[Repost] ‘Yes’ to One Drug Could Become ‘Yes’ for Other Drugs

English: Close up shot of some high quality marijuana. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 8 October 2013 ScienceDaily article

 

High school seniors who frown upon the use of drugs are most likely to be female, nonsmokers or hold strong religious beliefs, according to a study¹ by Joseph Palamar of New York University. Palamar examines how teenagers’ attitudes toward marijuana influenced their thoughts on the further use of other illicit drugs. The work appears online in the journal Prevention Science², published by Springer.

The study was conducted as marijuana use continues to be on the upswing in the United States, along with more lenient legislation and diminishing public disapproval toward its use. Although previous research has shown that people who disapprove of a particular drug will in all likelihood not use it, little is known about how the use of one drug affects people’s attitudes toward using other drugs.

Palamar therefore examined how demographics and a lifetime use of various drugs — marijuana use in particular — can predict if a person will become partial to using “harder” and more dangerous drugs, such as powder cocaine, crack, LSD, heroin, amphetamine and ecstasy, also known as “Molly.” Data was obtained from 29,054 high school seniors who took part in the Monitoring the Future annual cross-sectional survey of approximately 130 public and private schools in 48 states between 2007 and 2011.

Palamar found that youths who smoked cigarettes or used more than one “hard” drug were consistently less critical of other drug use. The lifetime use of alcohol had no impact on people’s attitudes. Those who used only marijuana tended to be less judgmental of further using such so-called “socially acceptable” drugs as LSD, amphetamine and ecstasy. They did not approve of cocaine, crack or heroin, however, most likely because of their perceived dangers and addictive qualities.

Unsurprisingly, female high school seniors consistently disapproved of using cocaine, crack, LSD and ecstasy. Compared to their male counterparts, females are generally less likely to use most drugs. Palamar was also not surprised by the finding that religiosity robustly increased attitudes against drug use, as it is a major force in societal values.

Youths from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds with highly educated parents as well as those living in urban areas were much less disapproving of the use of the so-called “less dangerous” drugs. Palamar believes that the higher prevalence of illicit drug use in urban areas may be helping to normalize drug use in cities.

The finding that Black students are less disapproving of powder cocaine, crack and ecstasy is somewhat paradoxical as members of this group generally use such drugs less than White students do. This could, in part, be explained by their strong religious beliefs and the higher rates of arrests and incarceration among Blacks that may serve as a deterrent. The normalization of ecstasy, specifically in rap and hip-hop music, may explain why Black youths are less disapproving of it.

“Public health and policy experts need to ensure that the use of other drugs does not increase in light of the growing prevalence of marijuana use and more lenient policies surrounding it,” Palamar explains. “Although it may be difficult to prevent an adolescent or a young adult from using alcohol, tobacco or marijuana, we need to prevent individuals from becoming users of multiple drugs.”

 

Related articles

• Attitudes toward drug use among high school seniors (medicalnewstoday.com)
• A ‘yes’ to one drug could become ‘yes’ for other drugs (medicalxpress.com)
• Here’s Why Vermont Has the Highest Rate of Illicit Drug Use in America (newageoftruth.wordpress.com)
• Illicit drugs now at cheapest for 20 years (radionz.co.nz)
• Special Report: Decriminalisation of drugs in the UK (voiceofrussia.com)

 

[Reblog]Over half of drug ad claims potentially misleading

From the 30 September 2013 article by Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org

 

“Content Analysis of False and Misleading Claims in Television Advertising for Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs,” is the title of a paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

In the eyes of coders in this analysis, 57% of major claims in TV drug ads were potentially misleading.

But the researchers broke down different shades of truth.  For example:

Minimal Facts

A claim that presented a difference among products, but
exaggerated the importance of the difference, promoting
the difference as important when it is not; for example,
when advertisers use poor-quality clinical evidence to
support a claim, and exaggerate the clinical importance of
the poor-quality evidence.

• “Bayer Quick Release Crystals are ready to work faster than caplets or tablets.” The formulation may dissolve quicker, but it is not taken up by the body any faster, nor will it relievepain faster than other formulations.
• “Nothing works better than Prevacid” implies that Prevacid is superior to other heartburn remedies when, in fact, it is just as good as other heartburn remedies.

