investigate whether lower doses of marijuana may have similar benefits with fewer adverse effects, said study researcher Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, professor of neurosciences and director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at the University of California, San Diego.

The study is published today (May 14) in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Improved symptoms

Previous studies have suggested marijuana use may have benefits for MS patients, but most have investigated oral forms of the drug, including mouth sprays and capsules. In addition, most studies have asked patients to report changes in their symptoms, rather than having a researcher objectively assess them.

In the new study, Corey-Bloom and colleagues evaluated 30 MS patients, 19 of whom were female, and more than half of whom needed walking aids.

Participants were randomly assigned to receive treatment with a marijuana cigarette or a placebo cigarette, which did not contain delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient of marijuana. Participants smoked a marijuana cigarette once a day for three consecutive days under the supervision of a researcher. Eleven days later, participants repeated the procedure, but this time, they switched treatment groups so that everyone received the marijuana cigarette and placebo at some point in the study. On average, participants smoked four puffs of their cigarettes at each session.

Shortly after each treatment session, the researchers assessed participants with a test specifically designed to measure spasticity.

After smoking marijuana, participants experienced a 30 percent reduction in spasticity, compared with when they smoked the placebo cigarette, Corey-Bloom said.

However, patients did not see improvements in the time it took them to walk 25 feet. And 45 minutes after their sessions, participants experienced a small but significant decrease in scores on tests designed to measure attention and concentration.

Participants were not told whether they recieved a placebo or a true marijuana cigarette, more than half correctly guessed the sessions when they were given marijuana.

Marijuana prescriptions?

The researchers are not advocating marijuana prescriptions for MS patients, Corey-Bloom said. They undertook the study to investigate whether anecdotal reports from MS patients about the benefits of marijuana smoking held up under the scrutiny of science. "I'm not a proponent for marijuana smoking at all," Corey-Bloom said.

Although cannabis may one day be used to treat spasticity in MS patients, delivery through a marijuana cigarette is "probably not the way that it would be done," because of the side effects patients experience, said Dr. Nicholas LaRocca, vice president of health care delivery at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, who was not involved in the study. "The majority of people with MS experience cognitive changes at some point in their lives," LaRocca said. "We don’t want to add any additional cognitive deficits with treatment," he said.

Researchers are currently investigating other treatments for spasticity, including exercise and Botox injections. "We need to continue to explore all of those possibilities, because any given person with MS may respond better to one [treatment] than another," LaRocca said.

Because many studies have not found a benefit of marijuana for MS patients, and because the new study was small, it's important for researchers to replicate the findings, said Dr. Karen Blitz-Shabbir, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Manhasset, N.Y.

Marijuana cigarettes have disadvantages compared with oral forms of the drug, including potential effects on the lungs and problems with administrating a controlled dose, Blitz-Shabbir said.

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Jackie Sherrill was shocked when her daughter, Morgan, 22 months, fell face-first with her bottle, cutting her lip and chipping a tooth.

Of all the things Jackie Sherrill had to worry about while juggling school, work and two kids, someone breaking a tooth on a baby bottle was least among them.

But that’s exactly what happened earlier this year, when Sherrill’s 20-month-old daughter, Morgan, took a nose-dive off a couch and landed face-first on the edge of an ottoman.

“She had her bottle in her mouth,” recalled Sherrill, 26, from Grove City, Ohio. “She must have hit right at that hard spot.”

The 9-ounce bottle of chocolate milk slammed into Morgan’s face, cutting her lip and chipping one of her baby teeth.

Sherrill, a nursing student, was able to calm her down and take her for treatment, but the incident was shocking: “You just don’t think of that,” she said.

It turns out that Morgan is among thousands of kids -- especially unsteady toddlers -- who get hurt every year while using bottles, pacifiers and sippy cups.  

The seemingly innocuous ba-bas and binkies caused cuts, bruises and other injuries serious enough to send 45,398 children under age 3 to the nation’s emergency rooms between 1991 and 2010, according to the first large-scale analysis of the problem. The findings were published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

“Baby bottles, pacifiers and sippy cups are extremely popular. Basically every baby uses them at some point,” said Dr. Sarah A. Keim, the principal researcher for the center for behavioral health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “There really hasn’t been much research at all on these products.”

Keim and her colleagues looked at data collected by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, or NEISS, and then extrapolated information to the rest of the U.S.

To her surprise, Keim found that there were an average of 2,270 cases each year where child was hurt while using bottles, pacifiers or sippy cups.

Dr. Nancy Snyderman's safety tips for parents with young children

That’s a child treated every four hours, the researchers said.

In most of the cases, 86 percent, the kids were injured when they fell with the object. Bottles were involved in nearly two-thirds of the injuries, while pacifiers accounted for about 20 percent and sippy cups just over 14 percent. About 70 percent of youngsters suffered cuts, and about 70 percent were hurt on or near their mouths, the study found. Others suffered soft tissue or dental injuries.

The trouble wasn’t the kind most parents think of when they ponder harm from the objects, particularly pacifiers and sippy cups. More than 16 million pacifiers and 1 million sippy cups were recalled by federal officials since 1991, but usually it was because they posed risks of choking or poisoning by cup materials.

Instead, Keim noted, the injuries are the kind that occur when a child is moving around the home while drinking from a bottle or cup or sucking on a pacifier.

“They’re convenient, they help quiet a fussy child,” she said.

But, as the injuries indicate, they might also hold potential harm.

Part of the problem may be the widespread use of bottles, pacifiers and sippy cups long past when medical and child development experts advise.

Pacifier use is advised by the American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, but usually during infancy, up to age 6 months, to help prevent sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS.

The AAP and the American Academy of Dentistry advise that babies move directly from the bottle to a lidless cup by 12 months to prevent dental decay.

In real life, however, an Arizona study found that about 45 percent of children ages 13 months to 3years still used bottles. A 2011 Canadian study found that 86 percent of children ages 1 to 2 use sippy cups. And a 2008 study in the United Kingdom found that more than 18 percent of toddlers were still using pacifiers at age 3.

