Marion County Medical Center

Health Shorts

October 2007

Diabetics Benefit from Flu Shot
But Vaccination Rates Are Low
Diabetes increases the risk of getting severe complications from the flu. Getting a flu shot, according to a recent Dutch study, resulted in 56 percent fewer flu-related complications, 54 percent fewer hospitalizations and 50 percent fewer deaths among diabetics.

Yet vaccination rates remain low among persons with diabetes.
[SOURCE: “Flu shots and diabetes (in the news),” Health News, February, 2007]

Kids with Asthma Need Flu Shots
For a child with asthma, yearly vaccination against the flu is an important way of avoiding asthma attacks and worsening of symptoms. According to one study, “vaccinating all children with asthma could prevent 59 percent to 78 percent of asthma hospitalizations” and emergency room visits during flu season.
[SOURCE: P. Kramarz, et al, “Does influenza vaccination prevent asthma exacerbations in children?” Journal of Pediatrics, 2001;138:306-310; K.M. Neuzil, “Influenza vaccine in children with asthma: why no progress?” Journal of Pediatrics, 2001;138:306-310]

Hand Washing Is Best Protection
The best thing you can do to protect yourself from getting a cold or the flu this winter, according to the Centers for Disease Control, is to wash your hands frequently. A recent study indicates that Americans are not as careful about hand washing as they profess to be.

When surveyed by telephone, 92 percent of adults claimed they washed their hands in public rest rooms. But a study conducted in public rest rooms in Chicago, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco found that only 77 percent actually did. That number represented a six percent decline compared to a similar study conducted in 2005.
[SOURCE: Julie Steenhuysen, “Americans getting lax about clean hands: study,” Reuters Health, September 17, 2007; study presented at Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy meeting, Chicago, September, 2007]

Lift Weights To Control Blood Sugar
If you have type 2 diabetes, you should be scheduling regular workouts–on a treadmill, in the weight room or–even better–both. A Canadian study of 251 subjects with type 2 diabetes found that resistance training with weights was as effective as aerobic exercise on a treadmill or exercise bike in helping diabetic patients control their blood sugar.

Patients showing the greatest decrease in blood sugar were those in a group performing both aerobic and weight training.
[SOURCE: Maggie Fox, “Study finds any kind of exercise helps diabetics,” Reuters Health, September 18, 2007; Ronald Sigal, Annals of Internal Medicine, September, 2007]

Scans That Show Function
Nuclear medicine scans such as PET (positron emission tomography) and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) use small doses of radioactive materials combined with special cameras and computer technology to create images of internal organs.

Showing function as well as structure, nuclear scans can be used to detect tumors, aneurysms, poor blood flow, blood cell disorders or inadequate functioning of organs.
[SOURCE: Craig C. Freudenrich, Ph.D., “How nuclear medicine works,” howstuffworks.com]

Universal Vaccine Could Make
Yearly Flu Shots Unnecessary
Why do you need to get a flu shot every year? Because the flu virus mutates regularly, leading to new strains capable of eluding previous antibodies.

That may change. A universal flu vaccine that will protect against all “A” strains of the influenza virus has been developed and is being tested on humans for the first time this year by a British-American biotech company. The vaccine has been tested on laboratory animals and is now in Phase I clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy.
[SOURCE: “Universal flu vaccine being tested on humans,” ScienceDaily, July 18, 2007]

Brain Scans for Psychiatric Disorders?
Brain scanning technology that has developed rapidly since the early 1970s has given doctors a valuable tool for evaluating and treating brain tumors, stroke, head trauma or seizure activity. Because nuclear medicine scans are capable of showing blood flow and metabolic activity throughout the brain, there has been considerable enthusiasm for using scans to diagnose mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder. So far, however, these scans have proven to be more useful for research than for actual diagnosis or treatment.

With so many variables and individual differences, doctors have found information from scans to be less reliable than they might wish for diagnosing mental illness.
[SOURCE: Benedict Carey, “Can brain scans see depression?” New York Times Health, October 18, 2005]

Presents Have Sentimental Value
Give a health-oriented gift this year, and you could make a significant impact on another person’s motivation to exercise or follow a healthy diet. A test conducted on college students in 1990 illustrated that individuals tend to place sentimental value on gifts they receive.

