Archive for the ‘Integrative Medicine blog’ Category
Wondering About Wasabi?
Does wasabi, the Japanese mustard that comes with sushi, have any health benefits? It always seems to clear my sinuses, at least temporarily.
The answer to your question is yes… and no. First of all, you should know that the green paste that usually comes with sushi isn’t really wasabi. It is a combination of horseradish, Chinese mustard and green food coloring. And it may surprise you to learn that this imitation product is now so widely used that – with the exception of some top-flight restaurants that still use genuine wasabi – it even accompanies sushi in Japan. (I’ve been told by wasabi experts that only about five percent of the restaurants in Japan serve the real thing, and I’ve found real wasabi in the United States only in high-end Japanese restaurants in New York and California.) Read more…
Looking Younger Than Your Age May Mean Longer Life
(HealthDay News) — People who look younger than their age tend to live longer than those who look older than their years, a new study suggests.
The finding came from research that involved 1,826 Danish twins, aged 70 and older, who were given physical and cognitive tests and then had their faces photographed. Three groups of volunteers looked at the photos and indicated the age they perceived the participants to be. Twins were assessed individually, and on different days.
The researchers, from the University of Southern Denmark, then tracked the twins for seven years and found that perceived age was significantly associated with survival, even after adjustments were made for actual age, sex and the environment in which each pair of twins was raised. The bigger the difference in perceived age, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first, they noted.
The researchers also found an association between perceived age and physical and mental functioning. Read more…
Detox Your Liver with These Natural Herbs
(NaturalNews) Maybe you have a childhood memory of forgetting to clean your fish tank’s filter. After all, it’s easy to forget a fish tank even has a filter until it’s so clogged up it starts to malfunction. Eventually, the tank is covered in slime and the health of your fish begins to fail. This scenario is much like the way we view our liver today. We often overlook the importance of the liver until it begins to adversely affect our health. However, this organ plays a vital role in cleansing, detoxifying and purification on a daily basis. The liver is also where many important nutrients are metabolized. Without a healthy liver, we cannot be healthy. Read more…
Online Advertising Easily Influences Teens to Eat More Junk Food
Teenagers are strongly affected by Internet marketing in a way that has yet to be addressed by scientific research or government regulation, a group of scientists has warned in a review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“As the media marketplace continues its rapid transformation, becoming a ubiquitous presence in young people’s lives, further academic research is needed to understand fully the nature, scope, and extent of interactive advertising’s impact on youth,” the researchers wrote.
According to the paper, the United States still regulates advertising to children and teenagers based on studies conducted in the 1970s on how television influences young minds. The authors said that the Internet is a fundamentally different medium than television, however.
“In the Internet era, children and teens are not passive viewers; they are active participants and content creators in an interactive digital environment that pervades their personal and social lives,” they wrote. Read more…
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Diabetes triples the risk of liver cancer
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – It appears that diabetes is a strong risk factor for liver cancer, raising the risk two- to three-fold, investigators report.
The study, using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End-Results (SEER)-Medicare database, is the first population-based study in the US that takes other major risk factors for liver cancer into consideration, according to Dr. Hashem El-Serag, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and colleagues.
Their analysis included 2161 patients aged 65 and older with confirmed liver cancer between 1994 and 1999. A comparison “control” group included 6183 randomly selected individuals, according to the team’s article in the medical journal Gut.
The researchers found that 43 percent of liver cancer patients but only 19 percent of control subjects had diabetes diagnosed during the three years preceding the diagnosis of liver cancer — to exclude the possibility that liver cancer was the cause of the diabetes. Read more…
New System Improves Distribution of Donated Livers
(HealthDay News) — Thanks to a new liver transplant allocation system that gives preference to patients with the greatest need, rather than time spent on a waiting list, racial disparities among those waiting for new livers are narrowing.
Blacks are no longer much more likely to die or become too sick for a transplant while on the waiting list, although there are still noticeable gender gaps, according to the study published in the Nov. 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The new MELD (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) scoring system was introduced in 2002.
“Post-MELD, the disparity between blacks and whites went away,” said Dr. Cynthia A. Moylan, lead author of the study and a transplant hepatology fellow at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. “The sickest patients get” the organs, she said.
The study is the first comprehensive look at the success of the new system.Read more…
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Exercise and Healthy Diet Slow Memory Loss
Exercise and healthy diet slow memory loss
By Paul Hoskins
An active lifestyle and a healthy, fish-rich diet are not only good for your heart, they may also help tackle the memory loss associated with old age, two leading neuroscientists said on Wednesday.
As people live longer, finding ways of halting the decline in mental agility is becoming increasingly important, said Professor Ian Robertson, director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.
“The biggest threat to being able to function well and properly is our brains,” he told journalists at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Dublin.