Clearly, cutting kids off cold turkey can be tough. But Keim said there are ways to allow children to enjoy their bottles and pacis and prevent injury, too.

“If kids are in the habit of sitting when they’re eating or drinking, it’s the kind of thing parents might want to consider,” she said.

In Jackie Sherrill’s case, Morgan’s accident marked the end of an era.

“She loves drinking out of regular cups anyway,” Sherrill said.

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Two more people have become ill after being exposed to salmonella-tainted dry dog food, bringing the total to 16, federal health officials reported Friday

That includes one more case in the United States, where people in nine states have been sickened. Another case was detected in Quebec, Canada. Five people have been hospitalized.

All of the illnesses follow a recall of at least 11 brands of dry dog food manufactured at a Gaston, S.C., plant operated by Diamond Pet Foods of Meta, Mo. They include the store brand pet food sold by Costco, Kirkland Signature and Kirkland Signature Domain.

Lab tests have confirmed that those sick were infected with a rare strain of salmonella Infantis, which was detected only after a routine test of dry dog food revealed contamination, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Public health investigators used DNA fingerprints of the bacteria to identify past cases of illness linked to the outbreak. People infected with the outbreak strain became sick between Oct. 8, 2011 and April 22, 2012.

Cases included three each in North Carolina and Missouri, two each in Ohio and Pennsylvania and one each in Alabama, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey and Virginia.

Diamond Pet Foods has voluntarily expanded its recall of certain brands of dry dog and cat food manufactured at the South Carolina site between Dec. 9, 2011 and April 7, 2012 because of potentially salmonella contamination. The federal Food and Drug Administration posted recalls as well, here.

People can become sick by handling the tainted pet food or through contact with an animal that has eaten the contaminated food.

Consumers should discard any of the recalled product. Those who think they may have become sick after contact should consult a health care provider.

Consumers should be sure to wash their hands after feeding or handling a pet, or after picking up after an animal. Cat litter boxes should be scooped daily.

Salmonella infections can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramping 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness can last up to a week and most people recover without treatment. In some cases, severe diarrhea can require treatment in a hospital.

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Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

The rate of foodborne illness in the United States dropped by nearly a quarter since the late 1990s, according to a new report.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the overall incidence of six common foodborne germs was 23 percent lower in 2010 than in the years between 1996 and 1998. 

"The 'big picture' is that we have seen declines in foodborne illness but there is still more that can be done to further drive down the incidence of these infections," said study researcher Olga Henao, leader of the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network Team at the CDC. 

However, the rate of foodborne illness was no lower in 2010 than in 2006, the researchers said, which may indicate that progress in reducing foodborne illnesses — which are largely preventable through following proper food safety practices — has slowed in recent years. 

"Foodborne illness continues to be a significant public health problem in the U.S. and around the world," said Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University. "For every step forward, there's a few steps back." 

The researchers based their findings on the rates of illnesses due to six types of bacteria: Campylobacter, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga-toxin producing E. coli O157, Yersinia and Vibrio. At least 50 percent of illnesses due to these bacteria are transmitted by food. 

The researchers noted that other germs that commonly cause foodborne illness, such as norovirus, were not included in the data. 

"There are limitations — for example, they don't include Clostridium perfringens outbreaks, and I can show you three that have happened in the last month," Powell said. 

The findings were released Thursday by the CDC, along with a slew of other studies looking at rates of specific foodborne illness and their causes. The data for all the studies were gathered from the Foodborne Diseases active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which was started in 1996 and is conducted by the CDC, 10 state health departments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. 

"The analysis that these authors have presented is probably the most in depth-analysis that's been done, and it will help us focus our activities to improve food safety," Powell said. "The value of all these detailed surveys is that it allows the science and technology community to zero in on the problems much faster," Powell said. 

"This measure of overall change is a simple way to describe change in incidence of selected infections over time," Henao said. Together, all of the studies "can contribute to the development of policies and interventions that will ultimately lead to reductions in the incidence of foodborne infections." 

To look only at the overall drop of 23 percent would be "miss the nuance and intricacies in the data," Powell said. For example, there were increases in illness rates from several specific pathogens.  

[ Top 7 Germs in Food that Make You Sick ] 

The rate of infections from one type of Salmonella bacteria, called Salmonella enterica, was 44 percent higher in 2010 than in the late 1990s, with the greatest increases seen in children under age 4 and adults over age 60. Salmonella causes 1 million cases of illness and 350 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to one of the new studies. 

The rise is likely due to an increase in the amount of chicken and undercooked eggs that people eat. Chicken and eggs are the most common sources of these infections, according to the study. 

Outbreaks of salmonella were seen throughout the country between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, but changes in farming practices and consumer education helped to decrease the rates in the late 1990s. 

However, outbreaks during the 2000s, including the largest outbreak ever reported from eggs, have highlighted the need for further national public health efforts, the researchers said. 

Another study showed an increase in the rate of Vibrio bacteria infections in 2010, compared with 1996. Powell said that some of this increase may be due to more awareness of Vibrio and better detection methods.   

Vibrio infections, which are commonly caused by undercooked seafood, cause an estimated 80,000 illnesses, 500 hospitalizations and 100 deaths each year in the U.S. 

A telephone survey in which researchers asked people about eating specific foods over the past seven days showed that men are more likely to eat "high-risk" foods compared with women. For instance, 12 percent of men reported eating runny eggs, whereas 8 percent of women said the same, 7 percent of men reported eating pink hamburger where as 4 percent of women did. 

"Taken together, these studies point to the need for creativity in providing information to people," Powell said. Within the "farm-to-fork system" that produces our food, "there are risks, and steps need to be taken everywhere to reduce those risks." 

