Conditions and Diseases « Silver Buzz Cafe

Berries May Slow Aging Brain’s Decline

In our previous article we mentioned the role of cells called microglia in repairing damaged tissues in the body. New research that looked at their affect in the aging brain has discovered an important new link between foods and the role that microglia play there. [...]

It’s Time For Your Annual Flu Shot

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that everyone over the age of 6 months have a flu shot for the 2010/2011 season. [...]

Rheumatoid Arthritis Protein May Reduce Risk Of Alzheimer’s Disease

In July we reported that researchers had found that activating a protein called Sirtuin that is found in the body can suppress the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. New research has found a link between a protein connected with rheumatoid arthritis and protection against the onset of Alzheimer’s. [...]

Eating Green Veggies Reduces Risk Of Type 2 Diabetes

The United States Department of Agriculture ( USDA) recommends that people eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day to help stay healthy. New research from Leicester University in the United Kingdom found that eating green leafy vegetables noticeably reduces the chance of developing type 2 diabetes. [...]

Genetic Link Found Between Immune System and Parkinson’s Disease

Hot on the heels of the announcement that a team at Oxford University will use idempotent stem cells to study Parkinson’s Disease, a new study has shed more light on genes associated with the immune system that may play a role in its development. [...]

New Super Bug Arrives From Asia

Researchers in the United Kingdom (UK) have identified fifty cases related to a “Super Bug” bacteria that makes an enzyme called NDM-1. Similar infections have been seen in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the USA and the researchers say that NDM-1 could become a major global health problem. [...]

New, Harmful Fat Cell Discovered

Our bodies store energy in fat and can reuse it to cope with times when more energy is needed to cope with increased activity or less food is consumed. A newly discovered kind of fat cell may end up in the wrong places in the body and cause health problems. [...]

Activating Sirtuin May Help Control Alzheimer’s Disease

There are an estimated 37 million people worldwide, including 5.3 million in the United States, who live with some form of dementia, with Alzheimer’s disease being the most prevalent. New research by Gizem Donmez, Leonard Guarente and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that activating sirtuin also appears to suppress Alheimer’s and destroying it made the condition much worse. [...]

Parkinson’s Disease Study Will Use Stem Cells

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the United Kingdom and is currently affecting about 120,000 people there. More than half a million Americans are affected by it any given time and about 50,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s every year. An Oxford University team will use adult stem cells to study the potential of using a person’s stem cells to treat the disease. [...]

Things That Every Caregiver Needs To Know

With more than 65 million people in the United States serving as informal caregivers, generally for family members, it’s important that they learn how to find their way through the entangled web of information connected to the cared person’s case. [...]

Waterborne Infections Cost the United States Over Half a Billion Dollars Annually

A study conducted in 13 US states in 2008 forced the closure of one in eight public pools for public health and safety code violations. Approximately 13,500 of the 112,000 pools inspected were found to be in serious violation of health and safety codes and were immediately closed down. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC) released a report that estimates the cost of waterborne infections to the United States health care system at around $539 million a year. [...]

FDA Panel Votes To Leave Dangerous Drug On The Market

SmithKline Beecham introduced Avandia, a type of diabetes drug known as insulin sensitizers in 1996. They launched an aggressive $34 million “Ask Your Doctor” advertising campaign and in its first full year on the market, Avandia reached $647 million in sales. In 2006, Avandia generated $2.1 billion in revenue for GlaxoSmithKline. Based on the [...]

Are The GOP Leaders Mentally Ill?

Key GOP leaders bowed to pressure from the ultra-conservative Club for Growth this week and pledged to work to repeal the recent health care reform bills. If you look at the list of benefits that click in this year alone, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to repeal them.

The Republicans [...]

Tea and Coffee As A Protection Against Heart Disease

A new study conducted over a thirteen year period in The Netherlands has concluded that both tea and coffee are beneficial to our hearts. However, the amount consumed each day is very important. [...]

UK Hospital To Map All Of Its Patients' Genes

It was ten years ago this week that President Bill Clinton and United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Tony Blair held simultaneous press conferences in the White House and Downing Street to announce the completion of the first draft of a map of the human genome. Now, London’s Royal Brompton Hospital, a UK National Health Service ( NHS) hospital, has begun decoding all 22,000 genes in each of its 10,000 patients with the help of the Sanger Institute. [...]

Brain May Play A Role In Controlling Blood Cholesterol Levels

It has long been thought that the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream depends solely on what we eat and the amount produced in the liver. Researchers have now found a direct neurological link between a receptor in the brain and the amount of cholesterol that enters the bloodstream. [...]

New Vaccine May Eventually Be Able To Prevent Or Halt Breast Cancer

Breast cancer occurs as a result of a malignant tumor that has developed from cells in the breast. It can affect both men and women, though its prevalence is very much higher in women. A new vaccination technique holds hope that it may be possible to create a one-time vaccination that can prevent breast cancer. [...]

