Sleep loss can cause testosterone levels to plummet |  |
- Sleep loss can cause testosterone levels to plummet
- Prepared for monsoon: Delhi civic agency
- Cancer victim writes to PM for ban on tobacco products
- Inadequate, say health activists of new anti-tobacco warnings
- Reducing revolving door hospital re-admissions
- 1 world, 1 sound
- BUSM names Deborah Frank, M.D., inaugural professors in child health and well-being
| Sleep loss can cause testosterone levels to plummet Posted: 02 Jun 2011 06:25 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Cutting back on sleep can be quite disastrous for healthy young men - it sends their testosterone levels plummeting, says a study. Men who slept less than five hours a night for one week in a lab had significantly lower levels of testosterone than when they had a full night's sleep, according to the study. Significantly, skipping sleep was found to reduce a young man's testosterone levels by the same amount as aging 10 to 15 years, or 10 percent to 15 percent. Low testosterone has a host of negative consequences for young men, and not just in sexual behaviour and reproduction. It is critical in building strength, muscle mass and bone density. 'Low testosterone levels are associated with reduced well being and vigour, which may also occur as a consequence of sleep loss,' said Eve Van Cauter, professor in medicine, University of Chicago Medical Centre, the US, who led the study, according to a Chicago statement. At least 15 percent of the adult working population in the US gets less than five hours of sleep a night, and suffers many adverse health effects because of it. Low testosterone is also linked with low energy, reduced libido, poor concentration and fatigue. The group of young men recruited for the study passed a rigorous battery of tests to screen for endocrine or psychiatric disorders and sleep problems. They were an average of 24 years old, lean and in good health. They spent three nights in the lab sleeping for up to 10 hours, and then eight nights sleeping less than five hours. Their blood was sampled every 15 to 30 minutes for 24 hours during the last day of the 10-hour sleep phase and the last day of the five-hour sleep phase. The effects of sleep loss on testosterone levels were apparent after just one week of short sleep. Five hours of sleep decreased their testosterone levels by 10 percent to 15 percent. The young men had the lowest testosterone levels in the afternoons on their sleep restricted... http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Prepared for monsoon: Delhi civic agency Posted: 02 Jun 2011 12:09 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, June 1 - The Municipal Corporation of Delhi - Wednesday said it was prepared for the monsoon and vector-borne diseases. 'We have already stepped up our activities of checking mosquito breeding this year. We have started intensive checking of breeding of aedes mosquitoes at domestic level quite early,' said V.K. Monga, chairman, medical relief and public health committee. While four dengue cases have been reported this year, 3,931 houses were found to have mosquito breeding during checking done at 33 places in the city. 'Focal spray to check mosquito breeding has been done in 88,762 houses so far this year. We are equipped to encounter any kind of situation,' added Monga. According to Monga, Zoological Park, Zakir Nagar, Okhla, Najafgarh drain, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences -, Commonwealth Games village and the Yamuna bank areas were some of the sensitive areas it had identified to check mosquito breeding. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Cancer victim writes to PM for ban on tobacco products Posted: 01 Jun 2011 08:10 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, June 1 - A 35-year-old cancer victim has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pleading with him to impose a ban on tobacco products such as gutka and cigarette. Rahul Bhardwaj, working with a private company, said in his letter sent Tuesday: 'My life changed four months back when I was diagnosed with an advanced stage of mouth cancer that the doctors say is a result of my habit of gutka/pan masala chewing....' Bhardwaj described his on-going agonising fight with cancer and how he was unable to eat or drink due to the ailment. 'I have sent a copy of the letter to the health minster and chairman of the human rights commission. I have gone through the trauma of seeing death from close quarters, and know how harmful the addictive product is,' Bhardwaj said. According to a 2009 study by the Global Adult Tobacco Survey -, India has nearly 274.9 million tobacco users - around 35 percent of the population. 'I represent the millions of youth in India. Why do we continue to allow this industry a legal status? Is it justifiable to allow killing of one million Indians every year for earning a few thousand crores -,' wrote Bhardwaj. 'I plead - the prime minister of this country to impose a ban on gutka, cigarette and pan masala,' said Bhardwaj who is currently undergoing chemotherapy in a Delhi-based hospital. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Inadequate, say health activists of new anti-tobacco warnings Posted: 01 Jun 2011 04:04 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, June 1 - They say a picture is worth a thousands words. But if the opinion of health activists - and many youngsters - is anything to go by, the new set of pictorial warnings for tobacco products are not enough to deter those addicted to the lethal habit. 'It is certainly better than the previous warnings that had hazy pictures of shrunken lungs. But this alone is not going to help as the notification has to be bolstered by many other actions in the anti-tobacco campaign,' Pankaj Chaturvedi, associate professor of head and neck cancer department at Mumbai's Tata Memorial Hospital told IANS over phone. After two years of campaigning and nudging by the civil society groups, the health and family welfare ministry Saturday approved harsher pictorial warnings for cigarettes and chewing tobacco products to be implemented from December this year. The warnings will carry gory pictures of mouth and lung cancer on smoke packets and non-smoke pouches. They will be rotated every two years. According to a 2009 study by the Global Adult Tobacco Survey -, India accounts for nearly 274.9 million tobacco users -- around 35 percent of the population. Chaturvedi, who initiated the nationwide 'Voice-of-Victims' campaign against tobacco, said: 'Firstly the pictures issued for smoking are very mild as compared to the pictures for gutka or chewing tobacco, then the rotation should be within a period of six months so that people are able to know multiple adverse effects of smoking.' Experts believe that steps need to be taken to improve low public awareness, deter strong industry lobbies, and for stringent implementation. 