The ironic (and surprising) effects of weight stigma

The ironic (and surprising) effects of weight stigma.

From the 8 January 2014 Science Daily article

If you’re one of the millions of people who count losing weight among their top New Year’s resolutions, you might want to pay careful attention to some new findings by UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Brenda Major.

It turns out that the weight-stigmatizing messages presented by the media — the ones that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent and contributing to rising health care costs — may be tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Designed to encourage weight loss, they may actually have the opposite effect.

According to Major’s research, which appears in the current online issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, when women who perceive themselves as overweight are exposed to weight-stigmatizing news articles, they are less able to control their eating afterward than are women who don’t perceive themselves that way.

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Read the entire article here

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[News article] Heart attacks hit poor hardest

Heart attacks hit poor hardest.

From the 8 January 2014 ScienceDaily article

As people get older, their bodies wear down and become less resilient. In old age, it’s common for people to become “clinically frail,” and this “frailty syndrome” is emerging in the field of public health as a powerful predictor of healthcare use and death.

p. 50 of The 2012 National Healthcare Disparities Report
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/nhdr12/2012nhdr.pdf

Now researchers Vicki Myers and Prof. Yariv Gerber of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the School of Public Health at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and colleagues have found that poor people are more than twice as likely as the wealthy to become frail after a heart attack. The findings, published in the International Journal of Cardiology, could help doctors and policymakers improve post-heart-attack care for the poor.

“By defining frailty, which combines many areas of medicine, we can predict which people are at the highest risk after a heart attack,” said Ms. Myers. “And we found a strong connection between frailty and socioeconomic status.”

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Read entire article here

Related Resource

National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR)

• 2012 Web Version | PDF Version [  – .8.74 MB] | State Snapshots
   

  For the tenth year in a row, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has produced the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) and theNational Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR). These reports measure trends in effectiveness of care, patient safety, timeliness of care, patient centeredness, and efficiency of care.
  New this year are chapters on care coordination, and health system infrastructure. The reports present, in chart form, the latest available findings on quality of and access to health care.
  The National Healthcare Quality Report tracks the health care system through quality measures, such as the percentage of heart attack patients who received recommended care when they reached the hospital or the percentage of children who received recommended vaccinations.
  The National Healthcare Disparities Report summarizes health care quality and access among various racial, ethnic, and income groups and other priority populations, such as residents of rural areas and people with disabilities.

   

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[News article] Amount, types of fat we eat affect health, risk of disease with an AND Opinion Piece

Amount, types of fat we eat affect health, risk of disease.

Healthy adults should consume between 20 percent and 35 percent of their calories from dietary fat, increase their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, and limit their intake of saturated and trans fats, according to an updated position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics**.

Read the entire article here

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**An aside about corporate sponsorship at the academy. The Current corporate sponsors include companies which make “junk” food in addition to healthier products.
A recent non mainstream article questions how the academy can not be influenced  by these corporations, including their advice to the public.
The academy does publish Guidelines for Corporate Relations Sponsors  which include

• Fit with Academy strategic goals
• Scientific accuracy
• Conformance with Academy positions, policies and philosophies
• Academy editorial control of all content in materials bearing the Academy name
• Clear separation of Academy messages and content from brand information or promotion
• No endorsement of any particular brand or company product
• The inclusion of relevant facts and important information where their omission would present an unbalanced view of a controversial issue in which the sponsor has a stake
• Full funding by the sponsor of all direct and indirect costs associated with the project

Ultimately, it is up to the individual to accept or not accept findings with the academy.
I’ve gathered some great online sites on how to evaluate health information. 

Have to say that I have found some of the information at the academy very useful.
For example, their peer reviewed Consumer and Lifestyle App Reviews in the areas of weight management, diabetes, and gluten free products. But even with the apps, it is good to check on who created them and is sponsoring them.

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Related articles – Several address controversial topics. Decided to include them for informational purposes.

• Top 20 Healthy Nutritional Tips
• The Nutrition Monopoly Is Beginning to Crumble
• Nutrition Advocacy Group Makes Headway in Protecting Your Freedom of Choice
• Why You Should Be Nuts…About Nuts
• Ask a Dietitian: Is eating like a caveman good for your health?

 

[News article] Why is type 2 diabetes an increasing problem?

Why is type 2 diabetes an increasing problem?.

From the 14th January 2014 ScienceDaily article

Contrary to a common belief, researchers have shown that genetic regions associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes were unlikely to have been beneficial to people at stages through human evolution.

Type 2 diabetes is responsible for more than three million deaths each year and this number is increasing steadily. The harmful genetic variants associated with this common disease have not yet been eliminated by natural selection.

