All About Propecia

Despite progress in some areas, smoking rates among U.S. adults remained stalled in 2008, halting the nation’s progress in ending the tobacco epidemic, according to a CDC study.

The study, released in advance of the annual Great American Smokeout, found that 46 million Americans (20.6 percent) were current cigarette smokers in 2008, which is virtually unchanged since 2004 when 20.9 percent of adults reported being smokers. The study’s findings indicate an alarming trend, because smoking is the leading preventable cause of death, killing more than 443,000 people every year and costing the nation $96 billion in health care costs annually.

This new data, based on the 2008 National Health Interview Survey, shows little to no change over the past five years and hints that smoking rates may be moving in the wrong direction.

“Today tobacco will kill more than 1,000 people, but we can reduce smoking rates,” said CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “We must protect people from second-hand smoke, increase the price of tobacco, and support aggressive anti-tobacco campaigns that will reduce smoking and save lives. If every State had smoking rates similar to places which have implemented effective programs, there would be at least 10 million fewer smokers in the US, and millions of heart attacks, cancers, strokes, and deaths would be prevented.”

According to the study, the people hardest hit by the tobacco epidemic are those among vulnerable populations, including people with lower levels of educational attainment. In 2008, 41.3 percent of persons with a General Education Development certificate smoked cigarettes, compared to 5.7 percent of persons with a graduate degree.

In another study in this week’s CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System reports that current adult smoking prevalence varied substantially across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the three U.S. territories. Among states, smoking prevalence was highest in West Virginia (26.6 percent), Indiana (26.1 percent), and Kentucky (25.3 percent) and lowest in Utah (9.2 percent), California (14 percent), and New Jersey (14.8 percent).

In the same study, CDC also reported significant variation among 11 states in the proportion of adults protected by smoke-free workplace policies and the proportion of adults who protect themselves and their families from secondhand smoke in their homes.

Among the 11 states which asked questions about exposure to second-hand smoke, there was a large variation in indoor workplace exposure – from a high of 16 percent in Mississippi to a low of 6 percent in Connecticut and Tennessee. Second-hand smoke is known to cause cancer, heart disease, and many other health problems, and smoke-free laws have many benefits, including protecting non-smokers, reducing heart attacks in non-smokers, and encouraging smokers to quit. Past experience shows that smoke-free laws covering public places encourage people to adopt smoke-free policies in their homes. In these states, home exposure varied widely from 3 percent of adults exposed in their homes in Arizona to 10.1 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively, in Mississippi and West Virginia. This finding correlates with household policies about not allowing smoking in households with a smoker present – for example, two thirds of smokers in Arizona live in households where smoking is not allowed in the home, compared to 41 percent and 36 percent in Mississippi and West Virginia. Nationwide, 21 states and D.C. have implemented comprehensive smoke-free laws covering workplaces, restaurants, and bars, but more than half of the country still lives in areas where they are not protected by comprehensive smoke-free laws.

“Despite states having received more than $200 billion in tobacco-generated funds over the past 10 years, many Americans—particularly those with low educational attainment levels, and those who work in the hospitality, service, and other industries are exposed to smoke in their workplaces, and they do not have equal access to the support needed to help them quit,” said Matthew McKenna, M.D., M.P.H., director, CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. “We need to make the investments so all people receive the same protections and adequate information to help them quit successfully.”

In an MMWR report last week, CDC noted that smoking rates among low-income adults enrolled in Medicaid programs are much higher than the general population (33 percent vs. 19 percent), and that only 6 Medicaid programs provided full access to all proven means to help smokers quit. Because access to tobacco cessation treatments (FDA-approved medications and counseling) has been shown to help smokers quit, providing coverage to all smokers, including the Medicaid population, would help reduce smoking rates.

Students with developmental dyslexia may not be able to focus on the teacher’s voice in noisy school settings that include banging lockers, scraping chairs and other auditory distractions, a U.S. study has found.

Developmental dyslexia affects reading and spelling skills in 5 to 10 percent of school-age children.

