Fact Check: Doctor Approval Needed for NyQuil?
Voice of San Diego
January 5, 2011
by Keegan Kyle
"Another example of unintended, and somewhat ridiculous, consequences in PPACA (the health care reform act) can be found in a provision that requires individuals to obtain a doctor's prescription before using their own money to purchase over-the-counter medications like aspirin or NyQuil," U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., wrote in an op-ed published by the Union-Tribune on Dec. 17.
Determination: False
Analysis: Part of the landmark health care legislation passed by Congress last year changed how millions of people can receive discounted medical supplies. In the editorial, Bilbray derided the change as another example of failed legislation and advocated for an overhaul.
But his example isn't accurate.
Some employer-provided health care plans, such as flexible spending accounts or health savings accounts, provide a tax break and reimburse recipients for the cost of their medical supplies, which may include over-the-counter medication like aspirin or NyQuil. Under the new legislation, those people must first get a prescription for over-the-counter medication in order to get the tax break and reimbursement. Without a prescription, they can't benefit from their health care plan's discounted price.
However, contrary to Bilbray's statement, the legislation doesn't stop people from buying over-the-counter medication without a prescription. They'll just have to pay the full retail price and any accompanying taxes...
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
Ohio Child Cancers Confound Parents, Investigators
Ohio Child Cancers Confound Parents, Investigators
The Associated Press
By JOHN SEEWER
December 30, 2010 (AP)
His oldest daughter, diagnosed with leukemia nearly five years ago when she was 13, is in remission. His 12-year-old son has another year of chemotherapy for a different type of leukemia. And his 9-year-old daughter is scared she'll be next.
Hisey is not alone in fearing the worst. Just about every mom and dad in this rural northern Ohio town gets nervous whenever their children get a sinus infection or a stomachache lingers. It's hard not to panic since mysterious cancers have sickened dozens of area children in recent years.
Since 1996, 35 children have been diagnosed — and three have died — of brain tumors, leukemia, lymphoma, and other forms of cancer — all within a 12-mile wide circle that includes two small towns and farmland just south of Lake Erie. With many of the diagnoses coming between 2002 and 2006, state health authorities declared it a cancer cluster, saying the number and type of diagnoses exceed what would be expected statistically for so small a population over that time.
...During the 1960s and '70s, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated 108 cancer clusters around the United States, most of them childhood leukemia. But they found no definite causes for any of them.
The CDC has since allowed states to take the lead investigating almost all suspected clusters while still offering some oversight, as the federal agency is doing in Ohio.
The outbreak around Clyde is only 50 miles north of another cluster that Ohio health officials spent four years investigating. Beginning in the late 1990s, nine former students from River Valley High School in Marion were diagnosed with leukemia.
Tests found toxic chemicals in schoolyard soil and students were relocated to new buildings miles away. Investigators never definitively linked the cancers to the old school site, a former World War II Army depot where wastes and solvents were dumped and burned.
The nation's most intensive investigation ever of a cancer cluster began nine years ago in western Nevada and remains inconclusive. Hundreds of state and federal experts have spent millions investigating the leukemia that sickened 17 children and killed three between 1997 and 2004...
The Associated Press
By JOHN SEEWER
December 30, 2010 (AP)
His oldest daughter, diagnosed with leukemia nearly five years ago when she was 13, is in remission. His 12-year-old son has another year of chemotherapy for a different type of leukemia. And his 9-year-old daughter is scared she'll be next.
Hisey is not alone in fearing the worst. Just about every mom and dad in this rural northern Ohio town gets nervous whenever their children get a sinus infection or a stomachache lingers. It's hard not to panic since mysterious cancers have sickened dozens of area children in recent years.
Since 1996, 35 children have been diagnosed — and three have died — of brain tumors, leukemia, lymphoma, and other forms of cancer — all within a 12-mile wide circle that includes two small towns and farmland just south of Lake Erie. With many of the diagnoses coming between 2002 and 2006, state health authorities declared it a cancer cluster, saying the number and type of diagnoses exceed what would be expected statistically for so small a population over that time.
...During the 1960s and '70s, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated 108 cancer clusters around the United States, most of them childhood leukemia. But they found no definite causes for any of them.
The CDC has since allowed states to take the lead investigating almost all suspected clusters while still offering some oversight, as the federal agency is doing in Ohio.
The outbreak around Clyde is only 50 miles north of another cluster that Ohio health officials spent four years investigating. Beginning in the late 1990s, nine former students from River Valley High School in Marion were diagnosed with leukemia.
