ΥΓΕΙΑ health

Maria Dalamagka  Does moderate, prudent drinking protect the heart and arteries? Two analyses say, actually that the answer is yes. But they raise a bigger issue: What should we do with this information? The answer to that question may come as a surprise. Let's look at the findings first. Researchers from the University of Calgary, University of Texas Health Science Center, and Harvard Medical School scoured the medical literature for long-term studies that compared drinking habits with the development of cardiovascular disease. Of the 4,235 studies they identified, 84 met the researchers' strict criteria. When combined, these studies included more than two million men and women who were followed for an average of 11 years. Using a technique called meta-analysis, the researchers pooled results from the 84 publications and analyzed the data as if they were from one gigantic study. Compared with no alcohol use, moderate alcohol use over the average study duration • reduced the...

Maria Dalamagka  Poor glycemic control , whether too high or too low, is associated with decreased survival in diabetic patients on hemodialysis, Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, MD, MPH, PhD, professor of medicine, pediatrics, and epidemiology at the University of California at Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, reported here at Kidney Week 2011: American Society of Nephrology 44th Annual Meeting. Dr. Kalantar-Zadeh reported that in a 6-year study, moderate hyperglycemia raised the risk for all-cause or cardiovascular mortality of hemodialysis patients with diabetes, and levels of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) below 6% or blood glucose below 100 mg/dL were associated with an elevated risk for death. According to most studies, he said, if glucose is well controlled, there are improvements in mortality, microvascular complications, and cardiovascular disease. One study showed that for every 1% decrease in HbA1c, deaths related to diabetes decreased 21%, microvascular complications de...

Maria Dalamagka Women who suffer either physical or sexual abuse early in life have a significantly increased risk for subsequent cardiovascular events, including myocardial infarction and stroke, a new study suggests. The study, using data from the Nurses' Health Study II, shows that women who reported they had experienced forced sexual activity during childhood or adolescence had a greater than 50% increased risk for cardiovascular disease. The relationship with physical abuse was significant but less robust, the authors note, and will have to be confirmed in other data sets. This is the third study to show that forced sex among girls is linked with at least a 50% increase in cardiovascular event risk, lead author Janet Rich-Edwards, ScD, MPH, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, said at a press conference here. The relationship was only partially explained by traditional cardiovascular risk factors. ...

Maria Dalamagka  Autism may be an advantage in some settings and should not be viewed as a defect that needs suppressing, according to a provocative article published online November 2 in Nature. Recent data and my own personal experience suggest it's time to start thinking of autism as an advantage in some spheres, not a cross to bear," said author Laurent Mottron, MD, PhD, from the University of Montreal's Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders. According to the article, the definition of autism itself is biased, being characterized by "a suite of negative characteristics," focusing on deficits that include problems with language and social interactions. However, in certain settings, such as scientific research, people with autism exhibit cognitive strength."We think that the kind of strengths and cognitive profile that we find in autistics are much more specific than scientists usually acknowledge," said Dr. Mottron."Unfort...

Maria Dalamagka  Deep in the jungles of  West Africa, there are places where obesity is completely unknown. The natives just don’t get fat. A professor doing population studies discovered this curious fact. After watching this group and comparing them to others, he found something unique about their diet: The locals use a paste derived from the seed of a “bush mango” to thicken their soups. This professor, an expert in nutritional biochemistry at the University in nearby Cameroon, created an extract of this seed and ran his own tests. After 10 weeks, the people taking this extract dropped an average of 28 pounds and dropped 6 inches around their waist. The results were published in a national, peer-reviewed medical journal. FOX News picked up the story from Reuters when the study hit the media last year. Along with a healthy diet and regular exercise, you can use this very same natural extract to help drop unwanted fat.

Maria Dalamagka  A clot lytic treatment strategy with low-dose recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (rtPA) speeds clot removal in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) that is complicated by intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH), results of a phase 2 trial confirm. Moreover, it does so with an "acceptable safety profile compared to placebo and historical controls," the authors, led by Neal Naff, MD, from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, write. One caveat with the novel treatment, however, is that it appears to be associated with more bleeding,said senior author Daniel F. Hanley, MD, also from Johns Hopkins. Still, the aim in treating this condition, which can be almost 100% fatal, is to reduce the patient's exposure to blood, thereby reducing injury to the brain. "This drug has to be used carefully because of the increased risk of bleeding, but it will dissolve the blood clot that has formed in the intraventricular space," Dr. Hanley s...

