C-Section May Raise Child's Risk of Allergies, Asthma: Study

Title: C-Section May Raise Child's Risk of Allergies, Asthma: Study
Category: Health News
Created: 2/25/2013 6:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/26/2013 12:00:00 AM

View the original article here

Healthy Older Women Advised Against Taking Calcium

Title: Healthy Older Women Advised Against Taking Calcium
Category: Health News
Created: 2/25/2013 6:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/26/2013 12:00:00 AM

View the original article here

'Worried Well' Often Ignore Negative Test Results: Study

Title: 'Worried Well' Often Ignore Negative Test Results: Study
Category: Health News
Created: 2/26/2013 10:35:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 2/26/2013 12:00:00 AM

View the original article here

Primary Care Doctors Can Make the Wrong Call

Title: Primary Care Doctors Can Make the Wrong Call
Category: Health News
Created: 2/25/2013 6:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 2/26/2013 12:00:00 AM

View the original article here

Artificial Pancreas Worked Overnight on Kids With Type 1 Diabetes

By Serena Gordon

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) -- The artificial pancreas -- a treatment that's been called the closest thing to a possible cure for type 1 diabetes -- may be another step closer to becoming a reality.

Israeli researchers just released the findings from an overnight trial of their artificial pancreas system at three different camps for youngsters with type 1 diabetes. The artificial pancreas system was able to maintain better blood sugar levels, and helped prevent dangerous overnight drops in blood sugar levels, compared to an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor, according to the study.

"There is hope for better control without the fear of [low blood sugar levels], and therefore improvement in quality of life is coming soon," said study author Dr. Moshe Phillip.

Philip is director of the Institute for Endocrinology and Diabetes at the National Center for Childhood Diabetes at the Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel, in Tel Aviv. The findings appear in the Feb. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system turns against healthy cells. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks beta cells in the pancreas, effectively destroying the body's ability to produce the hormone insulin. Insulin helps metabolize carbohydrates from food and fuels the body's cells.

Insulin can't be replaced with a pill. It must be injected with a shot or delivered by a pump that uses a tiny catheter inserted under the skin. This catheter must be changed every few days. The problem with both techniques is that people have to estimate how much insulin they'll need based on the foods they eat and how much activity they'll be doing.

Too much insulin can result in low blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia), which makes a person with diabetes feel awful, and if left untreated, can cause a person to pass out. Low blood sugar levels can even lead to death. Too little insulin leads to high blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia), which over time can cause serious complications, such as heart disease and kidney and eye problems.

An artificial pancreas could potentially solve those problems by taking over the decision-making process and applying sophisticated computer algorithms to decide how much insulin is needed at any given moment.

But developing such a device isn't easy. It has to be able to continuously detect patients' blood sugar levels and know whether the levels are trending up or down. There also has to be a piece of the device that holds and delivers insulin. Right now, most artificial pancreas devices, including the one tested in this study, use already-available insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. Such monitors measure blood sugar levels every few minutes with a sensor that's inserted under the skin, and send the results to a transmitter.

View the original article here

Iron-Rich Diet Might Ease PMS Misery

By Serena Gordon

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Millions of American women know the pain and emotional tumult of premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. But a new study finds that diets full of iron from plant-based sources might help ease the condition.

Women who ate in this way were about one-third less likely to develop PMS than women who consumed less iron, the researchers found. Non-meat sources of iron include dried beans and green leafy vegetables.

Another mineral makes a difference, the study found. Higher levels of zinc were also associated with less PMS over the 10-year study period. Zinc occurs in many fresh fruits and vegetables.

"It does look like a range of minerals are important for menstrual cycle health and for PMS. Women should consume a balanced diet, and if they're not getting enough nutrients from their diet, they should take a multivitamin," recommended senior study author Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Bertone-Johnson said the researchers don't know exactly why iron might be associated with less PMS, because iron is involved in many processes in the body. They think higher levels of iron might reduce the pain and emotional symptoms of PMS by boosting levels of a brain chemical called serotonin. Low serotonin levels play a role in clinical depression, and Bertone-Johnson said that serotonin has been linked to PMS symptoms in other research.

As with iron, Bertone-Johnson said it wasn't clear how higher levels of zinc might protect against PMS.

Results of the study were published online Feb. 26 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

PMS affects between 8 percent and 15 percent of women in their reproductive years, according to study background information. Symptoms can be physical or emotional, and may include breast tenderness, abdominal bloating, appetite changes, depression and anxiety.

The current research followed about 3,000 women enrolled in the U.S. Nurses' Health Study II. None of the women reported having PMS at the start of the study.

Over 10 years, the women completed three food-intake questionnaires. At the end of the study, 1,057 women reported PMS, and the remaining 1,968 women did not.

After adjusting the data for calcium intake and other factors, the researchers found that the women who consumed the most non-heme iron had up to a 40 percent lower PMS risk compared to the women who consumed the least non-heme iron. Non-heme iron is iron that comes from plant-based sources or supplements, rather than from meat.

