April 10th, 2010 by DaveMunger in Better Health Network, Health Tips, Humor, Opinion, Research, True Stories
Tags: Exercise, General Medicine, iPad, Kinesiology, Mortality Rate, Physical Activity, Primary Care, Sedentary Lifestyle, Standing Up
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If you follow me on Twitter or read my personal blog, you probably know by now that I bought myself an iPad this week. The main reason I got it is because I’m a sucker for shiny new technology, but I also wanted to see if I could use it to help myself become a little less sedentary.
As I mentioned in my first two posts about fitness this month, there’s a growing body of research suggesting that a sedentary lifestyle is harmful to your health. I was interviewed about one such study a few months ago on the PRI show “The Takeaway,” and the evidence is fairly convincing: People who spend more hours watching TV also have a higher mortality rate than those who watch it less, even after accounting for exercise. Granted, it’s only a correlation, but the evidence converges quite well with several other studies.
But what am I supposed to do about it? My job requires me to spend long hours in front of a computer screen. If exercising a 30 or 40 minutes a day can’t prevent me from getting heart disease or cancer, what will? Some researchers, including David Dunstan, the lead researcher on the TV-watching study, suggest that just standing periodically, rather than sitting all day, can help a lot. That’s where the iPad comes in. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*
April 10th, 2010 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips, Opinion, Research, True Stories
Tags: American Diet, Basal Metabolic Rate, Caloric Intake, Calories, Cardiovascular Disease Risk, Cholesterol, David Kessler, Diet and Nutrition, Dieting, Dietitian, Food and Nutrition, General Medicine, High-Protein Diet, Mediterranean Diet, Primary Care, Research Diet Study, The End of Overeating, Weight Loss, Which Diet Is Best, Zone Delivery Diet
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I’ve been waiting for this soup for weeks. Eleven weeks, to be exact. That’s how long I was enrolled in a research diet study, and unable to eat anything other than the food they provided me, which was nowhere near as delicious as this soup.
The study is designed to compare the effects of three different diets — the American Diet, the Mediterrnean Diet, and a high-protein diet — on weight loss and cardiovascular disease risk.
I randomized to the American Diet, meaning that Thursday’s lunch was a slice of pizza with potato chips and an afternoon snack of Oreos and chocolate pudding, Saturday’s lunch was hamburger and fries, and the most veggies I ever saw at one sitting was a measly stalk of broccoli.
Despite this, I lost 30 pounds over the 11 weeks of the study, primarily because my caloric intake was only 1,200 calories per day, carefully calculated based on my basal metabolic rate. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*
April 8th, 2010 by DavidHarlow in Better Health Network, Interviews, Opinion, Research
Tags: Clinical Care, Communication Across Healthcare IT Systems, Earl Jones, GE Centricity, GE Healthcare IT, HITECH, Intermountain, Interoperability, Mayo, Medical IT Support, Medical Technology, Population Health Improvements, Qualibria, Technology-Agnostic Bridge of Information
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GE Healthcare IT has been working in the years leading up to the HITECH Act on a number of initiatives to enable meaningful use of healthcare IT — or as Senior VP and General Manager of eHealth Earl Jones puts it, building the “connected healthcare ecosystem.”
In what may be seen as either a pragmatic move or a revolutionary one, GE is developing tools that allow for communication across healthcare IT systems — not just connecting one GE Centricity installation with another — but acting as a technology-agnostic bridge for information across healthcare IT systems and across health systems.
While Jones notes that we’re in the early stages of linking isolated lilypads across the surface of a pond, GE is developing tools that not only facilitate interoperability, but also facilitate the dissemination of medical knowledge and the use of clinical decision rules developed locally or by pacesetting health systems (e.g. Mayo, Intermountain). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at HealthBlawg*
April 8th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
Tags: Antenna, Capsule, Drug, Electronic Devise, Gastroenterology, Gastrointestional Tract, Ingested, Ingestion, Internal Medicine, Low-Voltage Electricity, Medication, Microchip, Nanoparticles, Pharmacology, Pill, Primary Care, Rizwan Bashirullah, Signaling Technology, Silver, Stomach Acid, Tablet, University of Florida
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University of Florida researchers have developed a signaling technology that can be embedded into drug tablets to notify clinicians and caretakers that a pill has been ingested.
Although a bit of electronics is going to be moving through the digestive system, the researchers believe that it will pass safely without causing side effects to the patient.
If the technology proves itself, it may soon be used to confirm compliance in clinical trials or to monitor patients under a strict drug regimen.
One part is the pill, a standard white capsule coated with a label embossed with silvery lines. The lines comprise the antenna, which is printed using ink made of non-toxic, conductive silver nanoparticles. The pill also contains a tiny microchip, one about the size of a period on paper. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
April 8th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
Tags: American College of Surgeons, Controlled Trials, Double-Blinded Trials, General Surgery, Human Subject Research, Modalities, Randomized Clinical Trials, Research, Science Based Medicine, Scientific Techniques, SCOS, Society Of University Surgeons, Surgery, Surgical Innovation, Surgical Procedures, Surgical Science
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One of the things about science-based medicine that makes it so fascinating is that it encompasses such a wide variety of modalities that it takes a similarly wide variety of science and scientific techniques to investigate various diseases. Some medical disciplines consist of mainly of problems that are relatively straightforward to study. Don’t get me wrong, though. By “straightforward” I don’t mean that they’re easy, simply that the experimental design of a clinical trial to test a treatment is fairly easily encompassed by the paradigm of randomized clinical trials.
Medical oncology is just one example, where new drugs can be tested in randomized, double-blinded trials against or in addition to the standard of care without having to account for many difficulties that arise from difficulties blinding. We’ve discussed such difficulties before, for instance, in the context of constructing adequate placebos for acupuncture trials.
Indeed, this topic is critical to the application of science-based medicine to various “complementary and alternative medicine” modalities, which do not as easily lend themselves to randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials, although I would hasten to point out that, just because it can be very difficult to do such trials is not an excuse for not doing them. The development of various “sham acupuncture” controls, one of which consisted even of just twirling a toothpick gently poked onto the skin, shows that.
One area of medicine where it is difficult to construct randomized controlled trials is surgery. The reasons are multiple. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
