(Reuters) – A South African lawyer has moved to file a class action suit against over 30 gold firms on behalf of 17,000 former miners who say they contracted silicosis, a debilitating lung disease, due to negligence in health and safety.

The companies include third-largest global bullion producer AngloGold Ashanti, fourth-largest Gold Fields and Harmony Gold. Also named is Anglo American’s South African unit, which owed gold assets in the past but no longer produces it.

Attorney Richard Spoor said on Friday he had filed last week for class certification for an action for damages in the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg.

“We need to ask the court for permission to proceed on a class action basis. We filed the papers last week, and that matter will have to be argued in the court if it’s opposed,” Spoor said.

He expected the matter to be heard in April or May of next year.

The damages sought in what could be Africa’s biggest ever class action suit have not been disclosed but could be huge at a time when South Africa’s mining industry is battling with soaring power costs and wage costs as well as violent labor militancy.

Spoor has signed up 17,000 plaintiffs so far from South Africa, Botswana and Lesotho, the landlocked kingdom that has provided hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to South Africa’s gold mines over the past century, he said.

Spoor said the number of plaintiffs was growing by around 500 a month.

The planned suit, which has little precedent in South African law, has its roots in a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court that for the first time allowed lung-diseased miners to sue their employers for damages.

Silicosis is a chronic and progressive disease that cannot be cured. Miners contract it by inhaling silica dust from gold-bearing rocks.

African Rainbow Minerals, one of the companies named, said it was “too soon to discuss the outcome of the matter as none of the merits of the matter has yet been established, let alone tested in court”.

An Anglo American spokesman said, “We are aware of the case, but Anglo American has not yet been served, so it would not be appropriate to comment any further.”

Officials at AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Harmony and some other companies named in the filing could not be reached for comment.

The companies named in the filing owned or operated 78 different gold mines from 1965 to the present.

(Reporting by Ed Stoddard and Sherilee Lakmidas; editing by Jane Baird)

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That builds on previous research that found no short-term survival differences in adult victims given compression-only CPR instead of the standard kind, which includes mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

And it supports an American Heart Association recommendation that the simpler form of CPR is appropriate for bystanders, who may feel so intimidated by the prospect of combining chest compressions with rescue breathing that they give no aid at all.

This study shows “we were on the right track in 2008,” said Dr. Roger White of the Mayo Clinic, who was on the advisory group that wrote the AHA’s statement.

The recommendations don’t apply to CPR performed in the hospital, nor in the community by medical personnel or people who are proficient in rescue breathing. They also apply only to adult, not pediatric, victims.

Some 383,000 people in the U.S. suffer cardiac arrests every year, and only about 10 percent survive.

The study looked at data from two randomized trials that were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 and covered more than 3,200 adults whose cardiac arrests were likely due to heart problems rather than trauma, suffocating or drowning. Dispatchers instructed bystanders via phone to use either the standard or compression-only form of CPR.

The new study’s authors, who were from Seattle, France and Sweden, were able to follow up on longer-term outcomes for 78 percent of those participants.

The one-year survival rate was about 12 percent for chest compression alone and about 10 percent for compression plus breathing, said Dr. Florence Dumas, an author of the study, in an email to Reuters Health. After adjusting for different factors, mortality in the compression-only group was 9 percent lower than in the standard CPR group. The survival benefit persisted over five years, according to findings published in the journal Circulation.

That suggests “that potential short-term outcome differences do translate to meaningful long-term public health benefits,” said Dumas.

ALLAYING CONCERNS

In 2008 the AHA said compression-only CPR was an option for bystanders who aren’t trained or who aren’t confident in their ability to perform the compressions combined with rescue breathing.

Some people have worried that collapsed victims of non-cardiac events such as drug overdoses or a blood clot in the lungs might not get the oxygen they need with the compression-only approach, he said.

But the study authors wrote that, “importantly, we did not observe evidence of harm among those for whom oxygenation and ventilation might in theory be more important” such as non-cardiac causes or an unwitnessed cardiac arrest.

