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If you haven’t tried DL1961 jeans, try it!  Great stretch without loosing its shape and very flattering!

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By Anna Berrill

PUBLISHED: 12:09 EST, 24 December 2012 | UPDATED: 12:09 EST, 24 December 2012

There is just one more night to go until stockings are opened and gifts are unwrapped, and some of us are waiting with eager anticpiation to see what fortune will bring us.

But according to a new study, a great many of us aren’t satisfied with relying on Santa or loved ones to bring us the perfect gift.

A survey has revealed that nearly half of us have been treating ourselves to at least one Christmas present with every purchase we made online this festive season.

Christmas comes early: Nearly half of women admit to buying themselves gifts while out Christmas shopping

Almost half of the women polled admitted to popping a gift for themselves into their virtual basket, with a third revealing to picking out two gifts, and nine per cent buying three.

The survey of 2,000 shoppers carried out by Waitrose found that residents of Yorkshire and the Humberside were most likely to splurge on themselves when shopping for others, with 21 per cent confessing to picking our two presents for themselves in one shop, and nine per cent buying three. 

Those in Wales were likely to buy themselves the highest number of presents while doing their Christmas shopping, allowing themselves up to six gifts in one shop.

All wrapped up: Shoppers have swapped the busy high street for logging on and have been treating themselves at the same time

Robin Phillips, Waitrose’s ecommerce director, said: ‘Choosing the perfect gift for a loved one can

often be time consuming and stressful.

Online shoppers have found ‘one for you, one for me’ shopping makes Christmas even more rewarding – by adding themselves to their gift list.’

Now that’s one way to make sure your list to Santa gets ticked off.

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• Ronald, 77, suffering from a life-threatening disturbance to heart rhythm
• Neat alcohol injected into artery to destroy heart muscle causing the problem
• Patient was well enough to leave hospital three days later

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 06:03 EST, 24 December 2012 | UPDATED: 09:16 EST, 25 December 2012

Doctors have saved a patient’s life by killing off part of his heart with neat alcohol.

Medics used the rare treatment on Ronald Aldom to induce a controlled heart attack, after they realised they could not safely perform standard procedures on him.

Cardiologist Dr Tom Johnson said his 77-year-old patient would have died without the procedure.

Roland Aldom raises a toast with his wife Pam to the doctors who saved his life

Mr Aldom was suffering from a life-threatening disruption to his heart rhythm called ventricular tachycardia (VT) – which occurred as a result of a previous heart attack.

The team decided to treat Mr Aldom, from Portishead near Bristol, with ‘ethanol ablation’.

The treatment has only been conducted a handful of times in the UK to treat VT, Dr Johnson said.

The procedure involves passing a catheter to the heart from the groin which identifies which part of the heart the dangerous rhythms are coming from.

A tiny balloon is then blown up in the heart artery supplying that area and a small amount of absolute alcohol is injected into the artery to produce a small controlled heart attack.

Roland was suffering from a life threatening disruption to his heart rhythm

This kills the area of the heart muscle causing the problem allowing the heart’s rhythm to return to normal.

Mr Aldom said he was admitted to hospital after his implantable defibrillator (ICD) gave him a “thunderstorm of shocks”.

Dr Johnson, an interventional cardiologist, said: ‘Mr Aldom presented a couple of months ago with this life-threatening type rhythm disturbance, VT, which was related to the damage done to the heart – the scar associated with his previous heart attack.

‘The defibrillator is there to try and prevent you from dropping dead in the community – they listen out for the heart doing unusual things – if your heart is doing something unusual like going very, very fast, firstly it will try and pace you out of that rhythm – it will try and suppress the activity within the heart.

‘If that fails it will actually illicit a shock of energy across the heart which hopefully straightens things out and puts you back into a normal rhythm.

‘It is potentially a rather difficult thing for a patient to live with because there is that threat that it could go off and actually when it does go off it is like being kicked in the chest.’

Mr Aldom added: ‘I was admitted to the Bristol Heart Institute after what doctors described as a thunderstorm of shocks from my ICD.

‘I had an ICD fitted about ten years ago after I had a double by-pass operation at the hospital. The device gives my heart a shock when the rhythm becomes abnormal; however, I had about 30 shocks and knew there was something wrong.’

Mr Aldom was treated at The Bristol Heart Institute, which is a state-of-the-art centre that opened in 2009

Dr Johnson said the team of medics tried to treat Mr Aldom’s irregular heartbeat with medication and “electrical ablation” to try and burn away – or kill off – the area of muscle which was generating the irregular heartbeats.

Consultant cardiologist Dr Tom Johnson performed the rare procedure

But they were unable to perform the procedures – so treating they decided to treat Mr Aldom with ethanol ablation.

‘The alternative, unfortunately, was that he was going to die from his irregular heart rhythm,’ he said.

Dr Johnson has previously performed the procedure for patients with Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – a condition in which the heart muscle becomes thick – but this was his first use of the procedure to treat VT.

‘The patient is doing tremendously well and is doing and is much better,’ he said.

‘He wasn’t going to leave hospital unless something was done. There was no other option.’

Mr Aldom added: ‘After the procedure I was out of hospital within about three days.

‘I think it’s wonderful that the doctors tried everything to help me. If they hadn’t have done this I wouldn’t be here now.’

Naomi Campbel Danneel Ackles

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By Anna Berrill

PUBLISHED: 12:09 EST, 24 December 2012 | UPDATED: 12:09 EST, 24 December 2012

There is just one more night to go until stockings are opened and gifts are unwrapped, and some of us are waiting with eager anticpiation to see what fortune will bring us.

But according to a new study, a great many of us aren’t satisfied with relying on Santa or loved ones to bring us the perfect gift.

A survey has revealed that nearly half of us have been treating ourselves to at least one Christmas present with every purchase we made online this festive season.

Christmas comes early: Nearly half of women admit to buying themselves gifts while out Christmas shopping

Almost half of the women polled admitted to popping a gift for themselves into their virtual basket, with a third revealing to picking out two gifts, and nine per cent buying three.

The survey of 2,000 shoppers carried out by Waitrose found that residents of Yorkshire and the Humberside were most likely to splurge on themselves when shopping for others, with 21 per cent confessing to picking our two presents for themselves in one shop, and nine per cent buying three. 

Those in Wales were likely to buy themselves the highest number of presents while doing their Christmas shopping, allowing themselves up to six gifts in one shop.

All wrapped up: Shoppers have swapped the busy high street for logging on and have been treating themselves at the same time

Robin Phillips, Waitrose’s ecommerce director, said: ‘Choosing the perfect gift for a loved one can

often be time consuming and stressful.

Online shoppers have found ‘one for you, one for me’ shopping makes Christmas even more rewarding – by adding themselves to their gift list.’

Now that’s one way to make sure your list to Santa gets ticked off.

Julia Brendler Theresa Russel

One for you, one for me: Online shoppers treat themselves to a Christmas gift every time they shop is a post from: Top News

However, that finding was based on a relatively small number of cancers. And neither relief workers nor people who lived, worked or went to school near the towers had a higher-than-average chance of being diagnosed with all cancers combined up to seven years later.

“There’s a lot of interest in the question of, does exposure to the World Trade Center cause cancer?” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the New York City Health Commissioner.

In part, that interest has been driven by a debate on whose health care should be covered by the James L. Zadroga 9/11 Health & Compensation Act – set up to care for World Trade Center victims – and what conditions should be included.

Based on this study, Farley said the role of the attacks on cancer risk is “complicated.”

“Most of the people who have had cancer so far would have had it anyway,” Farley told Reuters Health.

But because cancer can take 20 or more years to develop, the true risks may not become clear for many years, he added.

Researchers have predicted that exposure to dust, smoke and other chemicals after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks may have put people who were nearby or involved in the clean-up efforts at risk of some diseases, including cancer.

To see how those workers and residents had fared through 2008, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene tracked 55,778 enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry. That included 21,850 people involved in the rescue and recovery efforts.

Using state cancer records, the research team, led by Jiehui Li, recorded any new diagnoses among those groups and compared their chance of cancer to data from all of New York State during the same time period.

In total, there were 1,187 new cancers among everyone in the health registry. The overall rates for both rescue workers and residents were similar to the rate of cancer diagnoses across the state.

Out of 23 types of cancer the researchers examined, three cancers were more common in rescue and recovery workers during the last two years of the study: prostate cancer, thyroid cancer and multiple myeloma – cancer of the bone marrow cells.

Aid workers were between 1.4 and 2.9 times more likely to be diagnosed with one of those cancers in 2007 or 2008 than other New Yorkers, the researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That was based on 67 prostate cancers, 13 thyroid cancers and seven myelomas among responders.

TIME WILL TELL

Dr. Jacqueline Moline from North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, New York, said studies have consistently shown a higher rate of thyroid cancer in responders – but it’s unclear why rescue workers would also be at increased risk of prostate cancer.

Farley said it could be that people who were exposed have had better health care in recent years, so they’ve been checked for prostate and thyroid cancer more often.

“It may be that these would be cancers that would never have been picked up” had workers not been screened, he said.

Moline, who has studied cancer in World Trade Center responders but wasn’t involved in the new report, also noted that seven years isn’t a very long time to track the growth of solid tumors.

“I think as times goes on we are going to see increased rates of cancer in those who were exposed, at higher rates than we would expect if they weren’t exposed,” she told Reuters Health.

Researchers should especially be on the lookout for whether certain cancers show up earlier than usual, or in unexpected populations – for example if lots of non-smokers are diagnosed with lung cancer, Moline said.

“We don’t have a really good handle on what happens when people are exposed to a complex mixture of carcinogens,” she added.

“I think we’re not going to get a full answer for many years.”

That’s a concern, Moline said, because the Zadroga Act only provides health monitoring and care for people affected by the attacks through 2016 – before some related cancers may have even been diagnosed.

Farley said the major health risks linked to the World Trade Center attacks so far have been breathing problems such as asthma and mental health problems, including post traumatic stress disorder. But he said he and his colleagues will continue to monitor cancer in relief workers and residents.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JjFzqx Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 18, 2012.

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(Reuters) – U.S. men looking for the best place to find happiness, health and a good quality of life might consider heading to Boise, Idaho, or San Jose and San Francisco in northern California.

The three western U.S. cities top the list of the 100 best towns for men in a new ranking compiled by Men’s Health magazine, while Charleston, West Virginia, Philadelphia and Birmingham, Alabama are considered the worst.

“Anytime we do a best and worst city ranking and a city comes in at the very top like this, it immediately says to us they were consistently strong across the board in pretty much all of the 38 criteria that we looked at,” Men’s Health Executive Editor Matt Marion said.

Boise, which jumped from fifth place last year, scored high marks for the physical and mental health of its residents, its low crime rate and short commuting times – an average of just 18 minutes.

“Boise finishing number one was interesting to us because it is a city that would have finished in the top 20, but to come in right at the top is impressive,” Marion said.

San Francisco, which consistently ranks high in the annual list, impressed with its small percentage of obese people, low number of smokers and highly educated and generally fit population.

San Jose had very low death rates from cancer and heart disease, the lowest percentage of smokers in any of the 100 cities in the ranking, and not much crime.

Plano, in Texas and Seattle rounded out the top five, followed by Burlington, Vermont, which dropped from the top spot last year.

At the opposite end of the list, high cancer rates, violent crime and poor fitness levels assured Birmingham last place. In addition to Philadelphia and Charleston, West Virginia, the bottom five included Toledo, Ohio and St. Louis, Missouri.

New York ranked 33rd and Los Angeles was in the middle of the ranking.

The magazine compiled the list, now in its 12th year, by ranking the cities on criteria ranging from the cost of living, number of jobless, obesity, crime and death rates, to air quality and the ratio of men to women.

It used data from various sources including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the National Center for Health Statistics, state cancer registries and federal crime statistics.

“The things that we do focus on ultimately are the ones that will make a difference in terms of whether or not you will be happy and healthy,” Marion said.

The full list can be found here

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Paul Casciato and Leslie Gevirtz)

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Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

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There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

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I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

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Growing up I thought I was special because on Christmas Eve every year Santa Claus would visit my grandparents house in East L.A. The evening would go something like this. I’d open the screechy white metal door to my grandparents house that protected the actual wooden door– and the delicious familiar smells of pozole and frijoles de la olla would give me a great big olfactory hug. Then my abuela and abuelo and all my aunts and uncles and cousins would individually give me a great big hug. Then I’d make a big paper plate of cookies and see how many I could eat without getting trouble. After a few hours, the phone would ring. Only one person would ever call my abuelos’ house on Christmas Eve, and that’s Santa Claus.

“Hello, SANTA!?” Whoever answered the phone would say– loud enough to get the kids to stop chasing each other or showing off any early presents they’d negotiated opening. “Where ARE you!? How DID you find time to CALL!?” My entire family has a penchant for the dramatic. The phone would then be passed around to all the children who were old enough to hold a phone. Santa would have the same conversation with all of them, “How are you? Have you been good?” “I’m flying over China!” That was Santa for you, always flying over China. However formulaic, this conversation made me feel the most special I’d felt all year. We’d chat a little more about the health of his reindeer and how I was doing in school, and then he’d always end the conversation by telling us to go to sleep and that he’d see us soon.

Then we’d all run into my Mom’s old bedroom, piling one on top of one the other on the bed, and pretend to be asleep for about 30 minutes until Santa came. As kids we never cared that this part made no logical sense. This is how it had always been and this was how it always would be.

No one ever slept. Instead, in between excited squeals and the shushing of said squeals, one of the older kids would retell the legend of how grampa saved Santa’s life. The story was different every time. Most of the time the narrative involved wars and trenches but the point of the story was to explain that because abuelo saved Santa’s life, as a token of immense gratitude, Santa came to my grandparents house in East L.A. every year on Christmas Eve. The story was full of plot holes, of course, but before any kid could ask something like, “When was grampa in a war? I thought he was a barber?” Santa’s actual arrival would interrupt the story.

When Santa arrived, he often smelled like my Grampa’s pomade. He was short, about 5’4″, just like my grampa. His white beard contrasted with his brown skin– and when you sat on his lap, his breath didn’t smell like milk or cookies, but Folger’s, my grampa’s brand of coffee. But we suspended our disbelief. Even one year when Santa’s red furry trousers fell down and my abuela shrieked, “Ramon! Your pants!” My cousin rushed to Santa’s aid, holding the back of his pants as one would a bridal train, and Santa merrily waved goodbye out the screechy white metal gate of my grandparents house. No kid suspected a thing.

The toys Santa gave were often unimpressive (one time I got batteries). But it didn’t matter because actually seeing Santa Claus was the best present any kid could get for Christmas. There was something about that fact growing up that comforted me and led me to believe my life was charmed. Going back to school after the holiday break, maybe other kids got the Power Wheels Barbie Jammin’ Jeep I wanted but never got, maybe they got to fly somewhere far away that had snow like Nevada, maybe they got to see Santa at the mall, but no one got to see Santa in their house. Except me. I’d even talked to the real Santa while he flew over China. So by the associative property, I kinda flew over China, too. I always thought I had better Christmases than any of my friends. Until last year.

Two Novembers ago my grampa, now 84, had to have heart surgery. I got so scared that I didn’t visit him in the hospital. When I was little, I thought my grampa was beyond magical — after all, he saved Santa’s life. But when I got a got a picture text from my Mom of a half-conscious old man, thinner than I remember, with tubes coming out of him every which way, I panicked. I didn’t want it to be real. Couldn’t Santa return the favor now? Didn’t he remember the trenches?

It’s funny. Sometimes crisis can turn us back into children.

The surgery was fortunately a success. And I later apologized to my abuelo for not being there for him. He forgave me, saying, “Don’t worry hita, I’m still around, causing trouble.” I cried. It was at my Mom’s birthday dinner. The waitress asked, “How’s the steak?” I couldn’t taste it.

My mother and maternal grandparents in East L.A. in the 1950s. My grandfather is on the far left.