Maria Dalamagka  Repeated exposure to anesthesia for early-life surgeries may lead to neurodevelopmental problems in children, new research suggests. A large cohort study showed that children who underwent 2 or more anesthetic/surgery episodes before the age of 2 years had a nearly 2-fold increased risk for developing learning disabilities (LDs) by their late teens compared with their counterparts who had not received anesthesia. Receiving multiple early-age exposures was also significantly associated with the need for school-based individualized educational programs (IEPs) related to speech and language impairment and for lower scores on tests of cognitive ability and academic achievemen "It's important to reassure parents that single exposures to anesthesia don't seem to be associated with a problem and that the need for repeated surgeries among young children is relatively unusual," added Dr. Flick. "This is likely to affect a relatively small number of child...

Maria Dalamagka A combination of brain exercises and healthy lifestyle changes can improve memory performance in healthy elderly adults, new research suggests. In a sample study of 115 participants from 2 live-in retirement communities, those who underwent a new educational program (that included memory training, physical activity, stress reduction, and better diet) showed significant improvements on a variety of measures after just 6 weeks, including word recognition and recall. Gary Small, MD, professor of aging at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) and director of the UCLA Longevity Center noted that the investigators wanted to test whether this intervention improved both objective and subjective memory performance. "Subjective memory is a person's self-perception of how they're doing, and objective is how well they do on a pen-and-paper test. It was gratifying to see that this program seemed to be helping people in day-to-day memory challenges." Lead...

Maria Dalamagka  Researchers first discovered evidence of a “longevity gene” about 20 years ago. It’s a gene that may increase your life span. There’s a few ways you can turn on this “longevity gene.” One way is by calorie restriction. Researchers found that giving mice a diet with very few calories significantly extended their life spans.1 Later studies found the same was true with a wide range of living creatures from single-celled organisms to plants and animals. The results showed that taking in fewer calories does turn on the longevity gene, and the organisms live longer.2 It wasn’t until recently an explanation was found. Researchers isolated a family of life-protecting genes called sirtuins (silent information protein regulators). Under conditions of severe stress, such as starvation, the sirtuins are turned on. And they transmit signals to every cell in your body to cancel out the effects of aging. This would be a great solution to aging … if starving were an option. ...

Maria Dalamagka  Nearly half of men who undergo surgery for prostate cancer find themselves with greater incontinence problems and less sexual function than they anticipated, according to a new poll. Before the surgery, some men in the study had expected to have better urinary and sexual function a year after the procedure than before it -- a misbelief the researchers say is out of step with reality. As part of the new survey, 152 men undergoing radical prostatectomy filled out a questionnaire before they had surgery but after they had received counseling on the risks of the procedure. The questions asked about their expectations of urinary, bowel and sexual function a year after the surgery. About half of men expected the same function after surgery as before, but 17% anticipated better sexual function after the surgery. On a follow-up survey one year later, just 36% of the men said their expectations for urinary function matched the true outcomes, and 40% said their expectations...

Maria Dalamagka  Older patients with hypertension and coronary artery disease who use nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) chronically for pain are at significantly increased risk of cardiovascular events, a new post hoc analysis from the International Verapamil-Trandolapril Study (INVEST) demonstrates [1]. The research is published in the July 2011 issue of the American Journal of Medicine. "We found a significant increase in adverse cardiovascular outcomes, primary driven by an increase in cardiovascular mortality," lead author Dr Anthony A Bavry (University of Florida, Gainesville) told heartwire . "This is not the first study to show there is potential harm with these agents, but I think it further solidifies that concern." He says the observational study, conducted within the hypertension trial INVEST, is particularly relevant to everyday practice because the patients included were typical of those seen in internal-medicine, geriatric, and cardiology ...

Maria Dalamagka The risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome is not increased after use of adjuvanted pandemic influenza (H1N1) 2009 vaccine, but the upper limit does not exclude a potential increase in risk up to 2.7-fold, according to the results of a multinational case-control study reported online July 12 in the BMJ. "A concern with the pandemic influenza A (H1N1) 2009 vaccine was the possible occurrence of neuroimmunological adverse events, including Guillain-Barré syndrome," write Jeanne Dieleman, senior pharmacoepidemiologist from the Department of Medical Informatics at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues. "A more than sevenfold increased risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome was observed with the swine origin influenza A (H1N1) subtype A/NJ/76 vaccine applied in the United States in 1976, when the vaccination campaign had to be discontinued abruptly. Subsequent prospective surveillance studies and retrospective epidemiological stud...