Nonfacts

A claim that presented an intangible characteristic, but not
about the product. Often these claims were in the form of
product opinions or lifestyle claims. Opinions say nothing
about the product, but consumers are left to misinterpret the
opinion as an objective product evaluation. Lifestyle claims
associate the product with a target market that the
advertiser believes is likely to buy the product, in the
absence of evidence to support additional benefit to this
subpopulation.

• “Move on up to Aleve,” provides the advertisers baseless opinion or recommendation on the choice of product.

• “AlkaSeltzer is the official cold medicine of the US Ski Team.” Product endorsements like this one are the opinion of a famous or identifiable entity and do not say anything about the functioning of the product.

• “Help bridge the gap between the life you live and the life you want to live [by taking Enbrel].” This claim makes a vague lifestyle association between the product and the life “you want to life.”

• “Levitra works for me. Maybe it can work for you,” provides the opinion of the actor in the advertisement about the functioning of Levitra.

False

A claim that was objectively false by directly contradicting
evidence, or lacking any evidence to support it.

• “Alkaseltzer crystal packs are a taste-free powder.” Inspection of the inactive ingredients from the product label include both flavor and sucrose.

• “The difference between Advil PM and Tylenol PM is a better night’s sleep.” The specificity of this claim implied that specific head-to-head comparative evidence was available. No studies had been published comparing Advil PM (ibuprofen with diphenhydramine) versus Tylenol PM (acetaminophen with diphenhydramine), only studies comparing ibuprofen

The researchers remind us that “consumers may see up to 30 hours of TV drug ads each year while only spending 15 to 20 minutes on average at each visit with their primary care physician.

television (Photo credit: jeevs)

 

Related Resources

 

Anyone can publish information on the Internet. So it is up to the searcher to decide if the information found through search engines (as Google) is reliable or not. Search engines find Web sites but do not evaluate them for content. Sponsored links may or may not contain good information.

 

 

A few universities and government agencies have published great guides on evaluating information.

 

 

Here are a few

 

• The Penn State Medical Center Library has a great guide to evaluate health information on the Internet.

  The tips include

  • Remember, anyone can publish information on the internet!
  • If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
    If the Web site is primarily about selling a product, the information may be worth checking from another source.
  • Look for who is publishing the information and their education, credentials, and if they are connected with a trusted coporation, university or agency.
  • Check to see how current the information is.
  • Check for accuracy. Does the Web site refer to specific studies or organizations?

The Family Caregiver Alliance has a Web page entitled Evaluating Medical Research Findings and Clinical Trials
Topics include

• General Guidelines for Evaluating Medical Research
• Getting Information from the Web
• Talking with your Health Care Provider

Additional Resources

• Consumer’s Guide to Taking Charge of Health Information (Harvard Center for Risk Analysis)
• How to Evaluate Health Information on the Internet (US National Cancer Institute)9iiu9
• Quackwatch (a private corporation operated by Stephen Barrett, MD)

…And a Rumor Control site of Note (in addition to Quackwatch)

 

National Council Against Health Fraud

National Council Against Health Fraud is a nonprofit health agency fousing on health misinformation, fruad, and quackery as public health problems. Links to publications, position papers and more.

 

 

Related articles

• TV Drug Ad Claims Are Often Misleading, Study Finds (huffingtonpost.com)
• Most TV drug ads can be misleading, often exaggerating their benefits, says new study (thescoopblog.dallasnews.com)
• Up to 60 percent of drug ads on TV make false health claims (blacklistednews.com)
• Most Drug Commercials False Or Misleading: Erectile Dysfunction Drugs Deemed ‘Repeat Offenders’ (medicaldaily.com)
• Study Finds Most Drug Commercials Misleading (scientificamerican.com)
• TV drug ads frequently make misleading claims according to study (pbs.org)
• Beware of TV drug ads (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Majority of Drug Ads Found to Be Misleading or False (madinamerica.com)
• Science confirms the obvious: Pharmaceutical ads are misleading (sott.net)

 

[Reblog] Imbalance in reporting on Alzheimer’s PET scan research

From the 4 October 2013 article by Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org

Just two weeks ago, CBS reported on PET scans for Alzheimer’s disease, “New scan may diagnose Alzheimer’s as brain changes occur,” based on a study in the journal Neuron.  (Do they scour this journal all the time?)

Just four days ago, the Washington Post reported on “good news on Alzheimer’s: Better ways to diagnose it.“  Excerpt:

“Now, for example, we no longer have to rely on autopsies to confirm the existence of Alzheimer’s plaques. In a major advance last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a method that uses a radioactive dye, known commercially as Amyvid, to light up amyloid plaques in a PET scan.”

