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Check out these newly released Special Health Reports from Harvard Medical School |  |
New ReleasesYou can't buy good health but you can buy good health information. Check out these newly released Special Health Reports from Harvard Medical School: |
At the stroke of midnight tonight we ring out the “old” year and begin a new one. For many people, the transition is a symbolic new start, a time to improve health or make other changes. If you are among the millions making a New Year’s resolution or striving to make improve your health in [...]
Many exercise programs these days spotlight the ever-present abs (abdominal muscles) but pay little attention to the other muscles that form the body’s core. Yet building up all of your core muscles is essential for staying strong and flexible and improving performance in almost any sport. It’s also vital for sidestepping debilitating back pain. Your core includes your back, side, pelvic, and buttock muscles, as well as the abdominal muscles. The core forms a sturdy central link between your upper and lower body. Much like the trunk of a tree, core muscles need to be strong yet flexible. A strong, flexible core underpins almost everything you do, from everyday actions like bending to put on shoes to on-the-job tasks, sports and sexual activity, and more. A strong core can also help you keep your back healthy or recover from back pain. It’s unwise to aim all your efforts at developing rippling abs. Overtraining abdominal muscles while snubbing muscles of the back and hip can set you up for injuries and cut athletic prowess.
Need a new book to read on the Kindle you received as a holiday present? I’d like to recommend one or more of the eight just-published eBooks that kick off the Harvard Medical School Guide series. Published by RosettaBooks, this series aims to give readers help with tricky health issues, like trouble sleeping or dealing [...]
It’s easy to get swept up in the holiday season. This combination of religious and national celebrations can help keep the cold winter away. But the feasts and parties that mark it can tax the arteries and strain the waistline. By eating just 200 extra calories a day — a piece of pecan pie and a tumbler of eggnog here, a couple latkes and some butter cookies there — you could pack on two to three pounds over this five- to six-week period. That doesn’t sound like much, except few people shed that extra weight in the following months and years. You don’t need to deprive yourself, eat only boring foods, or take your treats with a side order of guilt. Instead, by practicing a bit of defensive eating and cooking, you can come through the holidays without making “go on a diet” one of your New Year’s resolutions.
December 21st marks the shortest daytime of the year in the northern hemisphere. Although the winter solstice marks a seasonal turning point, with daylight getting incrementally longer from here until June 21, for people with seasonal affective disorder it’s just another day of feeling lousy. People with this condition lose steam when the days get shorter and the nights longer. Symptoms of seasonal affective disorder include loss of pleasure and energy, feelings of worthlessness, inability to concentrate, and uncontrollable urges to eat sugar and high-carbohydrate foods. Although they fade with the arrival of spring, seasonal affective disorder can leave you overweight, out of shape, and with strained relationships and employment woes. A unique approach to this problem is the use of light therapy. It involves sitting near a special lamp that emits bright light for 30 minutes a day as soon after waking up as possible.
What happens when the body rejects a protein found in many foods? Ask anyone with celiac disease. This increasingly common condition—it’s grown four-fold since the 1950s—causes a host of aggravating and potentially disabling symptoms such as gas, bloating, diarrhea, cramps, fatigue, weight loss, and more. But it’s also a trickster, causing subtle changes that may not be identified as stemming from celiac disease, like iron-deficiency anemia, low vitamin D, or a suspicious broken bone in an otherwise healthy person. People with celiac disease can’t tolerate gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, even in small amounts. It once took an average of 10 years to diagnose celiac disease. Today it can happen faster, thanks to a simple blood test that detects anti-gluten antibodies.
Many adult Americans take aspirin every day, often to prevent a heart attack. Headlines about a study published today linking aspirin use with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may scare some aspirin users to stop, but that’s the wrong message. In the study, aspirin’s effect on vision was small—far smaller than the lifesaving benefit it offers people with heart. Macular degeneration occurs when something goes wrong with the macula, a small part of the eye’s light-sensing retina. The macula is responsible for sharp central vision. In the new study, published in JAMA, 1.4% of long-term daily aspirin users and 0.6% of non-users developed macular degeneration over a 20-year period. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recommends that people age 65 and older have comprehensive exams at least every other year to check for macular degeneration and other eye problems.
When migraine or another type of headache strikes, some people turn to … Twitter and Google. And their Tweets and searches are providing a glimpse into how—and when—migraine and headache affect lives. In a letter to the editor published in the January 2013 issue of Cephalalgia (the journal of the International Headache Society), researchers from Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital analyzed Google searches conducted between January 2007 and July 2012. There were more searches for “migraine” on weekdays than on weekends or holidays. A similar pattern was seen in Twitter feeds. In the Google searches, the work week peak came on Tuesday and the low on Friday; on Twitter it was Monday and Friday. The most common time for migraine Tweets was between 6:00 am and 8:00 am, which the researchers say is a peak time for migraine attacks. Tweets could help researchers learn more about migraine triggers.
If you like numbers and statistics, especially those about health, two reports released this week should keep you occupied for days: the massive Global Burden of Disease study was published in The Lancet, and the American Heart Association released its annual “Heart and stroke statistics” report. The Global Burden of Disease project found that average life expectancy continues to rise in most countries. It also found that infection and other communicable causes of disease no longer dominate deaths and disability. Today, so-called non-communicable causes like traffic accidents, violence and war, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions account for two-thirds of world deaths and the majority of years lost to disability and death. According to the American Heart Association’s annual report, the percentage of deaths due to heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases has fallen by nearly one-third since 1999, but don’t expect that to continue. Increases in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, overweight, and inactivity threaten to reverse these gains.
The holiday season gets all the hype at this time of year, but the flu season needs your attention as well. It has come early this year—the earliest since 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—and is expected to be severe. In the last month, new cases of flu in the U.S. have gone from a few hundred a week to more than a thousand a week. Forty-eight states and Puerto Rico have already seen lab-confirmed cases of the virus, and five children have died from it. Getting vaccinated and washing your hands often are your best bets against getting flu. The vaccine isn’t an anti-flu guarantee, but it can reduce your risk by up to 80%. Yet barely one-third of Americans have been vaccinated against the flu so far this year. Why aren’t more people getting a flu shot?
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