But even as researchers' have gained a more sophisticated view of how to combat foodborne illnesses, the germs have evolved too, Powell said. "Think about the grocery store — how many new products you see every year? Some smart bug is going to find a way to flourish in them, in ways we can't always anticipate." 

The studies will be published June 1 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. 

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It’s a tragic sign of spring: Two young children have died this month in Texas and Missouri after their parents accidentally left them all day in hot vehicles.

Although such deaths occur in nearly every month of the year, records show that warmer weather typically heralds a seasonal spike in fatalities from hyperthermia, or heat stroke, among children left in cars and trucks.

Worse, experts add, such calamities don’t have to happen.

“It’s a totally preventable occurrence,” said Kate Carr, president and chief executive of Safe Kids Worldwide, which recently launched a new campaign to raise awareness about the problem. “Our hearts go out to the parents and families of these children.”

In the most recent cases, a 7-month-old boy from the Sugar Land area of Houston died May 3 after the child’s father, Leland Jacobson, 41, left the baby for hours in the backseat of a pickup truck in 89-degree weather. Jacobson wasn't normally the parent who took his children to day care and became distracted after dropping off the older kids, police said.

On the same day, a 13-month-old boy from Lee’s Summit, Mo., died after his mother, a teacher, mistakenly believed she’d already left the child at day care that morning. Temperatures reached 83 degrees that afternoon.

“The investigation has revealed no signs of foul play and at this time it appears that the death was a tragic accident,” said Sgt. Chris Depue, spokesman for the Lee’s Summit Police Department.

That’s true of most cases in which children die after being left in hot vehicles. At least 529 such deaths have been recorded since 1998, including the two logged in the past week, according to figures from the Department of Geosciences at San Francisco State University, which tracks reports.

On average, 38 children die each year in hot cars, reports show. The numbers typically begin to climb in May, with an average of three deaths per month. They spike in July and August, when nine deaths, on average, are recorded, the figures show.

Overall, more than half of the deaths -- 52 percent -- occur when a child is mistakenly left in a vehicle, typically by a parent or caregiver who is rushed or stressed, said Carr.

“That’s a story we’ve heard first-hand,” she said. “The baby falls asleep in the back and mom or dad gets distracted. You can get in the car headed to work and absolutely forget.”

More precisely, a distracted brain can get stuck on autopilot, allowing parents to believe they actually have left the child, said Janette E. Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org,which has been focused on the problem for a dozen years. Her agency has counted 620 child deaths from hyperthermia since 1990.

Frequently, the accidents occur when there’s a deviation from the normal routine. Dad is handling the drop-off instead of mom, or there’s been some other change in schedule.

"The parents are absolutely certain that their children are in a verysafe place," Fennell added. It's only later, at the end of the work day, for instance, that they realize what's happened. 

About 30 percent of the deaths occur when a child is playing in an unattended vehicle and becomes trapped inside -- or in the trunk, reports show. Another 17 percent of deaths occur when a child is intentionally left alone, for instance, when a parent went shopping.

Once inside, the babies and children face temperatures that soar quickly to lethal heights. It takes only 10 minutes for the temperature to jump 20 degrees; within 30 minutes, it can climb by 34 degrees, according to a vehicle heat study sponsored by General Motors, which helps fund Safe Kids Worldwide.

Under that scenario, even a mild day -- 70 degrees -- can quickly become deadly.

“Cracking the window doesn’t help,” Carr said. “If you’ve ever been in a hot car that’s parked on an asphalt parking lot, you know how quickly that car heats up, even if your windows are down.”

Child's body heats five times faster
Regardless of how or why a child is left behind, the effect is swift and devastating, said Dr. Leticia Ryan, researcher and clinician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C.

“The child’s body heats up three to five times faster than an adult’s,” she said. “Their internal systems are not fully developed.”

Kids don’t sweat as efficiently as adults and their bodies absorb heat faster. It can take as little as 15 minutes in an overheated vehicle for a child to begin to suffer life-threatening brain or kidney injuries. When body temperature reaches 104 degrees, internal organs begin to shut down. At 107 degrees, children die. 

“It’s the double whammy of being more vulnerable to the heat illness in a short amount of time,” said Ryan, a pediatric emergency medicine expert who has seen many young victims of heat stroke. “In most cases, they’re usually too young to get themselves out of the car seat or to alert people outside of the car to their predicament.”

Norman Collins Sr.

Three-month-old "Bishop" Collins died on May 29, 2011 after he was accidentally left in a car in a church parking lot in Clarksdale, Miss., on a 93-degree day. His grandfather, Norman Lee Van Collins Sr., has become an advocate for car safety.

Such deaths leave the families devastated, too. The shock, grief and guilt are overwhelming, said Norman Van Lee Collins Sr., whose 3-month-old grandson, Norman Van Lee Collins III, known as “Bishop,” died last May 29 a hot car in a Mississippi church parking lot.

The child was accidentally left behind as his family hurried into a church service. The child’s father was the minister of music, so he was retrieving his keyboard from the car. He asked another church member to get the baby and take him to the nursery. But the church member didn’t hear him.

“There was just this miscommunication,” the grandfather recalled sadly. “I lost my grandson.”

To compound the tragedy, when Norman Collins Jr. reported the accident to the police, he was arrested for negligent manslaughter.

Nineteen states have laws that address leaving a child unattended in a vehicle. Thirty-one states have no specific laws, according to San Francisco State reports. An Associated Press investigation in 2007 found that charges were filed in about half of cases in which children died of heat stroke in vehicles; more than 80 percent were convicted.

In Collins’ case, the grand jury didn’t choose to indict him. “I did not even explore why,” the senior Collins said. “I was just so glad they didn’t.”

The bereaved grandfather now speaks publicly about Bishop's death in order to warn other families about the danger.

Airbags put babies in backseat
In one of the ironies of vehicle safety, the number of hyperthermia deaths in cars has skyrocketed since the early 1990s, when the advent of airbags led to directives that young children be placed in the back seats of cars and in rear-facing car seats for infants.