University news releases promote even more Alzheimer’s PET scan research. For example, this UCLA news release: “Early imaging, diagnosis of Alzheimer’s leads to changes in patient care, better outcomes.”

Some journalists love such stories.  PET produces bright, colorful images.  It’s “good news” for Alzheimer’s, as the Washington Post headline stated, right?

Well, I didn’t see that either CBS or the Washington Post – or any other mainstream news organization, for that matter – reported on a paper published online this week by JAMA Internal Medicine – “Amyloid-β Positron Emission Tomography in the Diagnostic Evaluation of Alzheimer DiseaseSummary of Primary Findings and Conclusions.” The researchers reported that they analyzed data from 15 articles reporting on 15 studies focusing on Amyloid-β PET scan imaging. Their summary included this:

“At present, the medical literature provides extremely limited data with which to evaluate the clinical utility of Aβ (amyloid-β) PET. There are reasonable data showing that, when read by well-trained interpreters, Aβ PET is highly accurate in determining whether there is amyloid in the brain. However, the clinical utility of a positive scan result remains uncertain. If tested, approximately one-third of cognitively normal older adults would have a “positive” test result for brain amyloid. Thus a positive Aβ PET result is not diagnostic of AD, nor can the test be used to accurately predict the risk or the timing of progression of mild cognitive impairment.

The clinical utility of a negative Aβ PET result seems greater than the clinical utility of a positive result because the high sensitivity of a negative test result allows AD to be effectively ruled out as the cause of a patient’s cognitive impairment. It remains uncertain, however, if negative test results lead to important changes in subsequent clinical management or whether any such changes would produce net health benefits for patients and families. Even if negative test results would produce net benefits, rigorous evaluations of Aβ PET must consider the overall balance of benefits and harms of both positive and negative test results in broadly representative patient populations. The current literature on Aβ PET imaging for AD is insufficient to provide this level of evidence. Given the limited effectiveness of the targeted treatments for AD that are currently available, demonstrating that Aβ PET leads to changes in clinical impressions and intended management is insufficient. More persuasive evidence that Aβ PET improves patient outcomes is needed.”

An editor’s note in the journal stated:

“Clearly, more data are needed about the role of Aβ PET in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of patients with AD. At present, the evidence tells us that the role of the scans is uncertain in many situations. The test could aid diagnosis and management in some circumstances, but it could also be harmful in other circumstances; for example, if a positive scan result leads to labeling a person as having a dread and incurable disease and that potential diagnosis turns out to be wrong.”

Why wouldn’t this paper and this editorial receive the same kind of attention as the “good news” stories highlighted above?  Don’t journalists see the huge public policy issues at stake here?  It’s difficult to understand. If you’re that committed to reporting on imaging tests for Alzheimer’s that you are scouring the journal Neuron, for example, wouldn’t you consider these articles newsworthy as well?  If not, why not?

————————–

Related articles

• Amyvid Alzheimer´s Testing – To Be Or Not To Be? (brainblogger.com)
• Autophagy, Amyloid, and Alzheimer’s Disease (fightaging.org)
• Amyloid Beta Inhibits Olfactory Bulb Activity and the Ability to Smell (plosone.org)
• Amyloid-β and APP Deficiencies Cause Severe Cerebrovascular Defects: Important Work for an Old Villain (plosone.org)
• No cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but curcumin may help (foodconsumer.org)

Truth or consequences? The negative results of concealing who you really are on the job

 

 

Caption: Clayton R. Critcher is an assistant professor of marketing at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

From the 8 October 2013 EurkAlert

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – Most know that hiding something from others can cause internal angst. New research suggests the consequences can go far beyond emotional strife and that being forced to keep information concealed, such as one’s sexual orientation, disrupts the concealer’s basic skills and abilities, including intellectual acuity, physical strength, and interpersonal grace—skills critical to workplace success.

“With no federal protection for gays and lesbians in the work place, our work suggests that the wisdom of non-discrimination laws should be debated not merely through a moral lens, but with an appreciation for the loss of economic productivity that such vulnerabilities produce,” says Clayton R. Critcher, assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Critcher, a member of the Haas Marketing Group, conducts research on consumer behavior and social psychology, including questions of self and identity.