There is likely some oxygen remaining in the blood when a victim’s heart has stopped for a short period of time, and the compression-only technique can distribute it to vital organs. If a person has been down for a longer or unknown period of time, it’s more likely that they’ll need fresh oxygen through rescue breathing, said White, an anesthesiologist and cardiac care specialist who was not involved in the new study.

That’s why the AHA’s recommendations apply when bystanders actually witness an adult suffering cardiac arrest with no obvious non-cardiac cause such as drowning. (Kids suffering cardiac arrest need rescue breathing.)

“The vast majority (of events) are likely to be cardiac in origin,” said White. “So proceeding with chest compression is likely to be beneficial in the vast majority of cases,” he said.

One limitation of the study was that it tracked survival only; it couldn’t assess patients’ level of function or quality of life. In addition, the original trials the study drew from weren’t designed to track long-term outcomes.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/UdlXKb Circulation, online Dec. 10, 2012.

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Chest compression-only CPR shows long-term benefit is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

McKee, a 72-year-old grandmother of four from Bethpage, Tenn., was one of nearly 14,000 people who found out this fall that they’d been exposed to tainted medications made by the now shuttered New England Compounding Center.

In her case, the threat came from a steroid shot that she’d had on Sept. 7 to relieve some nagging back pain.

“We got a letter. We were told that if we could make it 28 days, that we’d be clear,” says Fred McKee, her husband of 51 years. “We watched it and worried about it,” says Fred, his voice filling with emotion.

But Johnnie felt fine. She didn’t have any of the symptoms they were told to look for — headaches, nausea, fever.

The waiting period passed, and she felt good enough to get back to her yard, which she had always tended with great care. “She mowed the lawn,” says Fred.

Then, on Oct. 8, the pain hit like a bolt of lightning at the base of her spine. “It was just excruciating pain,” says Fred. Their surgeon told them to drive to the emergency room at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, where doctors had started to treat a wave of patients who were battling a rare type of fungal meningitis, an infection of the brain and spinal cord.

“There were three criteria they looked for to determine if you have fungal meningitis, and she met all three,” Fred says.

Still, he says, they didn’t worry. But that may have been because they didn’t understand what was coming.

“I don’t think we really realized that we were really getting into a two- to three-month hospitalization period and a six-month-to-a-year complete recovery,” he says.

An Outbreak Without Precedent

Since the outbreak began, 620 people have been infected and 39 have died in 19 states. No one has been cured.

“As far as we know, no one has been taken off medicines, and we wouldn’t recommend that now; it’s still too early,” says Tom M. Chiller, MD, MPH, deputy chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the CDC in Atlanta.

Many hope they are on the road to recovery, but no one can tell them when it will end.

Experts say they’ve never seen these kind of fungal infections, much less this many cases.

“It’s very difficult for the doctors and the patients because we can’t say, ‘Well, just two more weeks of this and it will be over.’ What we’re saying is that we’re going to keep treating you. We’re going to keep caring for you, and when the experts tell us we can stop, we’re going to do that,” says William Schaffner, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

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Fungal Meningitis Patients: A Long Road to Recovery is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

The FDA says the newly recalled lots were manufactured by Qualitest Pharmaceuticals and were repackaged and distributed by Mylan Institutional. The three lots include:  

The recalled bottles are supposed to contain tablets made up of 10 milligrams of hydrocodone and 500 milligrams of acetaminophen. But they are being recalled because the tablets may contain higher amounts of acetaminophen or hydrocodone than indicated on the label.

High doses of acetaminophen may put you at increased risk for liver damage.

Especially at risk are people who:

• Take other medications containing acetaminophen
• Have liver disease
• Drink more than three alcoholic beverages a day

Additionally, too-high doses of hydrocodone can cause increased sedation and/or breathing problems, particularly among the elderly, people with severe kidney or liver impairment, and those who are taking other sedating medications or certain antidepressants.

If you have the affected lots you can contact Mylan Customer Service at 800-848-0462. People who are unsure should call their pharmacist or doctor.

