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Articles from Dr. Eddy's Clinic Blog

Ob/Gyn Group Urges Routine HIV Tests for All Women 2008-08-03 23:26:00 (HealthDay News) -- Minority women are at higher risk for HIV/AIDS, and doctors need to make a special effort to encourage them to be tested for HIV.That's the new recommendation released Thursday by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)."Rates of infection among African Americans -- and also among Hispanics -- are much higher than among white women. Sixty-four percent of women with HIV are black, even though blacks only make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population," Dr. Heather Watts, a liaison member to ACOG's Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women, said in an organization news release.In 2004, HIV infection was the leading cause of death for black women ages 25 to 34. A combination of testing, education, and brief behavioral interventions can help reduce HIV infection rates among minority women, according to the ACOG committee."Education plays an important role. Because HIV is more prevalent in their communities, women of color need to know they ...

Secondhand Smoke Raises Stroke Risk for Spouses 2008-07-30 02:58:00 (HealthDay News) -- Nonsmokers who are married to smokers run a significantly higher risk for experiencing a stroke, a new study suggests.Researchers also found that ex-smokers married to men and women who still smoke carry an even greater risk for stroke. However, nonsmoking spouses of former smokers do not appear to bear any higher risk for stroke than those married to someone who had never smoked."This adds to the growing evidence that secondhand smoke is bad for you, and I hope that it will help people who want to stop smoking to know that it will probably be good for their spouse's health, too," said Maria Glymour, an assistant professor of society, human development and health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Glymour is also a health and society scholar in the department of epidemiology at Columbia University in New York City.She and her team were expected to publish the findings in the September issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.Glymour point ...

Spinal Cord Stem Cells May Act as Nerve Repair System 2008-07-23 03:41:00 (HealthDay News) -- Adult stem cells that may prove valuable in efforts to develop nonsurgical treatments for spinal cord injuries have been identified by researchers in the United States and Sweden.They say it may be possible to develop drugs that boost the ability of these stem cells to repair damaged nerve cells.An adult's spinal cord contains only a small number of stem cells, which proliferate slowly or rarely and don't promote regeneration on their own. But some research has shown that spinal cord stem cells grown in the lab and returned to the injury site can restore some physical function in paralyzed rodents and primates.In this new study, scientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in Cambridge, Mass., and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that neural stem cells in the adult spinal cord are limited to a layer of cells called ependymal cells, which make up the thin membrane lining the inner-brain ventricles and the connecting central column of ...

Health Tip: Teens and Sleep 2008-07-15 05:49:00 (HealthDay News) -- Teenagers need to get plenty of sleep -- between 8 1/2 and nine hours every night -- to feel good and keep their bodies healthy.Pay attention to these warning signs, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that you may not be getting enough shuteye:Difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. Problems focusing. Falling asleep at school during class. Feeling depressed, irritable, moody or sad. ...

Relationship Violence Common Among College Students 2008-07-08 02:51:00 (HealthDay News) -- Violence between partners, friends and acquaintances is common before and during college, a new study shows.Researchers surveyed 910 undergraduates aged 17 to 22 (57.1 percent female) at three urban college campuses to detect this trend.Among the findings:407 (44.7 percent) of respondents said they experienced violence either before or during college, including 383 (42.1 percent) who said they were victims and 156 (17.1 percent) who said they were perpetrators. 53 percent of women and 27.2 percent of men reported being victims. Rates of being a perpetrator or victim were higher before college than during college. More than half (130 of 227 reports) of violent incidents during college involved a partner, rather than a friend or acquaintance. Emotional violence was most common before college (21.1 percent), while sexual and emotional violence were equally common during college (12 percent and 11.8 percent).Men were more likely to commit sexual violence, while women we ...

Do You Need to Wear Sunglasses? 2008-06-30 23:37:00 Three important light questions that most people are confused on. ...

Worldwide War Deaths Underestimated 2008-06-23 01:54:00 (HealthDay News) -- Wars around the world have killed three times more people over the past half-century than previously estimated, a new study suggests.The finding supports the notion of armed conflict as a "public health problem" whose instability leads not only to violent deaths, but to indirect deaths from infectious disease and other causes, experts add."War kills more people than we had previously thought," said lead researcher Ziad Obermeyer, a research scientist at Brigham & Women's Hospital, in Boston. "And that has to be taken into account when we're looking historically, and it's important for people and policy makers to know when they're looking at the consequences of the war. It's important that there's an awareness of how many people actually die."In the study, Obermeyer's group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected ...

Is My Son’s Blue Tongue a Danger to His Health? 2008-06-12 03:05:00 By Theresa TamkinsWe had a houseful of guests this weekend, and somewhere between multiple shopping trips with various relatives, we managed to come home with a box of Fruit Roll-Ups.Heavy on the corn syrup and light on nutrition, kid-magnet products like this are usually banned at my house. Any food that turns your tongue bright blue seems just plain wrong—to me, but not to Jackson, who is 8 and thinks it’s a blast.But do I have reason to worry, beyond the garish tongue and mostly empty calories? Last week the Center for Science in the Public Interest asked the Food and Drug Administration to ban eight artificial dyes, including three on the side of the box we bought at the grocery story (red 40, yellow 5, blue 1). You probably know CSPI: For more than 30 years they’ve been high-profile agitators against junk foods, bad nutrition labeling, additives, and more. Read More ...

