All About Propecia

Whether you’re traveling or welcoming people into your home, lifting luggage can be hazardous.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons offers this advice to help prevent injury while lifting luggage:
Opt for suitcases that are lightweight but sturdy, and have wheels for easier transportation.
Pack items in a few smaller bags rather than packing one huge, heavy suitcase.
Stand next to the suitcase and lift while bending at the knees — not the waist — using your leg muscles.
Hold the suitcase as close to the center of your body as possible.
Use both hands, if possible, rather than carrying the suitcase on one side.
Keep your body straight, rather than twisting or turning.
Don’t be in a rush, and ask for help when you need it.

A medicinal herb, milk thistle, appears to reduce liver damage resulting from chemotherapy, a new study finds.

Chemo drugs often cause liver inflammation, making it necessary to lower the dose or suspend treatment until the inflammation subsides. These interruptions in therapy can make treatment less effective, the researchers said.

“We found that milk thistle, compared to placebo, was more effective in reducing inflammation,” said lead researcher Dr. Kara Kelly, from New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center’s Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York City.

“If these results are confirmed, milk thistle may allow us to treat liver inflammation or prevent it from occurring, which will allow better delivery of chemotherapy drugs,” she added.

The report is published in the Dec. 14 online edition of Cancer.

Milk thistle, a longtime folk remedy, is often recommended to treat liver damage and mushroom poisoning. No other treatment for liver toxicity exists, Kelly said.

For the study, Kelly’s team randomly assigned 50 children undergoing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia to receive milk thistle or a placebo for 28 days. All the children had liver inflammation at the start of the study.

Twenty-eight days later, the children who had received milk thistle had improved liver enzymes, compared with the children who received a placebo, the researchers said.

The milk thistle group had significantly lower levels of one enzyme in particular, AST, and a trend towards lower levels of another enzyme called ALT, Kelly’s group found.

In addition, milk thistle appeared to help patients tolerate higher doses of chemotherapy. Sixty-one percent of the children receiving milk thistle needed dose reductions, compared with 72 percent of the children receiving placebo, but this difference is not significant, the researchers noted.

Related lab experiments showed the herb did not lessen the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drugs, and Kelly thinks milk thistle might reduce liver inflammation for patients with other cancers who are taking other types of chemotherapy as well. Further research is needed, she said, to determine the appropriate dose and duration of milk thistle therapy.

Her team also hopes to evaluate the herb’s ability to prevent chemo-induced liver inflammation.

Still, some experts remain unconvinced about the herb’s value in cancer treatment. Dr. Julio C. Barredo, director of pediatric hematology-oncology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that the study’s small size, the low doses of milk thistle used and the short time frame of the study make the findings inconclusive.

Also, there was no difference in the delay of treatment in either group, he said.

“Improvement in one liver enzyme did not lead to patients who received the drug being delayed less than patients who received placebo in getting their chemotherapy,” Barredo said.

“I don’t think that you could recommend that people go and take this supplement when they are taking chemotherapy from the results of this study,” Barredo said. “Maybe a larger study, using a higher dose is warranted.”

Liver inflammation from chemotherapy usually abates when treatment stops or doses get reduced, Barredo added.

People who look younger than their age tend to live longer than those who look older than their years, a new study suggests.

The finding came from research that involved 1,826 Danish twins, aged 70 and older, who were given physical and cognitive tests and then had their faces photographed. Three groups of volunteers looked at the photos and indicated the age they perceived the participants to be. Twins were assessed individually, and on different days.

The researchers, from the University of Southern Denmark, then tracked the twins for seven years and found that perceived age was significantly associated with survival, even after adjustments were made for actual age, sex and the environment in which each pair of twins was raised. The bigger the difference in perceived age, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first, they noted.

The researchers also found an association between perceived age and physical and mental functioning.

Common genetic factors that influence both survival and perceived age may help explain the findings, the study authors explained.