WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — Cancer can put an enormous strain on a marriage, and couples are much more likely to fall apart if the woman is the patient.
In fact, the odds of separation or divorce are six times higher compared to when the man is the one with the illness, a new study shows.
The researchers did find that couples that have been married longer are more likely to survive the difficulties of dealing with cancer. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — Researchers report that a father in a Canadian family developed a strain of the H1N1 swine flu that was resistant to the antiviral Tamiflu, after being given the drug to prevent the disease.
To date, the World Health Organization has reported some 45 cases of H1N1 swine flu that were resistant to Tamiflu, which is why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others caution against using Tamiflu to prevent the disease in people who are symptomless. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — Eating a Westernized diet with lots of sugar and carbohydrates caused almost instantaneous changes in the gut flora of mice — changes that caused the mice to become obese, researchers have found.
These shifts in the microbial environment, reported in the Nov. 11 edition of Science Translational Medicine, might mean that experts should look more closely at the billions of microorganisms residing in human guts to better understand and perhaps even treat the epidemic of obesity plaguing the modern world. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — To get down to a healthy weight, obese and overweight people often struggle to cut their daily caloric intake by a necessary 15 percent to 40 percent.
But new research suggests that a twist on alternate-day fasting may make dieting easier to tolerate and boost heart health to boot.
“This diet has been around about 20 years, but its effect on weight loss hadn’t really been studied,” Krista Varady, an assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition who led a research team at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a news release. The study authors reported their findings in the Nov. 1 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Read More
TUESDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) — Methods to gauge blood cholesterol to determine vascular disease risk can be simplified, researchers in England say.
Their method measures levels of either total or high-density lipoprotein (HDL, or “good” cholesterol) in the blood or apolipoproteins (proteins that help transport cholesterol), without the need to have patients fast and without regard to another form of blood fat called triglycerides. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — Most of the dust that coats your furniture and floors comes from outdoors and can pose a health threat, a new study suggests.
The researchers developed a computer model that can track the distribution of outdoor soil and airborne particles into homes and found that more than 60 percent of household dust originates from tracked-in soil and airborne particles from the outdoors. The remainder is from dead skin shed by residents, fibers from carpets and upholstered furniture. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) — The tragedy last week at Fort Hood, Texas, where an Army psychiatrist anticipating active duty has been blamed for killing 13 people and wounding 29 others in a shooting rampage, has sharpened the nation’s focus not just on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on another casualty of war: soldiers’ mental health.
The ruptures wrought by post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, certainly seem more pronounced in the present-day conflicts than in previous wars. But as the nation pauses to honor its soldiers past and present this Veterans Day, experts are unclear whether there is an actual increase in PTSD or just a perception of increase due to more awareness about the condition. Read More
TUESDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) — Almost a quarter of the people on Medicare who are hospitalized for heart failure are back in the hospital within a month of discharge, a new study reveals.
That should not be happening, said Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, who added that there’s plenty of blame to go around. Ross was lead author of the study, published online Nov. 10 in Circulation: Heart Failure. Read More
TUESDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) — Exposure to several common pathogens may increase the risk of having a stroke, a new study shows.
Led by Dr. Mitchell Elkind, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, the research team found that the pathogens Chlamydia pneumoniae, Helicobacter pylori, cytomegalovirus and herpes simplex virus 1 and 2 may be implicated in accelerating arterial disease, which in turn increases the risk of stroke. Read More
TUESDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) — Long-term use of cholesterol-lowering statins appears to reduce the incidence of gallstones and the need for surgery to prevent the excruciating pain they cause, a new study indicates.
“We’re talking about people who have been taking them for about 1½ years,” said Susan S. Jick, director of the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Study at Boston University and a member of the team reporting the finding in the Nov. 11 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The protective effect seems to grow over time. The relative risk for them is about half the risk of someone who is not exposed to a statin.” Read More