Critcher’s paper, “The Cost of Keeping it Hidden: Decomposing Concealment Reveals What Makes it Depleting,” forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and co-authored with Melissa J. Ferguson of Cornell University, details multiple negative consequences of concealment. The findings, says Critcher, stem from the difficulty of having to constantly monitor one’s speech for secret-revealing content that needs to be edited out.

The researchers conducted four studies, each of which was a variation on a single paradigm. When participants arrived at the study, they learned they would be taking part in an interview. Following a rigged drawing, all participants learned they were assigned to be an interviewee. Another supposed participant—who, in reality, was an actor hired by the experimenter—was the interviewer.

Some participants were given special instructions about what they could reveal in the interview. In three of the four studies, some participants were told they should make sure not to reveal their sexual orientation while answering the questions. For example, participants were told that in answering questions, instead of saying “I tend to date men who …,” the participants could say, “I tend to date people who ….”

After the interview, participants thought they were moving on to an unrelated study. In actuality, this second part of the experiment was related, offering researchers the opportunity to measure whether participants’ intellectual, physical, or interpersonal skills were degraded by concealment. The studies revealed the variety of negative effects of concealment.

In one study, participants completed a measure of spatial intelligence that was modeled after items on military aptitude tests. Participants randomly assigned to conceal their sexual orientation performed 17% worse than those who went through the interview without instructions to conceal. In another experiment, participants tasked with hiding their sexual orientation exhibited reduced physical stamina, only able to squeeze an exercise handgrip for 20% less time than those in a control condition. Additional studies revealed that concealment led people to show less interpersonal restraint. For example, the participants responded to a “snarky” email from a superior with more anger than politeness.

During another test, participants demonstrated poorer performance on a “Stroop task,” a commonly-used measure of executive cognitive function.

In consequent experiments, participants’ abilities were assessed both before and after the interview. This permitted the experimenters to more directly observe that merely going through an interview does not affect one’s strength of cognitive control, but going through an interview while having to conceal one’s sexual orientation led to significant declines.

In addition, the researchers varied whether questions focused on participants’ personal or dating life, or on topics for which one’s sexual orientation would never be revealed. Concealment caused similarly sharp declines in both cases.

“Environments that explicitly or implicitly encourage people to conceal their sexual orientation—even when employers adopt a ‘Don’t Ask’ policy—may significantly harm workers,” says Critcher, “Establishing a workplace climate that supports diversity may be one of the easiest ways to enhance workplace productivity.”

 

###

 

Watch Clayton Critcher talk about his research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2bSRNjd5Yo&feature=youtu.be

See full paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23796042

 

 

 

‘Mobility shoes’ take a load off for knee osteoarthritis sufferers

In memory of my mother-in-law who had severe osteoarthritis…

From the 8 October 2013 EurekAlert

(CHICAGO) – The results of a new study by bone and joint experts at Rush University Medical Center suggest that patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA) who wear flat, flexible footwear, which allows natural foot mobility and provide sufficient support for the foot, had significant reduction in knee loading—the force placed upon the joint during daily activities.

Findings from the study were published in an issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

The research led by Dr. Najia Shakoor, a rheumatologist at Rush, shows that long term use of the such footwear, called “mobility shoes,” helped OA patients adapt their gait or how they walk, which improved knee loading, even when the mobility shoes were no longer worn.

In previous studies, Shakoor and colleagues from Rush found that walking barefoot as well as with ‘mobility shoes,’ which are designed to mimic barefoot mechanics, was linked to reduced knee loading compared to when walking with regular footwear worn by participants. However, the authors thought the long-term effects of the specialized footwear need further studying.

“There is much interest in biomechanical interventions, such as orthotic inserts, knee braces, and footwear that aim to improve pain and delay OA progression by decreasing impact on joints,” said Shakoor, the principal investigator of the study who is also an associate professor in the department of internal medicine at Rush. “In the present study, we expand understanding of our earlier research by evaluating the impact of the mobility footwear on gait after six months of use.”

More than 27 million Americans over the age of 25 have some form of OA, which causes painful swelling and stiffness in the hand, foot, knee or hip joints. According to existing research, doctor-diagnosed arthritis will swell to 67 million U.S. adults by 2030. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 16% of adults 45 years of age and older are burdened with symptomatic knee OA.