Santa didn’t come last year. There was no phone call, no cramming into my Mom’s old bedroom. No story of how Santa saved my abuelo’s life. Instead my grama passed out bars of chocolate shaped like Santa, his cartoon image printed on foil covering the hollow chocolate. I MAY have been disproportionately upset about the whole thing. “How could this happen?” I asked my grama. “Santa can’t not come!” But the answer of course was obvious. People get older; people get tired. People have heart surgery. People pass on their traditions, and traditions make us feel like were special. Now it’s more up to me than it is to them to keep those traditions alive. Only for a variety of reasons, I’ll never be able to be my 5’4″ Santa with the Folger’s breath.

I’ll be in Pittsburgh with my boyfriend’s family this Christmas Eve, trying to balance tradition with change. I’m trying to figure out if I should go through the trouble of making tamales, if frijoles de la olla and pozole would have crossover appeal to Pittsburg German-Italians. I’m trying to figure out where to put my Santa. Until I can figure out how to bring him around again for Christmas Eve, I will have a story, because stories are as much part of tradition as anything else. It begins, “My grandfather’s not just a barber, he’s also a a great Christmas hero.”

Martina Warren Hugh Grant

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(Reuters) – Yum Brands Inc’s fast-food chain KFC was supplied with chicken in China that contained excessive amounts of antibiotics, said food safety authorities investigating allegations of tainted KFC products.

The finding by the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) deals a blow to KFC’s reputation in China, where it is facing fierce competition from the likes of Taiwanese-owned fried chicken chain Dico and Japanese-style noodle chain Ajisen (China) Holdings Ltd. Yum Brands has forecast a drop in same store China sales in the fourth quarter.

Eight of the 19 batches of chicken samples Yum Brands sent to a testing laboratory in 2010 and 2011 contained overly high levels of antibiotics, the SFDA said in a statement on its Website late on Thursday.

An investigation is underway to determine whether Yum Brands had taken corrective measures at that time, and the Louisville, Kentucky-based company may face harsh penalties if the probe showed laws had been violated, the SFDA said.

On Friday afternoon, Yum said it was cooperating with the Chinese government’s review of two poultry suppliers who provided chicken with unapproved levels of antibiotics to KFC, adding that these suppliers “represent an extremely small percentage of product to KFC.”

In a securities filing dated Dec 21, the company said it does not anticipate a shortage of product supply, though “recent publicity has resulted in moderate sales impact the past few days.”

Shares in Yum Brands have slumped 4 percent since December 18 when China’s state television CCTV reported that some poultry suppliers in eastern Shandong province had fed chickens with anti-viral drugs and hormones to accelerate their growth.

The SFDA is looking into the CCTV report and has not released its findings yet, but authorities in Shandong have already shut two chicken farms in eastern China, including one that supplied KFC and McDonald’s Corp, the official Shanghai Daily newspaper reported on Thursday.

KFC’s subsidiary in China has pledged to cooperate with the authorities, while McDonald’s wrote on its official microblog that its chicken and raw materials pass through independent, third-party laboratory tests.

Shares in Yum Brands, which also owns Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, closed 1 percent lower at $69.49 in New York on Thursday.

China has been trying to stamp out health violations that have dogged the country’s food sector amid reports of fake cooking oil, tainted milk and even exploding watermelons. In 2008, milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine killed at least six children and sickened nearly 300,000.

(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Chicago, Samuel Shen and Kazunori Takada; Editing by Ryan Woo and Richard Chang)

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The 58-year-old’s health has deteriorated dramatically since he won re-election two months ago, casting doubt on the future of his “21st century socialism” project, which won him huge support among the poor but infuriated adversaries who denounce him as a fledgling dictator.

Officials said Chavez’s medical team in Havana had to use “corrective measures” to stop the bleeding which resulted from Tuesday’s surgery, his fourth cancer operation in 18 months. But they said his condition had improved since then.

“In the last few hours, his process of recovery has evolved from stable to favorable,” Vice President Nicolas Maduro told a rally of Socialist Party supporters, who cheered as he spoke.

“That allows us to continue saying that there is a growing recovery in Comandante Hugo Chavez’s situation.”

The president claimed he was cured earlier this year, and was able to campaign for re-election in October, but now looks to be fighting for his life again. Officials have stressed that his post-operation process will be long and complex.

The ashen faces of cabinet ministers and somber tone of their terse official statements since Tuesday’s surgery appeared to suggest top government officials are preparing for the worst.

The president has refused to divulge details of the cancer that was diagnosed in June of last year.

He won re-election by a big margin in October and is due to start a new six-year term on Jan. 10. According to the constitution, if he is unable to do so or steps down after starting a new term, an election must be held within 30 days.

On Saturday, Chavez anointed Maduro as his heir apparent in case he had to step down – the first time since he took office in 1999 that he has named a successor.

The 50-year-old Maduro, a former union organizer and loyal Chavez disciple who is seen as a pragmatic moderate, would be the ruling party’s candidate.

‘FATHERLAND IS SAFE’

The president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, said he planned to visit Chavez in Cuba, and Venezuelans held vigils and gathered in plazas to pray for their president’s swift return.

State TV launched a spot that opens with Chavez’s voice thundering “I am no longer myself, I am the people,” followed by Venezuelans of all ages telling the camera: “I am Chavez.”

Another shows short clips of Chavez singing folk songs with supporters and reciting poetry. One rally for a “Chavista” candidate in Sunday’s regional elections kicked off with a recording of the president singing the national anthem.

The Information Ministry published a document with the words “Loyalty to Chavez – The fatherland is safe” over a picture of Chavez and Maduro sitting below a painting of liberation hero Simon Bolivar. Chavez is shown holding an ornate golden replica of Bolivar’s sword.

Senior government officials have begun cautiously preparing people for the reality that Chavez may not survive.

“At the same time as we pray, we should be ready to turn our sadness and pain into a force that can mobilize the people,” Aristobulo Isturiz, a top ally of the president, told a rally of red-clad supporters.

Even if he dies, Chavez is likely to cast a long shadow over Venezuela’s political landscape for years – not unlike Argentine leader Juan Peron, whose 1950s populism is still the ideological foundation of the country’s dominant political party.

Elections shortly after the Venezuelan leader’s death could create an awkward scenario for the opposition. Campaigning on day-to-day concerns such as crime and inflation would be difficult in such an emotionally charged atmosphere.

BEYOND VENEZUELA

The implications of Chavez’s illness go far beyond Venezuela. Regional allies, most notably Cuba, have for years relied on him for subsidized oil and fuel shipments.

It could also slow the resurgence of the left in Latin America and weaken a global “anti-imperialist” alliance stretching as far as Syria and Iran that has sought to undermine the influence of the United States.

Energy companies are keenly watching events and hope a change in government will lead to greater access to the country’s vast crude oil reserves – the world’s largest. Years of combative state takeovers have alienated major oil companies.

Investors who pack their portfolios with Venezuelan bonds, among the highest-yielding and most widely traded emerging market debt, are hoping for more fiscal responsibility after a year of blowout campaign spending.

Venezuela’s opposition has begun discussing which candidate they might field in a new presidential election.

Henrique Capriles, a state governor who lost to Chavez in October but galvanized the opposition with a nationwide house-to-house campaign tour, is the obvious choice to face Maduro.

But he may not be able to count on the support of all the 20 or so parties that make up the opposition’s coalition, some of which are anxious to field their own candidate. The opposition hopes to retain its seven state governorships out of 23.

The key will be whether Capriles can win re-election on Sunday as governor of Miranda state, where he faces a challenge from Elias Jaua, a Chavez protege and former vice president. If Capriles loses, half a dozen opposition figures could emerge as possible candidates for a new presidential election.

The polls in Miranda are mixed, with one showing Capriles way ahead and another giving Jaua a 5 percentage point lead.

Rallies for Socialist Party candidates ahead of Sunday’s vote have become mass vigils for the president’s health.

“We have a great chance to win all 23 governorships. That would be the best support we can give Chavez,” the president’s brother Adan, who is running for re-election in Barinas state, told a rally.

Betty White George Lucas

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Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Killing Hiedi Michelle Vieth

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

By Ruth Styles

PUBLISHED: 14:11 EST, 20 December 2012 | UPDATED: 18:03 EST, 20 December 2012

 After a busy year and an even busier run up to the festive season, you could be forgiven for wanting to spend the festive season curled up in your pajamas.

And it would seem that designer and former Spice Girl, Victoria Beckham, is no exception.

Instead of diamonds, sports cars or luxe designer handbags, she’ll be unwrapping a pair of pajamas from husband, David this Christmas.

Not that the famously fashionable Victoria will be getting run-of-the-mill pajamas from Next or an Asda onesie.

Instead, she’s set to receive two pairs of luxe silk pajamas by British designer, Olivia von Halle.

According to fashion industry bible, Women’s Wear Daily, husband David put in a call to Harrods last week, in which he requested two sets of the luxury nightwear.

The Newcastle-born von Halle was working in China as a trend forecaster when fashionable inspiration first struck, courtesy of the mannish silk trousers sported by the likes of Coco Chanel in the 1920′s.

Luxury: Olivia von Halle’s gorgeous silk pajamas don’t come cheap at £260

Von Halle wanted to create something luxe but glamorous that she and her friends could lounge about in at home and her luxury pajama line was the result.

She returned to London in 2010 carrying a bulging order book and launched her line, which is now stocked retailers including Harrods and Fenwick in the U.K., and at Brown Thomas in Ireland.

Prices for Von Halle silk pajamas start at £260 – small change if your name is David Beckham.

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If you haven’t tried DL1961 jeans, try it!  Great stretch without loosing its shape and very flattering!

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I Love My DL1961 Emma Legging Jeans is a post from: Top News

By Ruth Styles

PUBLISHED: 06:37 EST, 20 December 2012 | UPDATED: 11:14 EST, 20 December 2012

Want to look younger for longer? According to new research, staying youthful for longer could be within your reach thanks to a daily vitamin pill.

Lots of the most beautiful celebrities already credit their perfect skin to Imedeen’s Time Perfection youth pills including models Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen and Laura Bailey, actress Jessica Biel and singer singer Danni Minogue.

And women looking for an anti-ageing solution don’t have to take their word for it, a new study conducted in Brazil has revealed that daily use of the supplements can help slow down the ageing process by as much as 48 per cent.

The study, undertaken by Brazilian cosmetic dermatologist, Dr Adilson Costa Рhead of the Dermatology Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas in Ṣo Paolo Рfollowed a test group of women taking the daily pill aged between 35 and 60 over a period of 12 months.

The results revealed a 30 per cent reduction in fine lines and a similar decrease in wrinkles. Radiance and smoothness were also boosted by a huge 42 per cent.

Ingredients in the Time Perfection supplement include a mega dose of anti-oxidant vitamin C, zinc and a substance called lycopene, which is extracted from the skin of tomatoes.

The latter was the subject of a study by L’Oreal a few years ago, which found that it had a marked effect on ageing.

Fresh faced: Laura Bailey (centre, with Olivia Palermo and Eugenia Da Silva) relies on skin supplements for keeping her looks in good shape

A-list fans such as Jessica Biel have talked of their love for the supplements in the past, which they describe as the reason for their preternaturally youthful skin.

The new Mrs Timberlake revealed that she believes skin is a ‘reflection of your inner health’ in a recent interview with website, Yahoo.

The actress is famed for her glowing complexion and credits a combination of facials, skincare and supplements for keeping it in good shape.

‘Your skin is a reflection of your inner health, so I try to eat well, stay hydrated and get regular exercise,’ she explained.

‘I also have monthly facials, which are a combination of natural fruit peels and massage. Plus I take Imedeen skin supplements.’

Model Naomi Campbell spoke of her faith in Imedeen’s anti-ageing prowess during an interview with the Daily Mail.

‘My beauty secret [is that] I use Creme de la Mer and I take Imedeen so my skin always has an air of good health,’ she revealed.

Meanwhile, 42-year-old supermodel Helena Christensen has admitted to using another beauty pill in preparation for time on the beach.

Imedeen’s Tan Optimiser pill is part of the brand’s anti-ageing range and helps protect skin from sun damage.

‘I tan easily and as everyone, I wish to preserve my suntan as long as possible,’ said the Danish model. ‘ImedeenTan Optimiser is a very healthy partner.’

Donna Gubbay Ashley Greene

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The latest “breakthrough” in depression treatment is a drug that’s supposedly able to relieve symptoms in a little over an hour. It works in patients who were previously resistant to treatment that, in any case, could take weeks to start working. 

Related Story

‘The Biggest Breakthrough in Depression Research’ in 50 Years Is … Ketamine?

The strongest effects of the new drug, which is being tested by the National Institutes of Health, only lasted for about a half-hour, sometimes lingering for two more days. But the researchers are encouraged because so far, the drug seems to be just as promising as ketamine.

Yep, that ketamine. The club drug, as a positive side effect of its other, dissociative side effects, is able to rapidly relieve symptoms of depression in the most hopeless of cases. The news from this past October was that its ability to do so was helping scientists to rethink the way they conceptualize the depressed brain. As I reported then, the focus was shifting away from the “low levels of serotonin” model of depression:

Instead, the studies reviewed here support a different theory, one which suggests that depression is the result of damage to the brain cells responsible for controlling mood. In mice, at least, this atrophy of neurons occurred in response to stress. Although the reasons stress causes this to happen are unclear, the weakening of synaptic connections appears to be at the root of depression and other stress-related disorders.

SSRIs are intended to increase brain levels of serotonin, but they do also, eventually, restore neurons. Ketamine is able to repair these synaptic connections in mice with near-miraculous speed. Indirect evidence from brain imaging supports the theory that this “synaptogensis” is the mechanism allowing for ketamine’s rapid effects in humans as well.

Reporting on these findings, Yale researchers writing in Science expressed the hope that they’d be able to develop faster-acting, longer-lasting antidepressants that work through the same mechanism, but that they’d feel more comfortable prescribing than a drug that variably causes “pleasant dream-like states, vivid imagery, hallucinations, and emergence delirium.” The promise this holds for people with depression, especially those for whom SSRIs and electroconvulsive therapy have proven ineffective, can’t be overstated.

The results from the NIH’s clinical trial are a first step in this direction. The new drug isn’t as headline-grabbing as ketamine — it’s definitely going to need a better name than its current “AZD6765″ — but when tested on 22 patients, it had a 32 percent success rate, which is approaching the 52 percent seen with ketamine. Strengthening its case, AZD6765 worked significantly better than a placebo, and had fewer ketamine-like side effects.

The trial established “proof of concept,” meaning that although there’s still much more testing and refinement to do before it can begin to be offered to the wider public, researchers are at least heading in the right direction.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/a-new-antidepressant-inspired-by-ketamine/266427/

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His first comments on the issue come weeks after Washington state and Colorado voters supported legalizing pot, or cannabis, last month in ballot measures that stand in direct opposition of federal law.

“It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal,” he told ABC News in part of an interview released on Friday.

“At this point (in) Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue. And, as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said.

The Department of Justice has said pot remains a federally controlled substance and states have been looking for guidance from Washington on how it will handle the conflict with state laws.

Medical use of the substance is legal in 18 U.S. states. But federal officials have still continued to crack down on some providers in those states.

Pot remains an illegal narcotic under U.S. law, but Washington and Colorado became the first states in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana use on November 6. A similar effort in Oregon failed.

Obama called the situation “a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law.” He told ABC that “what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about” how to reconcile federal and state laws, and that he has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to examine the issue.

In his 1995 memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” Obama admitted to regularly smoking pot in high school. The father of two told ABC that he would not go so far as to say pot should be legalized altogether. There are also concerns about drug use in children and violence, he told ABC, according to its website.

“I want to discourage drug use,” he added.

The new measures in Washington and Colorado, which already permit medical marijuana use, allow possession of up to an ounce of the substance for private use. They also will regulate and tax sales at special stores for those aged 21 and older.

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A plate from the De Bononiensi scientiarum et artium instituto atque academia commentarii, produced between 1731 and 1791 (BibliOdyssey).