“There is very strong evidence, particularly in the over-50s, that the degree to which you maintain your mental faculties depends on a handful of quite simple environmental factors,” he said, having identified seven key areas. Read more…
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Diet Soda Now Linked to Heart Disease
Eating two or more servings a day of red meat increases your risk of metabolic syndrome by 25 percent, compared to those who have two servings of red meat each week, a new study found.
Drinking diet soda also increased the risk of metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors such as excessive fat around your waist, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and high blood pressure, all of which can raise your risk of heart disease and diabetes. Read more…
Pesticides Linked to Blood Disorder
(HealthDay News) — People who apply pesticides have double the normal risk of developing a precancerous blood disorder, say U.S. researchers.
Called MGUS (monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance) and characterized by an abnormal level of plasma protein, the disorder requires lifelong monitoring because it can lead to multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells in the bone marrow.
The study looked at 678 men, aged 30 to 94, in North Carolina and Iowa who apply pesticides and compared them to more than 9,000 men from the general population in Olmsted County, Minn.
No cases of MGUS were found among those younger than 50 in the pesticide-exposed group, but the rate of MGUS in those older than 50 was 6.8 percent. That was 1.9 times higher than among the men in the general population group. Read more…
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Sugar Poisons the Blood, Brain and Body Leading To Dementia
The drinking of acidic sugary beverages like soda pops may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, suggests new research. Although the exact mechanisms aren’t known, the symptoms of obesity and diabetes are both associated with higher incidences of Alzheimer’s.
Ling Li and her colleagues tested whether high sugar consumption in an otherwise normal diet would affect Alzheimer’s progression.
They used a genetic mouse model that develops Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in adulthood, and over a 25 week period supplemented the regular, balanced diet of half the animals with 10% sugar water.
Afterwards, they compared the metabolism, memory skills (by means of various mazes) and brain composition of the regular and sugar-fed mice. Read more…
Allergy, Depression and Tricyclic Antidepressants
Psychiatrists have been very reluctant to accept the idea that depressions, which they know so well, may be caused by allergies to common environmental molecules such as foods, airborne particles, and chemicals in water. When patients were depressed and anxious, and at the same time suffered from diseases accepted as allergic, psychosomatic explanations were used. This usually meant that a psychological explanation for the presence of the allergic reactions was invoked. The mood disorder was looked upon as a natural reaction to the discomfort of the allergic reaction. Read more…
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Acids From Alcohol and Protein Causes Cancer
Drinking more than one acid alcoholic beverage a day dramatically increases your risk of developing a cancerous bowel. Large amounts of highly acidic red meat increases this risk, according to researchers at The George Institute in Sydney, Australia, who analyzed more than 100 international studies reaching as far back as the 1960s.
“It’s the first definitive study to quantify the role of lifestyle . . . on the risk of developing colorectal cancer,” associate professor Rachel Huxley told AAP.
“People who eat the highest amount of red and processed meat have about 20 percent greater risk of developing the cancer than those who don’t eat meat,” Huxley said. The risk was similar for those who are obese, smoke, or have diabetes. Read more…
Stem Cells May Improve Heart Bypass Results
(HealthDay News) — Patients who received bone marrow stem cell transplants during coronary bypass surgery (CABG) experienced “excellent long-term safety and survival,” say German researchers, who also noted the first promising results for stem cell transplantation during mitral valve repair.
The study included 35 patients who received CD 133+ bone marrow stem cell transplantation during CABG, 20 patients who received only CABG surgery and 10 patients who received stem cell transplantation after mitral valve repair.
Long-term survival among patients in the stem cell transplant/CAGB group was up to five years. Three patients in the stem cell/mitral valve repair group died six months to a year after surgery, including two who developed progressive heart failure, the researchers noted. Read more…
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Selenium, Omega-3s May Stave Off Colorectal Cancer
(HealthDay News) — Certain dietary supplements appear to affect the development of colorectal cancer or its recurrence, two new studies suggest.
In one study, researchers from the U.S. National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences found that eating a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids cut the risk of developing colorectal cancer by nearly 40 percent. In the other study, from cancer researchers in Italy, consumption of a dietary supplement containing selenium was found to reduce the chances of having polyps recur by a similar amount.
Both studies were to be presented Dec. 7 in Houston at a conference on cancer prevention sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research.
In the selenium study, 411 people, 25 to 75 years old, who’d had one or more colorectal polyps removed took either a supplement or a placebo. The supplement, described as an antioxidant compound, contained 200 micrograms of selenomethionnine (a combination of selenium and methionnine), 30 milligrams of zinc, 6,000 international units of vitamin A, 180 milligrams of vitamin C and 30 milligrams of vitamin E. Read more…
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Powerful Spices Block Cancer Development
The antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-carcinogenic properties of curcumin, the powerful yellow spice found in both turmeric and curry powders, have been undergoing intense research in various parts of the world.
According to researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, curcumin blocks a key biological pathway needed for development of melanoma and other cancers.