The Rush team recruited 16 participants with knee OA, obtaining a baseline gait with participants walking in their own shoes, mobility shoes and barefoot. Participants wore the mobility shoes for six hours each day for six days per week and patient gait was evaluated at 6, 12 and 24 weeks in all conditions.

Findings suggest that by 24 weeks, participants wearing mobility footwear saw an 18 percent reduction in knee adduction moment (KAM), which is the load on the inner or medial aspect of the knee when walking compared to baseline knee loading in their own footwear. This is where most people develop knee OA.

No significant difference in KAM was found between walking with mobility shoes and barefoot. Compared to baseline, analyses indicate an 11 percent and 10 percent reduction in KAM for OA patients walking in their own shoes and barefoot, respectively, suggesting the mobility shoes may have “re-trained” participant’s gait.

“Patients with OA who use flat, flexible footwear may experience a significant reduction in knee loading with continued use,” said Shakoor. “Our investigation provides evidence that footwear choice may be an important consideration in managing knee OA.

 

###

 

The Rush research team involved in the study includes Roy H. Lidtke, Markus A. Wimmer, Rachel A. Mikolaitis, Kharma C. Foucher, Laura E. Thorp, Louis F. Fogg and Joel A. Block.

Please note: Based on the study results, a patented shoe design called X-Sole Relief Technology in Flex-OA has been developed by Dr. Comfort. The shoe has been available on the market since January 2013.

 

Related articles

• Hope for knee osteoarthritis sufferers offered by ‘mobility shoes’ (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Researchers Report Wearing Certain Shoes Help with Knee Osteoarthritis (counselheal.com)
• ‘Mobility shoes’ take a load off for knee osteoarthritis sufferers (medicalxpress.com)
• Shoe mimics being barefoot with the goal of being pain free (wgntv.com)
• ‘Mobility shoes’ take a load off for knee osteoarthritis sufferers (eurekalert.org)
• Combined diet and exercise beneficial for knee osteoarthritis (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Exercise May Help Knees More Than Glucosamine And Chondroitin (wnyc.org)
• Diet-Exercise Combo for Knee Osteoarthritis Leads to Less Knee Pain, Better Function (medindia.net)
• Losing weight can save your joints from arthritis (express.co.uk)
• Shoe inserts don’t help knee osteoarthritis (douglassreport.com)

 

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia becomes first in nation to disallow use of dietary supplements

From the 8 October 2013 EurekAlert

 

New hospital policies will improve patient safety, education

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) announced today that its Formulary- the list of medications approved for use- will no longer include most dietary supplements. The hospital said the action was being taken because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not routinely review the manufacturing of dietary supplements, and therefore cannot guarantee their safety and effectiveness. The move makes CHOP the first hospital in the United States to discourage patients from using these products without a doctor’s provision as a matter of policy.

“Because vitamins and dietary supplements are essentially unregulated, there is no sound information about adverse side effects, drug interactions, or even standard dosing for the vast majority of them,” said Sarah Erush, PharmD, BCPS, Pharmacy Clinical Manager and a member of the hospital’s Therapeutic Standards Committee. “Administering these medications – particularly to children with serious health complications– is unethical when the risks are unknown, and when there are alternative treatments that have been proven in clinical trials to be safe and effective.”

Dietary supplements are defined as vitamins, minerals, herbs, botanicals, amino acids, enzymes and animal extracts meant to “supplement” the diet and are not intended to replace a healthy diet or to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure diseases. Melatonin, Echinacea, chondroitin sulfate, glucosamine, CoEnzyme Q10, milk thistle, and probiotics are some of the most commonly used supplements.

The hospital’s updated policy acknowledges that there are certain medical conditions that may require supplementation of vitamins or nutrients. To that end, the hospital has determined a very limited and carefully selected list of acceptable products that are proven to be of high quality and safe.

Under the hospital’s updated policy, parents or guardians will be asked upon admission whether the patient is taking any medication or supplements. If so, the attending nurse or physician will review the hospital’s policy discouraging the use of supplements and inform parents or guardians of the potential risks associated with the supplement. Potential risks include contamination, mislabeling, interactions with medications, or potential unforeseen adverse effects.

If, after receiving this information, a parent or guardian insists on continuing to give their child a dietary supplement that is not on the CHOP Formulary, they must sign a hospital waiver stating that they agree to be responsible for providing the product.