One night in the late 1700s, Luigi Galvani, an anatomy professor at the University of Bologna, strung up butchered frog legs on his balcony. This in itself was not unusual – they were, in all likelihood, awaiting the dinner plate. But on this night, with the air crackling with electricity from a storm, Galvani noticed something odd: when he touched the legs with a pair of scissors, they twitched. The professor’s curiosity was piqued. Soon thereafter, he hung some dissected frogs legs in his laboratory – where, as it happened, he also kept a newfangled machine that captured static electricity, known as a Leyden jar. Anytime the jar was on and someone touched the legs with a metal scalpel, they jumped. It was almost as if they were possessed. 

Galvani wondered if this strange phenomenon could be related to electrical currents. Perhaps the limbs contained some sort of charge, an “animal electricity” essential for life. He thought that this charge was undiscovered biological juice, and, while he was wrong, Galvani was perhaps the first person to purposefully stimulate exposed nerve cells with electricity. Years later, he noted his achievement in a book that recounted more than a decade of such research: “And still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friend to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone’s eyes.”

In the years that followed, Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and former assistant, went further. In 1802, he connected a primitive battery to a recently severed ox head. It was as if the animal came back to life: its eyes flew open; its ears wriggled; its tongue jerked. Aldini attempted a similar experiment on the corpse of a murderer who’d been hanged in London’s infamous Newgate Prison. The effects were much the same: “The jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horrible contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” 

These ghoulish experiments were well known in scientific and popular circles– Mary Shelley used the notion that electricity could animate life as the foundation for Frankenstein–and interest in the effects of electricity on living creatures continued for the next 150 years. Many efforts were little more than quackery. In England during the 1800s, for instance, electricity was used to treat everything from hysteria to melancholia. Yet the flegdling field of bioelectricity was stalled by a rival branch of science, not fringe thinking. DNA was discovered in the 1950s. A tidal wave of interest followed, and it swept aside the studies that descended from Galvani’s.

The search for the commands that shape our bodied became an investigation of the extraordinary interplay between genes and proteins. But as successful as the current approach has been, it does have limits. 

It is odd that electricity has been so negelected, because it is everywhere in our bodies. Ions flow in and out of our cells. Voltage pulses speed down our nerves. We are, in effect, walking electrical networks. The significance of this is readily accepted when it comes to the nervous system and the heart – think of the electrical pads used to revive someone after a heart attack. But in many ways, we remain stuck in an eighteenth century mindframe, aware of the electric signals that course through our bodies but oblivious to the ways in which they could play a subtler, and more profound, role in our development.

Not all of the blame for this is the result of the focus on proteins and DNA. There’s also the legacy of bioelectrical research, which has teetered between genuine scientific insights and frivolous nonsense. It would take someone who knew little about the field’s reputation, and who wasn’t concerned about how his interests would appear to colleagues, to pick up the line of inquiry, and return to the question of regeneration.

* * *

Michael Levin, director of Tufts University’s Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology (Kathi Bahr).

Modern medicine clutches at a number of dreams. Some, like developing an AIDS vaccine, can seem tantalisingly close. Others, like curing cancer or preventing the ravages of aging, have frustrated great minds for so many years that we’ve learned to temper our expectations.

And then there’s regeneration. The idea that humans could regrow missing or diseased organs or limbs often feels like fantasy. But why? There are, after all, many species that can accomplish the task with ease. A decapitated flatworm will grow a new head, replete with a new brain. For the first week of their lives, tadpoles can replace lost tails. And the axolotl, or Mexican salamander, has the ability to regenerate everything from its limbs and tail to its spinal cord and skin, all without any evidence of scarring. Even some mammals have limited regenerative abilities: every year, deer regrow exact replicas of the antlers they shed, and in some circumstances, young mice and rats can lose a leg and grow it back.

Humans hang onto a sliver of regenerative ability as well. If a child experiences a neat slice through the end of his fingertip, that tip will grow back — a talent that disappears sometime between the ages of seven and eleven. The Greek legend of Prometheus, the god who was cursed to have an eagle peck out his liver each day, only to grow it back every night, contains a grain of physiological truth: were you to lose part of your liver, it would, in fact, regenerate. With the exception of our skin, it’s the only human organ that has that capability.

But what if we could go further than skin and liver cells? What if we could signal to our bodies to regrow damaged retinal tissue – or even to regrow an entire eye? What if we could regrow lost limbs? Michael Levin doesn’t think this is an outlandish fantasy: in fact, he thinks he may be on the path to figuring out how to do precisely that.

Levin is director of Tufts University’s Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in Medford, near Boston. His thinks that the key to regeneration  — the key to pattern, to shape — may be found in the electrical signals that are transmitted among all our cells, much like the ones and zeros that zip along a computer’s hard drive. Manipulating these electrical signals has already led to results that seem more suited to X-Men than a scientific journal: Levin’s lab has produced four-headed flatworms and grown an eye from scratch on a tadpole’s belly. Over the course of the next year, Levin will begin experiments on mammals. Success could make human regeneration a reality in our lifetimes.

This is an exclusive extract from Electric Shock, the new article from MATTER, an online publisher focused on long-form science and technology writing. Visit readmatter.com to purchase the full article. 

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-solution-to-human-regeneration-may-hang-in-a-long-neglected-branch-of-science/266416/

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Instead of taking your fingerprint, maybe police should swab our belly buttons with Q-tips. No, that’s ridiculous, actually. But the idea illustrates a point made by a group of North Carolina-based researchers in their new Belly Button Biodiversity (BBB) project. Last month, the group published results of their first of many experiments, in which they swabbed 60 belly buttons and identified a total of 2,368 species of bacteria. People’s individual profiles were snowflake-ily, bacterially unique. 

As the BBB understands it, like exploring the depths of our majestic oceans, there’s much to be learned from our belly button hangers-on. National Geographic reported that 1,458 of the species “may be new to science,” and some of the bacteria were entirely out of their known context. One person’s belly button “harbored a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from Japan,” where he had never been. Another had two types of “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents.” 

Anonymous samples from a belly button sampling event. Which one are you? F/M/K?

---

“The belly button has captured the imagination for centuries,” BBB notes on their impeccably-URL-ed site, WildLifeOfYourBody.org. Prior to those centuries, belly buttons captured no one’s imagination. To be fair, in those days, imaginations were much less amenable to capture. They wandered, wily and free, with a discerning taste, the likes of which our indolent, Internet-weary imaginations of today know nothing.

When you return from this journey into the belly button of your mind, you can participate in one of the BBB’s very real “sampling events,” where you volunteer to be navally swabbed with a Q-tip. They then assign you an anonymous number, and in a few days you can then go online and look photos of what grows — your belly button bacterial profile — and learn about the little beings with whom you share your body.

If you’re just starting to date someone, or more seriously vetting them as a marriage candidate, you might suggest going to one of these sampling sessions as a fun date. But then, like so many dates, it’s actually a test to see how dirty they are. It’s anonymous, yes, but if you stand next to each other in line, you’ll know what their number is, and you can look it up later.

It’s up to you how you interpret the results. Dirtier is not necessarily worse, and that’s one important point BBB wants their work to make. The vast majority of bacteria in the world live in harmony with us, and don’t want to kill us. No, they want us to live and thrive, so we can keep being their warm homes. So they may actually be helping us.

As the BBB puts it, most bacteria are, like people, “either good or simply present.”

So should you be making extra effort to clean out the many bacteria in your belly button? I say no. Unless it’s visibly grimy, or you have a history of belly button infections, or just reading about this research no longer allows you to live comfortably with the knowledge that you are an infestation. Others will disagree — like Dr. Claire Cronin of the Massachusetts Medical Society. She notes that in the era of laparoscopic surgery, where the belly button is commonly used as a port of surgical access, there is virtue in keeping tidy down there:

There is a surprising lack of awareness on the public’s part as to what can accumulate in a belly button … the volume of material increases as the patient ages and, just like their arteries, can harden. I like to think of it as a cache of a lifetime of little treasures. … Most patients have not received adequate instruction on proper umbilical hygiene. It has not received the same level of attention that the area behind the ears has. … There is a technique to cleaning the belly button. It involves soap and water and gentle probing. … Alcohol should not be used, in order to not disturb the delicate pH balance of the area.

Beyond worrying about the embarrassment of doctors discovering “blackened wax casts,” in your belly button, though, the BBB project could make important progress in understanding how the bacteria that colonize us actually affect our health. Analogous to the parasite Toxoplasmosis gondii – which we only recently found out is present in 20-50 percent of our brains, subtly shaping our personalities and maybe even making us try to hurt ourselves — some of these little bacteria that go unnoticed are probably affecting us in ways unknown, good and bad. Ways that we’re currently just chalking up to chance or genetics or God or gluten. 

Meanwhile, BBB is now in the pilot phase of testing armpits, which is less fascinating, but doesn’t lose sight of their thesis that “in all likelihood your body hosts species that no scientist has ever studied.” That’s not meant to be used as a pick-up line.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bacteria-species-new-to-science-found-in-our-belly-buttons/266360/

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• Two out of five women admitted they often avoided the gym so they wouldn’t mess up their hair dos
• These women were almost three times less likely to meet the recommended physical activity guidelines

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 05:40 EST, 18 December 2012 | UPDATED: 08:33 EST, 18 December 2012

Going for a drink after work, feeling tired and forgetting your trainers are just some of the common reasons for avoiding the gym.

Now scientists have found haircare is another major barrier to working out.

A study of women from North Carolina revealed 40 per cent admitted to avoiding exercise because they didn’t want to ruin their hair-dos.

Gym bunny: In a study nearly 40% of black women admitted to avoiding the gym to preserve their hair dos

Research leader Dr Amy McMichael, from Wake Forest University, said she had struggled to go to the gym without ruining her hairstyle.

‘As an African-American woman, I have that problem, and my friends have that problem. So I wondered if my patients had that problem, she said.

To find out if women were putting hair above their health, the team surveyed 103 black women who came to the dermatology clinic at Wake Forest University in October 2007.

They found that more than half of the women were exercising for less than 75 minutes per week – the U.S Government recommends 150 minutes. One in four admitted to doing no exercise at all.

Those who avoided exercise because of their hair were almost three times less likely to meet recommended physical activity guidelines

Those who avoided exercise because of their hair were almost three times less likely to meet the recommended physical activity guidelines.

McMichael, who published the findings in the Archives of Dermatology on Monday, said hair care can be tedious and costly for African-American women.

Hair straightening costs around $40 in Harlem, New York, and is often part of a weekly routine. Women may not want to wash their hair more than once a week to keep their hairstyle, and may avoid sweating as a result.

The survey only looked at black women so it is not yet known if the issue is shared by all women.

Salon owner Rochelle Mosley said some women scheduled their appointments around their gym visits, but she also tries to find a hairstyle that will work with physical activity.

‘If you don’t have a healthy body then you aren’t going to have any hair to fix,’ she said.

Danniella Westbrook Black Eyed Peas

I can’t go to the gym – I’ve done my hair: Study finds 40 per cent women avoid exercise to keep their coiffures intact is a post from: Top News

Follow ASAP Science on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Check out more from ASAP Science on the Atlantic Video channel. 

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/why-the-morning-after-pill-is-not-abortion-the-science-of-plan-b/266377/

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(Reuters) – U.S. health regulators have approved a new four-strain seasonal influenza vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the company said on Monday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Fluarix Quadrivalent to immunize children age 3 and older and adults against flu virus subtypes A and B contained in the vaccine.

It is the first intramuscular vaccine to protect against four influenza strains. Three-strain flu vaccines currently administered help protect against the two most common A virus strains and the B strain expected to be predominant in a given year, the company said.

Since 2000, however, two B virus strains have circulated to varying degrees each season, meaning patients infected with the B virus not contained in the vaccine were not immunized.

Fluarix Quadrivalent helps protect against the two A strains and adds coverage against a second B strain, the company said.

Three-strain vaccines “have helped protect millions of people against flu, but in six of the last 11 flu seasons, the predominant circulating influenza B strain was not the strain that public health authorities selected,” said Dr. Leonard Friedland, head of clinical development and medical affairs for Glaxo’s North American vaccines program.

“Fluarix Quadrivalent will help protect individuals against both B strains and from a public-health standpoint, can help decrease the burden of disease.”

Glaxo said it will make the vaccine available in time for the 2013-14 flu season and plans to fulfill orders for its trivalent, or three-strain, vaccines. Healthcare providers traditionally order flu vaccines about a year in advance of each flu season.

Fluarix Quadrivalent is not currently approved or licensed in any country outside of the United States.

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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• Experts compared semen samples from more than 100 men who had fertility problems
  
• They found that consistent tail-length trumped average length when it came to strong-swimming sperm

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 11:59 EST, 17 December 2012 | UPDATED: 12:02 EST, 17 December 2012

Men have a better chance of having children if they have semen teeming with strong-swimmers.

Now fertility experts say they have found a good indicator of what makes sperm good movers in the first place.

A study from Brown University in Rhode Island, found sperm that had tails of a similar length were better able to travel than those with tails of varying lengths.

Successful sperm: Consistency of sperm tails was found to be more important than average length

The team led by James Mossmon were surprised to find that tail  consistency trumped average length.

The findings add to our understanding of why some couples struggle to have children.

Around one in six couples may have difficulty conceiving in the UK – which is around 3.5million people. Couples are recommended to visit their GP if they have not conceived after one year of trying, or sooner if the woman is aged over 35.

For the study, researchers from Brown University in  Rhode Island examined the semen of 103 men attending an infertility clinic at Sheffield Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

They found that the wider the variation of sperm length in samples, the lower the concentration of motile sperm. The variation in tail length was found to be the most crucial factor.

Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the scientists said: ‘Sperm length measurements may provide a useful insight into testis function and the efficiency of spermatogenesis (sperm cell development).’

Only one per cent of the 300million sperm released by a man during sex reach their partner’s uterus

It is another piece in the jigsaw that explains why only one per cent of the 300million sperm released by a man during sex manages to reach their partner’s uterus, while just a few dozen reach the egg.

Research published earlier this year from the University of Warwick and University of Birmingham revealed sperm has an appalling sense of direction.

The team injected sperm cells into hair-thin microchannels to study how they behaved in confined spaces.

They found sperm avoid the ‘middle lane’ of the female reproductive tract and instead crawl along the channel walls. They also struggle to turn sharp corners and crash into the walls and each other in a scene reminiscent of a demolition derby.

Only one sperm enters a woman’s ovum as afterwards the cell membrane of the egg hardens and the remaining sperm die.

Lillian Muller Hedy Burress

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By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 18:44 EST, 16 December 2012 | UPDATED: 18:44 EST, 16 December 2012

Men – who, unless they are Eddie Izzard, generally don’t wear make-up, jewellery or high heels – are notoriously tricky to buy presents for.

So we’ve come up with five unique treats to spoil the special chaps in your life…

CRAFTY COVERS

If you’re giving your man an  e-reader for Christmas, why not also get him one of these covers that looks like a classic book?

They’re made by hand in the New Forest. Styles include Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Burns’s Poetical Works or, for the intellectual look, Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity. 

£28, notonthehighstreet.com

STYLISH & SNUG

Made by British craftsmen for home-grown company Albam, this subtle scarf is the perfect way to introduce pattern into his wardrobe without scaring him witless.

Plain wool on one side, and colourful cotton on the other.  

£75, albamclothing.com

FOODIE THOUGHT

Sign him up to Flavrbox for a greedy gift that keeps giving.

He’ll be sent a box of unusual treats every month (you choose how long you want to send it for).

Boxes have included raspberries in chocolate, cheese straws and chilli and bacon jam. He’ll  be cooking like Jamie in no time.

flavrbox.com, from £20

MAN READING

Probably the manliest cookbook ever, lavishly illustrated Faviken is this year’s must-have for foodie shelves.

Its hearty Swedish recipes aren’t easy, but look incredible and are fascinating to read.

And, after all, what man doesn’t love  a challenge?

£22.40, amazon.co.uk

MILKING IT

Olympic gold medalist Michael Klim’s new skincare range for men, Milk, has been snapped up by Boots.

The swimmer’s products come in sleek white bottles.

The moisturising milk (£11.95), cleansing wipes (£9.95) and face scrub (£12.95) came in for rave reviews from our male tester.   

boots.com

Kristy Hinze Julia Brendler

Bits and pieces: Manly cookbooks, Kindle covers, cosy scarves and other products that will make his Christmas is a post from: Top News

If you haven’t tried DL1961 jeans, try it!  Great stretch without loosing its shape and very flattering!

