Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. The Shortlist of Serious Medical Symptoms
2. Russian Antihistamine Improves Alzheimer’s Patients
3. Epilepsy Drug Eases Diabetic Neuropathy Pain
4. Patients Don't Know Exercise Cuts Colon Cancer Risk
5. Too Much Sleep Raises Older Women’s Stroke Risk
1. The Shortlist of Serious Medical Symptoms
There’s a shortlist of six symptoms that should immediately send you to the doctor or the emergency room. The list was put forward by Neil Shulman, MD, who is the author of Your Body’s Red Light Warning Signals. He describes hundreds of symptoms in his book that could mean life or death, but these are true “red flags”:
1. Unexplained weight loss. “If you’re on a diet, you’re expecting this to happen,” Shulman says. “But if you’re eating the same way—and now have to adjust your belt a few notches tighter—you could have a serious problem.” Unexpected weight gain can also be a warning, especially with ovarian cancer. “Fluid builds in the abdomen, and women think they’re gaining weight. But if you have been at the same weight range for years, and doing nothing different, see a doctor.”
2. Slurred speech, numbness and/or weakness, and paralysis. You know what this one is—a potential stroke. Rush to the emergency room because quick treatment may save your life as well as prevent brain damage.
3. Black, tarry stools. The food you eat changes stool color, but according to Shulman, black, tarry stools could be the sign of cancer or a bleeding ulcer.
4. A headache with fever and a stiff neck. You may have bacterial meningitis. Quick test: if you can’t put your chin on your chest, you need immediate treatment.
5. A sudden severe headache. If you’re struck out of the blue by a headache that’s worse than any you’ve ever had before, you may have an aneurysm, which is a blood-filled pouch that bulges out from the wall of a brain artery. Get treatment before it breaks—it could save your life.
6. For women: postmenopausal vaginal bleeding. Bleeding after menopause is a symptom of several conditions, including deadly uterine cancer. For men: lump in the testicle. A lump could be a sign of cancer, and the best thing for men to do is to regularly check themselves in the shower.
When you seek treatment or consultation, be firm with physicians about testing and ruling out a potentially life-threatening emergency. “Sometimes you have to make a scene,” Shulman says. “The one person most likely to be concerned about whether you live or not is you.”
Editor's Note:
2. Russian Antihistamine Improves Alzheimer’s Patients
A nearly forgotten Russian-made drug, formulated to combat hay fever, helps improve cognitive abilities in patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to the results of a year-long trial published on Thursday.
Known as Dimebon, the drug was first discovered in 1983 and sold in Russia as an antihistamine, but was dropped when better treatments came on the market.
A few years ago, interest in the drug picked up when lab tests by researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences showed it to have a protective effect on brain cells.
The news was picked up by an entrepreneurial company in San Francisco, which funded further work.
After further experiments on lab animals and a small-scale trial on humans, scientists have now carried out a trial on a relatively large group of people diagnosed with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's.
In this neurodegenerative disease, brain cells are killed by a build up of toxic plaques and tangled proteins, leading to forgetfulness, mood swings, dementia and death.
The team enrolled 155 patients at 11 sites in Russia, who were given a dose of Dimebon three times a day or a harmless lookalike pill called a placebo.
They were assessed according to a scale to measure cognitive abilities and memory.
After the six months on this regime, the patients were assessed again. After that, 134 of them took part in a 26-week extension, and were assessed once more.
At both phases of the experiment, the Dimebon group "significantly improved" compared to the start of the experiment, while the placebo group showed clear deterioration, the researchers say.
Dimebon "was well tolerated," with dry mouth or depressed mood the most frequent adverse events.
Around 25 million people around the world have Alzheimer's, for which there is no cure, only an array of treatments that are considered moderately effective and likely to have side effects.
On its website, Medivation, which is also testing Dimebon for people with Huntington's disease, said a wider, Phase III trial in testing the drug for Alzheimer's is underway.
Lead researcher in the trial is Rachelle Doody, of the Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
The project was vetted to ensure it met US and Russian standards of ethics and objectivity, and the study, presented at a conference last year, was peer-assessed before appearing in the latest issue of The Lancet.
Doody has had to fight skepticism within the medical community about Dimebon given the unusual way in which the drug was rediscovered, according to the medical media.
Researchers are also cautious about the drug's effectiveness until they see how it performs against existing treatment in clinical trials. They stress that, like other drugs, Dimebon appears to treat symptoms of the disease but not the underlying causes and thus is not a cure.
Copyright AFP
Editor's Note:
3. Epilepsy Drug Eases Diabetic Neuropathy Pain
A review of previous studies indicates that the seizure drug pregabalin (Lyrica) is safe and effective for relieving diabetic neuropathy, the pain that diabetics often experience in their feet and hands.
The analysis of data from seven studies of pregabalin, with dosages of 150, 300, and 600 milligrams daily and study durations from 5 to 13 weeks, is published in the journal Diabetes Care.