“Educating families is one of the most important reasons for implementing this new policy. Most people assume that supplements they buy at the health food store or online are strictly monitored or are safe because they are ‘all natural’,” said Erush. “But supplements are only subject to FDA review if an adverse event is reported, so there are many for which we have no reliable data. We’d much rather treat children with what we know works than provide them with a substance that may at best do nothing, or at worst, cause harm.”

In order to be included in CHOP’s formulary, all products must follow similar guidelines as for FDA-approved medications. If able to meet these criteria, pharmacy will stock and dispense as a formulary medication, avoiding the need for a waiver:

 

• The product must have adequate safety and efficacy data to support use for the requested indication, including data in pediatric patients
• There must be an available formulation with adequate quality assurance data

 

“CHOP has long embraced its responsibility to advance patient safety as the cornerstone to improving children’s health.” said Paul Offit, MD, Chair of the hospital’s Therapeutic Standards Committee. “Patients with chronic diseases use dietary supplements more frequently than the general population and are at greater risk for adverse events and interactions. Better monitoring and regulating the way we distribute these products is one more step we can take to make sure that we’re providing the best possible medical care for our children.”

 

###

 

About The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation’s first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children’s Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program receives the highest amount of National Institutes of Health funding among all U.S. children’s hospitals. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 527-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu.

 

Diet supplement – omega 3 fish oil-based (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

Related articles

• Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Becomes First in Nation to Disallow Use of Dietary Supplements (healthimpactnews.com)
• Philadelphia Children’s Hospital Bans Dietary Supplements (livescience.com)
• Use of Oral Nutritional Supplements in Pediatric Patients Decreases Their Length of Hospital Stay (medindia.net)
• Oral nutritional supplement use in pediatric inpatients decrease hospital stay and costs (eurekalert.org)
• Oral nutritional supplement use in pediatric inpatients decrease hospital stay and costs (federalnutrition.com)
• Hawaii reports dozens of acute non-viral hepatitis cases linked to dietary supplement, OxyElite Pro (theglobaldispatch.com)
• Feds link dietary supplement made in Texas to hepatitis, liver failure cases (kvue.com)
• Dietary supplement industry says “no” to more information for consumers (again)|Jann Bellamy|Science-Based Medicine (sciencebasedmedicine.org)

 

[Repost] Household chaos may be hazardous to a child’s health

Remembering that the television was only on for about an hour weekday evening (after homework was done!), and Saturday mornings for cartoons. Also Sunday evenings.  Still  generally stick to this after all these years. Even without homework.
No angel, could be on the Internet less!!

From the 9 October 2013 EurekAlert article

Study links crowding, noise, lack of routine to worse outcomes

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Kindergarten-age children have poorer health if their home life is marked by disorder, noise and a lack of routine and they have a mother who has a chaotic work life, new research suggests.

The results show the importance of order and routine in helping preschoolers stay healthy and develop to the best of their potential, said Claire Kamp Dush, lead author of the study and assistant professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Children need to have order in their lives,” Kamp Dush said. “When their life is chaotic and not predictable, it can lead to poorer health.”

Kamp Dush said that the study involved mostly low-income families, and the results showed mothers who were more impoverished reported significantly higher levels of chaos.

“I don’t think that the findings would be different in a middle-class sample – chaos is bad for children from any background,” she said.

“But most middle-class families can avoid the same level of chaos that we saw in the most impoverished families. We’re not talking about the chaos of your kids being overinvolved in activities and the parents having to run them from one place to another. This harmful chaos is much more fundamental.”

Kamp Dush conducted the study with Kammi Schmeer, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State, and Miles Taylor, assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University. Their results appear online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Data came from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, and included 3,288 mothers who were interviewed at their homes by a trained interviewer when their child was 3 and again when he or she was 5 years old. Most of the parents were unmarried and low-income.

The researchers used several measures of household chaos: crowding (more than one person per room), TV background noise (TV was on more than 5 hours a day), lack of regular bedtime for the child, and a home rated as noisy, unclean and cluttered by the interviewer.

The study also included a measure of the mother’s work chaos, which included stress caused by the work schedule, difficulty dealing with child care problems during working hours, lack of flexibility to handle family needs and a constantly changing work schedule.

The children’s health was rated by their mother at ages 3 and 5 as excellent, very good, good, fair or poor.

Results showed that higher levels of household chaos and mothers’ work chaos when their children were age 3 were linked to lower ratings of child health at age 5, even after taking into account initial child health and other factors that may have had an impact.