Joan Jett Tania Bryer

I Love My DL1961 Emma Legging Jeans is a post from: Top News

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

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Among its many distinctions, like being the birthplace of both peanut butter and hot dogs on buns, St. Louis holds two less cheerful records: Its cigarette tax is the lowest in the United States, and it also ranks as the seventh worst “Asthma Capital” in the country, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Although an indoor smoking ban took effect nearly two years ago, fines on first-time violators are mild, ranging from $50 to $100, and casinos and bars are exempt. More importantly, researchers have found that smoking bans are ineffective in changing the behavior of smokers. In areas with bans, smokers are no less likely to have tried to quit, and studies indicate that bans mostly affect where people smoke, not how much. Higher cigarette taxes, though, are a statistically significant factor in getting smokers to quit, implying that price matters for the prevalence of smoking in a community. Last month, however, Missouri voters narrowly voted down a proposition to raise cigarette taxes from 17 to 90 cents per pack, which would have still ranked far below the nation’s average of $1.49. This was the third effort in eleven years to raise tobacco taxes in the state.

Medical providers, local communities, and the public wellness movement. See full coverage

Meanwhile, residents of St. Louis, particularly children, continue to struggle with respiratory issues. The number of children suffering from asthma in the St. Louis metropolitan area is nearly three times the national average, according to Asthma Friendly St. Louis, a community program designed to help school-age kids and teens manage respiratory illness. Despite the efforts of several community initiatives, the disease is often poorly managed because of a lack of access to care and educational resources. At the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, asthma is the number one reason for patient admissions, and the county’s rate of emergency room visits for asthma-related incidents among children under 15 is 52 percent higher than in the rest of Missouri.

Certain communities in the area struggle with asthma more than others, pointing to a complex set of root causes underlying the prevalence of childhood respiratory problems in the area. In 2008, African American children accounted for 91.9 percent of asthma-related emergency room visits in St. Louis City, a rate nine times greater than that among white children. In East St. Louis, which sits across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Illinois, asthma rates are among the highest in the nation, and experts suspect that this is linked to the high rates of pollution and poverty in the city. 44 percent of East St. Louis residents live on incomes below the federal poverty line.

With a smoking rate 19 percent higher than the rest of the country and an estimated $2.13 billion in annual healthcare costs directly related to smoking in Missouri as a whole, in St. Louis, smoking clearly aggravates these underlying causes of poor respiratory health.

Solutions to these kinds of systemic problems are clouded by a lack of resources and education, and by attitudes about health. “Survival needs are more important than long-term prevention needs,” explained one participant at The Atlantic’s Conversation on Community Health in St. Louis on Wednesday. Her comments pointed to the vast number of pressing, everyday problems, such as poverty, lack of education, and problems with the built environment, like pollution, that have to be overcome in battles for better community health. 

As another participant put it, this leads to “band-aid surgeries” on area health problems, which only amount to temporary solutions for structural problems. Although the summit’s panelists and participants focused heavily on root cause analysis of public health problems in the city, many agreed that real change will depend upon broad shifts in attitude and approach to the social, economic, and environmental problems affecting struggling communities.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-makings-of-an-asthma-epidemic-in-st-louis/266289/

Sarah Miles Justine Bateman

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Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Donna Gubbay Ashley Greene

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

Melanie Alexander Rachel Ward

Los Angeles Sample Sales is a post from: Top News

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Diane Lane Mariah Carey

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

WebMD talked to Leslie Garrard, PsyD, a child psychologist at Miami Children’s Hospital, and Melissa Brymer, PhD, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. We asked for their best suggestions on what parents and others can do now to help children cope.

Q: What reactions should parents and other caregivers in Newtown expect from the children who have gone through this tragedy?

A: Kids can have a wide range of reactions, Garrard says. “Any exposure to trauma can have immediate reactions and lasting effects. Parents need to be very [mindful] and watch their children.”

“Some kids withdraw, some are dismissive, although internally they are scared. Some cry and some are outwardly terrified. Some become depressed. Some just kind of shut down. Some might have nightmares and re-experience the traumatic events. … They may be fearful of leaving their parents.”

Q: What reactions are typical from children who didn’t go through it, but watched news coverage or heard details about the tragedy?

They can also have [the same range of] reactions — maybe not as strong, but they can also be impacted, Garrard says. “When watching it and seeing it on TV, it’s very scary.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics President Thomas McInerny, MD, says in a statement that if possible, “young children should not be exposed to the extensive media coverage of the event — in other words, turn off the TV, computer, and other media devices.”

Q: Is this age — elementary school — a particularly difficult one to experience trauma?

A: Yes, according to Garrard, because it affects emotional development and the way we view the world — whether it’s safe or not.  But “I think kids are very resilient. They can learn to maneuver the world and get through and past things. However, they do need a lot of care to get through things.”

Q: What is the best thing parents can do now?

A:  The most important thing parents can do is talk to their children, Garrard says. “Sit down with your child. Tell them a really bad thing has happened. Maybe they have already heard it on the news. Tell them, ‘We need to talk about this.’”

See how they feel about it, Garrard says. You want them to share their feelings.

“Technology makes things a lot more complex,” Brymer says. “They are getting information through Twitter feeds and Facebook. It’s harder to keep up with what your kids are hearing. When we tweet, we hear something from someone and then you re-tweet. You can’t fact-check when you tweet or post something on Facebook.”

Jeri Ryan Carla Bonner

How to Talk to Children About School Shooting is a post from: Top News

Helena Christensen Diane Lane

Retarded arsonist gets 10 years in Ontario is a post from: Top News

Sophie Lee Paula Jones

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Even better, many of the measures are simple and inexpensive.

Sinus Problems: Getting to the Triggers

First, it’s crucial to figure out why you have sinus problems, says Jordan Josephson, MD, a Manhattan ear-nose-throat specialist and author of Sinus Relief Now.  “Allergies are a fairly common reason for sinus problems,” he says.

Allergies that affect the nose, such as hay fever and indoor allergies, can cause the nasal membranes to swell, and the passages to the sinuses — hollow spaces within the bones around the nose — to become blocked. Mucus, which typically drains from the sinuses to the nose, can’t drain.  

Other reasons? “A dry nose leads to more sinus problems,” says Richard F. Lavi, MD, an allergist in Beachwood, Ohio.

Whatever the trigger, you can pick and choose from these five tips, or adopt all of them.

Sinus Tip 1: Keep Your Cool

“When the heat is on, the membranes get dry,” says Russell B. Leftwich, MD, an allergist in Nashville, Tenn. Mucus isn’t cleared as effectively, boosting the risk of sinus problems, including sinus headache.

He can’t recommend a specific indoor temperature range as ideal, but offers this guide: “You are better off wearing a sweater and keeping it cooler than cranking it up so you are comfortable wearing only a T-shirt.”

Let your nose guide your indoor temperature range, suggests Lavi. “If you are not waking up with nosebleeds or congestion, that is probably a good temperature range.”

Sinus Tip 2: Humidify Your Air

Strive for an indoor environment that’s not too dry and not too humid.  “Dust mites love greater than 50% humidity,” Lavi warns. And if you’re allergic to dust mites, that’s bad news for your sinuses.

A too-humid indoor environment can also encourage the growth of mold, which can also set off sinus problems, says Todd Kingdom, MD, director of rhinology and sinus surgery at National Jewish Health in Denver.

Experts are divided on the value of room humidifiers for creating a sinus-friendly home.

Forget them, Leftwich says. “A room humidifier never makes a difference. There is too much air to humidify.”

But Josephson says using humidifiers in the bedroom beginning in October through March or April can make a difference in keeping sinus problems at bay.

Vaporizers can keep you more comfortable if you are in the midst of a sinus problem, Leftwich says. But you need to have it close by. “It doesn’t do any good to have a vaporizer on the other side of the room.” And, he warns, the devices must be cleaned daily to keep bacteria from growing in them.

Breathe the mist coming from vaporizers, but not the steam, he warns. Steam can easily burn you. Ten minutes at a time is often recommended.

Kim Katrel Winona Ryder

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• Bev Worsnop, 51, and Robert Worthington, 59, first married in 1975
• Couple both live in Bolton, Greater Manchester
  
• Their daughter Kelly, 32, reunited them
• Granddaughter Lauren will be a bridesmaid at their wedding today

By Martha De Lacey

PUBLISHED: 07:25 EST, 14 December 2012 | UPDATED: 09:33 EST, 14 December 2012

In a story that mirrors the 1961 Hayley Mills film The Parent Trap (and the 1998 Lindsey Lohan remake), a couple are remarrying more than 30 years since their divorce after their daughter reunited them.

Bev Worsnop was just 16 when she married her childhood sweetheart Robert Worthington in 1975 in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

They split up five years later but finally found love again after their daughter Kelly Worthington, 32, got back in touch with her dad a couple of years ago.

It must be love: Robert Worthington and Bev Worsnop are today remarrying, having first married in 1975 but getting divorced five years later

They’ll get married for the second time at Bolton Register Office, Greater Manchester, today.

Bev said: ‘We first met when I had a party in my house while my parents were away. I’d been to the Stag’s Head pub in St Helens Road beforehand and met Robert.

‘I told him I was holding a party and he said he was going to one too. It turned out it was the same party. We were married at the old Bolton Register Office in the town centre and stayed together for five years.

‘I was only 16 and was pregnant, but we both felt we had been too young to get married. We wanted some freedom.’

Happy family: Robert Worthington and Bev Worsnop with their daughter Kelly Worthington, now aged 32, who reunited them 30 years after their divorce

However, when their daughter, Kelly from Tonge Moor, wanted to get back in touch with her father, the couple, who live near to each other in Aldersyde Street, Great Lever, Bolton, Greater Manchester, were reunited.

Ms Worsnop said: ‘We had a 30-year gap during which I remarried and then separated again. But Kelly got me and Robert back together.

‘She’d grown up living with me, but wanted to make contact with Robert. So I left a note at his home just under two years ago, saying Kelly wanted to get in touch with him.

‘Kelly is now over the moon that we are getting married again. There’s a lot of catching up for us all to do.’

Reunited: Ms Worsnop is keeping her wedding dress a secret from her 59-year-old husband-to-be, but their daughter Kelly will be a witness and granddaughter Lauren Richards Worthington, aged 17, is a bridesmaid

Ms Worsnop asked her father, Arthur Ellis, aged 82, of Great Lever, about her marrying again. She said: ‘He is giving me away at the wedding.’

Ms Worsnop is keeping her wedding dress a secret from her 59-year-old husband-to-be, but their daughter Kelly will be a witness and granddaughter Lauren Richards Worthington, aged 17, is a bridesmaid.

The newlyweds will enjoy a celebration meal at the Chinese Buffet in Bolton town centre followed by a break in Blackpool, where they had their first honeymoon back in 1976.

The original: Hayley Mills, far left, starred in the 1961 film The Parent Trap as a pair of twins who reunite their separated parents, played by Maureen O’Hara, centre, and Brian Keith, right

Life imitating art: Natasha Richardson, Lindsay Lohan and Dennis Quaid in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, in which twins reunite their separated parents

Ian McKellen Anne Heche

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Steffi Graf Chyna (Joanie Laurer)

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Before she left home on a scholarship to UCLA, before she became an Olympic athlete, winning multiple gold medals in the heptathlon and long jump, before Sports Illustrated named her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century, Jackie Joyner-Kersee was a young child in East St. Louis, Illinois, wondering why a big, oddly shaped building was being erected in the impoverished city.

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It turned out to be a community center, and when it officially opened in 1968, she immediately became involved in everything it had to offer, from dance lessons to the opportunity to adopt senior citizens as honorary grandparents through its Meals on Wheels program. As she recounted tonight to John Donvan of ABC News at The Atlantic’s forum on community health in St. Louis, “It offered, to me, another place to call home.”

It also exposed her to the sports that would change her life. But during all her travels and accomplishments, Joyner-Kersee never forgot her home. At the closing ceremonies of the Seoul Olympics, she held up a sign that said “I love East St. Louis.” And eventually, she returned. The original community center had closed while she was away. So she opened a new one.

The former Mary E. Brown Community Center, she said, made her not just a great athlete but also a great person. And now, with the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center, she is attempting to similarly inspire the next generation. Her goal, simply stated, is to keep kids off the street. Along the way, her foundation attempts to educate entire families about healthy living.

Sustaining the center hasn’t been easy — Joyner-Kersee likened the effort involved to trying to make it in onto an Olympic team. But despite the center bearing her name, she insists it isn’t about her. Instead, she is focusing on what the community needs. Most importantly, she wants to inspire pride in East St. Louis, so that the kids who make it out, come back. Already, she said, some are returning, with fresh ideas and new challenges.

“In order to build a community, you have to identify where you come from,” she said. She acknowledge that one center can’t be everything to everybody. But the very people it inspires will hopefully return to do more. From there, they can continue to build.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/jackie-joyner-kersee-on-improving-communities-from-within/266199/

Emily Symons Melissa Gilbert

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Gary Estrada Judy Landers

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Diane Lane Mariah Carey

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CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) – A South Carolina psychiatrist and his wife, a nurse, have taken an uncommon, controversial approach to helping war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder by treating them with MDMA, a pure form of the party drug known as Ecstasy.

Their studies have found that the psychoactive stimulant decreases fear and defensiveness while increasing trust in those who take it as part of a therapy program, say Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Ann Mithoefer.

The MDMA-assisted therapy could eventually provide relief for thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who suffer from combat trauma, the Mithoefers say, noting that nearly 300 military personnel from around the country have contacted them seeking help.

Though concerns may arise about creating drug dependence or abuse by administering a tightly controlled substance, Dr. Mithoefer said he hasn’t seen that problem. The couple’s use of MDMA in studies has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.

MDMA “does cause some euphoria. But for people with PTSD, it can be pretty intense anxiety as well,” he said. “You need to have the support there. This is not a take-home medicine.”

Not everyone is convinced the benefits outweigh the potential dangers.

Ron Acierno, director of the PTSD clinical team at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, said the Mithoefers’ results were interesting, but he remains skeptical of the treatment.

“I don’t think any VA is going to touch this with a 10-foot pole because of the type of drug it is,” Acierno said. “It’s hard to switch conceptual gears that it might actually be very useful for a relatively common emotional disorder.”

“Because the abuse potential is high, we have to be very careful about it,” he said.

SHIFTING CONSCIOUSNESS

Dr. Mithoefer, an assistant professor in the Medical University of South Carolina’s department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, said he has long been interested in experiential techniques that help patients shift their consciousness to revisit their traumas.

He developed the protocol for MDMA-assisted therapy in 2001 and published the first completed study of its effect on patients with trauma in 2010. He found that after two months of treatment, at least 74 percent of the patients, including rape victims and a veteran, no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis.

A follow-up review of those patients, published last month in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showed more than 80 percent of them still had lasting benefits 3-1/2 years after treatment.

The Mithoefers currently are treating 24 veterans, firefighters, police officers or victims of military sexual trauma who have chronic PTSD that hasn’t been helped by other kinds of treatment. This three-year study will be completed in 2014.

The participants travel to Dr. Mithoefer’s private practice in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, for treatment over a period of five to eight months. After being screened to eliminate anyone with cardiovascular problems or a psychotic disorder, patients are given a series of doses of MDMA.

The Mithoefers are both present for the eight-hour drug-assisted sessions, which include therapy and support. The patients also participate in therapy before, in-between and after the medication sessions, they said.

Those who suffer from PTSD often can’t sleep, have nightmares, isolate themselves emotionally and avoid “anything that reminds them of Iraq,” including crowds, fireworks or overpasses, Ann Mithoefer said.

The use of MDMA seems to help the brain learn to process traumatic memories without becoming overwhelmed by emotion or fear, Dr. Mithoefer said.

“People have said things like, ‘It’s changed my relationship to my emotions,’” he said. “They realize, ‘I don’t have to be so afraid of the fear anymore.’”

Other studies that might include veterans are pending in Colorado and Canada and are being planned in the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia, said Brad Burge, a spokesman for the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which funds the research efforts.

