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Health24.com | These African countries have the world’s most active adults, while Arab countries bring up the rear
A quarter of the world’s adults are doing too little exercise, putting them at risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and some cancers – and there has been no improvement over the past 15 years.
This is according to a global study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) published in The Lancet Global Health journal this week, that looked at exercise rates in 2016 and compared them to 2001.
Mozambicans and Ugandans doing fine
In four countries, more than half of adults did not get enough exercise in 2016: Kuwait (67%), American Samoa and Saudi Arabia (both 53%), and Iraq (52%). Kuwait and Samoa have some of the highest obesity rates in the world.
In contrast, Mozambicans and Ugandans were the most likely to get enough exercise, with only 6% reporting less than the recommended exercise of at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity every week.
“In 2016, around one in three women (32%) and one in four men (23%) worldwide were not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity to stay healthy,” according to the study.
The study, based on self-reported activity levels from 358 population-based surveys in 168 countries covering 1.9 million participants, noted that there had been no improvement in exercise rates since 2001.
“Unlike other major global health risks, levels of insufficient physical activity are not falling worldwide, on average, and over a quarter of all adults are not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity for good health,” said the study’s lead author, the WHO’s Dr Regina Guthold.
China making great progress
Women were less active than men in all regions of the world, apart from east and southeast Asia.
There were large differences in activity between women and men in many countries, such as Bangladesh (40% vs. 16%), India (44% vs. 25%), Iraq (65% vs. 40%), Philippines (49% vs. 30%), South Africa (47% vs. 29%), and the USA (48% vs. 32%).
China has made the most progress in promoting physical activity, but in high income Western countries, there has been an increase of 5% in people doing insufficient activity.
“Regions with increasing levels of insufficient physical activity are a major concern for public health and the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs),” says Guthold.
Although a recent NCD policy survey showed that almost three quarters of countries report having a policy or action plan to tackle physical inactivity, few have been implemented to have national impact, according to the researchers.
The study’s release comes ahead of the Third United Nations High Level Meeting on NCDs and their risk factors, including physical inactivity, being held on 27 September 2018 in New York. – Health-e News.
Image credit: iStock
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Health24.com | 4 migraine treatments that might actually work
Let’s talk migraines: Specifically how incapacitating they can be.
As if that familiar migraine pain weren’t enough – you know, that squeezing sensation and brain fogginess – those capital “H” Headaches also come with increased sensitivity to light noise, and smells, and sometimes even nausea and vomiting. And don’t even get me started on those auras.
And while about 12% of people get these headaches, they disproportionately affect women, who are three times more likely than men to get migraines.
Although you can’t necessarily make sure you never, ever get a migraine (they likely have a genetic cause, per the US National Library of Medicine [NLM]), you can keep a few things in your migraine arsenal for the next time the pain strikes.
To help calm your throbbing head, try these migraine helpers, recommended by Dr Lauren Natbony, assistant professor of neurology and headache specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital, and Dr Kerry Knievel, a neurologist in Phoenix.
1. Pop some magnesium supplements.
Migraine sufferers tend to have lower levels of magnesium, a vitamin that can inhibit ache-causing brain signals.
To slash frequency and severity of head pain, pop a 400- to 500-milligram supplement daily (clear it with your doctor first). Patience is a virtue with this OTC aid – it could take up to six weeks to notice a change.
Read more: Menstrual migraines are incredibly common – despite being often ignored
2. Give acupressure a try.
Pressing specific trigger points, like where the base of your head meets your neck, or your temples, for a few minutes could provide relief in the moment.
Ever heard of “daith” piercings? (They’re in the ear fold’s innermost cartilage, FYI.) There’s no proof, but (non-expert) proponents say they help, per the same theory.
3. Ask your doctor about prescription meds.
Fighting migraines five or more days a month? A preventive prescription could cut occurrence and intensity in half.
There’s no one drug that works for everyone, so you may have to experiment. Ask your doctor about oral options (like Topamax) or consider an injection, like the newly-approved Aimovig.
Read more: 5 types of headaches – and what the pain really means
4. Look into Botox (yes, really).
The wrinkle miracle is approved by the FDA to prevent chronic migraines (15 or more headache days, including eight migraine ones, a month).
Every 12 weeks, a trained physician injects 31 nerve-dense sites – some are where facial lines appear (talk about an added bonus).
