From Reuters.com

People with a vitamin D deficiency are as much as twice as likely to die compared to people whose blood contains higher amounts of the so-called sunshine vitamin, Austrian researchers said on Monday.

Their study — the latest to suggest a health benefit from the vitamin — showed death rates from any cause as well as from heart-related problems varied greatly depending on vitamin D.

“This is the first association study that shows vitamin D affects mortality regardless of the reason for death,” said Harald Dobnig, an internist and endocrinologist at the University of Graz in Austria who led the study.

The body makes vitamin D when the skin is exposed to sunlight, a reason for its nickname as the “sunshine vitamin.” It is added to milk and fatty fish like salmon but many people do not get enough of it.

Vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium and is considered important for bone health. In adults, vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis, and it can lead to rickets in children.

A number of recent studies have also indicated vitamin D may offer a variety of other health benefits, including protecting against cancer, peripheral artery disease and tuberculosis.

Last week, U.S. researchers said vitamin D may extend the lives of people with colon and rectal cancer.

Dobnig and colleagues, who reported their findings in the Archives of Internal Medicine, studied more than 3,200 people with an average age of 62 who were scheduled for a heart exam between 1997 and 2000.

During an eight-year follow-up the researchers found that the quarter of volunteers with the lowest levels of vitamin D in their blood were at greater risk of dying.

Even when accounting for factors such as heart disease, exercise and other conditions, the researchers found that the risk was double for people with between 5 to 10 nanograms per millilitre of vitamin D in their blood, Dobnig said.

Most doctors believe people should have between 20 to 30 nanograms per millilitre of the vitamin in their blood, he added in a telephone interview.

What causes this effect is not clear, but Dobnig pointed to a host of studies suggesting links to high blood pressure, cancer and fractures as places to begin looking.

The potential health risk of low levels of vitamin D should also prod physicians to be more aware of the potential problem, especially for the immobile, elderly and others who spend a great amount of time indoors, he added.

Many doctors agree that people with low levels of vitamin D cannot make up for it safely by sitting in the sun, but should take supplements.

“These results should prompt us to perform vitamin D measurements on a more frequent basis especially in populations at risk,” Dobnig said.

From HealthDay

For the more than half of all Americans over age 59 who complain about not being able to fall asleep easily, the answer may rest with a 2,000 year old Chinese series of movements.

Researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles found that the 19 moves and one pose found in tai chi chih — the Western version of the ancient philosophy that combines movements and poses to relieve stress and find spiritual fulfillment — actually allowed study subjects to improve their sleep patterns.

The 112 older adults in the study who ranged in age from 59 to 86 were divided into two groups, one taking tai chi chih instruction and the other group taking classes that included stress management, diet and advice on improving sleep patterns.

According to a UCLA news release, the tai chi chih group “showed improved sleep quality and a remission of clinical impairments, such as drowsiness during the day and inability to concentrate, compared with those receiving health education.”

“It’s [tai chi chih] a form of exercise virtually every elderly person can do, and this study provides more across-the-board evidence of its health benefits,” said lead study author Dr. Michael Irwin, the Norman Cousins Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, in the news release.

The study is available in the online edition of the journal Sleep.

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New Threat From Bird Flu: Food Shortages

A new warning has come about the deadly strain of avian flu that has caused the destruction of hundreds of millions of poultry around the world, especially in Asia.

But this time, the Associated Press reports, the threat is not so much whether the H5N1 strain will mutate into a virus that could infect millions of humans, but rather whether the destruction it has already caused will create a food shortage.

Communicable disease experts meeting at an infectious disease conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia acknowledged that H5N1 keeps erupting, even after local health officials believe they’ve brought an outbreak under control. “It’s like a boiling pot, and we need to keep the lid on that before it gets worse,” UN representative Juan Lubroth told the A.P.

Lubroth said that more than 240 million birds have been destroyed because of H5N1, and for poor people who raise their own food, the scarcity of poultry as a cheep protein source could cause hardship and hunger.

Insofar as the H5N1 strain mutating so that it can be spread from human to human, officials warned that possibility still remains, the wire service reported.

The disease is indeed deadly when humans become infected, the A.P. said, with 241 out of 385 who contracted it since 2003 dying. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Julie Gerberding warned against complacency.

“People have very short attention spans, and when something is in the news for a while, it becomes old news and then it’s no news,” the A.P. quotes her as saying.

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VA Says It Will Improve Care For Female Veterans

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is working to eliminate disparities in care offered to female and male veterans, VA Secretary James Peake said Friday.

He was responding to last week’s disclosure of a VA internal review, which found that about one-third of 139 VA facilities that offer outpatient care don’t provide female veterans with the same quality of care as males.

“We are making a full-court press to ensure that women veterans receive the highest quality of care,” Peake said at the National Summit on Women Veteran’s Issues, the Associated Press reported.