Catherine Bach source

Recall of More Hydrocodone-Acetaminophen Tablets is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Published: Dec. 27, 2012 at 12:29 PM

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(Reuters) – Shanghai will introduce tough new laws to blacklist firms that flout food safety laws, the official Xinhua news agency reported, a significant move in China’s consumer hub to end the food scandals that in recent years have killed children.

Under the proposed law, firms caught using banned substances in food, producing food from inedible ingredients, or illegally making, selling or using banned food additives, will be banned from operating in Shanghai, Xinhua reported late on Wednesday quoting city officials.

China’s food safety record is abysmal. Frequent media reports refer to cooking oil being recycled from drains, carcinogens in milk, and fake eggs. In 2008, milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine killed at least six children and sickened nearly 300,000.

On Monday, Shanghai’s food safety authority said the level of antibiotics and steroids in Yum Brands Inc’s KFC chicken was within official limits, but found a suspicious level of an antiviral drug in one of the eight samples tested.

Yum faced criticism last week from China’s state-owned broadcaster, which said Yum’s KFC chickens in China contained an excessive level of antibiotics.

The planned regulation, expected to take effect next year, will see blacklisted firms barred from operating food businesses in the city, Xinhua reported, quoting Gu Zhenhua, deputy director of the municipal food safety committee’s office.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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His first comments on the issue come weeks after Washington state and Colorado voters supported legalizing pot, or cannabis, last month in ballot measures that stand in direct opposition of federal law.

“It does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal,” he told ABC News in part of an interview released on Friday.

“At this point (in) Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue. And, as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said.

The Department of Justice has said pot remains a federally controlled substance and states have been looking for guidance from Washington on how it will handle the conflict with state laws.

Medical use of the substance is legal in 18 U.S. states. But federal officials have still continued to crack down on some providers in those states.

Pot remains an illegal narcotic under U.S. law, but Washington and Colorado became the first states in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana use on November 6. A similar effort in Oregon failed.

Obama called the situation “a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law.” He told ABC that “what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about” how to reconcile federal and state laws, and that he has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to examine the issue.

In his 1995 memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” Obama admitted to regularly smoking pot in high school. The father of two told ABC that he would not go so far as to say pot should be legalized altogether. There are also concerns about drug use in children and violence, he told ABC, according to its website.

“I want to discourage drug use,” he added.

The new measures in Washington and Colorado, which already permit medical marijuana use, allow possession of up to an ounce of the substance for private use. They also will regulate and tax sales at special stores for those aged 21 and older.

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Recreational marijuana should not be top federal priority: Obama is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Time is beginning to soften the shock of the Newtown massacre. As their community returns to the routines and rhythms of everyday life, much debate — some reasoned and some polemical — still rages around gun control. <=”" p=”">There is no question that something must be done, but the answer is not to become an armed state. 

<=”" p=”">I am a psychiatrist, a physician, and offer my ideas as a mental health professional. I believe there is one immediate action (among others that can be taken) that can reduce the risk of similar searing pain being rained upon families and communities in the future. We must employ an early warning system — one that is already in place. I am referring to the families of people with mental illness.

These are families who see a loved one begin to become different from the child or spouse or sibling or parent that they knew: To isolate themselves from family and friends; to show persistent changes in sleep, eating and hygiene; to say or do odd things that suggest their thinking is off, maybe hearing or seeing things others are not; to be moody or irritable or intolerant of the slightest of questions or statements; or abusing alcohol and drugs. Families see these changes first, notice them subtlety, and it is they who typically call out for help particularly to mental health services that is seldom then provided them.

The plight of families that recognize a member is becoming mentally ill, and at risk to harm themselves or someone else, can be truly agonizing. Their loved one often will not accede to their entreaties to go for evaluation or treatment. Sometimes this is because the illness is so serious that it interferes with the person’s ability to recognize they are ill — often denying any difficulty and blaming others for their fears or anger. Sometimes it is hopelessness that erodes a person’s capacity to take action on their own behalf, amplified by feeling unworthy and not wanting to be a burden; guilt and shame add to their psychic state; or they have had bad experiences with mental health care, or fear it. These are powerful forces to contend with, but families need help to manage them successfully.

