January 23rd, 2011 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, Research
Tags: Accelerometer, Athlete's Health, Blow to the Head, Contact Sports, Head Injury, Helmet Technology, Impact Sensors, Medgadget, National Football League, NFL, Sports Medicine, Sports-Related Concussions, Traumatic Brain Injury, Wired Magazine
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Anyone who’s ever watched football, the American variety, knows how rough of a sport it can be. With 22 fast-moving players (some weighing as much as 350 pounds) scrambling and tackling for possession of the pigskin, injuries are inevitable.
One of the scariest injuries a football player can get is a concussion. With its commonly insidious onset, concussions of the brain are often difficult to diagnose, or immediately treat to avoid long-term consequences.
The National Football League (NFL) has announced that they will be launching a pilot program next season in which accelerometers will be placed in players’ mouthpieces, earpieces, and helmets to analyze how blows to the head relate to the effects and severity of concussions and other traumatic brain injuries. The data could potentially help team doctors diagnose the severity of a concussion within a few minutes. Collected long-term from groups of players, the impact data could help coaches and doctors determine how players get injured and the possible effects of such injuries. Such data could also help engineers design a better football helmet.
As long as the game of football continues to be played, concussions will be pretty much impossible to avoid. However, changing technology and increasing knowledge of traumatic brain injury will hopefully only make football a safer, more enjoyable sport.
Wired article: Impact Sensors Slated for NFL Helmets Next Season…
Medgadget archive: Football helmet technology…
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
January 22nd, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
Tags: Activity Level, American Diet, Breakfast Calories, Counting Calories, Diet and Weight, Dr. Toni Brayer, Everything Health, Food and Nutrition, Healthy Diet, Hidden Calories, Nutrition Journal, Obesity, Overweight, Starbucks, Total Caloric Intake, Weight Management
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Haven’t we all learned that breakfast should be our biggest meal? “Start the day with ‘fuel’ and you can burn it off as the day goes on.” “Eat a big breakfast and you’ll eat fewer calories all day long.”
This advice is probably not true, and in fact a new study published in the January 17th issue Nutrition Journal shows that people ate the same at lunch and dinner regardless of what they had at breakfast. If a person ate 1,000 calories at breakfast (which is easy to do with bacon, eggs, toast, hashbrowns, and juice), he or she had a total increase in calories eaten throughout the day by 1,000 calories.
This doesn’t mean we should be skipping breakfast. The problem may be what we historically think of as an “American” breakfast. It might have worked for the farmer in the past or the laborer hauling lumber, but it’s just too many calories for our current level of activity. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
January 20th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Health Policy, Research
Tags: 2011 National Physicians Survey Frustration and Dismay in a Time of Change, ACP Internist, American College Of Physicians, Family Medicine, Future of American Healthcare, General Medicine, HCPlexus, Healthcare reform, Internal Medicine, Medical Specialties, New U.S. Healthcare System, Patients' Opinion, Physicians' Opinion, Primary Care, Quality of Healthcare, Ryan DuBosar, Thomson Reuters
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While public opposition to healthcare reform has diminished since its passage, physician opinions are still negative, especially among specialists who see their value to the healthcare system decreasing as reform emphasizes primary care.
A survey reports that 65 percent of nearly 3,000 physicians in all specialties said the quality of healthcare in the country will deteriorate in the next five years. Seventeen percent of respondents believe the quality of healthcare will stay the same and 18 percent believe it will improve. Meanwhile, 30 percent of healthcare consumers believe that the quality of healthcare will improve.
Physicians cited as reasons for their pessimism personal political beliefs, anger at insurance companies and a lack of accurate planning in the reform act. Other reasons include that primary care physicians won’t have the time to keep up with the extra workload, forcing more patients to depend upon nurse practitioners for primary care. When asked who will likely handle the 32 million Americans expected to receive healthcare following passage of the reform, 44 percent said primary care physicians will handle the load and 44 percent said that nurse practitioners will see them. (Physicians could vote for more than one category; options include physicians assistants and specialists, for example.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
January 20th, 2011 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, Research
Tags: Behavioral Medicine, Direct-To-Consumer Genomewide Profiling, Disease Risk, Genetic Risk Assessment, Genetics, Health Risk, Hereditary Disease Risk, Medgadget, Navigenics Health Compass, NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine, Patient Behavior, Patients' Anxiety, Personal Genetic Testing, Personal Genomics, Psychology, Scripps Translational Science Institute, Test Anxiety, Test-Related Stress
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Genome-wide profiling is increasingly being marketed towards consumers to assess their risk of developing certain diseases. However, there has been little research into the psychological effects of these tests.
Researchers from Scripps Translational Science Institute have now looked into these effects in a large group of patients. They followed 2,037 participants who took the Navigenics Health Compass, a test that assesses the risk for about 20 common diseases, for a period of three months.
Taking the test did not increase anxiety symptoms, dietary fat intake, or exercise behavior. There was some test-related distress correlated with the average estimated lifetime risk of getting the diseases tested for, but at the same time 90.3 percent of all subjects had no test-related distress at all. The use of screening tests did not change among the group and notably health effects of the test were not studied.
In conclusion, personal genetic testing does not seem to generate a lot of distress, although the study was clearly limited by a high dropout percentage of 44 percent and the self-selection of participants who opted to do the test.
Article in New England Journal of Medicine: Effect of Direct-to-Consumer Genomewide Profiling to Assess Disease Risk
Flashback: An Interview with Navigenics…
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