That position makes it easier to overlook babies, even for the most conscientious parent, said Carr, who recalled nearly forgetting to drop her own 2-year-old at day care -- until the child spoke up.

“Thankfully, my daughter was not a small baby who fell asleep,” she said. “From my own personal place in my heart, I have a great deal of empathy for these parents.”

Safety advocates such as Fennell, of KidsAndCars.org, have lobbied for years for technical solutions to the problem of leaving babies behind. Some private firms have come up with various devices, monitors and other alerts that can be purchased online, but none is available off the shelf, Fennell said.

Better, she said, would be a required sensor that could alert drivers that someone is still in the vehicle when they’re locking the car.

“We feel this is a good strategy because we know that many people feel that this ‘could never happen to them’ and may not think they need to purchase aftermarket technology,” she added.

Meantime, KidsAndCars advises all parents to institute an “iron-clad” rule with day care providers to contact parents if a child has not arrived as scheduled.

Safe Kids also advises that parents put back-up systems in place to prevent tragedy: Set up a “peace of mind plan” in which it’s routine to call or text a partner or other caregivers so that everyone knows when a child has been dropped off.

Place a purse, briefcase, gym bag, cell phone or other object needed at the destination in the backseat with the child. Set an alarm on a cell phone or computer calendar as a reminder to drop a child at care.

Though the number of child deaths from hyperthermia in cars is small, the actual number of incidents in which kids are endangered is likely much larger.

In Palm Beach County, Fla., there were 500 near-misses last year in which kids were retrieved from cars before they were seriously hurt, Carr said. The actual number of close calls is unknown.

“Never leave a child alone, even for a minute,” she said.  “It can and it does and it might happen to you.”

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By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

Young adults are doing things that dangerously increase their risk of skin cancer, according to new reports for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2010, half of all adults ages 18 to 29, and 65 percent of white people in this age group, reported that they were sunburned at least once in the past year, the report said.

In addition, about a third of white women reported using indoor tanning in the past year.

Both sunburn and indoor tanning increase the risk of melanoma, the deadliest type of skin cancer. Indoor tanning before age 35 increases melanoma risk by 75 percent, the CDC says.

While efforts to reduce indoor tanning have traditionally focused on adolescents, "This study suggests that as adolescents mature into young adults, they may continue to need environmental support to develop and maintain healthy behaviors and to change their perspectives about tanning," study researcher Anne Hartman, of the National Cancer Institute, said in a statement.

In one study, CDC researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of about 5,000 adults ages 18 to 29 about their sun-protection behaviors and sunburn in the past year.

They found that while use of certain sun-protective behaviors, such as wearing clothing to the ankles and staying in the shade, increased between 2000 and 2010, the prevalence of sunburn remained about the same (about 50 percent). The researchers do not know whether sun-protective methods were used properly (for instance, whether a sufficient amount of sunscreen was applied.)

The majority of young adults did not adequately protect themselves from the sun. For instance, in 2010, 37 percent of women and 15 percent of men reported using sunscreen always or most of the time. Just 3.8 percent of women and 6.7 percent of men reported wearing a wide-brimmed hat. (Wide-brimmed hats provide full sun protection to the face, ears and neck, while baseball caps and sun visors do not provide sufficient protection, the CDC says.)

A second study surveyed about 25,200 adults ages 18 and over about their indoor tanning. Overall, 5.6 percent of adults said they had used indoor tanning in the past year. The highest prevalence was among white women ages 18 to 21, at 31.8 percent. In the Midwest, 44 percent of white women in this age group reported using indoor tanning.

Of those who used indoor tanning, about 58 percent of women and 40 percent of men reported tanning at least 10 times in the past year.

The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recently recommended children and young adults ages 10 to 24 receive counseling from their primary care doctor on ways to reduce their skin cancer risk.

"More public health efforts, including providing shade and sunscreen in recreational settings, are needed to raise awareness of the importance of sun protection and sunburn prevention to reduce the burden of skin cancer," Dr. Marcus Plescia, director of CDC's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, said in a statement. "We must accelerate our efforts to educate young adults about the dangers of indoor tanning to prevent melanoma as this generation ages," Plescia said.

The new CDC reports will be published tomorrow (May 11) the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 

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CPSC

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission on Thursday recalled 21,000 inflatable Banzai in-ground pool water slides.

After investigating the death of a 29-year-old woman and severe injuries in two other consumers, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled 21,000 inflatable Banzai in-ground pool water slides.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and Toys R Us, Inc., have agreed to offer full refunds for the slides that are returned to them.

The CPSC determined that the slides were defective and could deflate suddenly, allowing the user to crash to the ground. The commission also found that the slide is unstable and can topple over in both still and windy conditions.

At the heart of the investigation was the death of Robin Aleo, a Colorado mom who had been visiting relatives in Andover, Mass. During a pool party on July 29, 2006, Aleo, the mother of an 18-month-old girl, climbed to the top of the 6-foot-high Banzai Falls slide and then started sliding down head first, according to a report in the Merrimack Valley Eagle-Tribune.

As Aleo neared the bottom, the slide deflated and she struck her head on the edge of the pool. Her neck was broken and she was paralyzed and unable to breathe, according to the Eagle-Tribune. She died the following day at a Boston hospital.

Aleo’s family sued Toys R Us and a jury returned a $20.6 million verdict after less than an hour of deliberation, the Eagle Tribune reported.

The CPSC also knew of two other cases: a 24-year-old man from Springfield, Mo., who became a quadriplegic and a woman from Allentown, Pa., who fractured her neck after slide deflations.

The recall is for Banzai in-ground pool water slides. The vinyl slides have a blue base, yellow sliding mat and an arch going over the top of the slide. By connecting a hose to the top of the slide, water can be sprayed on its downward slope. The words “Banzai Splash” are printed in a circular blue, orange and white logo that is shaped like a wave and appears on both sides of the slide.