The Santa Cruz, California-based organization said the pure MDMA used in treatment is different from Ecstasy, which often contains other harmful substances. Ecstasy’s recreational use has caused deaths from heat exhaustion or over-hydration, Dr. Mithoefer said.

Medical use of recreational drugs has been taboo since the 1960s, but the nonprofit is investing $10 million over 15 years in an effort to win FDA approval for MDMA as a prescription medicine in the United States.

“The taboos are lifting, and people are getting practical about science,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “If we took away everything in medicine that is being abused outside of medicine, we wouldn’t have too much left.”

Roland Griffiths, a professor in the psychiatry and neuroscience departments at Johns Hopkins University, called the Mithoefers’ research “groundbreaking.”

“It’s a potentially important, new application of use for a set of compounds that have not been available for clinical research for decades now,” Griffiths said. “PTSD is an awful, awful disease … I don’t think we should stick our heads in the sand.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/WJSlBm Journal of Psychopharmacology, online November 20, 2012.

Carey Lowell other facts

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Analyzing the medical records of nearly 1,000 knee-replacement surgery patients, researchers found that 30 percent of them gained five percent or more of their body weight in the five years following surgery.

One possible explanation for the counterintuitive results, experts said, is that if people have spent years adapting to knee pain by taking it easy, they don’t automatically change their habits when the pain is reduced.

“After knee replacement we get them stronger and moving better, but they don’t seem to take advantage of the functional gains” and become more active, said Joseph Zeni, a physical therapy professor at the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study.

“I think that has to do with the fact that we don’t address the behavioral modifications that have happened during the course of arthritis before the surgery,” he added.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. undergo knee replacement surgery each year.

The goal of putting in a new knee is to alleviate pain and get people moving around more, but Daniel Riddle, lead author of the new study and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said his team had noticed that patients tended to gain weight after surgery.

To see whether this was common, Riddle’s group used a patient registry from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, which collected information on 917 knee replacement patients before and after their procedures.

The researchers found that five years after surgery, 30 percent of patients had gained at least five percent of their weight at the time of the surgery. That’s 10 pounds or more on a 200-pound person, for example.

In contrast, less than 20 percent of those in a comparison group of similar people who had not had surgery gained equivalent amounts of weight in the same period.

Riddle’s team explains in their report, published in Arthritis Care & Research, that this degree of weight gain can lead to “meaningful effects on cardiovascular and diabetes related risk as well as pain and function.”

Part of the explanation for the weight gain the researchers observed could be the age at which patients get surgery, Riddle said. People in their 50s and 60s tend to gain weight anyway.

Still, in light of the lower rates of weight gain in the comparison group, which was also middle aged and older, Riddle said something else may also be at work among knee surgery patients.

“There’s something going on in these patients that predisposes them above and beyond their peers to weight gain,” Riddle told Reuters Health.

Indeed, the team also found that patients who had lost weight before their surgery were slightly more likely to gain weight afterward.

Riddle said that could be because when people lose weight in anticipation of an event, such as knee surgery, they are more likely to put on weight after they’ve achieved that goal.

Zeni said that to help people stave off the pounds after surgery, health care providers need to address the sedentary lifestyle people often adopt to accommodate their arthritis.

“We need to encourage patients to take advantage of their ability to function better and get them to take on a more active lifestyle,” he told Reuters Health.

Riddle agreed that the habit of being sedentary before knee replacement may carry over after surgery.

He said it will be important to develop and study weight loss interventions for these patients, and to target them to those who are most at risk of getting heavier, like relatively younger patients in their 50s and 60s and those who have lost weight before knee surgery.

In the meantime, Riddle said, patients can also take some action on their own by talking with their doctors about maintaining a healthy weight and consulting with a nutritionist and physical therapist about lifestyle changes.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TJTz24 Arthritis Care & Research, online November 30, 2012.

Judy Landers Barbara Streisand

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The first time you watch someone die (on this map), it makes you shudder. But then you start seeing how fast people are being born, and how the babies really coming at you. It’s babies and babies and more babies. “Sorry, but it’s babies all the way up!” And they are mostly named Aiden, Mason, Jayden, Madison, or Chloe – or Adele, Bristol, or Ivy. Eventually you start to feel full, and you cross your fingers for some deaths, so you can breathe. At least, I think that’s a normal way to feel. 

The visual simulation is based on average birth and death rates in the U.S. of 13.5 and 8.1 per thousand people annually, respectively. Our population is on pace to increase 44 percent by 2050.

I think there is a TV show where someone has access to this map a day in advance of the real deaths taking place, and she has to try and stop them. Or something like that. If not, it should be called The Mapmaker.

Don’t stare at it too long. Or do.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/to-sense-every-birth-and-death/266109/

Marlee Matlin Rebecca Romijn

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Older adults with colon cancer who were prescribed a daily aspirin were less likely to die than those who weren’t, according to a new study.

While the results need to be confirmed with more rigorous studies, they add to the evidence linking aspirin use to longer survival for cancer patients. Studies have also suggested the inexpensive drug can prevent some types of the disease from occurring in the first place.

Medical guidelines currently endorse the use of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart disease, but not to fight or prevent cancer.

The new study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, included more than 500 colon-cancer patients in the Netherlands aged 70 and older. More than 100 were prescribed daily low-dose “baby” aspirin for heart protection after their cancer diagnosis.

Between 1998 and 2007, the death rate for those prescribed aspirin was about half that of the non-aspirin users. The effect was biggest in people with more advanced cancer and in those who received no chemotherapy.

Anything that might improve survival in elderly adults with colon cancer would be welcome, since there is no consensus on whether to use chemotherapy in those patients, according to the study.

Previous studies have also associated aspirin use with increased survival. Research published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that aspirin therapy could extend survival for colon cancer patients whose tumors had a specific genetic mutation.

Still, more scientifically rigorous randomized controlled trials will be needed to confirm the findings of studies that are based on observation after the fact, and therefore less definitive about what actually causes the effect seen.

“We’re pretty sure this is a real effect, but we’re not sure of the magnitude,” said Dr. Gerrit Jan Liefers of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, an author of the new study. He said he didn’t expect randomized trials would show such a large survival advantage. Liefers is working to develop such a trial in the Netherlands.

One limitation of the study is that it looked at aspirin prescriptions, not actual use of the drug. (Low-dose aspirin for heart-disease protection isn’t available over the counter in the Netherlands.) It’s possible that heart benefits from aspirin might have helped the patients live longer, but the study authors said that alone couldn’t account for the big difference in death rates. Also, there might be differences between the groups unaccounted for by researchers that led to the improved survival among the aspirin users.

Liefers said it’s not completely clear how aspirin might combat colon cancer. One likely route: blocking the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2, or COX-2, which is involved in inflammation and is expressed in about 70 percent of colon tumors.

Boris Pasche, director of the hematology and oncology division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said it would be helpful to figure out who would benefit from and who could skip daily aspirin.

“It’s a fairly benign drug, but it has side effects,” including bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract and the brain, Pasche said.

He said patients should discuss with their physicians whether it makes sense to take aspirin at this point. “This supports the concept, but we need a prospective randomized trial,” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TFEnSF Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, online November 23, 2012.

Jennifer Garner Elena Anaya

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• WHSmith are now selling the book for £6.25, RRP is £25

• Party guide is currently languishing at 353 in Amazon’s bestselling chart

• Pippa was paid a reported £400,000 advance for the entertaining tome

By Toni Jones

PUBLISHED: 12:27 EST, 11 December 2012 | UPDATED: 13:22 EST, 11 December 2012

Sales of Pippa Middleton’s debut book haven’t exactly been soaring since the socialite launched the party guide in a blaze of publicity back in October.

So now it seems Kate’s little sister is spreading her wings and hoping for a bit more literary success across the channel.

Today Pippa arrived in Amsterdam to launch the Dutch edition of Celebrate: A Year of Festivities for Family and Friends and chose an eye-popping purple dress to ensure maximum publicity for her entertaining bible.

Pippa met with booksellers at a private Christmas drinks party to mark the launch of the Dutch edition of her book and posed for photographers outside the event in a Cadbury-coloured satin dress featuring a pelmet detail.

29-year-old Pippa teamed the smart block-coloured dress with purple suede court shoes and wore her hair pulled back in a simple up ‘do.

Meanwhile, back on British soil UK booksellers today slashed the price of the book – some by up to 75% – as they try to sell enough copies to make some money from the much-hyped book in time for Christmas.

High street stationery giants WHSmith are now selling the book for £6.25, even though its original cost was £25.

A spokesperson for WHSmith said of the price of the book: ‘We have got an up to 75 per cent-off promotion at the moment, and it is just one of the many hardback books that are part of that offer.’

Pippa met with booksellers at a private Christmas drinks party to mark the launch of the Dutch edition of her book

Pippa posed for photographers prior to the book launch at H. de Vries boeken, Haarlem just outside Amsterdam

Pippa was rumoured to have been given an advance of £400,000 for the book by publishers Penguin but the guide – featuring tips on chilling drinks and making tea – has been blasted by critics and is currently languishing at 353 in online retailer Amazon’s bestselling chart.

Novelist Jilly Cooper recently described the book as ‘terrible’ and claimed bosses at Penguin were ‘slitting their wrists’.

She said: ‘The sales have been dreadful, and I hear that the people at Penguin are virtually slitting their wrists over it. To think of all the money they spent on it, too.

‘I don’t blame her – I think that she was ill-advised.’

Booksellers in the UK have slashed the price of Pippa’s book by up to 75%

High hopes: Pippa Middleton and family leave Daunt Books in Fulham Road after her book launch in October

Angie Hart Carey Lowell

Pippa Middleton chooses a Cadbury-coloured dress to launch her entertaining guide in Holland as UK booksellers slash the price by 75% to drum up demand is a post from: Top News

PROBLEM: Aging, from a strictly medical perspective, can be thought of as a losing battle against progressive decline. Aside from figuring out how to reverse the process altogether, how might we help everyone “age well”?

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• Testosterone is Truth Serum
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METHODOLOGY: In an attempt to understand the aging process from multiple angles, researchers from UC San Diego and Stanford University surveyed and spoke with over 1,000 older adults, who averaged around 77 years in age, about their experiences. This included the standard information about chronic illness and disability, along with more subjective measures: how socially engaged the participants were, or how they characterized their own overall health, was looked at as well. They also asked them flat-out: On a scale from 1 to 10, how successfully do you believe you’re aging?

RESULTS: On the medical level, the results confirmed what we know to be true about aging: a significant association was found between older age and worsening physical and cognitive functioning. But when it came to attitude, this trend was reversed: as subjects got older, their self-rating of how successfully they were aging steadily improved. This increase in well-being was still presnt once income, education, and marriage were taken into account.

When age was controlled for, self-rated successful aging increased with higher levels of education, cognitive functioning, perceived physical and mental health, attitudes of optimism and resilience, and decreased levels of depression. Resilience and depression, specifically, appeared to affect successful aging to a degree comparable to the impact of physical health.

IMPLICATIONS: The researchers had assumed the opposite of what their results ended up showing: As our physical and cognitive functioning generally declines with age, they had reasoned, so, too, should our perceptions of how successfully we are aging. The very fact that their findings appeared so counter-intuitive carries a strong message against negative societal attitudes toward aging.

They identify psychiatric guidance as one potential key to enhancing the process for older adults. When it comes to successful aging, said lead author Dilip Jeste, “Perfect physical health is neither necessary nor sufficient.”

The full study, “Association Between Older Age and More Successful Aging: Critical Role of Resilience and Depression,” is published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Julia Brendler Theresa Russel

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Older adults with colon cancer who were prescribed a daily aspirin were less likely to die than those who weren’t, according to a new study.

While the results need to be confirmed with more rigorous studies, they add to the evidence linking aspirin use to longer survival for cancer patients. Studies have also suggested the inexpensive drug can prevent some types of the disease from occurring in the first place.

Medical guidelines currently endorse the use of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart disease, but not to fight or prevent cancer.

The new study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, included more than 500 colon-cancer patients in the Netherlands aged 70 and older. More than 100 were prescribed daily low-dose “baby” aspirin for heart protection after their cancer diagnosis.

Between 1998 and 2007, the death rate for those prescribed aspirin was about half that of the non-aspirin users. The effect was biggest in people with more advanced cancer and in those who received no chemotherapy.

Anything that might improve survival in elderly adults with colon cancer would be welcome, since there is no consensus on whether to use chemotherapy in those patients, according to the study.

Previous studies have also associated aspirin use with increased survival. Research published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that aspirin therapy could extend survival for colon cancer patients whose tumors had a specific genetic mutation.

Still, more scientifically rigorous randomized controlled trials will be needed to confirm the findings of studies that are based on observation after the fact, and therefore less definitive about what actually causes the effect seen.

“We’re pretty sure this is a real effect, but we’re not sure of the magnitude,” said Dr. Gerrit Jan Liefers of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, an author of the new study. He said he didn’t expect randomized trials would show such a large survival advantage. Liefers is working to develop such a trial in the Netherlands.

One limitation of the study is that it looked at aspirin prescriptions, not actual use of the drug. (Low-dose aspirin for heart-disease protection isn’t available over the counter in the Netherlands.) It’s possible that heart benefits from aspirin might have helped the patients live longer, but the study authors said that alone couldn’t account for the big difference in death rates. Also, there might be differences between the groups unaccounted for by researchers that led to the improved survival among the aspirin users.

Liefers said it’s not completely clear how aspirin might combat colon cancer. One likely route: blocking the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2, or COX-2, which is involved in inflammation and is expressed in about 70 percent of colon tumors.

Boris Pasche, director of the hematology and oncology division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said it would be helpful to figure out who would benefit from and who could skip daily aspirin.

“It’s a fairly benign drug, but it has side effects,” including bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract and the brain, Pasche said.

He said patients should discuss with their physicians whether it makes sense to take aspirin at this point. “This supports the concept, but we need a prospective randomized trial,” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TFEnSF Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, online November 23, 2012.

Sonia Couling Holly Hunter

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(Reuters Health) – Iron supplements may help boost brain development and ward off behavioral problems in babies who are born a bit on the small side, a new study from Sweden suggests.

Low birth-weight babies are more likely to end up iron deficient, researchers said. They need more of the nutrient for catch-up growth and haven’t stored as much as other babies if they’re also born premature.

For that reason, very early-term and very small babies are often put on iron – but less research has looked at babies born just shy of normal weight, to see if they are also at risk.

“I think this further solidifies the evidence that it’s a very good idea to give these (marginally low birth-weight) children iron supplements,” said Dr. Magnus Domellof, from Umea University, who worked on the study.

The research was led by his colleague, Dr. Staffan Berglund. Their team followed 285 infants born between 4 pounds, 7 ounces and 5 pounds, 8 ounces.

When the babies were six weeks old, the researchers randomly assigned them to get iron drops – either one or two milligrams per kilogram of body weight – or iron-free placebo drops each day until their six-month birthday.

Then at age three and a half, Domellof’s team brought the kids back for IQ tests and surveyed parents about their behavioral issues. The researchers compared kids in the iron- and placebo-drop study groups with another 95 children who were born at normal weight.

There were no IQ differences based on whether the smaller-than-average babies had been put on an iron regimen. All three low birth-weight groups had average scores between 104 and 105. (“Cognitive impairment” in this study was considered an IQ under 85.)

However, significantly more babies given placebo drops had behavioral problems, as reported by their parents. The issues included problems managing emotional reactions, anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and attention problems.

Almost 13 percent of the placebo-group babies scored above the cutoff for clinical behavior problems, versus about 3 percent of kids who’d taken iron drops and kids from the normal-weight comparison group.

That suggests iron deficiency in infancy may be a direct cause of behavioral problems later in childhood, the researchers wrote Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

They are continuing to monitor the same group of kids as they get older, to see if new cognitive or behavioral problems develop or old ones get better as the children head into grade school.

Domellof said he and his colleagues didn’t see any extra stomach problems in kids or delayed growth linked to the use of iron drops. Some research has suggested giving excessive iron to young kids who aren’t deficient may stunt their development.