To try to explain why this is, geneticists have previously hypothesized that during times of ‘feast or famine’ throughout human evolution, people who had advantageous or ‘thrifty’ genes processed food more efficiently. But in the modern developed world with too much food, these same people would be more susceptible to type 2 diabetes.

“This thrifty gene theory is an attractive hypothesis to explain why natural selection hasn’t protected us against these harmful variants,” says Dr. Yali Xue, lead author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “But we find little or no evidence to corroborate this theory.”

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Read the entire article here

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Newly published survey shows drug shortages still have major impact on patient care

Newly published survey shows drug shortages still have major impact on patient care.

According to newly published results from a survey of pharmacy directors, drug shortages remain a serious problem for patient safety. Nearly half of the responding directors reported adverse events at their facilities due to drug shortages, including patient deaths.

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In 2009, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists put drug shortage management guidelines in place for health care providers to try and minimize negative impacts patient care, and in 2011, following an Executive Order from President Barak Obama on reducing drug shortages, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) increased its efforts to prevent and resolve drugs shortages. While the FDA recently reported that the number of new shortages in 2012 was down to 117, from 251 in 2011, drug shortages are still having a major impact on patient care.

A common practice to help mitigate the problems caused by a drug shortage is to use an alternative medication when possible. Even when alternate medication can be used, there can be many unintended consequences and additional side effects. In general, drug shortages have been known to cause, or contribute to a variety of issues, which were also represented in the newly published survey responses including:

• Medication errors (such as wrong dose, wrong drug, wrong frequency),
• Increased institutional costs,
• Cancelled care, and
• Delayed treatment.

In addition to the more well-known impacts, the new JMCParticle revealed that nearly 10 percent of the reported adverse patient outcomes were increased readmissions due to drug shortage related treatment failures.

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Read the entire article here

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[Repost] School drug tests don’t work, but ‘positive climate’ might

School drug tests don’t work, but ‘positive climate’ might.

From the 14th January Science Daily article

School drug testing does not deter teenagers from smoking marijuana, but creating a “positive school climate” just might, according to research reported in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

An estimated 20 percent of U.S. high schools have drug testing; some target students suspected of abusing drugs, but often schools randomly test students who are going out for sports or clubs. The policies are controversial, partly because there is little evidence they work. And in the new study, researchers found no effects on high schoolers’ drug experimentation.

Of 361 students interviewed, one third said their school had a drug testing policy. Over the next year, those kids were no less likely than other students to try marijuana, cigarettes or alcohol.

“Even though drug testing sounds good, based on the science, it’s not working,” said Daniel Romer, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center in Philadelphia.

At best, Romer said, the policies might convince kids to lay off the drug their school is testing for — which is most commonly marijuana. But even if that’s true, Romer added, students in school sports and clubs are actually not the ones at greatest risk of developing drug problems. “So as a prevention effort,” Romer said, “school drug testing is kind of wrong-headed.”

So what does work? In this study, there was evidence that a positive school climate might help.

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Read entire article here

Study: Providing dental insurance not enough to induce americans to seek care

Study: Providing dental insurance not enough to induce americans to seek care.

 

English: ADA/Dental Health on US postage stamp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Providing people with dental insurance does not necessarily mean that they will use it and seek dental care, according to a new study from the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, published online in the American Journal of Public Health. The research suggests that outreach and education are needed to ensure that people value their dental health and use their coverage to seek appropriate dental care. The study has particular value in this era of health reform, and the researchers hope that policymakers will use the findings in designing future programs and initiatives, according to first author Richard J. Manski, DDS, MBA, PhD, professor and chief of Dental Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry.

 

Read entire article here

 

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Does taking multiple medicines increase risk of being admitted to hospital? Yes and no

Does taking multiple medicines increase risk of being admitted to hospital? Yes and no.

From the 14 January 2014 article

Patients with a single illness who take many drugs have an increased risk of being admitted to hospital, but for patients with multiple conditions, taking many medicines is now associated with a near-normal risk of admission. This is the key finding of work published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Doctors call the situation where people take many drugs ‘polypharmacy’, a state of affairs that is becoming increasingly common in part because we have more elderly people and also a rising number of people are being diagnosed with multiple health conditions.

Dr Payne says that previous studies have missed the different effect that polypharmacy has in different people because they used overly simplistic approaches when looking at the effect of taking many drugs at once. He points out that their new work demonstrates the need for more sophisticated and nuanced approaches when measuring the impact of polypharmacy in future clinical research.

Medicine drugs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Dr Payne says that previous studies have missed the different effect that polypharmacy has in different people because they used overly simplistic approaches when looking at the effect of taking many drugs at once. He points out that their new work demonstrates the need for more sophisticated and nuanced approaches when measuring the impact of polypharmacy in future clinical research.

Read the entire article here