The recalled slides, which were manufactured in China by Manley Toys, Ltd, were sold at Wal-Mart and Toys R Us from January 2005 through June 2009 and were priced around $250. They have a barcode number 2675315734 and a model number 15734. While those numbers both were on the original package, they do not appear on the slides themselves.  

While the CPSC began its investigation based on the three incidents, it’s not uncommon for more people to come forward with reports after a recall is announced, said Alex Filip, a spokesman for the CPSC.

“People sometimes attribute failures to poor maintenance or something they did wrong and if they’re not hurt, they may not report it," Filip said.

The CPSC urges consumers to immediately stop using the product and bring it to the nearest Toys R Us or Wal-Mart for a refund. Consumers don’t need to bring the entire pool. They can just cut out the two safety warning notices out of the slide and return those for a refund.

Filip warned people not to be lulled into a false sense of security because their slide hasn’t given them any problems yet.

“You could play on it all day Saturday and then the kids go out on Sunday and get hurt,” he said. “It’s dangerous. You need to do what’s best for your family. Just bring it back and you’ll get your money back.”

More on Vitals:

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• VIDEO: Car crashes into swimming pool

Jeff Fitlow / Rice University

A team of Rice University engineering seniors created a device to lift the weight from the abdomens of obese patients undergoing surgery. The R-Aides device uses suction cups hooked to a vacuum to help patients under light sedation breathe.

At first it sounds like the start of one of those offensive “fat” jokes obese people hate so much: “How fat was he? So fat the surgeons need suction cups to lift his belly.”

But this is no joke. A team of Rice University bioengineering students, responding to an urgent request from heart surgeon Mehdi Razavi, has developed a device that can lift the abdomen of an obese patient undergoing surgery so the patient can breathe.

Razavi, an electrophysiologist who specializes in implanting pacemakers and performs heart catheterizations, often places his patients under “conscious sedation,” a light anesthesia, because if the patient were simply knocked out, with a tube down his or her throat, and a machine doing the breathing, there’d be a greater risk of complications. But during one surgery on an obese man, Razavi realized his patient was snoring and having trouble breathing. The man’s oxygen levels were dropping.

That’s because the man was struggling against his own abdominal fat.

“It’s like putting a suitcase on the belly,” Razavi said. “It presses down and the belly has to go somewhere, so it pushes against the lungs, and if you try to take a deep breath, the lungs cannot expand.” The problem could become so severe, the doctor would have to stop the surgery.

The device the students designed uses suction cups hooked to a horizontal beam hovering above the abdomen. The cups are attached to the skin – there is a slight chance of bruising, student Marisa Prevost said – and a vacuum pump. Activating the device slightly raises the abdomen so the fat is out of the way.

When Razavi first approached the students for help, they were incredulous. “When we first heard about it, we were, like, ‘Huh? What?’” Prevost said. “We thought, that’s kind of weird.”

Now though, they’re intimately aware of how America’s obesity crisis is affecting medical practice in dozens of ways.

As of 2010, more than 35 percent of U.S. adults were obese. By 2030, the U.S. obesity rate is projected to rise to 42 percent. Obesity puts people at much greater risk for all sorts of medical problems, so they wind up in doctors’ offices and in hospitals more often than optimal weight people.

Medicine is struggling to make accommodations. Doctors often check blood pressure using cuffs meant for thighs, Razavi said. Surgical tools have to be enlarged in order to reach through layers of fat. Obese patients require higher doses of radiation during imaging tests like CT scans. “And that means if I’m doing the procedure, I am getting higher doses of radiation, too,” Razavi pointed out.

Some patients won’t fit into MRI scanners. Surgical tables have been redesigned to handle patients weighing up to 450 pounds. Needles for injections have made been longer so they can penetrate fat layers and reach muscles. Even lab tests results have to be interpreted differently.

For surgeries, Razavi said, “the ultimate compromise is that if the patient is really obese, you either do it under general anesthesia, or don’t offer it at all. It’s a judgment call,” he said. “When you tailor therapy to each patient, sometimes the risks outweigh the benefits.”

Brian Alexander is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction,"  to be published Sept. 13.

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By MyHealthNewsDaily

Parents who let their young children climb into bed with them during the night may decrease their child's risk of obesity, a new study from Denmark suggests.

In the study, children who never entered their parents' bed during the night were three times more likely to be overweight compared with children who got into their parents' bed every night.

The findings are contrary to what might have been expected: obesity is associated with poor sleep quality, and kids who climb into bed with mom and dad are clearly waking up during the night, the researchers said.

However, parents who let their kids enter their beds at night may be giving their children a greater sense of emotional support, which may protect against obesity, the researchers said. In contrast, some children who are not allowed to enter their parents' bed at night may feel rejected, and such negative feelings may increase the risk of obesity, they said.

Dr. Nanna Olsen, of the Institute of Preventive Medicine at Copenhagen University Hospitals, and colleagues analyzed information from 645 children ages 2 to 6 who were predisposed to obesity because they had a high birth weight, their mothers were overweight before pregnancy or their families had a low income.

For about 500 of the children, information was available on whether the child entered the parents' bed at night, and if so, how often. In addition, researchers had information on the children's body mass index (BMI).

The study was presented today (May 9) at the European Congress on Obesity in Lyon, France.

• 11 Surprising Things That Can Make Us Gain Weight
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By Kate Snow, Sarah Koch, Deirdre Cohen and Jessica Hopper

Rock Center

Fifteen-year-old Allison Kasacavage, once a rising soccer star in Pennsylvania, is slowly recovering after suffering debilitating concussions while playing the game she loved.

“It’s almost like I need a sign on my back saying, ‘My head is broken.’ And you can’t see it. It’s like not visible and it’s like not many people understand, “said Allison in an interview with Rock Center’s Kate Snow.

