What You Need To Know News

Almost 200 children are being diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases every month, raising fears about a generation of promiscuous young people who are failing to heed advice on safe sex.

Ministers pledged in 2004 to spend £50 million on sexual health education, much of it focused on young people. However, the rate of infection has remained steady and was revealed in figures for diagnoses on the under-16s in England.

They were placed in the Commons Library this week after a question from Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, and show that from 2002 to 2006, 11,256 under-16s were diagnosed with gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis, herpes and genital warts.

In 2006, there were 2,282 diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections, a slight rise from 2,148 in 2002.

Chlamydia cases have risen from 1,115 a year to 1,327. Over the past five years, a total of 6,495 children have been diagnosed with the disease, which can cause infertility in later life.
It has no symptoms in either men or women, so often remains undetected.

Genital warts are up from 552 to 621, with 2,845 cases. Cases of gonorrhoea among children have fallen, from 338 to 190, with a total of 1,196 diagnoses.

Last month, The Daily Telegraph reported figures showing that the number of adults diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases had risen by a quarter in just five years.

The Department of Health admits that rates of most sexually transmitted infections have increased in recent years.

It said the rate of infection could be attributed to factors including increased levels of testing and screening, improved sensitivity of diagnostic tests and changes in sexual behaviour.

In November 2006, the Government launched the “Condom Essential Wear” campaign, which it says is targeted at the hardest to reach young people who are at most risk of contracting an STI.

Approximately £7.3 million was spent on the campaign in 2006/07, on a combination of TV, cinema, radio, press and digital advertising and the creation of two websites.
Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1583661/More-children-diagnosed-with-sex-infections.html

If you’re an athlete or fitness enthusiast who suffers a strained muscle, sprained ankle or foot injury, you don’t necessarily have to stop exercising.

“Exercise can definitely be beneficial for a person dealing with an injury. Depending on its type, the injured area should be moved and not left in place for a long period of time,” Colleen Greene, wellness coordinator with MFit, the University of Michigan Health System’s health promotion division, said in a prepared statement.
“Some people think they should just rest and not move at all with an injury. Doing that can actually be worse because — depending on the amount of time one does not move the appendage — the muscle might begin to atrophy,” Greene said.

If you suffer an injury, the general rule of thumb for initial treatment is Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation (RICE). Once you’ve done that, consult a doctor as soon as possible. If the injury is severe enough, you may be referred to a physical therapist or specialist trainer. They’ll help guide your recovery and offer tips on how to maintain strength while you heal.

The goal is to maintain strength, not to gain it, while you recover, said Greene, who added that you should pay attention to pain as you try different workouts.
“Pain is always the indicator; discomfort is OK, but pain tells you when you should stop what you are doing and do something else. You always want to keep in mind that you should be doing something that doesn’t re-injure or further injure yourself,” she said.

It’s best to avoid injury in the first place, and there are preventive measures you can take to avoid pulling or straining a muscle: Warm up for five to 10 minutes; cool down at the end of your workout; and stretch.

“We find that as people age, they can actually pull muscles by doing everyday things such as bending over to grab a bag of groceries or leaning over to put something on a shelf,” Greene said. “So the preventative measures that should be taken to avoid pulling or tearing a muscle with exercise are also measures that should be taken to avoid tearing or pulling a muscle in everyday life, not just on a basketball court.”
Source: http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/080423/exercise-plays-role-in-recovery-from-sports-injuries.htm

For the first time researchers are beginning to understand exactly how various forms of exercise impact the heart. Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators, in collaboration with the Harvard University Health Services, have found that 90 days of vigorous athletic training produces significant changes in cardiac structure and function and that the type of change varies with the type of exercise performed.

“Most of what we know about cardiac changes in athletes and other physically active people comes from ’snapshots,’ taken at one specific point in time. What we did in this first-of-a-kind study was to follow athletes over several months to determine how the training process actually causes change to occur,” says Aaron Baggish, MD, a fellow in the MGH Cardiology Division and lead author of the study.

To investigate how exercise affects the heart over time, the MGH researchers enrolled two groups of Harvard University student athletes at the beginning of the fall 2006 semester. One group was comprised of endurance athletes — 20 male and 20 female rowers — and the other, strength athletes — 35 male football players. Student athletes were studied while participating their normal team training, with emphasis on how the heart adapts to a typical season of competitive athletics.

Echocardiography studies — ultrasound examination of the heart’s structure and function — were taken at the beginning and end of the 90-day study period. Participants followed the normal training regimens developed by their coaches and trainers, and weekly training activity was recorded. Endurance training included one- to three-hour sessions of on-water practice or use of indoor rowing equipment. The strength athletes took part in skill-focused drills, exercises designed to improve muscle strength and reaction time, and supervised weight training. Participants also were questioned confidentially about the use of steroids, and any who reported such use were excluded from the study.

At the end of the 90-day study period, both groups had significant overall increases in the size of their hearts. For endurance athletes, the left and right ventricles — the chambers that send blood into the aorta and to the lungs, respectively — expanded. In contrast, the heart muscle of the strength athletes tended to thicken, a phenomenon that appeared to be confined to the left ventricle. The most significant functional differences related to the relaxation of the heart muscle between beats — which increased in the endurance athletes but decreased in strength athletes, while still remaining within normal ranges.