In addition, the researchers were also able to use a statistical technique to determine if the causality may have been reversed: in other words, if poor child health might lead to more household chaos. “It would be easy to see how having a sick child may make your household more chaotic, but that’s not what we found. We did clearly see, however, that a chaotic household at age 3 was linked to poorer health at age 5,” Kamp Dush said.

The most common source of household chaos was television noise, with more than 60 percent of mothers reporting the television was on more than five hours a day. Between 15 and 20 percent of households reported crowding, noise, and unclean and cluttered rooms.

About a third of the mothers had inflexible work schedules and 11 percent worked multiple jobs.

How does household chaos lead to sicker children? Kamp Dush noted that chaos has been linked to stress, and stress has been shown to lead to poorer health. Women with inflexible work schedules may not be able to take their children to the doctor when needed. And a dirty house may increase exposure to toxins and germs.

Kamp Dush emphasized that the findings shouldn’t be used to suggest that the parents are at fault for the chaos in their households.

“We’re not blaming the victims here – there is a larger system involved,” she said.

“These mothers can’t help it that their jobs don’t give them the flexibility to deal with sick kids. They can’t afford a larger house or apartment to deal with overcrowding. With their work schedules, they often don’t have time to keep a clean home and they don’t have the money to spend on organizational systems or cleaning services used by middle-class families to keep their homes in order.”

What these mothers and fathers need most is jobs that allow them to maintain regular schedules and have the flexibility to deal with sick children, Kamp Dush said. Having to maintain two jobs is also detrimental to keeping households free of chaos.

 

###

 

Kamp Dush received support for this study from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

 

 

 

 

Food Allergics Beware: Herbal Products May Contain Surprise Ingredients Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/10/12/food-allergics-beware-herbal-products-may-contain-surprise-ingredients/#ixzz2hge0IfdB

From the 12 October 2013 article at Time- Health and Family

New research for the University of Guelph shows that the majority of herbal products on the market contain ingredients that are not listed on their labels.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, used DNA barcoding technology to assess the components of 44 herbal products from 12 companies. They found that 60% of the products contained plant species that were not listed on the label, and 20% used fillers like rice, soybeans, and wheat which were also not divulged on the bottles.

For instance, products sold as St. John’s wort supplement, which is sometimes used to treat depression, contained Senna alexandrina, which is a plant that spurs laxative symptoms. Other products contained Parthenium hysterophorus (feverfew), which is known to cause swelling and mouth numbness. One ginkgo product contained Juglans nigra (black walnut), which should not be consumed by people with nut allergies — but this warning was not noted on the label.

“It’s common practice in natural products to use fillers such as these, which are mixed with active ingredients. But a consumer has a right to see all of the plant species used in producing a natural product on the list of ingredients,” lead author Steven Newmaster, an integrative biology professor at the Guelph-based Biodiversity Institute of Ontario said in a statement.

 by Taboola

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/10/12/food-allergics-beware-herbal-products-may-contain-surprise-ingredients/#ixzz2hgeN2Srs

 

 

[Reblog] Gloves and Gowns Don’t Stop Spread of All Infections in Hospitals

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Bacteria (Photo credit: NIAID)

 

From the 5 October 2013 post at Time- Health & Family

 

Bacterial infections can imperil the fragile patients at hospitals‘ intensive care units. And a new study reveals an unlikely spreader: the health care workers who treat them. The standard sterile hospital garb typically thought to prevent infections isn’t helping.

 

Physical barriers are the most effective way to block invisible intruders like the bacteria responsible for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) infections, which are among the most common hospital-acquired pathogens. Such strains, which are resistant to most antibiotic treatments, contribute to more than $4 billion in health care costs for treating the skin lesions, respiratory symptoms and sepsis that the bacteria cause.

It’s hardly been clear that requiring all health care workers to put on gowns and gloves before visiting each patient, then discarding and re-robing before visiting the next patient, would help to reduce the spread of such infections in ICUs. The Centers for Disease Control currently recommends that workers suit up with gowns and gloves before caring for patients with known MRSA or VRE infections, but researchers led by Dr. Anthony Harris at the University of Maryland School of Medicine wanted to see how effective universal gowning and gloving would be in lowering the number of new cases of disease in ICUs.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/10/05/gloves-and-gowns-dont-stop-spread-of-all-infections-in-hospitals/#ixzz2hgctzzKb