Allison, who lives with her family in Chester Springs, Pa., has had at least five concussions.  She is only able to attend school four hours a day.  Her room is lit with soft blue light to ease her headaches and her family now eats dinner by candlelight. 

She is one of hundreds of girls across America each year who suffer concussions while playing soccer. 

“People who think of concussions as only being present mostly in guys and mostly in the sport of football are just plain wrong,” said Dr. Bob Cantu, who is chairman of the surgery division and the director of sports medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass. “Soccer is right at the top of the list for girls.” 

With the steady popularity of youth soccer, more girls are playing the game than ever before.  Girls make up 48 percent of the more than 3 million kids registered in US Youth Soccer leagues.

Cantu said that the country is in the midst of “a concussion crisis” and that studies show girls are reporting nearly twice as many concussions as boys in the sports they both play.

‘Concussion Crisis’ impacting girls’ soccer

The number of girls suffering concussions in soccer accounts for the second largest amount of all concussions reported by young athletes, according to the American Journal of Sports Medicine.  (Football tops the list.)

“What’s happening in this country is an epidemic of concussions, number one, and the realization that many of these individuals are going to go on to post-concussion syndrome, which can alter their ability to function at a high level for the rest of their lives,” Dr. Cantu said. 

Allison still remembers when she suffered her first serious concussion in October 2008.  It came when she collided with another player on the field. 

“When I like got up, my head was like pounding,” Allison said. “There was, like, a pulse in my head. It was like the strangest thing.  There was a heartbeat in my head and I had no idea what it was and why it was there.  I have never felt that before and I was just so confused,” she said.

Click here for more on concussion symptoms

After Allison had apparently healed from the concussion, she returned to soccer.  She’d been a star player since she was six years old, working her way up to one of the top teams in Pennsylvania.  She said that her identity had been wrapped up in the game and she felt pressure to please her coaches.

Allison said that she was nervous about heading the ball, but continued to do it. 

“If you didn’t head the ball, you were like the weakest link,” Allison said.

When heading, players attempt to use their foreheads to direct the ball, often jumping with opposing players, a move that can lead to collisions between players, bumped heads and strained necks.  Dr. Cantu says that the act of heading is one of the most dangerous parts of soccer because players often collide.

Allison suffered a third concussion in her final season of soccer and another two off the field, the latter because her spatial awareness had been impacted from her previous concussions and she hit her head on a table and other furniture, her mother said.

Her parents said that they knew about the danger of concussions in sports like football, but it wasn’t until Allison had her first serious head injury that they realized what a big problem concussions can be in soccer.

“I think that we were blind to what was going on around us because, yes, it was about the team.  It was about the winning. It was about all the, it was almost like a routine of, like I said, an awful lot of practices and you just went through it and really your lives rolled by with soccer being the most important thing,” said Lex Kasacavage, Allison’s father.

Sports psychologist Richard Ginsburg says that enthusiasm for the game and the kids by parents and coaches, while well-meaning, might be making the concussion crisis worse.

“We get wrapped up,” said Ginsburg, the author of ‘Whose Game is it Anyway?’  “We want success for them and so sometimes we get, we lose perspective.  It doesn’t make us terrible people. It just makes us human. “ 

NBC News

Kimmie Zeffert

In Allison’s town of Chester Springs, about 30 miles from downtown Philadelphia, she is not alone.  She has bonded with at least five other 14 and 15-year-old girls who have suffered concussions while playing soccer.  

“My main friends are actually people that have head injuries,” said one of the teens, Kimmie Zeffert, 14.  “I’ve become so close with them because I can relate to them.  They understand what I’m going through.”

Kimmie had her first concussion when she was 12.

“I took another head ball and then I don’t even remember,” she said. “The next thing is I got, apparently, got elbowed in the back of the head. But (when) the coach asked me if I wanted to come out, I was like, ‘No, I’m going, I’m going to stick it through.”

Those hits -- heading the ball and being elbowed by a player in the head -- ended her soccer career.

Kimmie’s teammate Jenna Rohr made the same choice to continue playing in her game after getting hit in the head.

“I didn’t want to quit,” she said. “I didn’t want to let my team down because, like, so many people already had concussions on the team.”

Both Jenna and Kimmie have been unable to make it through a full day of school for almost two years.  They still suffer from intense headaches, dizziness, nausea and vision problems. 

Along with their physical ailments, several of the girls NBC News spoke to have struggled with depression since leaving soccer. Some have taken anti-depressants. One teen soccer player, who is returning to the sport after suffering a concussion, said that she felt so terrible at one point that she even thought about suicide.

Despite their experiences, the teens still love soccer and say they don’t discourage their former teammates from the sport.

“I think like speaking for all of us, like we would do anything to just be able to play one more game,” Jenna said.

Should heading be banned from girls’ soccer?

Dr. Cantu has made the bold proposal that heading be eliminated from youth soccer under the age of 14.  He said girls, because of their anatomy, may be especially vulnerable to concussions.

“Girls as a group have far weaker necks,” Cantu said.  “The same force delivered to a girl’s head spins the head much more because of the weak neck than it does the guys.”

New research suggests some body types may be more at risk than others.

“We believe that individuals with very long, thin necks may be at greater risk,” Cantu said.

With this evidence, Cantu said, “I would hope it would not only make parents look at their daughters, but make every one of those parents insist their daughters are on a neck strengthening program if they’re playing a collision sport.”

Brandi Chastain, the Olympian who helped the United States win a World Cup, strongly disagrees with Cantu’s proposal to eliminate heading from girls’ soccer.

“It’s a part of the game and I think it’s an important part and I think it’s a beautiful part of the game, to be honest with you,” she said.  “I would never want to see that go away, but there’s a right way to do it. There’s a protective way to do it.”

Chastain said that girls need to be taught to create protective space around their bodies.  She says heading isn’t dangerous if it’s done correctly.

