What You Need To Know News

Diabetic patients who join a short-term weight management program can maintain the resultant weight loss on a long term basis and that to on their own, reveals a new study.

The study by researchers from the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston showed that diabetic patients, who enrolled in the Weight Achievement and Intensive Treatment (Why WAIT) program, successfully lost on average 24.6 pounds or 10.3 percent of their initial body weight during the 12-week program.

And after the one-year of follow-up period, the average weight loss was 18.2 pounds or 7.6 percent of initial body weight.

People have been waiting to see a longer term result of this novel program. Most people think that positive results of clinical trials around weight reduction in people with diabetes cannot be replicated in the real world and cannot give similar long-term results, said Osama Hamdy, M.D., Ph.D., director of the clinical obesity program at Joslin and the studys lead investigator.

This is going to change the way we treat diabetes and encourage us to move toward weight-based diabetes management rather than adding more medications.

The Why WAIT is a 12-week multidisciplinary diabetes weight management program designed for clinical practice and is mostly covered by insurance.

In the study, 85 participants were followed during the 12-week program and for a year afterwards when they managed their weight on their own.

The results indicated that 55 percent of participants continuously lost weight throughout the follow-up period and managed excellent diabetes and blood pressure control on less medications. Also, Hamdy said that patients saved average 561 dollars per year on diabetes medications alone.

The Why WAIT program included a change in diabetes medications to enhance weight reduction, structured dietary intervention with fewer than 40 percent of daily calories from carbohydrates and 30 percent of calories from protein and meal replacement drinks, an exercise program with an emphasis on strength training and weekly educational and support sessions.
Source: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/short-term-weight-loss-program-helps-diabetics-keep-off-the-pounds-long-term_10058063.html

What is the connection?

When you are subjected to stresses, whether they are mental stresses such as a phobia or environmental such as extreme heat, your brain sends signals throughout your body to prepare it to face whatever survival challenges that the stress may pose. In a way, it is as if your body is preparing for war. It knows that there is a threat, because you are feeling stressed. Therefore, the mind sets up its defences in order to protect its host — the body.

In cases of extreme stress, this defensive posture may include the suppression of menses. Pregnancy can be difficult enough in peaceful times, but in periods of extreme stress, it can be hazardous to both the mother and baby. By suppressing menses, the body is protecting itself from the possibly debilitating condition of pregnancy. Once the stress is removed, the menses will return.

How does stress cause infertility?

Stress affects the hypothalamus, a specific area in the brain. The hypothalamus secretes a variety of hormones that travel through the blood to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is also called the hypophysis. Stress can interfere with the hormone levels, which can result in a variety of symptoms ranging from a lack of desire for sex to the failure of the ovary to release its egg in the normal manner.

The hormones that control ovulation are:

Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH)
Estrogen (E)
Luteinizing Hormone (LH)
Progesterone (P)

The hypothalamus creates hormones that are sent to the pituitary gland, which causes it to release the FSH and LH hormones. Thereafter, for example, the LH hormone would stimulate the ovaries to produce the estrogen hormone. If even one of these hormones is out of step with the others, ovulation can be impeded.

How do I reduce the stress in my life?

Stress can build upon itself. For example, you feel stressed because you want to become pregnant. Every month when you learn you’re not pregnant, you become more stressed. The increased stress further decreases your chance of conception. You have to break this self-fueling cycle.

Stress management: Many hospitals and community centres offer stress management classes. These classes will teach you techniques to help you deal with a stressful situation and to minimize stress in your daily life.

Counselling: It may seem strange to visit a psychologist to help you with an infertility problem, but you may find that it is just the thing to help you conceive. A psychologist or counsellor will help you to understand why you feel stressed. They can also be very helpful if the stress has advanced to the stage that it is causing you to feel depressed.

Relaxation techniques: Yoga, meditation and massage are all useful techniques to help you relax.

Healthy diet: The healthier you are, the better able your brain will be to cope with stress.

Education: Knowledge is power. The more you know about your condition, its causes and treatments, the less anxiety you will have about it.

Is stress sex biased?

Stress effects both men and women equally. Just as extreme stress may impede ovulation, some studies have shown that extreme stress may reduce sperm production. Infertility is stressful to both parties involved. Combined with the everyday stress of life and you may find that you are both so much on the edge that you are arguing over the silliest things.
Source: http://www.canada.com/topics/lifestyle/parenting/story.html?id=3de94294-7465-4cfe-90fa-b0dec5d7a34a

According to a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, while treating obesity is often associated with an increased risk of osteoporosis, high-protein diets can hold bone loss at bay.