Maria Dalamagka  As we age, most of us will find our short-term memory and ability to process new information “not what it used to be.” This is the cognitive equivalent of creaky knees , an inconvenient reminder that we’re getting older. Dementia, though, is something different. With dementia, multiple areas of thinking are compromised and the deficits are likely to get worse. By definition, dementia means memory and other cognitive areas deteriorate to the point that everyday tasks and decisions become difficult, and sometimes impossible. The causes of dementia are many, but in this country, Alzheimer’s disease is responsible for between 60% and 80% of dementia cases. Are there ways to avoid Alzheimer’s disease? Not according to the 2010 National Institutes of Health conference on preventing Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. The group’s consensus statement said there is no evidence of “even moderate scientific quality” that nutritional supplements, herbal preparations, d...

www.iator.gr Maria Dalamagka  Μετά από παρακολούθηση ενός έτους σε ασθενείς με στένωση στην οσφυϊκή μοίρα της σπονδυλικής στήλης , οι οποίοι υποβλήθηκαν σε μια νέα χειρουργική επέμβαση στη σπονδυλική στήλη , κατέληξαν στο συμπέρασμα ότι η επέμβαση οδήγησε σε σημαντική βελτίωση του πόνου και της κινητικότητας , χωρίς σοβαρές ανεπιθύμητες ενέργειες. Ο Timothy Deer ιατρός από το Κέντρο Πόνου στο Τσάρλεστον , στη Δυτική Βιρτζίνια , παρουσίασε τη μελέτη στην 27η ετήσια συνάντηση της Αμερικάνικης Ακαδημίας Πόνου , που πραγματοποιήθηκε στη Ουάσιγκτον. Ο Dr. Deer είπε «ο λόγος που ασχοληθήκαμε με τη συγκεκριμένη τεχνική , είναι ότι μπορεί να αποτελέσει σημαντικό επίτευγμα στο πεδίο των ελάχιστα επεμβατικών τεχνικών , σε αντίθεση με τη σύντηξη και την πεταλεκτομή , καθώς οδηγεί σε μικρές τροποποιήσεις όσον αφορά τη σταθερότητα και τη βιομηχανική συμπεριφορά της σπονδυλικής στήλης». Τεχνική MILD Η τεχνική , γνωστή ως MILD(ήπια) : ελάχιστα επεμβατική αποσυμπίεση της σπονδυλική...

Journal of Anesthesia and Anesthetic Drugs ISSN: 2770-9108 J Anaesth Anesth Drugs, 2022, 2(2): doi https://doi.org/10.54289/JAAD00107 DOI: 10.54289/jaad2200107 Corpus ID: 248872219 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382428764_ebookpdf Editorial article Maria Dalamagka  Patients who present to the emergency department demonstrating clinical signs of circulatory shock constitute a medical emergency, often associated with significant mortality. Severe sepsis, characterized as infection with systemic manifestations and accompanying organ dysfunction or tissue hypoperfusion, can lead to septic shock.Septic shock is defined as severe sepsis plus sepsis-induced hypotension not reversed with adequate fluid resuscitation. Hypotension may be defined by a drop in systolic blood pressure (SBP) to < 90 mm Hg or by at least a 40-mm Hg from baseline. The inadequate perfusion of critical organs (heart, liver, and kidneys) may lead to significant morbidity and mortality.Initial hemodynamic...

Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 5.2 (2021): 01-05. ISSN: 2582-1423 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382428764_ebookpdf Editorial Maria Dalamagka  General anesthetics are administered to approximately 50 million patients each year in the United States. Anesthetic vapors and gases are also widely used in dentists' offices, veterinary clinics, and laboratories for animal research. All the volatile anesthetics that are currently used are halogenated compounds destructive to the ozone layer. These halogenated anesthetics could have potential significant impact on global warming. The widely used anesthetic gas nitrous oxide is a known greenhouse gas as well as an important ozone-depleting gas. These anesthetic gases and vapors are primarily eliminated through exhalation without being metabolized in the body, and most anesthesia systems transfer these gases as waste directly and unchanged into the atmosphere. Little consideration has been given to the ecotoxicological properti...