But, “I would not be afraid of recommending this to all children (born) below 2,500 grams (5 pounds, 8 ounces) at this dose,” Domellof told Reuters Health.

“Here’s where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said Dr. Michael Georgieff, a child development researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who had reviewed the study as part of Berglund’s dissertation committee.

He told Reuters Health that it’s important for all parents to know their baby’s iron requirements when they leave the hospital.

“The issue with these marginally low birth-weight infants is, people really haven’t paid a lot of attention to them, but the evidence is accumulating that they are at risk for behavioral problems and less than ideal cognitive function,” said Dr. Betsy Lozoff, who studies the effects of iron deficiency in infants at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

For most babies in the United States, extra iron is recommended starting at four to six months, either through supplements if the mother is breastfeeding or through formula. Very small or premature babies typically have their iron monitored from birth.

But Lozoff, who wasn’t involved in the new research, said that in many places, there are no recommendations for how to treat babies who are just below a normal birth weight.

“This would suggest that it should just be a routine supplementation, and it can be at a low level of iron,” she told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online December 10, 2012.

Sherilyn Fenn Ivana Trump

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The nation’s highest court agreed to review a case over whether Myriad Genetics Inc may patent two genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

In a 2-1 ruling on Aug. 16, a panel of the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the biotechnology company’s right to patent “isolated” genes that account for most inherited forms of the two cancers.

But that ruling also denied Myriad’s effort to patent methods of “comparing” or “analyzing” DNA sequences.

The Federal Circuit had ruled in Myriad’s favor in July 2011, but that ruling was set aside by the Supreme Court, which asked it to revisit the case in light of later developments.

The genes in question, BRCA1 and BRCA2, can be used to detect risk of breast and ovarian cancer and aid in treatment options. Women who test positive using Myriad’s gene test, BRACAnalysis, have an 82 percent higher risk of breast cancer and 44 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer in their lifetimes.

The appeal against Myriad and the University of Utah Research Foundation was being pursued by a variety of medical associations led by the Association for Molecular Pathology.

They contended that Myriad’s patents are illegal, prohibit standard clinical testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and restrict scientific research and patients’ access to medical care, including their own genetic information.

A decision by the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June.

The case is Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398.

Jerri Manthey read more

U.S. Supreme Court to decide if human genes patentable is a post from: Top News

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

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I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Anette Bening Alizee Vertaald

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

When Lance Armstrong stepped up to the podium after winning the Tour de France in the summer of 1999, he delivered a potent message. Indeed, it wasn’t about the bike. He won over the admiration of people affected by cancer worldwide. The young man proved it’s possible to excel in an extreme test of endurance after surgery and chemotherapy for an aggressive, metastatic tumor. He made it seem easy, like you could have your cancer treatment and pedal up a mountain, fast.

LIVESTRONG is an unarguably bright and deceptively simple directive. My sons, then in elementary school, got it on their yellow wrist bands supporting Armstrong’s foundation. I got it while riding a stationary bike and swimming laps, however slowly, during chemo for breast cancer. I pushed myself — his narrative in mind, working and exercising, determined to tough it out no matter what health obstacles I met. My physician colleagues got it, too: “Fantastic!” was the consensus among the doctors in my office. Few of us knew about doping in sports back then. We didn’t question Armstrong’s achievements. They served perfect testimony to the power of modern medicine and oncology drugs.

In retrospect it’s clear that we — patients and their kids, parents, lovers, nurses, doctors, physical therapists and social workers, all of us in cancerland — wanted Armstrong to win. We cheered for the young man who gave us a best-case scenario of what life might be after cancer. He delivered hope, not with words so much, as oncologists do, but more powerfully, by physical action. His influence was pervasive, and that’s why it matters so much that he misled millions about his strength after receiving medications like vinblastine, etoposide, ifosfamide and cisplatin. Those are harsh drugs, and he came through seemingly unscathed, in phenomenally good shape.

Armstrong greets a cancer patient in 2009. [Brandon Malone/Reuters]

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And that’s where the medical ethics lies: Armstrong’s tale made us feel good and, perhaps, a tad more comfortable prescribing and accepting caustic treatments. Sure, we knew he was as an outlier from the get-go. Few cancer patients step into a clinic having won international sporting events. But his story, deliberately and consciously, overtly or subtly, modified patients’ expectations. He pulled our collective perception of what people with illness can do up a notch. Some pushed hard who were older, feebler, or plainly less strong than he. In 2012, people expect doctors to tell it like it is. The same goes for peer patients.

Coming to grips with the evidence about Armstrong’s case is painful for more than a few. Reading details of his risky, multi-year use of erythropoietin, testosterone, steroids, other drugs and transfusions before racing is enough to make any cancer or blood specialist wince. Many patients and advocates still support him, as I do in part, but there’s a chord of denial running through. He was a hero, an iconic survivor, and he’s let us down. This can be difficult to accept, because he helped. There’s no taking that back.

In some respects, Armstrong typified the profile of a testicular cancer patient. These are usually germ cell tumors, and affect some 8,500 men in the U.S. each year. Armstrong was 25 years old at the time of diagnosis in September, 1996. The condition occurs most commonly in Caucasian men between the ages of 15 and 34. His tumor had spread, extensively, to his lungs and to his brain. His prognosis was said to be slim. As he recounts in his memoir, he suffered weeks of retching nausea, baldness, weight loss and tiredness so severe his friends outpaced him on flat ground. He experienced pain, fear, catheter complications and worries about loss of insurance and career. But he got better. He started the Lance Armstrong Foundation and, shortly, got his life back on track.

Today, some 13.7 million individuals are alive in the U.S. after a cancer diagnosis. While some return, smoothly, to school or work, or resume their previous activities in good shape, many contend with long-term side effects after treatment. Many are disabled or unemployed. Depression is common. Especially for young people who’ve had illness, the pressure to succeed can drive exhaustion and, upon failure to meet unrealistically high expectations, feelings of inadequacy.

We might learn a lot, yet, from Armstrong’s story. In his book, he says the Tour de France, “filled with peaks, valleys, challenges and new perspectives,” is a metaphor for life. If that’s the case — and I believe him in that — then he’s got the chance to ride again, uphill or otherwise. He might reclaim our respect. He has the potential to do good. I hope he’ll find the route to doing just that.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/reconciling-lance-armstrongs-story-with-the-realities-of-cancer-survival/266031/

Rachael Leigh Cook Barbara Bouchet

Reconciling Lance Armstrong’s Story With the Realities of Cancer Survival is a post from: Top News

The nation’s highest court agreed to review a case over whether Myriad Genetics Inc may patent two genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

In a 2-1 ruling on Aug. 16, a panel of the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the biotechnology company’s right to patent “isolated” genes that account for most inherited forms of the two cancers.

But that ruling also denied Myriad’s effort to patent methods of “comparing” or “analyzing” DNA sequences.

The Federal Circuit had ruled in Myriad’s favor in July 2011, but that ruling was set aside by the Supreme Court, which asked it to revisit the case in light of later developments.

The genes in question, BRCA1 and BRCA2, can be used to detect risk of breast and ovarian cancer and aid in treatment options. Women who test positive using Myriad’s gene test, BRACAnalysis, have an 82 percent higher risk of breast cancer and 44 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer in their lifetimes.

The appeal against Myriad and the University of Utah Research Foundation was being pursued by a variety of medical associations led by the Association for Molecular Pathology.

They contended that Myriad’s patents are illegal, prohibit standard clinical testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and restrict scientific research and patients’ access to medical care, including their own genetic information.

A decision by the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June.

The case is Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398.

get more Susan George

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Zara’s Studded Ankle Boots/Chloe Susan Boots is a post from: Top News

Although strokes are often thought of as a condition of the elderly, researchers said long-term changes in the heart, arteries and blood as a result of drug abuse or heavy drinking may put users at higher-than-average risk earlier in life.

It’s also possible that some drugs, particularly cocaine and methamphetamines, may trigger a stroke more immediately, according to Dr. S. Andrew Josephson, a neurologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied drug use and stroke.

Because substance use is common in older adults as well, he said doctors should ask anyone who’s had a stroke about drugs and alcohol.

But, “we know that even with vascular risk factors that are prevalent – smoking, high blood pressure… most people still don’t have a stroke until they’re older,” Josephson, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

“When a young person has a stroke, it is probably much more likely that the cause of their stroke is something other than traditional risk factors.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to 800,000 people in the United States have a stroke every year, and strokes are the most common cause of serious long-term disability. One study of 2007 data found that almost five percent of people who had a stroke that year were between ages 18 and 44.

The current study included people from Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky who’d had a stroke before they hit 55.

Dr. Brett Kissela from the University of Cincinnati and his colleagues reviewed medical charts for blood or urine test results or other records of substance abuse for close to 1,200 stroke patients.

In 2005, the most recent year covered, just over half of younger adults who suffered a stroke were smokers at the time, and one in five used illicit drugs, including marijuana and cocaine. Thirteen percent of people had used drugs or alcohol within 24 hours of their stroke, according to findings published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.

“The rate of substance abuse, particularly illicit drug abuse, is almost certainly an underestimate because toxicology screens were not obtained on all patients,” said Dr. Steven Kittner, a professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore who also wasn’t part of the research team.

“It’s certainly underreported,” he told Reuters Health.

The rate of smoking, drug use and alcohol abuse – defined as three or more drinks per day – seemed to increase among stroke patients between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

But Kissela and his team said they can’t be sure whether more people were actually using those substances or doctors were just getting better at testing for and recording drug abuse.

The study also can’t prove that patients’ drug or alcohol use directly contributed to their strokes. It’s possible, for example, that people who abuse drugs also see their doctors less often or engage in other risky behaviors that increase their chance of stroke, Josephson explained.

He said the study emphasizes the importance of learning and quickly recognizing the signs of a stroke – such as weakness on one side of the body and dizziness – even for young people. Some treatments can only be used during a short “window of opportunity” after the stroke.

“We see patients all the time who have symptoms that are classic for a stroke… and those symptoms are not recognized as being stroke symptoms because of the idea that, ‘Well, that’s something that happens only to older people,’” he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TvQvpi Stroke, online November 15, 2012.

Nathalie Oberman Diamond

Drug, alcohol abuse tied to early-life strokes is a post from: Top News

PROBLEM: As anyone who’s had a Man Men-style lunch followed by a Mad Men-style dinner knows, the connection between our brain and stomach is not simple or logical. 

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• Cocaine Increases Long-Term Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke
• Variation in the Smell of Our Sweat Can Convey Fear or Disgust
• Our Oceans Are So Acidic They’re Dissolving Snails

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METHODOLOGY: University of Bristol provided 100 volunteers with lunch, with either a large or small portion of tomato soup as an appetizer. But, as with all free lunches, there was a catch: the bowls had a secret attachment capable of pumping soup in or out without the participants noticing. What they thought they were eating was therefore different from what actually ended up making it into their stomachs. Immediately following the meal, and for the next three hours, they were asked to evaluate their levels of hunger and fullness.

RESULTS: Right after they finished eating, the participants seemed to be in touch with their stomachs: They reported levels of hunger proportional to how much they had eaten. But the brain-stomach line of communication weakened as time went on, and 2 to 3 hours later, memory took over. The participants who thought they’d had a larger portion of soup felt less hungry for another meal. A full 24 hours later, when again confronted with the two portion sizes, the ones who thought they’d had the larger portion believed that it was a sufficient size for them. In other words, they remembered it as being filling, even though it wasn’t.

CONCLUSION: Memory plays an important role in our feelings of satiety, separate from the physiologic signals our stomach sends us.

IMPLICATIONS: The only problem with these findings, as with most experiments involving trickery, is how to apply it to real life. Until we can figure out how to make our food secretly disappear from our plates, we’re stuck trying to convince ourselves that the rice cakes we had for lunch were actually a big plate of spaghetti.

The full study, “Episodic Memory and Appetite Regulation in Humans,” is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Glenn Close Kristy Hinze

Study: For Hunger, Remembering That You Ate Matters More Than Actually Having Eaten is a post from: Top News

PROBLEM: As anyone who’s had a Man Men-style lunch followed by a Mad Men-style dinner knows, the connection between our brain and stomach is not simple or logical. 

---

• Cocaine Increases Long-Term Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke
• Variation in the Smell of Our Sweat Can Convey Fear or Disgust
• Our Oceans Are So Acidic They’re Dissolving Snails

---

METHODOLOGY: University of Bristol provided 100 volunteers with lunch, with either a large or small portion of tomato soup as an appetizer. But, as with all free lunches, there was a catch: the bowls had a secret attachment capable of pumping soup in or out without the participants noticing. What they thought they were eating was therefore different from what actually ended up making it into their stomachs. Immediately following the meal, and for the next three hours, they were asked to evaluate their levels of hunger and fullness.

RESULTS: Right after they finished eating, the participants seemed to be in touch with their stomachs: They reported levels of hunger proportional to how much they had eaten. But the brain-stomach line of communication weakened as time went on, and 2 to 3 hours later, memory took over. The participants who thought they’d had a larger portion of soup felt less hungry for another meal. A full 24 hours later, when again confronted with the two portion sizes, the ones who thought they’d had the larger portion believed that it was a sufficient size for them. In other words, they remembered it as being filling, even though it wasn’t.

CONCLUSION: Memory plays an important role in our feelings of satiety, separate from the physiologic signals our stomach sends us.

IMPLICATIONS: The only problem with these findings, as with most experiments involving trickery, is how to apply it to real life. Until we can figure out how to make our food secretly disappear from our plates, we’re stuck trying to convince ourselves that the rice cakes we had for lunch were actually a big plate of spaghetti.

The full study, “Episodic Memory and Appetite Regulation in Humans,” is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/study-for-hunger-remembering-that-you-ate-matters-more-than-actually-having-eaten/266001/

Judy Landers Barbara Streisand

Study: For Hunger, Remembering That You Ate Matters More Than Actually Having Eaten is a post from: Top News

By Annabelle Robertson
WebMD Feature

Reviewed by Kimball Johnson, MD

You’ve probably used one at the gym and may even have one sitting in your spare bedroom. The treadmill is the top-selling piece of fitness equipment in the U.S..

Therese Iknoian, author of Fitness Walking, says, “Treadmills are a fantastic alternative to outdoor workouts, particularly for people who feel a little unsure about being outside. They’re a safe, secure, controlled environment. The treadmill allows you to stop when you need to. You can control the hills; you can control the speed.”

But some people find the treadmill boring or wonder if they’re getting the most out of their exercise time.

If that’s you, relax. Treadmill workouts can be some of the most efficient, challenging, calorie-burning routines around.

The key is intervals. With intervals, instead of trudging along at a steady pace, you’ll mix up your speed and incorporate floor exercises into your routine. Intervals keep boredom at bay, keep the heart pumping, and increase your calorie burn, says Cindy Wasilewski, fitness manager at The Lodge at Wooloch, a destination spa in Hawley, Pa.

Intervals lend intensity to treadmill classes at the Blast900 gym in Atlanta where fitness director Jeff Baird says exercisers burn at least 900 calories in an hour.

Blast900′s boot-camp style workouts alternate 10 minutes of walking, jogging, or running with 10 minutes of weight training and floor exercises. While some students are on the treadmills, others are on the floor, sweating it out. Then they switch.

Wasilewski and Baird share five treadmill routines that deliver great workouts in 20, 30, or 60 minutes. 

Besides a treadmill, you’ll need hand weights and a stability ball for the floor exercises. As always, check with your doctor before you start a new exercise program.

60-Minute Treadmill Workouts

If you’ve got an hour, here are two different treadmill workouts to try. Wasilewski, who designed both workouts, calls the first one the “No Excuses” routine because it delivers maximum results for the time investment. The second workout is an interval trek, designed to boost cardiovascular endurance.

The perceived exertion rate referenced in these workouts is a scale of 0-10 used to measure the intensity of exercise. For example, 0 (nothing at all) is how you feel when at rest, while 10 (very, very heavy) is how you feel after extremely strenuous exercise.