The risk of developing PMS dropped significantly for women who consumed more than 20 milligrams (mg) of iron daily. The lowest risk was seen in women consuming nearly 50 mg of iron daily. However, the recommended daily intake for premenopausal women is 18 mg per day, according to Bertone-Johnson.

View the original article here

Primary Care Doctors Can Make the Wrong Call

By Amanda Gardner

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Feb. 25 (HealthDay News) -- In one case documented in a new study, an elderly patient was misdiagnosed with bronchitis but actually had full-blown pneumonia and ended up being admitted to the hospital.

Although that patient recovered, other symptoms that aren't properly diagnosed could be even more serious: numbness, tingling and dizziness that aren't recognized as the first signs of a stroke, for instance.

According to the new study, published online Feb. 25 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, primary care physicians can make diagnostic errors across a wide range of conditions, many of them common conditions such as urinary tract infections and anemia.

"There's a great heterogeneity of conditions [that are missed]," said study author Dr. Hardeep Singh.

Although much is known about medication errors and mistakes that occur in hospitals and other inpatient settings, less is known about mistakes that happen in doctors' offices or clinics, said Singh, chief of the Health Policy, Quality and Informatics Program at the Houston VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence.

Similarly, while "high-profile" diagnostic mistakes -- missed cancer that ends in unnecessary death, for example -- often make the news, more mundane diagnostic errors can fly under the radar, he added.

In the study, Singh and his colleagues used electronic medical records to identify 190 cases of diagnostic errors that took place in a primary-care physician's office, either at a VA facility or in a private health care system. Sixty-eight of those were missed diagnoses, according to the study.

Diagnostic errors occurred across many common conditions, including pneumonia (6.7 percent of the cases), congestive heart failure (5.7 percent), kidney failure (5.3 percent) and urinary tract or kidney infection (4.8 percent). Cancer made up 5.3 percent of missed diagnoses, on a par with kidney failure.

Eighty percent of the errors were due to communication breakdowns between the patient and practitioner. This could have been failing to take a proper medical history or not performing a comprehensive physical exam. There also were problems with ordering and interpreting tests and follow-up care.

More than 40 percent of the cases studied involved more than one of these factors.

Although all the cases reviewed in this study involved patients coming back for -- and receiving -- follow-up care, the cases did have the potential for "moderate to severe harm," the authors said.

It's not clear if these findings would extrapolate into other primary care settings, especially ones that aren't part of a larger health care network, the authors said. (Even in this study, the authors found different patterns in the VA network versus the private system.)

The authors did not say what proportion of total diagnoses were in error, said Dr. Doug Campos-Outcalt, chairman of family medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, in Phoenix.

View the original article here

Another Study Says Mediterranean Diet Good for the Heart

By Kathleen Doheny

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Feb. 25 (HealthDay News) -- Score another heart-health win for the Mediterranean diet.

Eating a diet rich in olive oil, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables, along with red wine, helped those at high risk for cardiovascular problems avoid heart trouble better than those eating a low-fat diet, a new Spanish study has found.

During a follow-up period of about five years, study participants on a Mediterranean diet that emphasized either olive oil or nuts had a 30 percent greater reduction in relative risk of a heart attack, stroke or death from cardiovascular disease, said study lead author Dr. Miguel Angel Martinez-Gonzalez. He is chairman of preventive medicine and public health at the Universidad de Navarra in Spain.

"This is a moderate-to-high benefit," he said. "The low-fat diet also helped, but to a lesser degree."

The new findings are published online Feb. 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine. They will also be presented Monday at the International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition in Loma Linda, Calif.

The findings echo those from previous research.

Martinez-Gonzalez's team evaluated nearly 7,500 men and women. They ranged in age from 55 to 80 when they enrolled in the study, which began in Spain in 2003. Fifty-seven percent of the participants were women.

While the men and women had no history of heart attack or stroke or other cardiovascular problems at enrollment, they did have risk factors such as type 2 diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

The researchers assigned the men and women to one of three groups -- a low-fat diet, a Mediterranean diet that focused on nuts or a Mediterranean diet that focused on olive oil.

On average, the men and women were overweight or obese. In all three groups, the average body-mass index was 30 or close to it, which is defined as obese.

The olive oil group consumed about four tablespoons a day or more. The nuts group ate about three servings a week or more, including walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds. Members of both groups also ate plenty of fruits and vegetables, as well as fish, and drank wine with meals. They could have white meat but were told to avoid red and processed meats.

The low-fat group ate low-fat dairy, breads, potatoes, fruits and vegetables, and lean fish. They were told to avoid oils, baked goods, nuts, red and processed meat, and fatty fish.

At the end of the study, 288 cardiovascular events had occurred. While 109 of those events occurred in the low-fat group, 96 were in the group that ate a Mediterranean diet with olive oil, and 83 were in the Mediterranean diet-with-nuts group.

When the researchers looked separately at stroke, heart attack and death, only the link between the Mediterranean diet and stroke was statistically significant. The researchers found a link between the diets and heart protection, but it did not prove cause and effect, they said.

View the original article here