University of Illinois researchers say high-protein diets obtaining 30 percent of the daily calories from protein with an emphasize on lean meats and low-fat dairy products as protein and calcium sources, helps weight loss while maintaining bone density.

Findings showed that the combination of dietary protein, dairy calcium and additional vitamin D fortifying dairy products improve intestinal absorption of calcium and thus protect against bone loss.

Previous studies had noted that protein-rich weight-loss diets preserve muscle mass, help lower blood sugar and lipids, and improve body composition by targeting abdominal fat.

In the high protein diet in which 30 percent of the daily calories are obtained from the proteins, high carbohydrate foods are substituted with low-fat milk, cheese and yogurt. In this diet, individuals consume five servings of vegetables and two to three servings of fruit daily.
Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=59237&sectionid=3510210

Adult women who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who were not breast-fed, unless they were first-born, study findings suggest.

“As a general group, women who reported they had been breast-fed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk,” Hazel B. Nichols, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

“However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women,” said Nichols, of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.

A woman’s age at childbirth helps predict the levels of environmental contaminants in her breast milk, and studies have suggested a possible link between increased breast cancer risk and the accumulation of these contaminants, Nichols and colleagues note in the medical journal Epidemiology.

To analyze whether an adult woman’s birth order, mother’s age at the time of her birth, and whether or not she was breast-fed alters her risk for breast cancer, the investigators interviewed 2,016 women, aged 20 to 69 years, with breast cancer, and 1,960 women of similar age without breast cancer.

As noted, women breast-fed during infancy generally had reduced breast cancer risk.

However, in analyses restricted to breast-fed women, those with 3 or more older siblings had a lesser risk for breast cancer than first born women, the researchers found. But breast-fed women showed no altered breast cancer risk according to their mothers’ age at childbirth.

Among women who were not breast-fed, reduced adult breast cancer risk was linked with their mothers’ older age at childbirth, but the investigators identified no association between breast cancer risk and birth order in this group.
While the current results hint that breast cancer risk may differ according to whether or not women were breast-fed during infancy, additional studies are needed to determine if these associations vary with duration of breast-feeding or according to measured levels of environmental contaminants present in breast milk, Nichols said.

Source:  http://uk.reuters.com/article/healthNewsMolt/idUKKEN96096220080509?pageNumber=2

Being obese can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by as much as 80 per cent, according to a study. But it’s not just weight gain that poses a risk. People who are underweight also have an elevated risk of dementia, unlike people who are normal weight or overweight.

US researchers carried out a detailed review of 10 international studies published since 1995, covering just over 37,000 people, including 2,534 with various forms of dementia. Subjects were aged between 40 and 80 years when the studies started, with follow-up periods ranging from three to 36 years.

The review, which included studies from the USA, France, Finland, Sweden and Japan, also included a sophisticated meta-analysis of seven of the studies, published between 2003 and 2007 with a follow-up period of at least five years.

All kinds of dementia were included, with specific reference to Alzheimer’s Disease and to vascular dementia - where areas of the brain stop functioning because the blood vessels that supply them are damaged by conditions such as high blood pressure or heart disease.

“Our meta-analysis showed that obesity increased the relative risk of dementia, for both sexes, by an average of 42 per cent when compared with normal weight” says Dr Youfa Wang, Associate Professor of International Health and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore.

“And being underweight increased the risk by 36 per cent.

“But when we looked specifically at Alzheimer’s Disease, the increased risk posed by obesity was 80 per cent. The increased risk for people with vascular dementia was 73 per cent.

“The risks were greater in studies where sufferers developed Alzheimer’s Disease or vascular dementia before the age of 60 or in studies with follow-up periods of more than 10 years.

“We also found that obesity was more likely to be a risk factor for women when it came to developing Alzheimer’s Disease and for men when it came to vascular dementia.”

The authors estimate that 12 per cent of the dementia risk in the study population could be attributed to obesity, with this rising to just over 21 per cent in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease.

It’s estimated that up to 10 per cent of people aged 65 or more suffer from some form of dementia and two-thirds of those have Alzheimer’s Disease.

“There has been controversy about the links between obesity and dementia for a number of years, but previous findings have been mixed and inconclusive” says Dr Wang.

“The advantage of carrying out a meta-analysis is that it provides researchers with access to a large number of study subjects and it is possible to iron out the inconsistencies and come to overarching conclusions.

