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This Week In Health: Red Skies Ahead

This Week In Health: Red Skies Ahead

“This Week In Health” offers some highlights from the world of health news and wellness tips that you may have missed this week:

Genetics Experiment Will Be First Chinese Project On Space Station. China has contracted with an American company to aid in their first experiments on the International Space Station. The Houston-based company, NanoRacks, has a $200,000 contract to launch a genetics experiment designed by the Beijing Institute of Technology. Though NASA is prohibited from cooperating with Chinese agencies due to political tensions, there is no law preventing private collaboration and the deal is not expected to meet resistance in a congressional vote.

Watson Can Help You Treat Your Diabetes. In an effort to combat the rising costs of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease, CVS Pharmacy and IBM are teaming up to identify at-risk patients and revolutionize preventive care. IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, will scour the records of CVS’ 70 million members in order to discern red flags and create custom care plans for those who use the company’s health clinics. The care plans will take into account medical history, prescription use, and behavioral patterns, hopefully increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of preventive medicine.

Researchers Successfully Transport Blood By Drone. In a science-fiction moment come to life, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Uganda’s Makerere University found that small quantities of blood can be safely flown by drone, rather than using the traditional driving method. If their findings are further substantiated by other studies, the discovery could make a significant difference in rural areas where supplies must travel longer distances to reach those in need.

Smoking Linked To Hot Flashes. A new study surveying 761 women aged 45-55 has concluded that smoking can greatly increase the number of hot flashes experienced during menopause — even if a woman had quit years prior. After tracking the survey group over a period of seven years, researchers found that women who had never smoked, or quit smoking five or more years earlier, had 45 percent fewer hot flashes than their smoking counterparts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks smoking as one of the top causes of preventable deaths.

Photo: AK Rockefeller via Flickr

Obesity Rivals Smoking And War Among Self-Inflicted Health Risks

Obesity Rivals Smoking And War Among Self-Inflicted Health Risks

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Among the self-inflicted health risks plaguing the world, obesity now rivals smoking and armed conflict as a leading cause of death, a global research group reported Thursday.

The study by the McKinsey Global Institute in London found that more than 2.1 billion people, nearly 30 percent of the worldwide population, are overweight or obese. That is two times the proportion of adults and children who are undernourished.

If the current ascendant trend continues, the report warns, half the world will be too fat by 2030.

Excess weight adds $2 trillion in costs to public health services and it is responsible for at least 5 percent of deaths each year, the researchers reported.

“Obesity isn’t just a health issue, it’s a major economic and business challenge,” institute director Richard Dobbs said in an accompanying statement.

Lost productive potential from premature deaths and limited mobility consumes about 2.8 percent of global gross domestic product, Dobbs said.

Obesity now presents one of the top three social burdens generated by human beings, according to a chart compiled from the study findings. It is only narrowly less costly to humankind than smoking and the combined losses from armed violence, war and terrorism, which each deprive society of $2.1 trillion a year, the report notes.

Tackling the obesity epidemic is difficult, though, the researchers acknowledged.

“Obesity is a complex, systemic issue with no single or simple solution,” the report concludes. “The global discord surrounding how to move forward underscores the need for integrated assessments of potential solutions.”

It recounted 74 “interventions” examined across the globe — moves such as educational programs encouraging portion control, weight-loss surgery and supplements and government restrictions on the availability of high-calorie foods and beverages.

But getting the desired results is likely to require coordination and commitment by government, employers, educators, retailers, food processors and restaurants, as well as a combination of “top-down corporate and government interventions and bottom-up community-based ones,” the report says.

AFP Photo/Jean-Sebastien Evrard

E-Cigarettes Should Be Banned For Minors: U.S. Heart Association

E-Cigarettes Should Be Banned For Minors: U.S. Heart Association

Washington (AFP) — E-cigarettes should be subject to the same regulations as cigarettes and should not be sold to minors, the American Heart Association (AHA) said in new policy guidelines out Monday.

The use of e-cigarettes, which are electrical devices that heat flavored nicotine liquid into a vapor that is inhaled, much like traditional cigarettes but without the smoke, has been rising rapidly among youths in recent years, raising concerns about the potential for addiction risks and health damage.

