5 Health Tests You Need to Ace This Year from Yahoo News

No matter how fit you are, you can't change health risk factors like your genes, your family history, your race, or your age. Other aspects of your lifestyle count, too, including how you manage stress and your eating habits. The best way to safeguard your long-term health is to catch troublesome issues early, so ask your doctor about adding these screenings to your calendar.

BLOOD PRESSURE
There are no early symptoms of high BP (hypertension), but the longer it goes unnoticed--and untreated--the more damage occurs to your heart and blood vessels, upping your chances of a heart attack or stroke. With every birthday your risk goes up. Your favorite foods also play a role, with salt, saturated fats, and too much alcohol being top aggravators. Certain medicines can also raise BP.

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Insomnia In The U.S. Is Still A Pressing Public Health Problem, Study Shows from Huffington Post

Sleep is a major problem for many Americans, according to a new report that acts as a kind of "state-of-insomnia" in the U.S. The review, published online Thursday night by the medical journal The Lancet, finds that nearly a quarter of adults are unhappy with their sleep patterns, while up to 10 percent meet the criteria for full-fledged insomnia -- putting them at a greater risk for depression, hypertension and diabetes.

"Insomnia has traditionally been trivialized," paper co-author Charles Morin, Ph.D, a sleep researcher and professor at the Universite Laval in Quebec City, told HuffPost. "Now that we know a little bit more about its long-term consequences, it's getting a bit more attention."

More attention, maybe, but experts agree that insomnia remains a pressing public health problem.

To better assess just how pressing it is, researchers studied several scientific databases, synthesizing findings from major original studies, meta-analyses and systemic reviews from the last five or so years.

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Americans hit the brakes on health care spending from MSNBC

U.S. healthcare spending barely rose in 2010 from record-low recession levels, as high unemployment and the loss of private health insurance forced many Americans to delay or forego medical treatment, government officials said on Monday.

Spending edged up 3.9 percent, bringing the total size of the U.S. healthcare system to $2.6 trillion, or $8,402 per person, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, and published in the journal Health Affairs.

Growth in 2010 was only a slim 0.1 percentage point higher than the 3.8 percent recorded in 2009, which was the lowest rate recorded in half a century. Per capita health spending in the United States is still the highest worldwide.

"It's absolutely clear what's going on," said William Galston of the Brookings Institution. "People's budgets have been hard-hit, and even if they have 20 percent co-pays from their insurance companies, that 20 percent may still be too much."

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Should Doctors Be ‘Parsimonious’ About Health Care? From Kaiser Health Care News

A major medical group issued ethical guidelines on Monday that take the provocative position of urging doctors to consider cost-effectiveness when deciding how to treat their patients.

The American College of Physicians, the second-largest U.S. doctors’ group after the American Medical Association, included the recommendation in the latest version of its ethics manual, which provides guidance for some 132,000 internists nationwide.

“The cost of health care in the United States is twice that of any other industrialized countries and we are not providing care to as many people as they do in other places, and we don’t even have as good outcomes,” said Dr. Virginia Hood, president of the group. “So given that, we really have to look at ways of doing things better.”

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Nutrients May Stop Brain Shrinkage Linked To Alzheimer's from Medical News Today

A study of elderly people finds that those whose diets were high in certain essential nutrients were less likely to have the brain shrinkage associated with Alzheimer's disease and more likely to score better on tests of mental performance. The researchers published a paper on how they came to these findings in the 28 December online issue of Neurology.

The paper's first author is Dr Gene Bowman from the Departments of Neurology and Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. He and his colleagues describe three sets of findings:

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Medicare: Who Said That? From Kaiser Health News

In the past year, Medicare politics and policies have grabbed headlines, with politicians from both sides of the aisle talking about “saving Medicare,” “protecting beneficiaries,” “improving quality of care,” and “curbing fraud and abuse.” But a longer look at the program’s history shows that many of these ideas have been a part of the Medicare discourse since its earliest days, beginning even before the program was signed into law.

To test your knowledge of who has said what about Medicare, Kaiser Health News gathered the following 15 quotations. For each quote, you will have multiple-choice answers and, when you are done, you can check your work against a detailed answer key. Good luck!

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Bombast, Negativity … and Yet … from H and HN

If I had to sum up 2011 in one word, that word would be "peeved." You can probably think of more colorful words but, for this space, that'll do.

From all those folks on the other side of the globe who got so fed up with the bullying and the oppression and generally being treated like crap that they finally chased the despots out of their gilded fortresses to the Tea Partyers and Occupy Wall Streeters here at home who want to throw our own bums out but can't agree on which of those bums ought to be first down the gangplank, 2011 has been a banner year for aggravation, exasperation and just plain bad moods.

I don't know about you, but it hasn't been 365 days of unadulterated bliss for me either. My buying power isn't all that powerful and my life savings ought to be put on life support. Not only that, but my Chicago Cubs — well, let's not even go there, OK?

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Are Antibiotics Making Us Fat? from Yahoo News

Farmers have long used antibiotics to fatten up livestock—and now there’s growing evidence that these drugs may have the same effect on people. What’s more, instead of being miracle cures, there’s now scary speculation that antibiotics could be jeopardizing our health by making us more prone to lifestyle diseases, from type 2 diabetes to heart attacks and fatal strokes. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: States with the highest rates of antibiotic prescriptions also rank as the least healthy, Wired magazine reported on November 25.