Dr. Roy Freeman of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues report that "pregabalin significantly reduced pain and pain-related sleep interference" with all three dosages when divided into three pills taken throughout the day. Only the highest dosage was effective when divided into two pills.
With the 600 mg daily dose, it typically took 4 days for a sustained reduction in pain. With the 300 and 150 mg daily doses, it took 5 days and 13 days, respectively.
While the 600 mg dose was the most effective, it was also the most likely to cause side effects. Common side effects included dizziness, sleepiness, and swelling in the legs and arms.
Weight gain, which occurred in some patients, was directly related to the pregabalin dose and the duration of treatment.
"The underlying cause of the weight gain is not known," the authors note. However, the weight gain did not affect the patients' ability to control blood sugar levels.
SOURCE: Diabetes Care, July 2008.
Copyright Reuters
Editor's Note:
4. Patients Don't Know Exercise Cuts Colon Cancer Risk
Many experts now consider colon cancer a largely preventable disease, but a new study finds that primary care doctors might not always inform patients about one important step they can take to reduce their risk: becoming more physically active.
When researchers analyzed survey data from 1,932 adults who answered questions about colon cancer risks, only 15 percent listed physical activity as a means of reducing their risk.
Yet a sedentary lifestyle accounts for as many as 14 percent of all colon cancer cases in the United States. Highly active individuals have a 30 percent to 40 percent lower risk of developing colon cancer, according to the researchers.
Several factors contribute to the information gap, according to study co-author Elliot Coups. “Patients may not be learning this information from their health care providers and information regarding colon cancer prevention is not as well publicized as it could be.”
The study appears in the August issue of the journal Patient Education and Counseling.
Doctors might find it easier to promote the general benefits of exercise, without specifically mentioning colon cancer, even to a patient who has a family history or has other risk factors, said Coups, at the Division of Population Science at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Cheltenham, Pa.
“In the context of busy clinic visits, it is in some ways efficient for patients to be reminded that physical activity is good for their health in general,” Coups added. “Going through each specific health benefit of physical activity would take considerable time.”
Doctors might also need to offer more information about what it means to be physically active, as patients could imagine it involves dramatic lifestyle alterations, he said.
There is a strong benefit in going from completely sedentary to some modest levels of activity, such as walking two to three hours a week or gardening, said Edward Giovannucci, M.D., a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Sedentary people should first set such moderate, achievable goals. More benefits could accrue from higher levels and more intense exercise, such as jogging, running or tennis. To some extent, more may be better, but it is important to note that a little is much better than nothing.”
Because studies might skew toward cultural norms and 40 percent of Americans never engage in leisure time physical activity, inactivity could be a factor in over 14 percent of the estimated 112,000 cases of colon cancer diagnosed each year, Giovannucci said.
“While many people are vaguely aware that exercise is good, the idea that exercise specifically prevents a large proportion of a common cancer may make an impact on the patient,” he said.
Editor's Note:
5. Too Much Sleep Raises Older Women’s Stroke Risk
Regularly getting nine hours or more of sleep per night may increase the risk of stroke in postmenopausal women, according to a study published on Thursday.
Only 5 percent of the 93,000 women in the study, who were 50 to 79 years old and from 40 locations around the United States, reported getting nine hours or more of sleep nightly.
But they had a 60 percent to 70 percent higher risk of stroke compared to women getting seven hours of sleep per night, the most common sleep duration, the researchers wrote in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.
The researchers statistically accounted for known risk factors for stroke and still found the increased risk in the longer-sleeping women.
"Whether it's because of sleep apnea or because of restless sleep or because of any number of things, we don't know," Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
"The study definitely does not say that for women who sleep longer, if they decrease their hours of sleep they'll be better off," Wassertheil-Smoller, an epidemiologist, added.
The researchers said it is unclear whether the findings would apply to men and younger women.
The study, which ran from 1994 to 2005, also saw an increased stroke risk among women who got no more than six hours of sleep a night.
But this was a much smaller effect. The researchers said there was a 14-percent higher risk in this group compared to those getting seven hours of sleep.
The study found that in this group of postmenopausal women, 8 percent reported getting five hours or less sleep a night, 27 percent reported getting six hours, 38 percent reported getting seven hours, and 23 percent reported getting eight hours.
Some 4 percent reported getting nine hours and 1 percent reported getting 10 hours or more.
Copyright Reuters
Editor's Note:
Editor's Notes:
- You Could Be Getting the Wrong Tests — These Are the Ones You Really Need.
- Brain Surgeon Reveals How to Save Your Brain from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Other Diseases.
- Eleven Key Strategies for Preventing Diabetes.
- You Can Prevent Deadly Colon Cancer.
- High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease Caused by Your Salt and Sugar-Filled Diet.
- One Hundred Million People Worldwide Will Go Blind This Year. Don’t Be One of Them.
- Tea — It's Not Just a Drink, It's a Miracle Beverage
- Eliminate Joint Pain and Stiffness Naturally.
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