This article was originally published onwww.womenshealthmag.com
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HIV prevention drug trial boost in Wales
There were no new cases of HIV in more than 500 high-risk people who took part in a trial of Prep.
Health24.com | Skilled nurses strengthen HIV fight
The Limpopo Department of Health says nurses who complete a specialist programme are an important weapon in the fight against HIV/Aids.
About 600 nursing students who completed the Nurse Initiated Management of Anti-Retroviral Treatment (NIMART) programme in June have been honoured by Health MEC Dr Phophi Ramathuba in Polokwane.
Increasing the life expectancy
NIMART offers comprehensive training for nurses working with HIV-positive patients, teaching them how to accept, diagnose and manage the patients.
According to the provincial department, the programme has transferred HIV-positive patients from hospitals to local primary health care facilities, which means patients are now able to collect medication at their local clinics.
The programme plays a significant role in increasing the life expectancy of HIV-positive patients and has helped make ARVs accessible at universities, colleges, correctional services facilities and non-medical sites in the province.
Limpopo ‘on the right track’
The Limpopo department said 3 787 nurses have completed the NIMART programme since it was launched in 2010.
The department’s spokesperson Neil Shikwambane said the programme was the brainchild of the national Department of Health “to train nurses so they are better equipped to handle HIV cases in our hospitals”.
MEC Ramathuba said Limpopo was on the right track in testing and initiating HIV treatment to those affected by the virus.
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | Why do you eat junk food?
Most people know junk food is unhealthy, but they still eat it. Health-e News spoke to some residents of Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape to find out about their sugary habits.
Junk food ‘just for fun’
Andiswa Dotyeni said simply that she eats cakes, burgers, and sugary snacks because she likes it. “I eat knowing that it causes skin problems and I put on weight, but I crave it.”
Tozi Lugongolo said he ate junk food “just for fun”.
“I eat chips, chocolate, sweets maybe twice a day. I have gained a lot of weight and my face is oily and pimply. I want to quit but it’s one of my favourites,” he said.
Learner Zanele Manxasana said that during break she buys unhealthy food like cakes, chips and sweets. She said she knows it causes obesity but she eats it because it’s convenient.
Nutritionists tell us it’s important to make healthy food choices and be physically active.
More green vegetables and fruit
Bulelwa Majova, a nutritionist at Holy Cross Hospital, said junk food may lead to a higher risk of obesity and cardiovascular diseases among other chronic health problems.
She said people could make better nutritional choices with just a few simple changes like starting the day with a healthy breakfast, eating more green vegetables and fruit and less starch, and drinking water rather than fizzy drinks.
Majova said people who abandon junk foods will experience weight loss, their mood will improve and they will sleep better and be healthier.
“When you want to know if what’s on your plate is healthy or junk ask yourself: What are the healthy nutrients I am taking in and how fresh is this food?” – Health-e News
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Demand for heatwave advice from NHS doubled this summer
Searching for advice on signs of heat exhaustion and preventing heatstroke was most popular.
Many serious surgeries cancelled on the day, study finds
One in seven serious operations were cancelled on the day of surgery in a seven-day period in 2017, a study finds.
Building a better brain-in-a-dish, faster and cheaper
Writing in the current online issue of the journal Stem Cells and Development, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe development of a rapid, cost-effective method to create human cortical organoids directly from primary cells.
Experimental studies of developing human brain function are limited. Research involving live embryonic subjects is constrained by ethical concerns and the fragile nature of the brain itself. Animal models only partially mimic or recapitulate human biology and cognitive function. Single cell studies do not capture the complexity of neural networks.
In recent years, the development of in vitro human organoids — three-dimensional, miniaturized, simplified versions of an organ produced from reprogrammed stem cells — have allowed scientists to study biological functions, diseases and treatments more realistically and in greater detail.
“And that includes the brain,” said Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. “Cerebral organoids can form a variety of brain regions. They exhibit neurons that are functional and capable of electrical excitation. They resemble human cortical development at the gene expression levels.”
Muotri is among the leaders in the field, having used the “brain-in-a-dish” approach to provide the first direct experimental proof that the Zika virus can cause severe birth defects, to repurpose existing HIV drugs on a rare, inherited neurological disorder and to create Neanderthalized “mini-brains.”