Incidence of Rheumatoid Arthritis Increasing Among Women

Rheumatoid arthritis is a form of arthritis where the human immune system suddenly starts to attack body tissues, causing the wearing down of the protective layers on both sides of a joint. It often starts between 40 and 50 years of age and women are three times more likely to be affected by the condition than men. A new study suggests that incidence is on the rise again among women. [...]

New Drugs Cause Human Immune System To Attack Cancer

The human immune system consists of many types of cells, organs, proteins and tissues that interact in an elaborate and dynamic network to try to overcome threats to the human being. Researchers are now having some success at triggering the body’s own defense mechanism – the human immune system – to attack specific cancers. [...]

DNA Sequences Decoded For 178 Microbes That Live With Us

Each of us has millions of microbes living on or in our bodies. These fellow travelers outnumber our own cells by 10 to 1 and the total number of genes involved is about 100 times greater than in our own. Many of them have never been identified, let alone grown in the laboratory. Some of them are known to be essential to us – playing a role in digesting food and developing the immune system. Now an American consortium has set a goal of cracking the genomes of the 900 bacteria and viruses that we carry around. [...]

Assessing Frailty Helps Predict Surgical Outcomes

Frailty is a relatively new clinical concept. It is best defined as someone’s physical reserve and their ability to withstand stress to the body. Many patients considered medically healthy can still be frail. Approximately half of all operations in the United States are performed on patients over 65. A new frailty test can predict with great certainty their risk for complications, how long they will stay in the hospital and whether or not they are likely to end up in a nursing home afterward [...]

New Recommendations On Vitamin D Intake For Seniors

Vitamin D is a vital component for bone and muscle development, function and preservation, as such it is a factor in the prevention of falls and osteoporotic fractures in older people. The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) has released a new position statement on Vitamin D for older adults which makes important recommendations for vitamin D nutrition from an evidence-based perspective. [...]

Everyone’s Guide to Medical Equipment – Part 20 – Therapy Equipment

We started this series by looking at the equipment that you’d expect to encounter in your physician’s office or a medical clinic. Then we looked at medical monitors, laboratory equipment and many kinds of advanced diagnostic techniques before moving on to look at surgical instruments and systems. We then covered a range of life support equipment. In this article we’ll start looking at equipment used in therapies, ranging from simple devices that can be used at home to advanced systems that can help nurse a patient back to a comfortable recovery. [...]

Foods That Affect Your Sleep

We’ve probably all woken up in the night with indigestion or some other problem that we can attribute to food. It’s important to get a good night’s sleep both to help our bodies recover and work and to let our brains do their job properly. There are all kinds of old wives tales about foods that will keep you awake, or make you have nightmares, cheese being a favorite culprit. However, the real story is much more complex. [...]

Five-Minute Test May Be As Useful As Colonoscopy

There are around one million new cases of colon cancer every year and it accounts for about 600,000 deaths worldwide every year. Last year in the United States there were 106,100 new cases of colon cancer and 49,920 deaths from colon and rectal cancer combined. As with most forms of cancer, the prognosis is better if the disease is detected in the early stages. A new study shows that a one-time, five minute test may be effective in detecting colon cancer. [...]

Laughter may boost appetite

A 1996 study by researchers at Loma Linda University in California claimed that prolonged laughter can lower blood pressure and boost immune activity. Now they’ve built on their findings to investigate other effects of laughter by measuring levels of two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, in their volunteers’ blood, both of which are linked to appetite. Both are known to change during exercise and it is believed that they help stimulate appetite. [...]

Are We Kidding Ourselves About Modern Medicine?

It would be nice to think that everything your physician does is based on sound medical science, but a recent study in the United Kingdom found that only just over a third of medical treatments are beneficial, or likely to be beneficial. A similar evaluation by the US government in 1978 reached a similar conclusion, finding that only 10 to 20 percent of medical treatments had evidence of efficacy. [...]

Warning Strokes Often Go Unheeded

A stroke, sometimes called a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), occurs when a blood vessel carrying oxygen and nutrients to the brain is blocked or bursts. The American Heart Association says that stroke is the number three killer in the United States. It’s also a leading cause of severe, long-term disability. A new study underline the need to know the warning signs and react quickly. [...]

President Obama signed the second part (reconciliation) of the health care reform bill on March 30, 2010. That's great, but the provisions that will cover the uninsured haven't clicked in yet.

Our elected officials started work on the proposed health insurance reform bill on July 30, 2009. Harvard researchers estimate that 122 Americans die every day as a result of not having health insurance.

So, the estimated number of uninsured Americans who have died while the politicians in the Senate and Congress played politics and delayed new benefits for the sake of the health care insurers is

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Things That Every Caregiver Needs To Know

Waterborne Infections Cost the United States Over Half a Billion Dollars Annually

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Laughter may boost appetite

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