In his speech, he said the VA recognizes that 86 percent of female veterans from recent conflicts are younger than age 40 and have health needs related to having children. The agency is spending about $32 million for equipment specific to women’s health needs, Peake said.

He noted women make up about 14 percent of the U.S. Armed Forces, the AP reported.

—–

Blueberries May Lower Cholesterol

Blueberries may significantly lower cholesterol and protect the heart, according to Canadian researchers who conducted tests on pigs fed different kinds of blueberry-supplemented diets.

All of the diets reduced overall cholesterol levels, but some were more effective than others, United Press International reported.

“In feeding trials, we found that blueberry supplementation reduced plasma cholesterol levels more effectively when the animals received a mostly plant-based diet than when they received a less heart-healthy diet,” lead scientist Wilhelmina Kalt said in a prepared statement. “The soy, oats and barley contained in these diets may have functioned synergistically with the blueberries to beneficially affect plasma lipids.”

The greatest reduction in cholesterol levels was seen in pigs fed a two percent blueberry diet. In people, that would be equivalent to about two one-cup servings per day.

The study appears in the British Journal of Nutrition.

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U.S. Motorcycle Deaths More Than Doubled Since 1997

Between 1997 and 2006, motorcycle deaths in the United States increased from 2,110 to 4,810, a Governors Highway Safety Association study found.

From 2005 to 2006, motorcycle deaths increased in 27 states and Puerto Rico. The study also said that 15 states accounted for 67 percent of all U.S. motorcycle deaths in 2006 and that in 2004, 2005, and 2006, nearly one-third of all fatalities occurred in California, Texas and Florida, United Press International reported.

Despite clear evidence that proper helmet use saves lives, there is a patchwork of helmet laws in the country, poor enforcement, and a lack of helmet promotion, the study found. In states with partial or no helmet laws, most riders who died weren’t wearing helmets.

In 2006, 25 percent of riders killed in motorcycle crashes didn’t have a valid license, compared with 13 percent of drivers of passenger vehicles, UPI reported.

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Some Artificial Turf Fields Should Be Tested For Lead: CDC

Some artificial turf athletic fields should be tested for the lead, says a health advisory posted on the Web site of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency said any field containing worn or faded turf blades that are made of nylon or nylon-blend fibers should be tested, as well as nylon fields with visible dust, the Associated Press reported.

Testing doesn’t need to be done on artificial fields made from polyethylene or nylon fields that aren’t visibly worn, the CDC said.

The advisory was issued two months after health officials in New Jersey found high lead levels in artificial turf fibers from three athletic fields. They also determined that lead in the turf can be absorbed by people.

While the lead levels weren’t high enough to cause poisoning in people who play on the fields, these levels could cause additional health damage to children already exposed to lead, said New Jersey epidemiologist Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, the AP reported.

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Antioxidant vitamins counter cognitive decline, but experts say eating healthy is better 

From HealthDay

Older adults with type 2 diabetes are apt to have memory problems after eating a meal loaded with fat, but a new study has found the damage can be undone if they take antioxidant vitamins along with the unhealthy food.

However, the researchers emphasize, it is better to eat healthy foods and not rely on vitamins to undo the cognitive harm.

“What we are aiming for is for people to actually eat healthier meals,” said study author Michael Herman Chui, a third-year medical student at the University of Toronto. His report is published in the July issue of Nutrition Research.

“From this study, we could conclude that if people continue to eat this kind of meal long-term, the memory impairment would potentially be long-lasting,” he said. His co-author is Dr. Carol E. Greenwood, a senior scientist at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, a research and care facility affiliated with the University of Toronto.

In 2003, Greenwood published a paper finding that memory problems occurred after type 2 diabetics ate a meal of rapidly absorbed carbohydrates — in this case, half a bagel and white grape juice.

In the recent study, Greenwood and Chui added fat to the meal. They looked at the effects of the meal on the cognitive performance of 16 adults with type 2 diabetes, average age 63. The meal included 3,356 calories and had more than 50 grams of fat, more than 63 grams of carbs and more than 25 grams of protein. It included Danish pastry, cheddar cheese and yogurt with whipped cream.

They tested their cognitive performance on various tests 60 minutes and 105 minutes after eating the meal. On a second occasion, the researchers conducted the same tests after the participants ate the same meal but also took 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 800 IUs of vitamin E. On a third occasion, they tested the participants again after they had only water.

Eating the high-fat meal without vitamins caused performance to fall in verbal recall and working memory when tested 105 minutes later, compared to the water-only meal. After eating the high-fat meal, participants showed more forgetfulness of words and paragraph information in recall tests.

But when they ate the high-fat meal and took the vitamins, their performance was as good as after the water-only session, Chui said.