“I circle back to education and preparation and I put that on parents and coaches because the kids don’t know any better,” Chastain added. “You know, they just want to go out there and play, but if we can educate them in a fun environment that’s safe, that teaches them the skill and gives them the confidence to try it and then they can put it into practice in the game.”

Back in Pennsylvania, the girls and their families are trying to educate people based on their own experiences.  Despite their concussions, though, they say they don’t want to discourage girls from playing soccer.

“Please don’t go and not play soccer because it’s such a great opportunity for the girls to just prove themselves and challenge themselves and make friends and travel,” said Wendy Zeffert, mother of Kimmie.  “But be aware.”

Editor's Note: Click here to watch Kate Snow's full report, 'Contact Sport,' that aired on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams on May 9.

featurepics.com

A resuable grocery bag was traced to an outbreak of norovirus that sickened members of a girls' soccer team in Oregon.

Oregon public health officials have traced a nasty outbreak of norovirus infections in a group of soccer players to an unlikely source: a reusable grocery bag contaminated with what some experts are calling “the perfect pathogens.”

The incident is raising questions, once again, about the cleanliness of the portable shopping bags that many consumers use to avoid the paper vs. plastic impact on the environment.

“We wash our clothes when they’re dirty; we should wash our bags, too,” said Kimberly K. Repp, an epidemiologist with the Washington County Department of Health and Human Services in Hillsboro, Ore. Her work is published this week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Repp was an intern with the Oregon Health and Science University in October 2010 when she and other experts were asked to help unravel the mystery of sick soccer players and their chaperones. They had traveled north from Beaverton and Tigard, Ore., to Washington state on a Friday for a weekend tournament.

Less than 48 hours later, nine people were ill with unpleasant symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea. The question was: How did they get it?

One of the soccer players --  all 13- and 14-year-old girls -- had fallen ill on Saturday night and moved into the room of one of the parent chaperones. The pair went home early Sunday, with no further contact with other players.

Even so, seven other people became ill within days, stumping scientists momentarily.

CDC

Noroviruses are a group of viruses responsible for some 21 million cases of gastrointestinal illness a year, including 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths.

“It involved really thinking outside the bag, so to speak,” Repp said.

Eventually, interviews revealed that most of those who became ill ate packaged cookies at a Sunday lunch. Where did the cookies come from? Turns out, the culprit was a reusable grocery bag of snacks left in the empty hotel room occupied by the first girl who got sick.

Quickly, the puzzle fell into place. The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room.

When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later.

“It was a knock out of the park,” said Repp. “We demonstrated norovirus transmission without person-to-person contact. That’s why this is different.”

The trouble with noroviruses -- which cause an estimated 21 million cases of gastroenteritis a year, some 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths -- is that they’re tough bugs that can live for prolonged periods on objects and surfaces, said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

“Norovirus does have the vexing capacity to persist in the environment,” he said.

While the risk of contracting an illness from any particular reusable bag is low, Schaffner said, the Oregon study follows a 2010 paper by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University that found large numbers of bacteria in reusable grocery bags, including 12 percent that were contaminated with E. coli.

When scientists stored the bags in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria jumped 10-fold.

Some critics dismissed that study, which was funded in part by the American Chemistry Council, which supports the makers of some disposable plastic bags.

But few have debated the study’s conclusion, which found that washing the reusable shopping bags regularly decreased contamination by 99.9 percent.

“You could just wipe it down with Lysol or Clorox,” said Repp.

Schaffner agrees. The most important tool to prevent norovirus, which spreads rapidly and infects quickly, is good hygiene, including careful hand-washing and thorough cleaning of the contaminated environment.

“You could wash the bag,” Schaffner said. “Or you could start over with a new bag."

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By MyHealthNewsDaily staff

For heart attack survivors, living close to a roadway may be hazardous for their health, a new study suggests.

The results show that heart attack survivors who lived about 300 feet (100 meters) from a major roadway at the time of their heart attack were 27 percent more likely to die over the next 10 years compared with those who lived at least 3,200 feet (1,000 m) from a roadway.

Those who lived between 650 to 3,200 feet (200 to 1,000 m) away from a roadway had a 13 percent higher risk of dying in 10 years.

Exposure to air pollution and traffic noise from the roadway may explain the link, said study researcher Dr. Murray Mittleman, a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Long-term exposure to air pollution is known to increase the risk of death from heart disease, and some studies have shown exposure to traffic noise increases blood pressure, the researchers said.

The study involved 3,547 people who were hospitalized for a heart attack at 64 medical centers in the United States between 1989 and 1996. Participants' average age at the beginning of the study was 62.

Over a 10-year follow-up period, 1,071 participants died: 63 percent of cardiovascular disease, 12 percent of cancer, 4 percent of respiratory failure and 0.4 percent in traffic accidents.

The closer patients lived to a major roadway, the more likely they were to die during the follow-up period. The results held even after the researchers accounted for factors that could affect a person's risk of death, including age, smoking status, proximity to a hospital and household income.

The researchers said the study was limited in that they don't know whether participants moved after their heart attack, or if new roadways were built closer to participants' homes, but either of these scenarios could affect the results.  For instance, a patient who moved closer to a roadway would have been misclassified in the study.

The American Heart Association suggests clinicians educate their patients on the risks posed by air pollution, and encourage patients with cardiovascular disease to avoid unnecessary exposure to traffic, the researchers said.

The study will be published in the May 8 issue of the journal Circulation.  

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Related: 
Long commute can hurt your health

By Bill Briggs

Sure, speed kills. But new science suggests your sluggish slog from home to work (and back again) is slowly sucking the life out of you -- exit by excruciating exit. 

Commuters who log 16 or more miles each way on their daily haul to the job tend to pack plumper paunches and post higher blood pressure when compared to those with shorter excursions, according to the first research exploring the intersection of travel distances and health impacts.