Tests found toxic chemicals in schoolyard soil and students were relocated to new buildings miles away. Investigators never definitively linked the cancers to the old school site, a former World War II Army depot where wastes and solvents were dumped and burned.
The nation's most intensive investigation ever of a cancer cluster began nine years ago in western Nevada and remains inconclusive. Hundreds of state and federal experts have spent millions investigating the leukemia that sickened 17 children and killed three between 1997 and 2004...
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Study ties brain structure size to socializing
Study ties brain structure size to socializing
AP
Dec. 26, 2010
NEW YORK (AP) — Do you spend time with a lot of friends? That might mean a particular part of your brain is larger than usual.
It's the amygdala, which lies deep inside. Brain scans of 58 volunteers in a preliminary study indicated that the bigger the amygdala, the more friends and family the volunteers reported seeing regularly.
That makes sense because the amygdala is at the center of a brain network that's important for socializing, says Lisa Feldman Barrett, an author of the work published online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
For example, the network helps us recognize whether somebody is a stranger or an acquaintance, and a friend or a foe, said Barrett, of Northeastern University in Boston.
But does having a bigger amygdala lead to more friends, or does socializing with a lot of friends create a bigger amygdala? The study can't sort that out. But Barrett said it might be a bit of both...
AP
Dec. 26, 2010
NEW YORK (AP) — Do you spend time with a lot of friends? That might mean a particular part of your brain is larger than usual.
It's the amygdala, which lies deep inside. Brain scans of 58 volunteers in a preliminary study indicated that the bigger the amygdala, the more friends and family the volunteers reported seeing regularly.
That makes sense because the amygdala is at the center of a brain network that's important for socializing, says Lisa Feldman Barrett, an author of the work published online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
For example, the network helps us recognize whether somebody is a stranger or an acquaintance, and a friend or a foe, said Barrett, of Northeastern University in Boston.
But does having a bigger amygdala lead to more friends, or does socializing with a lot of friends create a bigger amygdala? The study can't sort that out. But Barrett said it might be a bit of both...
Saturday, December 25, 2010
You are what your father ate
RODENT OF THE WEEK: You are what your father ate
December 24, 2010|By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
As they say, you are what you eat. And if you’re a mouse, you’re also what your father ate.
So say researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Texas at Austin. In a study published this week in the journal Cell, they report that a father’s diet influences how metabolic genes function in his offspring.
The research team fed some male mice a normal diet, while other mice got a low-protein diet. All the males mated with females who ate the same healthy diet. Sure enough, the offspring of the protein-deprived fathers had hundreds of genetic changes that weren’t seen in the mouse pups whose fathers ate the normal amount of protein. The changes were observed even when the fathers never met their offspring.
December 24, 2010|By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
As they say, you are what you eat. And if you’re a mouse, you’re also what your father ate.
So say researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Texas at Austin. In a study published this week in the journal Cell, they report that a father’s diet influences how metabolic genes function in his offspring.
The research team fed some male mice a normal diet, while other mice got a low-protein diet. All the males mated with females who ate the same healthy diet. Sure enough, the offspring of the protein-deprived fathers had hundreds of genetic changes that weren’t seen in the mouse pups whose fathers ate the normal amount of protein. The changes were observed even when the fathers never met their offspring.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Memory and Jet Lag
Memory and Jet Lag
May 21, 2001
NPR
NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on a new study looking at memory and jet lag. The study, which appears in the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, tested the mental skills of 20 flight attendants after they had crossed at least seven time zones. Those who had only a few days to recover had significantly more memory problems and brain changes than those who had two weeks or more between long flights.
May 21, 2001
NPR
NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on a new study looking at memory and jet lag. The study, which appears in the June issue of Nature Neuroscience, tested the mental skills of 20 flight attendants after they had crossed at least seven time zones. Those who had only a few days to recover had significantly more memory problems and brain changes than those who had two weeks or more between long flights.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Second-hand smoke kills 1% of the world's population every year
Second-hand smoke kills 600,000 a year: WHO study
Nov 25 2010
By Kate Kelland
Reuters
Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.
In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.
"Two-thirds of these deaths occur in Africa and south Asia," the researchers, led by Annette Pruss-Ustun of the WHO in Geneva, wrote in their study.
Children's exposure to second-hand smoke is most likely to happen at home, and the double blow of infectious diseases and tobacco "seems to be a deadly combination for children in these regions," they said.
Commenting on the findings in the Lancet journal, Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California said policymakers try to motivate families to stop smoking in the home.