No-Excuses Routine

Start on the treadmill:

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Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

this link Glenn Close

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

• 18 per cent over mothers over 35 opted not to give birth naturally
• Royal College of Midwives raises concern about a quarter of mothers having the surgery
  
• But teen pregnancies down by a fifth in five years

By Anna Hodgekiss

PUBLISHED: 10:11 EST, 6 December 2012 | UPDATED: 13:21 EST, 6 December 2012

25 per cent of mothers in England had a Caesarean – a slight increase from the previous year

Older mothers are behind the number of Caesarean sections rising yet again.

The latest maternity figures show that 25 per cent of mothers in England had a caesarean – a slight increase from the previous year, according to data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).

Older mothers were more inclined to have an elective C section – with 18 per cent over the age of 35 opting not to give birth naturally.

One in 10 mothers aged 25 to 34 had the elective surgery with just five per cent of those under 25 giving birth by caesarean, according to the hospital data from 2011 and 2012.

The Royal College of Midwives has raised concerns about the figures.

Louise Silverton, the RCM’s director for midwifery, said: ‘That means that one in four women giving birth is having a caesarean, which is a major surgical procedure.

‘There has also been a rise in the number of elective caesareans while the number of emergency caesareans has remained stable. Questions must be asked as to what the driver is behind this increase in elective surgery.

‘An increase in caesarean rates and instrumental deliveries often reflects a decrease in involvement with midwives, and this concerns me.’

The data also shows that more older women and fewer teenagers are having babies.

The rate of teenage mothers giving birth in English hospitals has fallen by a fifth in five years.

In 2011/12, 33,600 mothers aged 13 to 19 gave birth in NHS hospitals – a 22 per cent fall on the number recorded in 2006/07.

Older mothers were more inclined to have an elective C section – with 18 per cent over the age of 35 opting not to give birth naturally

In the same time frame, the number of mothers aged 40 to 49 increased by 16 per cent, from 22,200 to 25,600. 

Ms Silverton added: ‘This data also shows that the age profile of pregnant women is getting older.

“The baby boom, combined with the increasing age of mothers, means greater demands on maternity services, as pregnancies for older women can give rise to increased complications and a need for medical interventions, which demands more of midwives and others in the maternity team.

‘As we are in the midst of a baby boom, these factors together with the increasing social complexity of care needs for all mothers have a dramatic effect on the workload heaped on already overstretched midwives.’ 

London has the most older mothers – but the youngest number of teenage pregnancies

HSCIC chief executive Tim Straughan added: ‘While the number of hospital deliveries in England has broadly risen – albeit relatively slowly – in recent years, almost 10,000 fewer hospital deliveries last year were to teen mums compared to five years previously.

‘This drop in hospital teen deliveries has occurred in all regions of the country, although the North East still has the highest rate of deliveries among 13 to 19-year-olds according to its population size. 

In contrast, London has the lowest rate for teenage mothers, but the highest rate for older mothers.

other facts Rebecca Gibney

Caesarean sections now account for a QUARTER of all births – and older mothers are the reason why is a post from: Top News

• Lucy Day was ‘badly let down’ by the NHS who missed opportunities that could have saved tragic daughter Fleur, coroner rules
  

By Leon Watson

PUBLISHED: 23:40 EST, 5 December 2012 | UPDATED: 04:02 EST, 6 December 2012

A tragic baby girl survived for just 15 hours following a catalogue of blunders by hospital staff which included an obstetrician ignoring three bleeps to his pager.

A coroner ruled that mother Lucy Day was ‘badly let down’ by the NHS who missed opportunities that could have saved tragic daughter Fleur.

Dr Martin Voss was alerted three times by the midwife team amid growing concerns for the expectant mother.

The child was born at Cheltenham General Hospital in Gloucestershire but survived for just 15 hours after a catalogue of errors by staff

He only arrived to review her at 4.05am after initially being called at 3.15am and gave no explanation for his delay, an inquest heard.

Mrs Day gave birth to little Fleur by Caesarean section within the hour at 4.54am on December 9, 2010 at Cheltenham General Hospital.

She weighed just 5.86lbs and was very cold. She was not feeding naturally from her mother and developed both hypoglycaemia and hypothermia.

But a coroner said other staff also failed the mum as her condition didn’t trigger alarm bells quickly enough and there was a delay in moving her to a special care unit.

Paediatrician Dr Haroon Mansoori, a locum who had been at the hospital for just four days, told the inquest Fleur appeared to be in ‘good condition’ when he examined her.

He said he was unaware of her low temperature, but had he been, would have admitted her to the special care baby unit.

Paediatrician registrar Dr Ka Fai Sun was also said to be lacking ‘basic skills’ to help when Fleur went into the Special Care Bay Unit at around 5pm. By that time her oxygen saturation levels were low.

And a consultant paediatrician was held up in traffic and did not arrive at the hospital until 6.30pm – an hour after he was called.

Fleur died two hours later at 8.30pm and pathologists were unable to determine her cause of death.

Tom Osborne, the assistant deputy Gloucestershire coroner, said hospital staff ‘missed opportunities’ that might have saved the baby.

He said he was referring the case to the Care Quality Commission to investigate neo-natal care at the Gloucestershire NHS Hospitals Trust.

Recording a narrative verdict, Mr. Osborne said: ‘She was not recognised as small for her gestational age and at high risk of hypothermia and hypoglycaemia – or that she had signs indicating she was unwell after delivery.

‘These would have warranted an early paediatric review and admission to the special care baby unit for monitoring and investigation.

‘This resulted in a lost opportunity to render further medical intervention.

‘As a result of this little girl’s death, it may well be that we will avoid and prevent similar deaths in these circumstances in the future.

‘The NHS is rightly cherished as a favourite institution of which mostly we can be proud.

‘But unfortunately, as is evident from the death of Fleur, there are rare occasions when a person under the care of the NHS is badly let down.’

Mrs Day, formerly of Cirencester, Gloucestershire, but now living in China, left the two-day hearing without comment.

 

Danneel Ackles Anette Bening

Newborn died after doctor ignored three bleeps to his pager and then failed to explain why he was late is a post from: Top News

The nation’s highest court agreed to review a case over whether Myriad Genetics Inc may patent two genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

In a 2-1 ruling on Aug. 16, a panel of the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the biotechnology company’s right to patent “isolated” genes that account for most inherited forms of the two cancers.

But that ruling also denied Myriad’s effort to patent methods of “comparing” or “analyzing” DNA sequences.

The Federal Circuit had ruled in Myriad’s favor in July 2011, but that ruling was set aside by the Supreme Court, which asked it to revisit the case in light of later developments.

The genes in question, BRCA1 and BRCA2, can be used to detect risk of breast and ovarian cancer and aid in treatment options. Women who test positive using Myriad’s gene test, BRACAnalysis, have an 82 percent higher risk of breast cancer and 44 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer in their lifetimes.

The appeal against Myriad and the University of Utah Research Foundation was being pursued by a variety of medical associations led by the Association for Molecular Pathology.

They contended that Myriad’s patents are illegal, prohibit standard clinical testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and restrict scientific research and patients’ access to medical care, including their own genetic information.

A decision by the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June.

The case is Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398.

Carey Lowell other facts

U.S. Supreme Court to decide if human genes patentable is a post from: Top News

Amanda Doherty Pete Travis

Shopbop’s Biggest Savings Event of the Season! is a post from: Top News

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Christy Turlington John Goodman

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Top News

Although the experts have only conducted studies on the gene Arih2 using mice, they hope it can be used as a target for drugs eventually to fight a spectrum of incurable diseases.

Lead author Marc Pellegrini at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia said the gene appears to act like a switch, flipping the immune system on and off.

“If the gene is on, it dampens … the immune response. And if you switch it off, it greatly enhances immune responses,” Pellegrini said in a telephone interview.

Arih2 was first identified by another group of scientists in the fruit fly but it drew the interest of Pellegrini’s team because of its suspected links to the immune system.

In a paper published in Nature Immunology, Pellegrini and his team described how mice embryos died when the gene was removed.

Next, they removed the gene from adult mice and noticed how their immune systems were boosted for a short period of time. But it quickly went into an overdrive and started attacking the rodents’ own healthy cells, skin and organs.

“The mice survived for six weeks quite well. Then they started developing this very hyperactive immune responses and if you leave it for too long, it starts reacting against the body itself,” Pellegrini said.

Pellegrini and his colleagues hope that scientists can study the gene further and use it as a drug target to fight a large spectrum of diseases.

“It’s like an accelerator. In infectious diseases, you want to slam on the brakes on this gene, and for autoimmune diseases, you want to push the accelerator to make it work much harder to stop the whole immune response,” said Pellegrini.

“The more the gene works, the less of an immune response there is. And the less active the gene is, the more the immune response is.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/YjjNv0 Nature Immunology, online Nov. 25, 2012.

Gisele Bundchen Eliza Szonert

Scientists find immune response to gene in mice is a post from: Top News

Lillian Muller Hedy Burress

Piperlime.com – 20% Sitewide is a post from: Top News

“You let it settle, pour it through a cotton cloth and then you wait 20 minutes and it’s ready to drink,” said Allgood, the U.S.-based director of Procter & Gamble Co’s not-for-profit program to provide clean water in developing nations and disaster zones.

“We reverse engineered a municipal water treatment plant, so something that costs tens of millions of dollars we can make for three and a half cents.”

P&G, a consumer products giant, works with international and local humanitarian groups such as Care, World Vision and Save the Children to get the sachets to areas where dirty water is a leading cause of illness and death.

One sachet purifies 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of water, enough for five people for one day, and it does not matter that the container and straining cloth are not clean. Shipping, duties and distribution, education and training by the groups on the ground take the final cost to about 10 U.S. cents per packet.

The dirt in Allgood’s demonstration came from his garden, where his dog likes to romp. Iron sulphate is the coagulant that pulls together soil, heavy metals and parasites. Chlorine – a precise 80 granules per sachet – kills viruses and bacteria, including those that cause cholera.

“When the water is really dirty, there aren’t a lot of low-cost technologies that work very well,” Allgood, who has a PhD in toxicology and is P&G’s point person in the Clinton Global Initiative, told Reuters in an interview before the formal opening of a new production plant in Singapore on Thursday.

“It seems strange to us but I hear it so many times – people see this and they say ‘Oh my God, I was drinking dirty water’.”

About 40 million sachets will be made this year at a plant in Pakistan and 100 million in Singapore, which is also P&G’s global disaster relief hub. The goal is to make 200 million a year by 2020, equal to 2 billion liters of clean water.

Many of the sachets are sent to development projects in Africa and emerging Asian countries but were also handed out to people hit by floods and other disasters in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Haiti, Allgood said.

Clean water is also vital to people with HIV/AIDS, he added, as their damaged immune systems make them very vulnerable to life-threatening diarrhea and other infections.

“It goes well with Scotch,” Allgood joked, handing over a glass of clear, clean water that had been dangerous to drink 30 minutes earlier and now had only a slight taste of chlorine.

In Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, he said, the sachets were part of relief supplies and he visited tents for cholera victims, showing aid workers how the powder works.

“I grabbed a bucket out of the place where the effluent was from where they washed the clinic. I went and treated it and told the World Vision folks we had to drink it,” he said. “They looked at me like I was crazy. But we did drink it.”

Catherine Bell Stephanie Powers

Small sachets are big help for clean water in developing world is a post from: Top News

This time of year, trainees make the rounds to interview for graduate programs, medical school, and residency or fellowship positions. In many cases, they spend a decade or more after college before they can move on to independent careers in academia or industry. As a director of the Physician Scientist Training Program at Northwestern, my discussions with these young men and women invariably turn to their plans for the future, their much-deserved opportunities to practice their trade for which they have been so thoroughly trained, and the challenges they might face in research. But this year I try not to go there. This year the fiscal cliff looms

If the U.S. Congress fails to act, the now clichéd across-the-board tax cuts on discretionary spending — the so called “sequestration” clause of the Budget Control Act of 2011 — will kick in. One might argue that this could trigger a recession; but there is almost no denial that it will cripple U.S. scientific enterprise.

Even speaking from a purely economic perspective, there are excellent fiscal reasons why science should perhaps be the last sector to face cuts.

The sequestration will cause an approximately 8 percent cut in funding for federal research agencies. This includes the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Agency, the Environment Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey. These do not even take into account the proposed cuts in research spending by the military. 

Scientists everywhere are worried. Federal agencies do not just fund science in their own institutes; through their extramural programs they provide grants to investigators in universities and medical schools across the nation. No private foundation or corporation even comes close in providing this magnitude of research support. Scientific communities such as the Society for Neuroscience, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology and others are aghast, urging their members to speak out.       

As a physician-scientist, I am most familiar with biomedical research. In this arena, scientists have been having a tough time obtaining research support already: funding from the National Institutes of Health, also known as the NIH, that funds this sort of research has been static at around $31 billion for the last decade; indeed falling in comparison to inflation by approximately 20 percent.

This has made it very difficult for scientists to compete for the diminishing pot of money. The odds of a new proposal being funded have reduced precipitously, by almost half.

This has taken a steady toll on careers. Established scientists have had to down-size their research programs; younger, less-established investigators are essentially straggling along with shoe-string budgets, or quitting the field. University leaders are aware of the implications.

Indeed, this month, the presidents of three Illinois Universities — Northwestern University, University of Chicago and University of Illinois — have appealed in a joint letter to Senator Dick Durbin to spare scientific research funding from the guillotine.

In their letter, Morton Schapiro of NU; Robert J. Zimmer of The University of Chicago; and Robert A. Easter of the University of Illinois, wrote that these schools have “received more than $1 billion in research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation last year alone.” They claim an estimated loss to these three institutions from sequestration will be $20 million in funding from the NSF in 2013.

Scientific advancement can ultimately bring down health care costs — the far bigger driver of our national indebtedness.

Simply put, with the new cuts, it is really difficult to see how the U.S. scientific program can flourish. With funding levels so low a lot of excellent science cannot be funded. Promising new lines of research are not started, and long term projects don’t get the funds to be renewed.

But it is not just the scientific product that is in jeopardy. Federal funding also funds the salaries for trainees who become the future scientific workforce. After years of training, at great personal sacrifice, they are now facing this dismal scenario. A decrease in morale is rapidly percolating throughout the system, tainting the optimism of the next generation.

To be sure, times are tough for everyone. Why pity scientists when unemployment rates are high across all sectors?

First, science is an important social endeavor where we learn about ourselves and the universe around us. It teaches us creativity with intellectual rigor and logic that enhance our lives at multiple levels.

These are not trivial benefits; this training might originate in universities but slowly seeps through the fabric of our culture to make for a more enlightened citizenry. But even speaking from a purely economic perspective, there are excellent fiscal reasons why science should perhaps be the last sector to face cuts.

The science dollars that are being discussed are a pittance: less than 1 per cent of the federal budget. It is ludicrous to entertain the idea of attacking the national debt by cutting down on this sliver of the economic pie.

Besides, scientists are the true innovators, with science being the real engine of growth in this competitive global economy. Science provides the know-how and expertise that are relayed as baton to entrepreneurs and the corporate sector.

More visibly, the NIH provides grants to small businesses to exploit nascent areas of science for commercialization. Science provides the technology to deal with national disasters, epidemics and bioterrorism. And then there is, of course, health — the NIH’s stated reason d’être.

Research is the only way we can improve upon diagnosis and treatments that will allow people to long, healthy, and productive lives. Solutions here can ultimately bring down health care costs — the far bigger driver of our national indebtedness. It is the NIH that funds research on diseases such as diabetes, neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases, liver, kidney, immune-mediated diseases, you name it. And these are just the more common ailments. There are so many others less well known, often devastating, frequently genetic, that as a group cause enormous havoc to human health.

The only hope for patients and their caregivers is through research.

We should have never have placed our scientific enterprise hostage to such economic brinkmanship. Funding of science really is discretionary in name only; it is absolutely essential for the very survival of our country.

So what must be done? We can petition legislators to stop sequestration. But that is not enough. We should ask that science budgets grow consistently to keep up with economic growth and inflation. Only with long-term support of our scientific enterprise can we keep the U.S. competitive in a global economy, its citizens prosperous and healthy.