When the nonprofit research group Extending the Cure recently mapped antibiotic prescriptions by state, it found the heaviest use (measured per 1,000 people) in the eastern half of the US, particularly West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama, all of which comprise the so-called Stroke Belt, due to the high rate of stroke fatalities. According to CDC data, Wired adds, these states (and to a lesser extent, much of the eastern US) also have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks, compared to the western US. While these correlations don’t prove that antibiotic overuse triggers these diseases, studies suggest that it could drive up obesity by changing how our stomachs work. Here’s a look at the findings.

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Experimental Magnetic Pulses May Help Heal A Brain After Stroke from NPR

A little brain stimulation seems to speed up recovery from a stroke.

This isn't the sort of brain stimulation you get from conversation. It's done using an electromagnetic coil placed against the scalp.

Researchers think the treatment encourages brain cells to form new connections, allowing the brain to rewire itself to compensate for damage caused by a stroke.

The latest evidence that stimulation works comes from Italy, where researchers treated patients with a condition called hemispatial neglect. It's a common problem in stroke patients that leaves them unable to see or recognize anything on one side of their body, even though their eyes work just fine.

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Cancer Vaccine Significantly Reduces Tumor Size from Medical News Today

An experimental cancer vaccine has been found to reduce tumor size by an average of 80%, researchers from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Georgia reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In their animal experiment, mouse models that mimic most human pancreatic and breast cancer cases had dramatic reductions in tumor size - even among those that had not responded to standard treatments.

Tumors that share the same distinct carbohydrate signature may be especially treatable with this new vaccine, say the authors. This includes various cancers such as colorectal, ovarian, breast, pancreatic and some others.

Co-senior author Geert-Jan Boons, wrote:

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Big providers compare notes on product usage from HealthIT.com

ST. LOUIS, MO – The Healthcare Transformation Group (HTG), a collaborative of Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and Mercy, is seeking to spur efficiency and safety by performing data analysis to determine specific product lines the group has in common.

Earlier this year, the HTG hosted a summit with its top 20 suppliers to discuss how to move the healthcare industry forward with GS1 Standards adoption. Each supplier shared their plans and timeline toward adoption, and asked what product lines or manufacturing divisions they should focus on first in the adoption of standards in healthcare. 


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Access to the Power of Vaccines from Huffington Post

Several major announcements have been made in recent weeks about the expansion of vaccine access to the world's poor. This progress and the "Power of Vaccines" are the subject of a high level discussion today in Washington convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), featuring USAID Administrator Raj Shah and speakers from NIH, CDC, the GAVI Alliance and Johns Hopkins University.

From rolling out the first diarrhea vaccines in Africa, to doubling the number of low-income countries approved for vaccines against pneumonia, to announcing they will now assist countries introduce vaccines for that prevent cervical cancer, the GAVI Alliance and its partners are tearing down the barriers to vaccine access that have historically divided rich from poor on our planet.

To appreciate how far we've come you need to remember where we started. Consider the situation with pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV) in 2003. At that time, developing country access to these vaccines seemed almost unthinkable. The vaccine had only been routinely used in the U.S. for three years, and the manufacturer was struggling to supply American children who paid top dollar prices. Access to affordable supplies of this vaccine was out of the question. In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) had not yet recommended the vaccine for use and most developing countries had little appreciation for the burden of pneumococcal disease in their countries. Finally, our track record in vaccine access was generally lame, with 15 years or more passing before poor countries accessed the same vaccines as richer ones.

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Studies: New drug combinations slow down metastatic breast cancers From CNN

(CNN) -- A new combination of treatments can help battle some forms of metastatic breast cancer and slow down the spread of the disease, according to two separate studies.

The new studies show that the combinations of treatments significantly overcome or reduce drug resistance in the metastatic phase. That phase is when the cancer has spread beyond the breasts and lymph nodes, doctors said.

Results from the two clinical trials also revealed combining two targeted therapies can slow the progression of the cancer. Scientists presented the research at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium on Wednesday in Texas.

About 200,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer a year, according to Dr. Ben Ho Park, an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"These two studies address about 80% of breast cancers in the metastatic setting," said Park, who is not involved in the trials.

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Leapfrog Group names top hospitals for 2011

WASHINGTON – Sixty-five hospitals have earned The Leapfrog Group's annual "Top Hospital" designation, equaling 2010's record-setting total. The designation, which Leapfrog bills as the most competitive national hospital quality award in the country, recognizes quality of care.

Quality measures, which hinge on the use of healthcare information technology, include preventing medical errors, reducing mortality for high-risk procedures like heart bypass surgery, and reducing hospital readmissions for patients being treated for conditions like pneumonia and heart attack.
[See also: Research aims to boost follow-up care with IT]

Officials tout the Leapfrog Hospital Survey, now in its 11th year, as the toughest standard-bearer, providing the most complete picture of a hospital's quality and safety.

The survey focuses on three critical areas of hospital care:

how patients fare,
resources used to care for patients, and
management practices that promote safety and quality.


For the full article please go here.