The students were given coffee mugs purchased from the university book store and then asked whether they would be willing to sell the mugs to another group of student subjects who did not receive gifts. The students receiving the mugs became attached to them and set prices on them higher than their actual value. Students who did not receive mugs, on the other hand, did not find them very attractive and set a much lower value on them.
[SOURCE: Kevin Hassett, “Did the three kings bear gift receipts?” Washington Post, December 10, 2006]

Planning Health-Oriented Gifts?
Are you planning to give one or more health-oriented gifts this holiday season? About 69 percent of survey respondents indicated that they would consider giving a health-oriented gift and 80 percent said they would appreciate receiving such a gift. The survey was conducted by the Jenny Craig, Inc. weight loss organization.
[SOURCE: Cozette Phifer, “survey reveals health-related items make popular gifts for both the naughty and the nice,” JennyCraig.com, December 9, 2003]

Exercise, Fish Oil–Good Combination
Regular exercise plus a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids is a combination that’s likely to improve your cardiovascular health and your body composition, according to one recent study.

Overweight subjects with high blood pressure and/or high cholesterol were asked to 1) exercise, 2) take six grams of tuna fish oil daily or 3) do both. The researchers concluded that while both exercise and fish oil supplements were effective, the combined effect was even greater in reducing body fat, increasing levels of HDL (the good cholesterol) and improving the function of blood vessels.
[SOURCE: Alison M. Hill, Jonathan D. Buckley, Karen J. Murphy and Peter R.C. Howe, “Combining fish-oil supplements with regular aerobic exercise improves body composition and cardiovascular disease risk factors,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, May, 2007]

What You Can Do To Raise Your HDL
HDL (high-density lipoprotein) is the good cholesterol; it helps clear LDL (bad cholesterol from the system) and it has antioxidant and antiinflammatory qualities that help keep blood vessels healthy.
If your HDL is below 40 mg/dL (50, if you’re a woman), you’re at risk of heart disease and should consider the following measures to increase it:

exercise regularly–the more the better;
don’t smoke;
if you’re obese, lose weight;
eat fish once or twice a week; and
eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, legumes and nuts.

[SOURCE: Peter P. Toth, “The ‘good cholesterol’: high-density lipoprotein,” Circulation, February 8, 2005]

New Way To Test for Triglycerides
A blood lipid profile–measuring total cholesterol, “bad” LDL, “good” HDL and triglycerides–is performed after an 8 to 12-hour fast. However, two recent studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [July 18, 2007] suggest that doctors should consider measuring non-fasting levels of triglycerides.

Triglycerides help move and store fat, and blood levels of triglycerides rise after a meal. A study of 14,000 Danish men and women and another of 25,000 American women found that women with the highest non-fasting triglyceride levels were five times more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke than those with the lowest levels. For men, the highest levels had twice the risk of those with the lowest levels.

Current guidelines recommend treatment for persons with fasting triglyceride levels higher than 150 milligrams per deciliter.
[SOURCE: “New way to test triglycerides helps reveal women’s heart risk,” Harvard Women’s Health Watch, October, 2007]

High Density Really Does Matter
HDL (high-density lipoprotein) is known as the good cholesterol, in part because it sweeps the bad LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol out of arteries before fatty deposits form. As a result, some scientists have argued that if LDL is lowered enough, the HDL level becomes irrelevant. That theory is not true, according to a study of 9,700 patients at the Heart Institute in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Philip Barter and his international team of colleagues found that no matter how much LDL cholesterol was lowered through medication, subjects with a low HDL reading (40mg/dL for a male, 50 mg/dL for a female) still had a substantially increased risk of heart disease. The higher a subject’s HDL, the lower the risk of a heart attack or stroke.

Some cholesterol-lowering drugs raise HDL levels, but by modest amounts compared to their effect on LDL cholesterol.
[SOURCE: Gene Emery, “Lack of ‘good’ cholesterol always poses heart risk,” Reuters Health, September 26, 2007]

Health Shorts

October 2007

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