The spice stops laboratory strains of melanoma from proliferating and pushes the cancer cells to commit suicide by shutting down nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-kB), a powerful protein known to induce an abnormal inflammatory response that leads to an assortment of disorders such as arthritis and cancer. Read more…
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Chemicals in Marijuana Smoke May Harm DNA
(HealthDay News) — The smoke from cannabis, the plant from which marijuana is derived, contains compounds that can damage DNA and increase the risk of cancer just like tobacco smoke, says a new study from the United Kingdom.
In laboratory tests, Rajinder Singh from the University of Leicester and colleagues found certain carcinogens in cannabis smoke in amounts 50 percent greater than those found in tobacco smoke. They noted that light cannabis use could possibly prove to be even more damaging because cannabis smokers usually inhale more deeply than cigarette smokers. Read more…
How Is Heart Valve Disease Treated?
Treatment for heart valve disease depends on the type and severity of valve disease. There are three goals of treatment for heart valve disease: protecting your valve from further damage; lessening symptoms; and repairing or replacing valves.
Protecting your valve from further damage.
If you have valve disease, you are at risk for developing endocarditis, a serious condition. People who have mitral valve prolapse without thickening or regurgitation/leaking are not at risk of developing endocarditis.
You are still at risk for endocarditis, even if your valve is repaired or replaced through surgery. To protect yourself: Read more…
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Bicarbonate of Soda Used to Cure Stage Four Prostate Cancer
(NaturalNews) Bicarbonate of soda or baking soda to cure cancer? The amazing abundance of alternative cancer cures is more than most of us know, close to 400! The more notorious alternative cancer cures are the ones that get attacked viciously by the Medical Monopoly. Those cures are the ones that begin to develop into public practices that threaten their monopoly.
Then there are those inexpensive non-toxic remedies that slip by the Medical Monopoly virtually unnoticed. Some become like folk medicines that can be administered individually. This type of application worked for Vernon Johnston. He used baking soda and molasses as the driving force to recover from aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer (http://www.dreddyclinic.com/findinformation/cc/prostatecancer.htm), which had even metastasized into his bone matter! Read more…
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Sounds May Help Solidify Memories While Asleep
(HealthDay News) — Sounds can penetrate deep sleep and enhance associated memories upon waking, new research finds.
In a study linking sounds to what is called spatial memory, researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago showed 50 objects on a screen to study participants and played corresponding sounds, like a cat meowing and a tea kettle whistling. Then they played some of the sounds as participants napped.
The participants didn’t consciously hear the sounds, but they still did better in tests of remembering where the objects belonged on the screen. Read more…
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Why Health Care Costs are So High (Opinion)
Recently, USA Today has been running an interesting series of articles on our ridiculous health care system or, as reality would put it, our “disease care” system. While more and more Americans are concerned with the increasing costs of the U.S. health care system, hawked as the best medical care in the world, the problem is that those that cannot afford it are steadily increasing. Read more…
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Whooping Cough Immunity Lasts 30 Years or More
(HealthDay News) — Exposure to whooping cough will provide immunity for an average of three decades, new research suggests.
Doctors had previously thought that immunity lasted for much less time. But the new study, by researchers based at the University of Michigan and the University of New Mexico, rebuts that assumption.
Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has become more common in the United States and elsewhere since the 1980s. Some health experts have thought that immunity is wearing off for people who’d been vaccinated or had been infected by the disease. Read more…
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Peer Review System for Journals Can Get You Into Trouble
Medical journals are the prime source of information about scientific advances that can change how doctors treat patients in offices and in hospitals. And to ensure the quality of what journals publish, their editors, beginning 200 years ago, have increasingly called on scientific peers to review new findings from research in test tubes and on animals and humans. Read more…
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Hormones Boost Frequency of Women’s Migraine With Aura
(HealthDay News) — In women, hormones increase the frequency of an inherited form of severe migraine accompanied by visual disturbances called auras, according to a Massachusetts General Hospital study.
Like other types of migraine, familial hemiplegic migraine affects women more than men. Most cases of familial hemiplegic migraine are caused by mutations in the CACNA1A gene. However, it hasn’t been clear whether these mutations lead to spreading depression — the event in the brain that suppresses nerve cell activity and has been linked to non-genetic forms of migraine with aura, according to background information in the study. Read more…
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For Organ Donation, Intent and Reality Don’t Align
(HealthDay News) — Though Americans by and large say they support the idea of donating some or all of their organs after death to save others’ lives, reality presents a different picture.
Just 38 percent of licensed drivers in the United States are registered as organ and tissue donors, according to a report this year by Donate Life America, a national alliance of organ donor groups. And most waiting lists for organ transplants remain long. Read more…
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Tired Doctors More Prone to Errors
(HealthDay News) — Attending surgeons and obstetricians/gynecologists who get fewer than six hours of sleep between procedures risk increasing the rate of surgical complications, according to Harvard researchers.
A lot of attention has been paid to the long hours that residents and interns work and the increase in medical errors brought on by their fatigue, but the new study found the same problems among practicing physicians. Read more…