School of Being Healthy

U.S. researchers have remarked that drugs used for treating children infected with the virus that causes AIDS do not appear to increase the risk of psychiatric problems in children.

“The question that is coming up is why do they have so many issues? Is it their HIV, is it their antiretrovirals or is it other factors?” said Dr. Sharon Nachman of Stony Brook University in New York, who worked on the study published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

No link between HIV drugs (antiretrovirals) any psychiatric problem was found by the team.

“It wasn’t the antiretrovirals. It didn’t matter which antiretrovirals the kids used. Those didn’t predict or prevent a kid from getting a psychiatric illness” or having social or academic problems, Nachman said in a telephone interview.

Montel Williams, Emmy Award-winning television personality and patient activist, recently said he was impressed with Israel’s liberal attitude toward medical marijuana, and he believes the U.S. could learn a thing or two from the Jewish state.

The activist was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and has since been an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana to relieve pain caused by the disease.

From news.yahoo.com:

The former host of the popular long-running talk show “The Montel Williams Show” is in Israel on a fact-finding mission to learn about its medicinal cannabis practices. He is meeting with legislators, scientists and physicians.

At the height of his TV career, Williams was one of the most recognizable faces in America alongside fellow daytime TV hosts Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera.

“We need to get out of the dark ages and into the new ages,” he told The Associated Press. “Not every patient can use cannabis, but for those who can — why deny it?”

Itay Goor-Aryeh, the head of the pain management unit at the Sheba Medical Center in central Israel, said certain doctors in Israel can approve cannabis prescriptions and disperse them to patients.

An Earth-observing satellite will be launched after a five-year delay to test new technologies aimed at improving weather forecasts and monitoring climate change.

“We’ve already had 10 separate weather events, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damages,” said Louis Uccellini of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

From news.yahoo.com:

The satellite will lift off before dawn Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a Delta 2 rocket that will boost it into an orbit some 500 miles (800 kilometers) high.

The space agency already has a fleet of satellites circling the Earth, taking measurements of the atmosphere, clouds and oceans. But many are aging and need replacement.

The latest — about the size of a small school bus — is more sophisticated. It carries five different types of instruments to collect environmental data, including four that never before have flown into space.

The information will “help us understand what tomorrow will bring,” whether it’s the next-day forecast or long-term climate change, said Andrew Carson, the mission’s program executive at NASA headquarters.

The number of teenagers who have undergone weight loss surgery on the NHS has more than trebled in only a period of three years.

Teenagers as young as 14 are having gastric bands fitted with a cost of £7,000 a time despite the fact that warnings have been issued about the procedure not always effective.

From Dailymail.co.uk:

Last year, 34 teenagers underwent procedures such as gastric band fitting and stomach stapling on the NHS – up from ten in 2007.

In total, 210 under-25s had weight-loss surgery last year. It marks a near four-fold increase since 2007, when only 52 operations were carried out on this group.

But there are concerns that many of these expensive ‘quick-fix’ procedures don’t work.

Gastric band surgery involves fitting a band near the top of the stomach, restricting the amount of food that can move down into the lower part. The top part of the stomach fills up quickly, making the patient feel full.

Susan Ringwood, chief executive of eating disorder charity Beat, told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, which obtained the figures:  ‘Having a gastric band fitted is a very serious operation that has long-term, permanent consequences, yet we know young people are not always being given this information and that is very concerning.’

Men with prostate cancer could halve their risk of dying if they are given hormone therapy as well as radiotherapy, according to a recently concluded research.

It was found by the study that hormone therapy reduces the levels of male hormones that can boost the growth of tumours.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

“[This] is an important trial, and has two clear messages for current clinical practice. First, it confirms that NADT significantly reduces mortality after radiotherapy for high-risk prostate cancer, and is a standard of care,” the Telegraph quoted Chris Parker from London’s Royal Marsden Hospital, as saying.

“Second, it helps to resolve the uncertainty regarding NADT duration, and strongly suggests that men receiving NADT should have at least six months’ treatment,” added Parker.

In the new research, a team from Australia and New Zealand looked again at results of a trial involving 802 men with locally advanced prostate cancer, some of whom were only treated with radiation and others who also received either three or six months’ worth of hormone therapy.

The researchers looked at the patients 10 years on and found there was an 11 per cent death rate among those who had the six-month NADT treatment combined with radiotherapy, compared with 22 per cent who just had radiation.

The study has been published in The Lancet.

Scientists have claimed that a traditional remedy made from foxgloves can lower the risk of prostate cancer by a quarter.

Digoxin, the drug, is already used for treating congestive heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms.

From Dailymail.co.uk:

Scientists from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found digoxin lowered the risk of prostate cancer by 24 per cent among the 47,000 men tested.

But they warn the results do not prove digoxin, whose side-effects include nausea, headaches and male breast enlargement, prevents the disease.

Professor Elizabeth Platz said: ‘We realised that combining our laboratory and epidemiologic approaches could reduce the possibility that results on the candidate drugs might be due to chance.

‘Adding the epidemiology study to the drug screen step provided an assessment of the drug’s potential activity in people.’

According to the Cancer Discovery journal, researchers say Digoxin could help to combat prostate cancer by stopping the growth of the disease.