"In some countries, smokefree homes are becoming the norm, but far from universally," they wrote.
The WHO researchers looked at data from 192 countries for their study. To get comprehensive data from all 192, they had to go back to 2004. They used mathematical modeling to estimate deaths and the number of years lost of life in good health.
Worldwide, 40 percent of children, 33 percent of non-smoking men and 35 percent non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, they found.
This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.
For the full impact of smoking, these deaths should be added to the estimated 5.1 million deaths a year attributable to active tobacco use, the researchers said.
CHILDREN
While deaths due to passive smoking in children were skewed toward poor and middle-income countries, deaths in adults were spread across countries at all income levels.
In Europe's high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, while 35,388 deaths were in adults. Yet in the countries assessed in Africa, an estimated...
Nov 25 2010
By Kate Kelland
Reuters
Around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year, World Health Organization (WHO) researchers said on Friday.
In the first study to assess the global impact of second-hand smoke, WHO experts found that children are more heavily exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.
"Two-thirds of these deaths occur in Africa and south Asia," the researchers, led by Annette Pruss-Ustun of the WHO in Geneva, wrote in their study.
Children's exposure to second-hand smoke is most likely to happen at home, and the double blow of infectious diseases and tobacco "seems to be a deadly combination for children in these regions," they said.
Commenting on the findings in the Lancet journal, Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California said policymakers try to motivate families to stop smoking in the home.
"In some countries, smokefree homes are becoming the norm, but far from universally," they wrote.
The WHO researchers looked at data from 192 countries for their study. To get comprehensive data from all 192, they had to go back to 2004. They used mathematical modeling to estimate deaths and the number of years lost of life in good health.
Worldwide, 40 percent of children, 33 percent of non-smoking men and 35 percent non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, they found.
This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.
For the full impact of smoking, these deaths should be added to the estimated 5.1 million deaths a year attributable to active tobacco use, the researchers said.
CHILDREN
While deaths due to passive smoking in children were skewed toward poor and middle-income countries, deaths in adults were spread across countries at all income levels.
In Europe's high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, while 35,388 deaths were in adults. Yet in the countries assessed in Africa, an estimated...
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Plant-based diet may help depression, dementia
Food Consumer
07/07/2010
A new study in the July 6, 2010, issue of Neurology suggests that having depression boosts risk of dementia like Alzheimer's disease.
This is only a suggestion because the study does not mean that depression causes dementia or vise versus.
The study involved 949 people at an average age of 79 years, who were free of dementia, but 125 of them were diagnosed with depression at the beginning of the study.
At the end of the 17-yer follow-up, 164 participants developed dementia; of those participants, 136 were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
Jane Saczynski, PhD, author of the study from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA and colleagues found 22 percent of those who had depression at baseline ended up developing dementia at the end of the study compared to 17 percent of those who were not depressed.
Dr. Saczyynski said even though depression may not necessarily cause dementia, it is possible that something like inflammation of brain tissue that contributes to depression boosts the risk of dementia like Alzheimer's.
Indeed, that is a possibility. Diet is one of the things that may affect risk of both depression and dementia.
A study led by Nanri A and colleagues from the National Center for Global Health and Medicine in Tokyo, Japan shows that a plant-based diet protects against depression.
Nanri found a healthy Japanese diet, consisting of high amounts of vegetables, fruit, mushrooms and soy products was associated with fewer depressive symptoms...
Food Consumer
07/07/2010
A new study in the July 6, 2010, issue of Neurology suggests that having depression boosts risk of dementia like Alzheimer's disease.
This is only a suggestion because the study does not mean that depression causes dementia or vise versus.
The study involved 949 people at an average age of 79 years, who were free of dementia, but 125 of them were diagnosed with depression at the beginning of the study.
At the end of the 17-yer follow-up, 164 participants developed dementia; of those participants, 136 were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
Jane Saczynski, PhD, author of the study from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA and colleagues found 22 percent of those who had depression at baseline ended up developing dementia at the end of the study compared to 17 percent of those who were not depressed.
Dr. Saczyynski said even though depression may not necessarily cause dementia, it is possible that something like inflammation of brain tissue that contributes to depression boosts the risk of dementia like Alzheimer's.
Indeed, that is a possibility. Diet is one of the things that may affect risk of both depression and dementia.
A study led by Nanri A and colleagues from the National Center for Global Health and Medicine in Tokyo, Japan shows that a plant-based diet protects against depression.
Nanri found a healthy Japanese diet, consisting of high amounts of vegetables, fruit, mushrooms and soy products was associated with fewer depressive symptoms...
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