The vitamins are thought to work by reducing oxidative stress, which is triggered when levels of free radicals, unstable molecules that can damage brain and other tissues, are elevated. Eating unhealthy foods induces oxidative stress. Having type 2 diabetes is also associated with oxidative stress, which in turn is associated with vascular problems.

The study produced interesting results, said Lona Sandon, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. But she offered several caveats: The study was small, with only 16 participants. Comparing performance after a meal with vitamins to performance after having only water is not the best idea, she said.

“Of course, they would perform poorly with water only; there is no glucose getting to their brains,” she explained.

“Type 2 diabetics are encouraged to avoid high-fat meals and choose plenty of fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants,” she said.

More study is definitely needed, said Connie Diekman, director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis. Among the unanswered questions: “The meal consumed was not a typical meal, so would the vitamins have similar effect on a more typical meal?”

If anything, Sandon said, the study reinforces standard advice that those with type 2 diabetes should avoid high-fat, rapidly absorbed carbohydrate meals for heart health, blood sugar control, and possibly brain health.

No symptoms, but some loss of brain function occurs, study finds  

FromHealthDay

If you’re an older American with no major health problems, chances are about one in 10 that you’ve had a stroke and didn’t know it.

It was probably not severe enough to cause recognizable symptoms, such as vision problems, facial weakness or trouble walking, but it was still a blockage of a brain artery, and it reduced your thinking powers just a bit.

That estimate comes from a new study of 2,040 people, average age 62, in the long-running Framingham Offspring Study. MRI scans showed that 10.7 percent of them had experienced what study author Dr. Sudha Seshadri, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University, called “a silent brain infarct.”

It’s the cerebral equivalent of what physicians call a myocardial infarct — blockage of a blood vessel that causes damage to tissue. In the case of a silent stroke, the blockage and the damage occurs in the brain, without symptoms.

A silent stroke is different from a transient ischemic attack (TIA), a momentary loss of brain function, Seshadri said. A TIA causes some symptoms, while a silent stroke, by definition, doesn’t. But both are warning signs to pay attention to the well-known risk factors for stroke, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, obesity and smoking, she said.

The incidence found in the Framingham Offspring study “was within the ballpark of what prior studies have suggested,” Seshadri said. “But this was a group of people who were younger than in most of the prior studies. The fact that one in 10 persons had silent attacks that had subtle side effects on the brain is something we should be concerned about and should address.”

The report was published in the online issue of Stroke.

The effects of a silent brain infarct show up on an MRI scan as “small lesions in various parts of the brain,” Seshadri said. “We can’t tell from that whether they had a symptomatic attack.” And the MRI scans give no clues as to when the silent stroke occurred.

Testing showed that “on average, compared to age-matched controls, those with lesions do have subtle signs, such as loss of flexibility of talk,” she said.

The incidence seen in the study did not startle Dr. Claudette Brooks, director of the neurovascular laboratory at West Virginia University Health Sciences Center.

“When I look for the cause of headaches and similar problems, it doesn’t surprise me when I see these lesions, and other colleagues tell me they see them,” Brooks said.

An even higher rate of silent strokes might be expected in a study of black Americans, she noted. “They have a higher incidence of hypertension [high blood pressure], atherosclerosis, and hyperlipidemia [excess blood fat],” Brooks said.

Nothing special needs to be done to reduce the risk of silent stroke, Seshadri and Brooks both said.

“I wouldn’t recommend that people rush out to have an MRI,” Seshadri said. “It’s up to the medical and public health community to emphasize the importance of controlling risk factors.”

“The whole thing boils down to modifying risk factors,” Brooks said. “If you don’t have risk factors such as high cholesterol, obesity and diabetes, try to keep yourself out of the group that does. If you do, modify them by keeping blood pressure and cholesterol down, things like that.”

 

From HealthDay

A new warning has come about the deadly strain of avian flu that has caused the destruction of hundreds of millions of poultry around the world, especially in Asia.

But this time, the Associated Press reports, the threat is not so much whether the H5N1 strain will mutate into a virus that could infect millions of humans, but rather whether the destruction it has already caused will create a food shortage.

Communicable disease experts meeting at an infectious disease conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia acknowledged that H5N1 keeps erupting, even after local health officials believe they’ve brought an outbreak under control. “It’s like a boiling pot, and we need to keep the lid on that before it gets worse,” UN representative Juan Lubroth told the A.P.

Lubroth said that more than 240 million birds have been destroyed because of H5N1, and for poor people who raise their own food, the scarcity of poultry as a cheep protein source could cause hardship and hunger.

Insofar as the H5N1 strain mutating so that it can be spread from human to human, officials warned that possibility still remains, the wire service reported.

The disease is indeed deadly when humans become infected, the A.P. said, with 241 out of 385 who contracted it since 2003 dying. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Julie Gerberding warned against complacency.

“People have very short attention spans, and when something is in the news for a while, it becomes old news and then it’s no news,” the A.P. quotes her as saying.