Alcohol, Drug Counseling Benefits Teens, Too 2008-06-04 21:46:00 (HealthDay News) -- Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous offer benefits to adolescents, even if they eventually stop attending meetings, says a study that included 160 teens enrolled at two treatment centers in California.The teens, with an average age 16, stayed from four to six weeks at the centers, which were focused on abstinence and used a 12-step model. The teens were reassessed at six months, and one, two, four, six, and eight years after they left the centers."We found that most of the youth attended at least some AA/NA meetings post-treatment," John F. Kelly, associate director of the MGH-Harvard Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a prepared statement."Those patients with severe addiction problems and those who believed they could not use alcohol/drugs in moderation attended the most. The NA and AA focus on abstinence/recovery probably resonates better with these more severely dependent individuals who also typically need ongoing s ...

Seizures Likely Sign of Brain Injury After Stroke 2008-05-30 00:05:00 (HealthDay News) -- Stroke patients who suffer seizures are more likely to die within 30 days than stroke patients who don't have seizures are, a new study shows.Seizures may be a sign of significant brain injury and may occur in patients who've suffered any type of stroke. This study found that the overall incidence of seizures within 24 hours of a stroke is 3.1 percent. Patients with intracranial hemorrhages (bleeding within the brain) have a higher rate of seizures (8.4 percent) in the first 24 hours after stroke. Overall, there was a 30 percent mortality rate within the first 30 days of a stroke.The researchers also investigated any racial differences in post-stroke seizures and found that, even though blacks are known to have higher rates of both seizures and strokes, there were no racial differences in seizure incidence or death rates."Patients with seizures in the setting of acute stroke may constitute a target population for the development of drugs that may prevent seizures, ...

Group B Strep Down Among Newborns, Up Among Adults 2008-05-10 07:41:00 (HealthDay News) -- Instances of Group B streptococcus, a major cause of serious infections, have dropped by about 25 percent among week-old infants, but rose by almost 50 percent among most adults during a recent six-year period, according to a new study.Group B strep is the leading cause of sepsis and meningitis in the first week of life. Prevention strategies put in place during the 1970s have helped quell the condition, called early-onset disease. However, an estimated 21,500 cases of invasive disease and 1,700 deaths were traced to the disease during 2005, according to the study, published in the May 7 issue of Journal of American Medical Association.Group B streptococcus can also cause invasive disease in older infants, pregnant women, children and young adults with underlying medical conditions and older adults. An increase in disease incidence among non-pregnant adults has been previously documented in past decades.The new study, which examines data on laboratory-confirmed inva ...

Health Tip: Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle 2008-05-02 05:32:00 (HealthDay News) -- No one knows precisely why people get cancer, and there's no surefire cure.But if you maintain a healthy lifestyle, you can help reduce your risk. Here are some suggestions, courtesy of AARP:Eat a healthy diet, including plenty of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Limit intake of red meat, saturated fats, smoked and salt-cured foods, and foods preserved with nitrates.Get regular exercise of 30 minutes or more at least five days a week. Maintain a healthy body weight. If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation. Wear sunscreen and avoid prolonged exposure to direct sun during the midday hours. Get screened for cancers for which you may be most susceptible. ...

Melanomas on Scalp and Neck More Deadly 2008-04-22 07:17:00 (HealthDay News) -- The most deadly melanoma skin cancers occur on the scalp and neck, says a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) study.Researchers analyzed 51,704 melanoma cases in the United States and found that patients with scalp or neck melanomas died at 1.84 times the rate of patients with melanoma elsewhere on the body, including the face or ears.The five-year survival rate for patients with scalp-neck melanomas was 83 percent, compared with 92 percent for patients with melanomas at other sites. The 10-year survival rate was 76 percent for scalp-neck melanomas and 89 percent for other melanomas.The findings confirm that melanoma patient survival rates differ depending on where the cancer first appeared, the researchers said. The study was published in the April issue of the Archives of Dermatology.Doctors need to pay close attention to the scalp when examining patients for signs of skin cancer, said senior author Dr. Nancy Thomas, an associate professor of dermato ...

Chronic Exposure to Solvents Disturbs Brain's Wiring 2008-04-18 10:22:00 (HealthDay News) -- Long-term exposure to solvents in products such as paints and dry cleaning agents may cause disturbances in the brain's wiring, researchers report.These abnormalities play a role in a condition called chronic solvent-induced encephalopathy (CSE), the Dutch team conclude in the April issue of the Annals of Neurology.People with CSE experience problems with memory, attention and psychomotor function long after exposure to solvents has ceased, according to background information in the study. Cases of CSE, a recognized occupational health problem, are increasing in a number of western nations.This study found that disturbances within the brain's frontal-striatal-thalamic (FST) circuitry are related to the clinical characteristics of CSE, as well as to the severity of exposure to solvents.The study included 10 CSE patients who'd been exposed to solvents and had mild to severe cognitive impairment, 10 people who'd been exposed to solvents but had no CSE symptoms, and ...

Boston Trial to Test New HIV/AIDS Vaccine 2008-04-12 02:24:00 (HealthDay News) -- A new HIV/AIDS vaccine designed to overcome the problem of preexisting immunity to common vaccine vectors is being tested in an early clinical trial at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.Preexisting immunity is believed to be a major problem in developing nations.There will be 48 healthy volunteers taking part in the trial of the vaccine, which consists of a replication-incompetent, recombinant adenovirus serotype 26 (rAd26) vector encoding an HIV-1 envelope gene.Each volunteer will receive either two or three immunizations, and then be monitored to assess the safety of the vaccine and its ability to trigger an immune response.The rAd26 vaccine was developed by the Integrated Preclinical/Clinical AIDS Vaccine Development (IPCAVD) program, sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The program brings together academic and industry researchers to accelerate development of promising HIV/AIDS vaccine candidates.The vaccine, the fir ...