Clogged roads seem to clog arteries, in part, by eating into potential gym minutes. Among folks who drive 16-plus miles to earn a paycheck, the prevalence of obesity is almost 9 percent higher while the rate of fitness is nearly 9 percent lower versus those who journey six to 10 miles, according to a study published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (Those numbers are not adjusted for age or gender).

“Part of it is that people with longer commutes aren’t exercising as much. But there could be other factors like they’re eating (fast food) while driving or they’re getting less sleep because they don’t have as much discretionary time,” said Christine M. Hoehner, the study’s lead investigator and an assistant professor in the department of surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

By mapping the daily drives and dissecting the health scores of 4,297 residents from two Texas metro areas, Dallas and Austin, Hoehner and her colleagues distilled the mile-by-mile health hazards linked to sitting behind the wheel.

Take, for example, Body Mass Index -- a calculation of stored fat based on height and weight. (A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal). For every 10-mile increase in your driving distance, your BMI rises by .17 units, Hoehner said. So if you’re already on the cusp of an unhealthy BMI -- say at 24.5 -- adding 15 miles to your foray -- each way -- will nudge you into the danger zone.

The daily drive has taken a toll on Sharon Binford, part of the marketing and development team at an online office supply retailer. She has a roughly 30-mile commute to and from her home in White Plains, N.Y., and her office in Manhattan, spanning 1 hour and 20 minutes each way.

“I am more tired, so I think my mood and activity level have been affected” by the daily trek, said Binford, 25. Before she got her current job, she didn’t drive to work.

“Before, I would have avocados and tomato, or strawberry and yogurt, or eggs-and-bacon breakfasts. Now, I eat cereal in the mornings -- Special K Red Berries, but it’s still all carbs instead of almost none,” Binford said. “I used to spend about an hour running three times a week. Now, I try to occasionally squeeze in a half-hour run during my hour lunch break.”

Americans are, indeed, spending slightly more time collectively navigating to and from their jobs. In 2010, 8 percent of U.S. workers had one-way commutes of one hour or more -- up from 7.8 percent in 2009, said Brian McKenzie, a commuting analyst at the U.S. Census Bureau.

But the true traffic terrors are, of course, found on the local levels, especially in cities where far-flung suburbs offer more affordable housing. According to INRIX, a traffic information provider that ranks the worst municipal commutes, the most congested cities in 2010 were, in order, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. then Dallas/Fort Worth -- where Hoehner conducted much of her study.

And, hardly shocking to any fuming driver who routinely winces at an agonizing line of brake lights, Hoehner found that longer commutes are more likely to fuel stress levels.

“It’s about the chronic stress: daily exposure to traffic, the hassles of not being able to predict when you’ll arrive, and having no control over your time because of that traffic,” Hoehner said.

About one-third of the commuters Hoehner analyzed notched 16 or more miles getting to work. The prevalence of elevated blood pressure in that group was about 52 percent. Meanwhile, slightly more than half the drivers studied needed 10 miles or less to reach their jobsite or office. The rate of high blood pressure in that portion: about 45 percent.

So, honk if you hate the guy driving one car ahead -- and the other 500 beyond. They’re killing you.

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WESH-TV

When it comes to porn, there's nothing Mickey Mouse about the hometown of Disney World.

In its April edition, Men's Health magazine ranks the nation's 100 "smuttiest" U.S. cities. Not only did Orlando, Fla. — home to Walt Disney World and SeaWorld — finish No. 1, but Florida headed the list of smuttiest states.

Read the full article at Men's Health

"It seems that while tourists line up at a kid-friendly fantasy world, the locals prefer one in which Snow White and the dwarfs whistle while they... well, you know," the magazine offered.

Watch US News videos on msnbc.com

Men's Health said it based its rankings on the number of X-rated DVDs bought, rented or streamed, as compiled by AdultDVDEmpire.com; the number of adult entertainment stores per city, as monitored by StorErotica.net; the rate of porn searches, via Google; and the percentage of households that subscribe to Cinemax, the bluest of the cable movie networks.

The Top 10:
1. Orlando, Fla.
2. Las Vegas
3. Wilmington, Del.
4. Raleigh, N.C.
5. Charlotte, N.C.
6. Minneapolis
7. Atlanta
8. Tampa, Fla.
9. Anchorage, Alaska
10. Austin, Texas

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woman, sick, allergies, nose, sneeze, tissue, cold, flu, allergen, pollen, msnbc stock photography

By Joyce Ho
NBC News

Spring's early arrival brought a welcome respite from winter, but for allergy sufferers the warm weather also brings a new round of sniffling and sneezing. New research suggests pollen counts are not only higher this year, but also more potent. 

Taking medication is an option, but there are other ways to cope with the allergen onslaught without simply resorting to pills and prescriptions. So if you're one of the 31 million Americans with seasonal allergies, check out the tips below to help minimize the effects of hay fever.  

1) Keep pollen out of the house: Close windows and doors to prevent the pollen from coming in. Change vents on air conditioners and vents and wash bedding and rugs every week in hot water.  Vacuum two times a week and don’t forget to wear a mask while cleaning or dusting. If you are still experiencing allergies in your house, use a dehumidifier or an air filter indoors.

2) Prevent pollen accumulation on your body: Shower before going to bed because pollen can stick on your clothes and hair, and don't forget to clean your eyeglasses and sunglasses frequently. 

3) Plan your time outdoors: Pollen counts are highest between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. and tend to be lower in the late evening. Pollen also accumulates in the air during warm breezy days as opposed to cool rainy ones. Check the weather and pollen count forecast to schedule your exercise routine and other time outdoors.

4) Cover your eyes and mouth: Some people choose to wear a bandanna and/or goggles while exercising outdoors.

5) Clean your pets: Pets can track in pollen from outdoors, so be sure to groom your pets regularly.

Read more from msnbc.com: 

• Miserable spring allergies? Why that's a good sign
• Need spring allergy relief? Avoid these top 5 mistakes
• 5 Allergy Fighters You May Not Have Heard Of
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