Health News

Study Explores Medical Exemptions From School Vaccination Requirements Across States

Date: Aug-31-2012
Findings suggest need to ensure medical exemptions are granted only to children who truly need them In states where medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kindergarten students are easier to get, exemption rates are higher, potentially compromising herd immunity and posing a threat to children and others who truly should not be immunized because of underlying conditions, according to a study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases and now available online...

A Steady Job Is Good For A Diabetic's Health

Date: Aug-31-2012
If you're diabetic or prone to diabetes, having a steady job appears to be good for your health, and not just because of the insurance coverage. A new University of Michigan study found that that jobless working-age people with diabetes are less likely to adhere to their oral anti-diabetic medications than diabetics who are employed. Further, people of working age with diabetes are more likely to be unemployed than those who do not have diabetes...

Lifesaving ICDs Should Not Be Cut During Financial Crisis

Date: Aug-31-2012
Implantable devices for treating cardiac arrhythmias, which include ICDs, are already underused in parts of Eastern and Central Europe and there is a risk that the financial crisis could exacerbate the problem. The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), a registered branch of the ESC, is tackling this issue through ICD for Life. The initiative aims to raise awareness about the importance of ICDs and sudden cardiac death in countries in Central and Eastern Europe...

Restaurant Food Consumption And Satisfaction Affected By Lighting And Music In Surprising Ways

Date: Aug-31-2012
It's more than just the food that makes McDonalds different from a fine dining restaurant - the lighting and the music contribute to create two very different atmospheres. A restaurant's atmosphere may cause people to overeat if it stimulates them to eat faster, but also if the ambiance of the restaurant gets people to linger longer it may get them to order an unplanned dessert...

Mystery Surrounding The Death Of Two Sisters Nearly 50 Years Ago Solved By Researchers

Date: Aug-31-2012
Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified the genetic cause of a rare and fatal bone disease by studying frozen skin cells that were taken from a child with the condition almost fifty years ago. Their study, which details how the MT1-MMP gene leads to the disease known as Winchester syndrome, appears in the online edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics...

France, Germany, And The UK Outperform The US On Potentially Preventable Death Rates

Date: Aug-31-2012
The United States lags three other industrialized nations - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom - in its potentially preventable death rate, and in the pace of improvement in preventing deaths that could have been avoided with timely and effective health care, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published as a web first online in Health Affairs. Between 1999 and 2006/2007, the overall potentially preventable death rate among men ages 0 to 74 dropped by only 18.5 percent in the United States, while the rate declined by nearly 37 percent in the U.K...

Controlling Diabetes After Pancreas Removal

Date: Aug-31-2012
Removing the entire pancreas in patients with cancer or precancerous cysts in part of the organ does not result in unmanageable diabetes - as many physicians previously believed, research at Mayo Clinic in Florida has found. The study, published online in the journal HPB Surgery, evaluates how well patients who had their entire pancreas removed could control their resulting diabetes. The pancreas produces insulin to remove sugar from the blood, so when the organ is gone, insulin must be replaced, usually through an external pump or with injections...

Factors That Regulate Size Of Cellular Fat Pools, Obesity

Date: Aug-31-2012
As the national waistline expands, so do pools of intra-cellular fat known as lipid droplets. Although most of us wish our lipid droplets would vanish, they represent a cellular paradox: on the one hand droplets play beneficial roles by corralling fat into non-toxic organelles. On the other, oversized lipid droplets are associated with obesity and its associated health hazards. Until recently researchers understood little about factors that regulate lipid droplet size...

Causes Of Internet Addiction At The Molecular Level

Date: Aug-31-2012
"It was shown that Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination," says the lead author, Privatdozent Dr. Christian Montag from the Department for Differential and Biological Psychology at the University of Bonn. "Researchers and therapists are increasingly closing in on it." Over the past years, the Bonn researchers have interviewed a total of 843 people about their Internet habits...

Scientists Stop Abnormal Brain Cell Growth In Mice With Neurofibromatosis Using Experimental Tumor Drug

Date: Aug-31-2012
A drug originally developed to stop cancerous tumors may hold the potential to prevent abnormal brain cell growth and learning disabilities in some children, if they can be diagnosed early enough, a new animal study suggests. The surprising finding sets the stage for more research on how anti-tumor medication might be used to protect the developing brains of young children with the genetic disease neurofibromatosis 1 - and other diseases affecting the same cellular signaling pathway...