Only then can we recruit and maintain the next generation of our work force, a motivated crew that just needs the resources. The trajectory of science funding must be upwards, not downwards, and definitely not off a cliff.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/in-defense-of-science-how-the-fiscal-cliff-could-cripple-research-enterprise/265749/

Kyla Cole Rosa Blasa

In Defense of Science: How the Fiscal Cliff Could Cripple Research Enterprise is a post from: Top News

This time of year, trainees make the rounds to interview for graduate programs, medical school, and residency or fellowship positions. In many cases, they spend a decade or more after college before they can move on to independent careers in academia or industry. As a director of the Physician Scientist Training Program at Northwestern, my discussions with these young men and women invariably turn to their plans for the future, their much-deserved opportunities to practice their trade for which they have been so thoroughly trained, and the challenges they might face in research. But this year I try not to go there. This year the fiscal cliff looms

If the U.S. Congress fails to act, the now clichéd across-the-board tax cuts on discretionary spending — the so called “sequestration” clause of the Budget Control Act of 2011 — will kick in. One might argue that this could trigger a recession; but there is almost no denial that it will cripple U.S. scientific enterprise.

Even speaking from a purely economic perspective, there are excellent fiscal reasons why science should perhaps be the last sector to face cuts.

The sequestration will cause an approximately 8 percent cut in funding for federal research agencies. This includes the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Agency, the Environment Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey. These do not even take into account the proposed cuts in research spending by the military. 

Scientists everywhere are worried. Federal agencies do not just fund science in their own institutes; through their extramural programs they provide grants to investigators in universities and medical schools across the nation. No private foundation or corporation even comes close in providing this magnitude of research support. Scientific communities such as the Society for Neuroscience, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology and others are aghast, urging their members to speak out.       

As a physician-scientist, I am most familiar with biomedical research. In this arena, scientists have been having a tough time obtaining research support already: funding from the National Institutes of Health, also known as the NIH, that funds this sort of research has been static at around $31 billion for the last decade; indeed falling in comparison to inflation by approximately 20 percent.

This has made it very difficult for scientists to compete for the diminishing pot of money. The odds of a new proposal being funded have reduced precipitously, by almost half.

This has taken a steady toll on careers. Established scientists have had to down-size their research programs; younger, less-established investigators are essentially straggling along with shoe-string budgets, or quitting the field. University leaders are aware of the implications.

Indeed, this month, the presidents of three Illinois Universities — Northwestern University, University of Chicago and University of Illinois — have appealed in a joint letter to Senator Dick Durbin to spare scientific research funding from the guillotine.

In their letter, Morton Schapiro of NU; Robert J. Zimmer of The University of Chicago; and Robert A. Easter of the University of Illinois, wrote that these schools have “received more than $1 billion in research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation last year alone.” They claim an estimated loss to these three institutions from sequestration will be $20 million in funding from the NSF in 2013.

Scientific advancement can ultimately bring down health care costs — the far bigger driver of our national indebtedness.

Simply put, with the new cuts, it is really difficult to see how the U.S. scientific program can flourish. With funding levels so low a lot of excellent science cannot be funded. Promising new lines of research are not started, and long term projects don’t get the funds to be renewed.

But it is not just the scientific product that is in jeopardy. Federal funding also funds the salaries for trainees who become the future scientific workforce. After years of training, at great personal sacrifice, they are now facing this dismal scenario. A decrease in morale is rapidly percolating throughout the system, tainting the optimism of the next generation.

To be sure, times are tough for everyone. Why pity scientists when unemployment rates are high across all sectors?

First, science is an important social endeavor where we learn about ourselves and the universe around us. It teaches us creativity with intellectual rigor and logic that enhance our lives at multiple levels.

These are not trivial benefits; this training might originate in universities but slowly seeps through the fabric of our culture to make for a more enlightened citizenry. But even speaking from a purely economic perspective, there are excellent fiscal reasons why science should perhaps be the last sector to face cuts.

The science dollars that are being discussed are a pittance: less than 1 per cent of the federal budget. It is ludicrous to entertain the idea of attacking the national debt by cutting down on this sliver of the economic pie.

Besides, scientists are the true innovators, with science being the real engine of growth in this competitive global economy. Science provides the know-how and expertise that are relayed as baton to entrepreneurs and the corporate sector.

More visibly, the NIH provides grants to small businesses to exploit nascent areas of science for commercialization. Science provides the technology to deal with national disasters, epidemics and bioterrorism. And then there is, of course, health — the NIH’s stated reason d’être.

Research is the only way we can improve upon diagnosis and treatments that will allow people to long, healthy, and productive lives. Solutions here can ultimately bring down health care costs — the far bigger driver of our national indebtedness. It is the NIH that funds research on diseases such as diabetes, neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases, liver, kidney, immune-mediated diseases, you name it. And these are just the more common ailments. There are so many others less well known, often devastating, frequently genetic, that as a group cause enormous havoc to human health.

The only hope for patients and their caregivers is through research.

We should have never have placed our scientific enterprise hostage to such economic brinkmanship. Funding of science really is discretionary in name only; it is absolutely essential for the very survival of our country.

So what must be done? We can petition legislators to stop sequestration. But that is not enough. We should ask that science budgets grow consistently to keep up with economic growth and inflation. Only with long-term support of our scientific enterprise can we keep the U.S. competitive in a global economy, its citizens prosperous and healthy.

Only then can we recruit and maintain the next generation of our work force, a motivated crew that just needs the resources. The trajectory of science funding must be upwards, not downwards, and definitely not off a cliff.

Kevin Smith Catherine Oxenberg

In Defense of Science: How the Fiscal Cliff Could Cripple Research Enterprise is a post from: Top News

Researchers, who published their findings in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, said there are about five bounce house-related injuries per 100,000 U.S. children every year.

That’s far less than the estimated 31 trampoline-related injuries per 100,000 U.S. children reported in 2009, but the study’s lead author says the new findings should make people take notice.

“Groups should take a look at these data, help us get the word out and make sure parents are making informed decisions,” said Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The number of kids being brought into emergency rooms (ERs) for the injuries increased from 702 in 1995 to 11,311 children in 2010.

Broken bones and sprains were the most common types of injuries with each accounting for about a quarter of the ER visits. Cuts, concussions and bruises made up the rest.

Smith suggested that parents limit the use of bouncers to children about 6 years old and older, limit the number of children using them at one time, and always have a parent present.

Until now, according to the researchers, there had only been one other study looking at bouncer-related injuries, and that only looked at broken bones in a small number of patients at one hospital.

For their new study, the researchers used information from a database of injuries related to consumer products that were treated at about 100 U.S. ERs between 1990 and 2010.

From that database, Smith and his colleagues were able to estimate that about 65,000 children and teens were treated for bouncer-related injuries during that time.

About a third were under five years old, half were between six and 12 years old, and the rest were between 13 and 17 years old.

They found that the rate grew toward the end of the study with the annual number of injured children more than doubling from 2008 to 2010.

The most likely explanation for the increase is more children using inflatable bouncers.

“We tried really hard to get those numbers,” said Smith. “We generally got the feedback that the usage was going up but we couldn’t get any firm numbers.”

Dr. Tigran Avoian, the author of the previous study on bouncer-related broken bones, said it could also be attributed to other factors, such as better reporting by hospitals.

“I don’t think it’s related to an epidemic,” said Avoian of the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, who was not involved in the new study.

In an email to Reuters Health, John Carr, of the American Inflatable Alliance, warns that the new study does not say how many children who use inflatable bouncers got injured.

He added that – by his calculations – children may use bouncers as many as 643 million times per year.

“When utilization is factored in, injury rates are actually quite small,” he writes.

SIMILAR TO TRAMPOLINES

The researchers point out that — aside from the frequency — inflatable bouncer-related injuries were similar to previous findings on trampoline injuries.

Specifically, arm injuries decreased, while leg injuries increased, as children got older.

Also, the number of children needing to be hospitalized — about 3 percent — in the new study was about the same as for trampoline-related injuries.

Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised against the use of trampolines at homes and playgrounds. (see Reuters Health article of Sep. 24, 2012. http://reut.rs/OPn4z5)

But Smith told Reuters Health that a similar recommendation for bouncers is probably not wise.

“My personal philosophy is that we need to try to get children off the couch so that they are physically active and develop a healthy and active lifestyle, but understand any activity comes with risks… So the purpose was not to be an alarmist, but to make sure parents understand the risks,” he said.

In his previous study, Avoian and his colleagues suggested that children playing in bouncers be supervised and broken into groups by size.

“They should know kids can get serious injuries, but it could be prevented,” said Avoian.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/HjQ8dI Pediatrics, online November 26, 2012.

Chyna (Joanie Laurer) Jennifer Garner

Bounce house-related injuries on the rise in U.S. is a post from: Top News

Rebecca Gibney Lillian Muller

‘Twilight’ repeats at No. 1 with $17.4M is a post from: Top News

Although the experts have only conducted studies on the gene Arih2 using mice, they hope it can be used as a target for drugs eventually to fight a spectrum of incurable diseases.

Lead author Marc Pellegrini at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia said the gene appears to act like a switch, flipping the immune system on and off.

“If the gene is on, it dampens … the immune response. And if you switch it off, it greatly enhances immune responses,” Pellegrini said in a telephone interview.

Arih2 was first identified by another group of scientists in the fruit fly but it drew the interest of Pellegrini’s team because of its suspected links to the immune system.

In a paper published in Nature Immunology, Pellegrini and his team described how mice embryos died when the gene was removed.

Next, they removed the gene from adult mice and noticed how their immune systems were boosted for a short period of time. But it quickly went into an overdrive and started attacking the rodents’ own healthy cells, skin and organs.

“The mice survived for six weeks quite well. Then they started developing this very hyperactive immune responses and if you leave it for too long, it starts reacting against the body itself,” Pellegrini said.

Pellegrini and his colleagues hope that scientists can study the gene further and use it as a drug target to fight a large spectrum of diseases.

“It’s like an accelerator. In infectious diseases, you want to slam on the brakes on this gene, and for autoimmune diseases, you want to push the accelerator to make it work much harder to stop the whole immune response,” said Pellegrini.

“The more the gene works, the less of an immune response there is. And the less active the gene is, the more the immune response is.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/YjjNv0 Nature Immunology, online Nov. 25, 2012.

Winona Ryder Jeri Ryan

Scientists find immune response to gene in mice is a post from: Top News

Although Ranbaxy supplied more than 40% of the generic cholesterol-lowering drug sold in the U.S., the FDA says it does not expect a shortage. Five other firms make generic Lipitor: Sandoz, Teva, Apotex, Mylan, and Dr. Reddy’s.

The FDA says the tiny glass particles contaminating Ranbaxy’s atorvastatin have only “a remote possibility” of causing harm. Ranbaxy says the particles, about the size of a grain of sand, might cause “physical irritation.”

Ranbaxy makes atorvastatin, and puts it into pill form at its U.S. facilities. The active ingredient, however, comes from India. Ranbaxy’s preliminary investigation suggests that this active ingredient was contaminated with the glass particles, according to FDA public information officer Sarah Clark-Lynn.

To date, there have been no reports of harm linked to Ranbaxy generic Lipitor.

It’s not the first sign of trouble for Ranbaxy, the huge Indian pharmaceutical company owned by Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo. Last January, the company signed an FDA-requested consent decree closing plants in India and the U.S. until it made “fundamental changes.” None of those plants made the recently recalled generic Lipitor products.

The company admitted to several serious charges, including submitting false data to the FDA, failing to prevent contamination of sterile drugs, failing to prevent penicillin contamination of non-penicillin drugs, and inadequate testing of drugs to ensure they kept their potency until their expiration date.

The U.S. Justice Department said the action was “unprecedented in its scope.”

Recalled Generic Lipitor

The recalled atorvastatin comes as a white tablet packaged in plastic bottles. The 10-mg tablets bear the imprint “RX12,” the 20-mg tablets bear the imprint ”RX828,” and the 40-mg tablets bear the imprint “RX829.” No 80-mg tablets are included in the recall.

Here’s the list of the recalled atorvastatin products:

source Sarah Miles

Firm Stops Making Generic Lipitor After Recall is a post from: Top News

• Daily 15-minute bouts of low-intensity vibration could help immune and bone problems linked with being severely overweight
• Experts hope it could help the obese ‘regain health without drugs’ – until they lose weight by diet and exercise

By Amanda Williams

PUBLISHED: 11:32 EST, 30 November 2012 | UPDATED: 14:30 EST, 30 November 2012

Researchers have found the machines could offer significant clinical benefits for obese people suffering from a wide range of immune problems related

They have until now been seen as ‘the lazy option’ for those hankering after a slimmer physique, but without the hard work.

But it seems the vibrating machine could really hold the key for overweight people when it comes to improving their health – even if it doesn’t mean losing weight.

Tests carried out by New York researchers has shown the machines could offer significant clinical benefits for obese people suffering from a wide range of immune problems related to obesity.

A study published online in The FASEB Journal found that low-intensity vibrations led to improvements in the immune function of overweight mice. 

Researchers say if the same effect can be found in people, it could lead to a number of clinical benefits.

Study author, Clinton Rubin, from Stony Brook University, in New York, said: ‘This study demonstrates that mechanical signals can help restore an immune system compromised by obesity.’

To make the discovery Rubin led a team which fed a group of adult mice a high fat diet for seven months to make them obese, significantly damaging their immune and skeletal systems.

Part of the group that was subjected to daily 15-minute bouts of low-intensity vibration.

It seems the vibrating machine could really hold the key for overweight people when it comes to better health, even if it does not mean losing weight

The results showed the vibrations boosted levels of disease fighting T-cells and B-cells in the obese mice, which are both vital to the immune system.

The intervention also helped to reverse bone loss, returning the overweight rodents toward the health of the mice that were fed a regular diet.

Gerald Weissmann, of the FASEB Journal, said: ‘This solid support for a shaky intervention should get scientists and health care professionals buzzing.

‘If it works out in people, low intensity vibration could be a relatively cheap way of helping obese folks regain health without drugs – until they lose weight by diet and exercise.’

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Researchers found each successive job loss was tied to a higher chance of heart problems among more than 13,000 older adults. Still, it’s not clear if or how unemployment, itself, might have caused the extra heart attacks.

Matthew Dupre, the lead researcher on the report from the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, said a combination of stress, worsening lifestyle and poor management of chronic conditions without health insurance may be to blame.

“Those without a job may be unable to control their high blood pressure or to manage their diabetes (with their usual medication), or rates of smoking may be exacerbated,” Dupre told Reuters Health.

But it’s too early to know for sure what’s behind the link, he said, which means it’s also too early to recommend ways to ward off heart problems among the recently-unemployed.

The new data came from a large U.S. study of 13,451 adults who were interviewed every other year, for an average of 12 years, about their health, lifestyle and life events such as employment and job loss.

Study participants were 55 years old at the onset, on average, and two-thirds of them were overweight or obese. One in seven people was initially unemployed.

During the research period, 1,061 of all participants – almost eight percent – had a heart attack.

Dupre’s team found the more times people had been let go leading up to the latest survey, the higher their chance of having a heart attack. Unemployment was still linked to a 35 percent increased risk of heart attack after the researchers accounted for the effects of poverty and education, as well as race, age and other heart risks.

“We weren’t surprised to find the association, but we were surprised to find that the effects were so large, on par with classic risk factors such as hypertension and diabetes,” Dupre said.

“The associations are strong, and they remain despite accounting for a whole host of possible explanations.”

FIRST YEAR OUT

People were especially likely to have a heart attack during their first year of being out of work, the researchers reported Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 900,000 Americans have a heart attack every year.

Dupre said people who have recently lost their jobs, as well as the doctors who treat them, should be aware of these added heart risks and be extra vigilant about the signs and symptoms of a heart attack.

The author of a commentary published with the study said more research is needed to understand why unemployment may affect health and who is most at risk for such problems.

Studies have shown “a fairly convincing relationship between job loss and adverse health,” according to William Gallo, from City University of New York.

However, he wrote, “Egregiously absent is research on why and how a socioeconomic exposure, such as job loss, influences health.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/WtbYlQ Archives of Internal Medicine, online November 19, 2012.

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