“We were quite surprised by both the magnitude of changes over a relatively short period and by how great the differences were between the two groups of athletes,” Baggish says. “The functional differences raise questions about the potential impact of long-term training, which should be followed up in future studies.”

While this study looks at young athletes with healthy hearts, the information it provides may someday benefit heart disease patients. “The take-home message is that, just as not all heart disease is equal, not all exercise prescriptions are equal,” Baggish explains. “This should start us thinking about whether we should tailor the type of exercise patients should do to their specific type of heart disease. The concept will need to be studied in heart disease patients before we can make any definitive recommendations.”

Their study appears in the April Journal of Applied Physiology. Baggish and senior author Malissa J. Wood, MD, of MGH Cardiology note that collaboration with the Harvard University Medical Services, led by Francis Wang, MD, was instrumental in the success of this study. Additional co-authors of the report are Rory Weiner, MD, Jason Elinoff, Francois Tournoux, Michael Picard, MD, and Adolph Hutter, MD, MGH Cardiology; and Arthur Boland, MD, Harvard University Health Services.

source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080422103857.htm

FEW numbers tell a happier story than those that measure life expectancy. An American born in 1900 could expect to live 47 years. Thanks to colossal improvements in sanitation and medicine, that figure is now 75 for men and 80 for women. And the poorest Americans have gained the most: blacks, for example, live more than twice as long now as they did a century ago.

So it is both alarming and surprising when life expectancy falls, even for a small part of the population. Yet that is what some researchers at Harvard have found. They looked at death rates by county, having corrected for migration and merged sparsely populated ones so that America’s 3,141 counties became 2,068 “county units”.

For most Americans, life expectancy continues merrily to rise. But between 1983 and 1999, it fell significantly (by about a year) for women in 180 county units, and stagnated in another 783. Men fared less poorly: their life expectancy fell significantly in only 11 county units, and stagnated in another 48.

Put differently, life expectancy appears to have either stagnated or fallen slightly for some 4% of American men and 19% of women. The main culprits are diseases linked to smoking or obesity, such as lung cancer and diabetes. The crucial question is whether this represents a blip or the start of a trend.

Majid Ezzati, one of the study’s authors, says it is too soon to say. An optimist would point out that women took up smoking later than men. It was not until after the second world war that they started puffing at anything like the male rate. The bulge of poor women now dying of lung cancer may be a hangover from the end of the taboo on female smoking. But both sexes have quit in droves since the 1970s, so the death toll may fall in the future.

A pessimist would reply that the other big killer, obesity, keeps spreading, especially among the poor. “We’ve been saying for ages that it must have peaked, but it keeps going up,” says Dr Ezzati. Two decades ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15%. Now, 22 have passed the 25% mark. The counties where life expectancy has fallen are nearly all in the South or Appalachia, where huge deep-fried portions are the norm and waistlines are among America’s widest. Neither are getting any smaller.

Source: http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11089916

Ladies, no matter how much you don’t like it, your eggs age as you do and that makes it harder to get pregnant.

The older a woman becomes, the more brittle and easily damaged her eggs get. At the same time, the egg’s exterior becomes less pliable and harder to penetrate by sperm swimming up her reproductive tract, Beltsos said.

Also, the machinery inside the egg isn’t as “well oiled” and doesn’t function as well, meaning the egg has less chance of developing properly, Beltsos noted.

From age 32 on, those effects begin to show up and the quality of women’s eggs begins to deteriorate. By the early 40s, most women have run out of “good” or really viable eggs.

What about those 40-something Hollywood beauties cuddling their newborns in the magazines at the checkout counter in your supermarket?

It’s all but certain they used eggs from donors—young donors—to become pregnant, fertility experts suggest.

Consider these numbers, reported by Dr. Kevin Lederer, president of Fertility Centers of Illinois.

Until age 34, women have a 20 percent chance of conceiving in a given month and 20 percent of those pregnancies will end in a miscarriage.

After 35, a woman’s likelihood of conceiving in a given month drops to 10 percent and her miscarriage risk goes up to 30 percent.

After 40, she has a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant and a 40 percent chance of having a miscarriage. After 42, “99 percent of fertility is over,” Lederer said.

The message is clear: Wait till your late 30s to have a baby and you could have problems. Wait till your 40s and most of the time you’ll be out of luck unless you turn to an egg donor.

But demographic trends reported by the National Center for Vital Statistics go in the opposite direction. They show a declining birth rate for women in their 20s, a 20 percent increase for women 30 to 34, a 40 percent increase for 35 to 39-year-olds, a 60 percent jump for the 40-to-44 set and, are you ready, a 150 percent rise for women 45 to 49.

(That last increase undoubtedly looks large because the number of moms in this age group is extremely low.)

The trend is good news for fertility centers – lots of women are going to need help! — but bad news for women of a certain age who were counting on having their own children. And yes, as you age, the chance that in vitro fertilization will be successful diminishes too.

You can fight it, but the fact remains – biology rules.
Source: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/triage/2008/04/your-biological.html