_ Heart HealthOriginal Oily Fish Study Flawed By articleYou’ve heard it here on ThirdAge and probably elsewhere as well: Oily fish such as salmon, fresh tuna, and swordfish are currently recommended as part of a heart healthy diet. Oops! An international team of researchers have called into question the validity of a now-classic study from the 1970s that claimed that because the diet of Eskimos in Greenland is rich in whale and seal blubber, these peopledon’t have coronary artery disease at the same rate as other populations.On the contrary, the Eskimos turn out to have alarmingly high rates of lethal CAD and stokes.
Vision HealthAbnormal “Binocular Vision” as We Age By articleAbnormal “binocular vision”, which involves the way our eyes work together as a team, increases dramatically as we age, according to research from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. A release from the university reports that the study also found that general health and antidepressant use are also linked to this disorder, which affects depth perception and therefore may increase the risk of falls.
_ Mental & Emotional Health Stress Management Stress-Free LivingStress Is Contagious By articleWatching somebody else try to cope with a stressful situation, even on TV, can be enough to bump up your own level of the stress hormone called cortisol. That is the finding of research done at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Technische Universität Dresden and published on April 17th 2014 in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
_ OsteoporosisFracture Risk Tool Is Flawed By articleIf you’re between the ages of 40 and 65, or if you’ve ever broken a single bone, the World Health Organization's tool for assessing the likelihood of breaks would underestimate your risk of “fragility fractures” resulting from falls. That is the conclusion of a study done at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada and published in April 2014 published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).
Vision HealthProtect Your Eyes During Exercise By Jane Farrell articleFor many of us, the warmer seasons mean more exercise. And you’re probably taking several safety factors into account: how to protect yourself from dehydration or the sun’s damaging and even deadly rays. We should think about our sight as well. According to the National Institutes of Health, emergency room doctors treated an estimated 42,000 sports-related eye injuries each year. And 90 percent of them, the NIH says, could have been prevented with protective eyewear.
_ Healthy Diet & Nutrition Mental & Emotional Health Stress Management Stress-Free LivingChronic Stress Makes Junk Food Even Worse for You By articleFile this under “That’s not fair!” People who are not dealing with chronic stress can get away with eating a lot of high-fat, high-sugar food without upping their risk of metabolic syndrome, but stressed out people can’t. That’s the finding of research done at the University of Califorina, San Francisco.
_ Sleep HealthCherry Juice Promotes Better Sleep By articleA morning and evening ritual of tart cherry juice may help you sleep better at night. That’s the finding of a study presented on April 28th at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nutrition, which is being held in conjunction with the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting in San Diego Researchers from Louisiana State University found that drinking Montmorency tart cherry juice twice a day for two weeks helped increase sleep time by nearly 90 minutes among older adults with insomnia. The study has been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
_ Breast CancerChemo for Breast Ca May Lead to Job Loss By articleA study done at the University of Michigan Health System has found that loss of paid employment after a diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer may be common and potentially related to the type of treatment patients received. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings support efforts to reduce the side effects and burden of treatments for breast cancer and to identify patients who may forego certain treatments, particularly when the expected benefit is low.
Pain ManagementWatch: New Device for Migraine Prevention By Jane Farrell articleHere's another addition to our Third Age video collection. Press play to start learning.
_ Breast CancerStudy: Chemotherapy Not Always Best for Breast Cancer By Jane Farrell articleAlthough many women with early-stage breast cancer are getting chemotherapy, the ones that decide against it appear to be more empowered about making a good decision, new research indicates. The current guidelines for treating cancer that hasn’t spread to the lymph nodes or other parts of the body have led to thousands of women receiving chemotherapy without benefiting from it.
_ Heart HealthSix Tips to Turn Back the Clock on Your Heart By articleBy Steven Masley, MD, CNS The first step to avoiding cardiovascular disease, which is the #1 killer of Americans, including women—is understanding how your heart and arteries age. The traditional approach to evaluating heart disease does not address what’s actually happening within your arteries. The single factor that causes most heart problems is not cholesterol per se, but the growth of plaque in your arteries. This is what determine your heart’s true age.
_ Skin Skin HealthSkin Tags and Cysts: When You Should Worry By articleThe Family Health Teamat the HealthHub of the Cleveland Clinic offers expert advice about skin tags and cysts:
_ Men's HealthThe Disappearing Y Chromosome By articleNot only do men have a shorter average life span than women but the incidence of cancer and the death rate from the disease is higher in men than in women. Yet the reason for these differences between the genders has long eluded researchers. Now a study led by scientists as Uppsala University in Sweden has shown a correlation between a loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells and both a shorter life span and higher mortality from cancer in other organs. As you probably know, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X chromosome and on Y chromosome.
_ Heart HealthStatin Users Eating More Fat By Jane Farrell articleMany Americans who take statins don’t have a healthy diet because the drugs give them a false sense of security, according to a new study. And the number of statin users with unhealthy diets appears to have increased. The research by investigators from UCLA indicates that patients who took statins in 2009-2010 were eating more calories and fat than those who used statins earlier. Among people who didn’t use statins, there was no similar increased.
Men's HealthRisks of Testosterone Tx for Older Men Not Known By articlePhysicians do not have sufficient information from clinical trials to understand the risks associated with the prescription of testosterone in older men, according to a Comment in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, written by Professor Stephanie Page, of the University of Washington and Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, USA. A release from the publisher notes that while the benefits of testosterone therapy in younger men with a deficiency of the hormone are well established, testosterone is now widely prescribed to older men, particularly in the USA.
_ Pain ManagementWatch: Treating Severe Shoulder Pain By Jane Farrell articleHere's another addition to our ThirdAge video collection. Read more at www.thirdage.com.
_ Women's Health and WellnessProof of Women’s Intuition By articleIf you suspect that you have what is popularly called women’s intuition, you may be right. Researchers at the University of Granada, the Barcelona Pompeu Fabra University, and the Middlesex University of London have shown that the tendency to be intuitive could have a biological component related to the lower prenatal exposure to testosterone females receive in the womb. This team says this would lead women to have a "more intuitive and less reflective" attitude to life than men. The study was published in 2014 in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
_ Heart HealthEating Meat Ups Heart Disease Risk By articleHere’s more proof that steaks and burgers can be bad for your health: A new study from the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington has bolstered the link between red meat consumption and heart disease by finding a strong association between heme iron, found only in meat, and potentially deadly coronary heart disease.