'Now that the first important measure has been taken, it should be accompanied by raising taxes on cigarettes and gutka and raising public awareness about the ill-effects of tobacco at different stages under various age groups,' said Monika Arora, senior director at Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Reducing revolving door hospital re-admissions Posted: 01 Jun 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Currently, one in five elderly patients discharged from a hospital is readmitted within a month. Seeking to address the human and substantial financial burden of revolving door hospital readmissions, the Affordable Care Act proposes a number of initiatives to improve care and health outcomes and reduce costs for the growing population of chronically ill people in the U.S. While transitional care is a central theme in these provisions, there is little information available to guide those responsible for implementing these important opportunities. To bridge the gap, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing reviewed existing programs in order to determine what works, for whom and for how long. They discovered a robust body of evidence that transitional care can improve health outcomes and reduce hospital readmissions. Their paper published in the current edition of Health Affairs, the major public policy journal, highlights a range of solutions to reduce avoidable hospitalizations and health care costs. Specifically, their review shows that, among the common elements of successful transitional care programs, is the use of nurses, often master's prepared, who work with patients, family caregivers and health teams to prevent medical errors and assure continuity of care as patients navigate a very fragmented care system. All nine interventions that showed any positive impact on readmissions relied on nurses as the clinical leader of manager care, wrote lead author Mary Naylor, Ph.D, R.N., a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Transitional care, short-term services that bridge gaps between hospital and home, focuses on identifying and addressing patients' and family caregivers' goals as well as needs for education and support, such as access to community services, to prevent poor outcomes. We have identified a number of strategies that result in short term benefits and a few that... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The world is composed of multiple languages, cultures, races and religions, but among this diversity our eyes see, it is possible that the world is more united through our ears. In fact Mihailo Antovic, a linguist and visiting researcher at Case Western Reserve University, proposes that our musical conceptualization brings together a world of different people. He found the commonality among children of distinct ethnic backgrounds and languages in his home of Serbia, and he's now testing whether the same can be found among English-speaking, Serbian-speaking and seeing-impaired children in the U.S. Antovic is currently conducting the study at Case Western Reserve with graduate student Austin Bennet. It will be interesting to compare the Serbian kids' results here in America to the results of those back in Serbia, as they have experienced different cultures, Antovic said. He's also interested in how the results from the seeing-impaired children compare to the rest. Seeing-children's responses are strongly based on the visual modality, which means their verbal responses seem to utilize some sort of reference to visual/spatial information. Previously, in 2009, Antovic worked with native Serbian and Romani children (Gypsies, stereotyped as musical people) back home in Serbia, where he observed their ability to comprehend musical tones. He compared three distinctly different types of people: children who were attending music school, native speakers of Serbian with no formal musical education, and native speakers of Romani with no formal musical education. In the study, the subjects were exposed to short musical sequences, which contain two strikingly opposing musical elements - a high and low tone, a soft and loud tone, a quick and slow succession of pitches, an ascending and descending scale, and a major and minor chord, Antovic said. He then analyzed the ability of the children to verbally describe what they had comprehended... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| BUSM names Deborah Frank, M.D., inaugural professors in child health and well-being Posted: 01 Jun 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) announces the establishment of an endowed Professorship in Child Health and Well-Being in the department of Pediatrics. This anonymously donated endowment reinforces the importance of supporting clinical practice focusing on public policies related to ending hunger and hardship in young children. The inaugural incumbent of this professorship is Deborah A. Frank, MD. Frank serves as BUSM professor of Pediatrics; director, Grow Clinic for Children at Boston Medical Center (BMC); and founder and principal investigator of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatric and public health researchers working to improve child health. A highly respected national authority, she has testified before both the United States and Massachusetts legislatures on the growing national problem of hunger and its effects on children. Frank also leads research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse on the effects of intrauterine exposure to cocaine and other substances on children's long term development. She advocates at hearings and in the media against criminalizing addicted mothers or stigmatizing their children. Frank has served on numerous committees and advisory boards including the Mayor's Hunger Commission, the Massachusetts Child Hunger Initiative and the Physicians Task Force on Childhood Hunger in Massachusetts. She has received awards in recognition for her work including the 2004 Standing Ovation Award, Massachusetts Human Services Coalition; 2007 Woman of Valor Award, Jewish Funds for Justice; 2008 Woman of Justice Award, Boston Lawyer's Weekly, and more recently in 2010 Dr. Frank received the Massachusetts Health Council Outstanding Leadership Award and the Physician Advocacy Merit Award from the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University. Frank is the author of more than 50 papers and articles. An endowed professorship is one of the most significant means by... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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