E-cigarettes are currently unregulated, meaning they can be sold to youths and are openly advertised, unlike cigarette-makers which must follow strict rules about where and how their products are marketed.

The AHA guidelines go a step further than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s April proposal, which set out a new series of regulations on e-cigarettes that included banning their sale to minors, but did not restrict advertising or online sales of the candy and fruit-flavored liquids that some say are targeted at young people. A public comment period on the FDA’s proposal ended earlier this month, and the new rules have not yet been implemented.

“Recent studies raise concerns that e-cigarettes may be a gateway to traditional tobacco products for the nation’s youth, and could renormalize smoking in our society,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of AHA.

“These disturbing developments have helped convince the association that e-cigarettes need to be strongly regulated, thoroughly researched and closely monitored.”

The guidelines, published in the journal Circulation, recommend that since e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they “should be subject to all laws that apply to these products.”

The AHA “also calls for strong new regulations to prevent access, sales and marketing of e-cigarettes to youth, and for more research into the product’s health impact.”

The sales of e-cigarettes have risen sharply since they were introduced to the market in 2007, according to health officials.

The number of high school students who tried e-cigarettes nearly doubled, from 4.7 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2012, and sales of e-cigarettes could top $2 billion this year, according to industry estimates.

According to Georgetown University pulmonologist Nathan Cobb, the AHA “is right in calling for this minimal set of regulations to be implemented no later than the end of the year.”

He also said more aggressive regulations should follow.

“They can and should be part of a concerted regulatory push to drive towards a tobacco ‘end game,’ which increases the price of combusted tobacco cigarettes while guaranteeing the safety and consistency of e-cigarettes.”

Cobb added that the FDA’s “bare bones regulations” fall short because they subject manufacturers to “significantly less oversight and safety requirements than pet food manufacturers, and are truly a minimum.”

AFP Photo/Joe Raedle

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Smoking May Increase Suicide Risk, Study Says

Smoking May Increase Suicide Risk, Study Says

By Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — It’s well-known that cigarettes are bad for your health, but does smoking make you more likely to kill yourself too?
In a paper published this week in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, authors argued that smoking and suicide may be more closely related than previously thought.

The researchers analyzed suicide rates in states that aggressively implemented anti-smoking policies from 1990 to 2004 and compared them to suicide rates in states that had more relaxed policies.

Those states that imposed cigarette excise taxes and smoke-free air regulations had lower adjusted suicide rates than did states with fewer anti-smoking initiatives, authors wrote.

“There does seem to be a substantial reduction in the risk for suicide after these policies are implemented,” said lead study author Richard Grucza, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“For every dollar in excise taxes there was actually a 10 percent decrease in the relative risk for suicide,” Grucza told Washington University BioMed Radio. “The smoke-free air policies were also very strongly associated with reduced suicide risk.”

Study authors said that states with lower taxes on cigarettes and more lax policies on public smoking had suicide rates that were up to 6 percent greater than the national average.

This is not the first study to document a correlation between cigarette smoking and suicide, but it is among the first to suggest smoking and nicotine may be specific factors.

Up until now, researchers believed smoking coincided with suicide because people with psychiatric problems or substance abuse problems were more likely to smoke as well as to commit suicide.

“Markedly elevated rates of smoking are found among people with anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug dependence, schizophrenia, and other diagnoses, in both clinical and general studies,” authors wrote. “However, it is also possible that smoking is not merely a marker for psychiatric disorders, but rather directly increases the risk for such disorders, which in turn increases the risk for suicide.”

Grucza said that the imposition of anti-smoking rules presented the researchers with a naturally occurring experiment. However, the authors did note that there were limitations on their research.

In particular, they said that since they considered state-imposed anti-smoking efforts only, their research would not account for local-level policies aimed at smoking behavior.

“While further studies may be required to establish a compelling weight of evidence, this study provides strong epidemiological support in its favor of the proposition that smoking is a casual risk factor for suicide,” authors wrote.

Photo: DucDigital via Flickr

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