“Our detailed analysis clearly shows a U-shaped relationship between weight and dementia, with people who are obese or underweight facing a greater risk.

“We believe that our results show that reducing the prevalence of obesity is a promising strategy for preventing the progression of normal ageing into Alzheimer’s Disease.
Source: http://www.news-medical.net/?id=38144

A group of middle managers gathers in central London for a half-day workshop on stress. Merren Barber, an occupational health physiotherapist, delivers a stark warning: managers who put too much pressure on their workers can cause serious health problems.

“Stress isn’t an illness but there’s quite a bit of evidence that it increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease and mental health problems. So people potentially can become ill because of chronic stress,” Barber tells the group.

Is this really true?

Stress management courses are now a staple of corporate life and the claim often made that there is a link between stress and ill health has become the received wisdom.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the government body in charge of protecting people’s health at work, has even made giving workers more control over their workload a legal obligation.

According to employment lawyer Gordon Turner, the HSE standards on stress are so rigorous that many employers fear details of their working practices becoming public. “It’s so easy to slip up. If an employee takes a grievance as far as an employment tribunal, companies often settle rather than risk a public hearing that might attract the attention of the HSE.”

Both the HSE and stress management trainers are influenced by a famous survey of the health of British civil servants known as the Whitehall II study. Led by Prof Sir Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London, Whitehall II has tracked the lives of thousands of civil servants for more than 20 years in an attempt to assess the effect of job status on health.

According to Professor Marmot, it is not stress per se that has an adverse effect on health and life expectancy. Rather it is working in a job where there are high demands accompanied by a lack of control. “People of high status tend to have high demand and that doesn’t seem to cause any illness problems at all.”

Some academics in this field have their doubts. Dr John MacLeod is one of a team of researchers at Bristol University who are sceptical about Professor Marmot’s findings.

“We looked at these issues in a study of 6,000 working men in South West Scotland. Unusually, when these men were recruited in the early 1970s, it was the middle classes and the more advantaged who were experiencing high levels of stress. In those circumstances stress was not associated with poorer health.”

Professor Marmot’s response is that the Scottish study does not use good measures of stress.

As far as heart disease is concerned, it is not only Dr MacLeod and colleagues at Bristol University who are unconvinced there is a proven link with stress. The American Heart Association website states that “current data don’t yet support specific recommendations about stress reduction as a proven therapy for cardiovascular disease”.
Dr MacLeod believes that so-called psychosocial explanations of ill health are a distraction from what he believes are more likely causes of a growing health divide between richer and poorer people.

“We don’t really know the causes but material disadvantage in childhood is one of the strongest predictors of health in adulthood. So the best bet would be to target and reduce childhood deprivation if we want to see reductions in health inequalities.”

So are companies wasting money by sending managers on courses that might make them feel guilty about placing high demands on their workers?

Dr MacLeod doesn’t go that far. “It may not reduce the risk of heart disease but creating fairer workplaces is a humane and just thing to do.”
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7384002.stm

Overeating disrupts entire networks of genes in the body, causing not only obesity, but diabetes and heart disease, in ways that may be possible to predict, researchers reported on Sunday.

The researchers developed a new method of analyzing DNA and used it to discover that obesity is not only complex — something already known — but complex in ways that had not been previously understood.
“Obesity is not a disease that is the result of a single change to a single gene. It changes entire networks,” said Eric Schadt, executive director of Genetics at Merck Research Laboratories.

His team identified networks of hundreds of genes that appear to be thrown out of kilter when mice are fed a high-fat diet.

“This network is completely rocked by exposure to a high-fat, Western-type diet,” Schadt said.
They then turned to a database of Icelandic people being studied by Decode Genetics Inc and found people have the same networks.

The joint teams did a detailed study of 1,000 blood samples and almost 700 samples of fat tissues from some of the Icelandic volunteers.

This showed that people who have a higher body mass index, a measurement of obesity, have characteristic patterns of gene activation in their fatty tissues not seen in DNA taken from blood.

“What it says it that the common forms of these diseases are very complex,” said Schadt.

“Simple genetic tests cannot detect these networks,” said Schadt, who also works at Merck subsidiary Rosetta Inpharmatics in Seattle.

Schadt said his team hoped to study these networks and identify the genes most key to causing disease. New drugs can be designed to target their activity, he said.
Source: http://www.canada.com/globaltv/national/health/story.html?id=e2427cc8-9b7d-499a-b67a-d324bddca53a