Even when these families do reach out to professionals (medical, mental health, police, etc.), their calls are often rebuffed. They are told that professionals cannot speak with them because of HIPAA (federal privacy) regulations, or that no action can be taken to hospitalize a person with a mental illness unless they demonstrate “imminent” dangerousness, which is to say at that very moment (a moment in which many an ill person will manage to put on a good face for the doctor and promise to go to an outpatient appointment – -though they have steadfastly refused for months). This has been termed “dying with your rights on.”

Family alarm calls often occur months before what become difficult to reverse setbacks in school or work accumulate. Their calls come at a time when early intervention could prevent crisis and the need for involuntary treatment or the assistance of police. Their calls come when there is greater likelihood of success and greater opportunity to avert disability and potential catastrophe. I meet these families all the time. I see their demoralization and outrage about how handcuffed they feel in trying to get help for their loved one.

No mental health system will ever be able to identify serious behavioral problems as early as a family. We have tried. But “random” acts of violence are not so random. In addition to privacy and civil rights requirements that limit how families can assist their loved ones, families have too often been led to doubt what they see, to attribute problems to phases in a life (like adolescence or being older) or to external events (like loss or disgrace). At other times, these families know very little about mental illness, or addictions, television notwithstanding — or consider these to be problems others have, not them. Or they feel guilty, or ashamed, or just do not know where to turn. 

These are real and remediable problems.

While I think mental health professionals and legal authorities could say many smart things about what can be done to correct the ways we miss opportunities to do more (and earlier), I sincerely, and with all due respect, suggest they (we) are not the ones to tell us all what needs to be done. It is families who are the true experts, the people who have learned all too well from experience what they need to help their loved one get help. It would also be a good idea to invite the opinions of those people with mental illness, who are well into their recovery, about how we can do better in engaging people with serious mental illness in the treatments that will keep others from losing ground, or from acts of aggression that blight their lives and ours.

There is a great and inescapable tension that exists between those advocates and experts who represent patient civil rights and those who call for more involuntary control of people with mental illnesses. But the pendulum has swung hugely since the 1960s, when commitment to a mental hospital was far too readily exercised (and little treatment offered once admitted). The former group is passionate about privacy and self-determination and deploys lawyers to defend patient rights for freedom and choice in psychiatric units throughout this country. The latter group, no less passionate, call for increasing involuntary hospitalization for people with serious mental illness, including outpatient commitment and requiring that patients take medications they refuse. Neither group has it all right nor is all wrong about what may be the best course for our country (and for mental health services and the law) to take. After Newtown, however, we are pressed to ask, and answer, is it our children or our rules?

So, as the tide of ideas carries on in the wake of Newtown, my suggestion is that we be sure to ask those who are first to notice, most determined to help, and whose ongoing love and support will be essential to whatever the professionals (like me) have to offer: the families who have member with a serious mental illness. Some have called this approach user driven design.

More money for treatment, while always welcome, is imprecise, if unlikely. We already spend a great deal of money poorly for mental health care. Let’s start by formally inviting families with members who have a serious mental illness to the “invitation-only” policy and planning meetings that dedicated public officials will call to see how future mental health disasters can be averted — including those that take the lives of one person at a time, not just the ones that wind up the focus of national attention.

I am sure that families, represented by exceptional organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other established family advocacy groups, can help medical, mental health, social service, and legal and law enforcement professionals more responsively change many of the encrusted and ineffective practices that exist today. Let’s involves these families in engineering the most effective systems for involving their early warnings, using their leverage with their loved ones, and capitalizing on their ongoing support of the treatments that, if delivered early and consistently, will reduce the risks for tragic events.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/in-psychiatric-illness-families-must-be-our-first-responders/266628/

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In Psychiatric Illness, Families Must Be Our First Responders is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

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However, that finding was based on a relatively small number of cancers. And neither relief workers nor people who lived, worked or went to school near the towers had a higher-than-average chance of being diagnosed with all cancers combined up to seven years later.