In their study, researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago found that the brains of non-dyslexic children could ignore distractions and automatically focus on relevant, predictable and repeating auditory information. Dyslexic children didn’t have this ability.

These findings confirm previous research that found children with developmental dyslexia have difficulty separating relevant auditory information from competing noise. The new study also offers biological evidence that children who have difficulty hearing speech in noisy settings also have a measurable neural impairment that hampers their ability to utilize regularities in the sound environment.

“The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeating elements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for superior ‘tagging’ of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a particular voice within background noise,” researcher Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences and neurobiology and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, said in a university news release.

Along with conventional reading- and spelling-based interventions, children with developmental dyslexia may benefit from simple approaches such as placing them in front of the teacher or using wireless technologies to enhance the sound of a teacher’s voice, the researchers said.

“The study brings us closer to understanding sensory processing in children who experience difficulty excluding irrelevant noise. It provides an objective index that can help in the assessment of children with reading problems,” Kraus said.

Cancer can put an enormous strain on a marriage, and couples are much more likely to fall apart if the woman is the patient.

In fact, the odds of separation or divorce are six times higher compared to when the man is the one with the illness, a new study shows.

The researchers did find that couples that have been married longer are more likely to survive the difficulties of dealing with cancer.

The findings, published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Cancer, confirm existing research that has reported that nearly 12 percent of marriages end in divorce or separation after a spouse develops cancer.

The new study sheds some more light on gender differences: nearly 21 percent of couples split up when the woman was the patient, compared to just about 3 percent when the man was the patient.

“Female gender was the strongest predictor of separation or divorce in each of the patient groups we studied,” study co-author Dr. Marc Chamberlain, director of the neuro-oncology program at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, said in a news release.

The researchers compiled their statistics after studying 515 patients with certain types of cancer, including brain cancer, and multiple sclerosis, from 2001 to 2006.

“We believe that our findings apply generally to patients with life-altering medical illness,” the authors wrote. “We recommend that medical providers be especially sensitive to early suggestions of marital discord in couples affected by the occurrence of a serious medical illness, especially when the woman is the affected spouse and it occurs early in the marriage. Early identification and psychosocial intervention might reduce the frequency of divorce and separation, and in turn improve quality of life and quality of care.”

To get down to a healthy weight, obese and overweight people often struggle to cut their daily caloric intake by a necessary 15 percent to 40 percent.

But new research suggests that a twist on alternate-day fasting may make dieting easier to tolerate and boost heart health to boot.

“This diet has been around about 20 years, but its effect on weight loss hadn’t really been studied,” Krista Varady, an assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition who led a research team at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a news release. The study authors reported their findings in the Nov. 1 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The researchers tracked 16 obese people — 12 women and four men — for 10 weeks. All were aged 35 to 65 and weighed at least 211 pounds.

For the first two weeks, the study participants didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. From the third through sixth weeks, they ate normal meals one day and then ate much less on the alternate days: what the researchers called the equivalent of a three-course lunch. Each meal provided 20 percent to 25 percent of the daily energy they needed.

Over the last four weeks, the participants essentially chose the food they wanted to eat, but they were guided by dieticians about their options.

“We wanted to see if they could actually do it by themselves — because what’s the point of studying this diet if you have to feed people meals prepared at metabolic kitchens all the time?” Varady said.

The subjects lost between 10 and 30 pounds, well beyond the expected loss of 5 pounds on average. The study participants also managed to lower their blood pressure, cholesterol levels and heart rate.

“It takes about two weeks to adjust to the diet, after which people don’t feel hungry on the fast day,” Varady said “We need to find out how long they can stay on this diet — and if they go off it, do they automatically regain the weight?”

The American Diabetes Association says anyone who is diabetic can benefit from blood glucose checks, especially if the person:
Takes insulin or medication to manage diabetes.
Is pregnant.
Has difficulty keeping blood glucose stable and under control.
Has dangerously low blood glucose, or develops ketones from high levels of blood glucose.
Develops low blood glucose without the typical warning signs.