But human brain organoids are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to produce, requiring sophisticated tools and know-how to first generate human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) capable of becoming almost any kind of cell from skin cells, called fibroblasts, then directing those iPSCs to differentiate into the variety of interconnected cell types that comprise an organ like the brain.
In the new paper, senior author Muotri and colleagues describe a new, rapid and cost-effective method to reprogram individual somatic cells directly into cortical organoids from hundreds of individuals simultaneously. To do so, they compressed and optimized several steps of the process so that somatic cells are reprogrammed, expanded and stimulated to form cortical cells almost simultaneously. The result is a cortical organoid that fully develops from somatic cells with only minor manipulation, Muotri said.
“What we’ve done is establish a proof-of-principle protocol for a systematic, automated process to generate large numbers of brain organoids,” said Muotri. “The potential uses are vast, including creating large brain organoid repositories and the discovery of causal genetic variants to human neurological conditions associated with several mutations of unknown significance, such as autism spectrum disorder. If we want to understand the variability in human cognition, this is the first step.”
Co-authors of the study include: Monique Schukking, Helen Miranda, Cleber A. Trujillo, and Priscilla D. Negraes, all at UC San Diego.
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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Scott LaFee. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
New way to identify telltale markers for breast cancer tumors
A research team led by USC scientists has developed a new way to identify molecular markers of breast cancer tumors, a potentially life-saving breakthrough that could lead to better treatment for millions of women.
Aided by machine learning, the researchers taught a computer to rapidly sort images of breast tumors to identify which ones had estrogen receptors, a key to determining prognosis and treatment options. That’s a big step forward from microscopes and cell biopsies in use for more than a century, according to the scientists.
The work opens a new pathway for breast cancer treatment that promises faster results for less cost for more people worldwide, said David B. Agus, professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is also CEO of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC.
The findings appear this week in Nature Partner Journals Breast Cancer.
“It’s the beginning of a revolution to use machine learning to get new information about breast cancer to the physician,” Agus said. “We can use it to detect better treatments, get information to patients faster and help more people. We’re unleashing this power to give new information to physicians and help treat cancer.”
Except for skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States. While deaths have declined, it remains the second-leading cause of cancer death among women and the leading cause of cancer death among Hispanic women.
About 237,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in U.S. women and about 41,000 die from the disease each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The key to identifying and treating cancer is knowing the nature of the tumor. Cancer cells that contain receptors for estrogen and other hormones respond differently to cancer drugs that target these mechanisms. While doctors use these characteristics to classify tumors and select treatments, testing for markers is a slow and inefficient process.
For example, assays can be inconsistent depending on the laboratory doing the testing. They’re also expensive, take weeks to do and are unavailable in many developing countries.
“If you’re diagnosed with cancer, it’ll be a few weeks before you get a call from the doctor saying they’ve identified a marker,” said Dan Ruderman, one of the study authors and assistant professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine. “With machine learning technology, we can tell you the same day, so there’s less delay, less stress and potentially better outcomes. It’s going to enable us to identify the right drug and dose more quickly. It’s a big step toward personalized medicine.”
While machine learning has been used before for cancer detection, the USC study adapted the technology to more clearly focus on telltale markers of a cell’s nucleus. The key was to extract parameters describing the shape of nuclei, and feeding these into a large neural network that could learn relationships between nucleus shape and molecular markers.
The scientists used publicly available hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) stained histopathology images. the cell-stained slides doctors have been using for more than a century. Next, they ascertained clinical status for 113 cancer patients, then split the patients into two groups, using one group to train a convolutional neural network algorithm, which is used to enhance visual imagery, and another to test the machine. When they compared the two sets, they found a strong correlation, providing high confidence that an algorithm can predict the estrogen receptor status of the tumor.
“We can use this technology to identify the molecular markers of the tumor and in the future will identify which therapeutics the tumor will respond to. Machine learning helps us get this information to patients sooner and may transform cancer care in the developing world where precise breast cancer marker assessment is in short supply,” said Rishi Rawat, a graduate student in the Keck School of Medicine and first author of the study.
So far, the research findings demonstrate that the new technology has the potential to improve clinical care. Validation studies are under way — an important step before it’s ready for use in the doctor’s office
The study authors are Agus, Rawat and Ruderman of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC; Paul Macklin of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University; and David L. Rimm of the Department of Pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine.
The research was supported by a grant from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF-16-103).