“There’s a lot of interest in the question of, does exposure to the World Trade Center cause cancer?” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the New York City Health Commissioner.

In part, that interest has been driven by a debate on whose health care should be covered by the James L. Zadroga 9/11 Health & Compensation Act – set up to care for World Trade Center victims – and what conditions should be included.

Based on this study, Farley said the role of the attacks on cancer risk is “complicated.”

“Most of the people who have had cancer so far would have had it anyway,” Farley told Reuters Health.

But because cancer can take 20 or more years to develop, the true risks may not become clear for many years, he added.

Researchers have predicted that exposure to dust, smoke and other chemicals after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks may have put people who were nearby or involved in the clean-up efforts at risk of some diseases, including cancer.

To see how those workers and residents had fared through 2008, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene tracked 55,778 enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry. That included 21,850 people involved in the rescue and recovery efforts.

Using state cancer records, the research team, led by Jiehui Li, recorded any new diagnoses among those groups and compared their chance of cancer to data from all of New York State during the same time period.

In total, there were 1,187 new cancers among everyone in the health registry. The overall rates for both rescue workers and residents were similar to the rate of cancer diagnoses across the state.

Out of 23 types of cancer the researchers examined, three cancers were more common in rescue and recovery workers during the last two years of the study: prostate cancer, thyroid cancer and multiple myeloma – cancer of the bone marrow cells.

Aid workers were between 1.4 and 2.9 times more likely to be diagnosed with one of those cancers in 2007 or 2008 than other New Yorkers, the researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That was based on 67 prostate cancers, 13 thyroid cancers and seven myelomas among responders.

TIME WILL TELL

Dr. Jacqueline Moline from North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, New York, said studies have consistently shown a higher rate of thyroid cancer in responders – but it’s unclear why rescue workers would also be at increased risk of prostate cancer.

Farley said it could be that people who were exposed have had better health care in recent years, so they’ve been checked for prostate and thyroid cancer more often.

“It may be that these would be cancers that would never have been picked up” had workers not been screened, he said.

Moline, who has studied cancer in World Trade Center responders but wasn’t involved in the new report, also noted that seven years isn’t a very long time to track the growth of solid tumors.

“I think as times goes on we are going to see increased rates of cancer in those who were exposed, at higher rates than we would expect if they weren’t exposed,” she told Reuters Health.

Researchers should especially be on the lookout for whether certain cancers show up earlier than usual, or in unexpected populations – for example if lots of non-smokers are diagnosed with lung cancer, Moline said.

“We don’t have a really good handle on what happens when people are exposed to a complex mixture of carcinogens,” she added.

“I think we’re not going to get a full answer for many years.”

That’s a concern, Moline said, because the Zadroga Act only provides health monitoring and care for people affected by the attacks through 2016 – before some related cancers may have even been diagnosed.

Farley said the major health risks linked to the World Trade Center attacks so far have been breathing problems such as asthma and mental health problems, including post traumatic stress disorder. But he said he and his colleagues will continue to monitor cancer in relief workers and residents.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JjFzqx Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 18, 2012.

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9/11 responders may have higher risk of some cancers is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

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By Toni Jones

PUBLISHED: 08:58 EST, 26 December 2012 | UPDATED: 08:58 EST, 26 December 2012

Front row regular Louise Roe knows a thing or two about style

As well as reporting from fashion’s front line for U.S. TV channel E! and replacing Elle McPherson on the hit show Fashion Star the LA-based stylist has her own clothing line and is often singled out as being ‘best-dressed’ on the glitziest red carpets both sides of the Atlantic.

So when a professional style hunter like Louise shares her shopping tips FEMAIL takes note.

Alongside a stable of other stylist talent 31-year-old Louise works with fashion site Stylistpick.com to curate her favourite buys throughout the year.

Now Louise and co. have dished their sales shopping tips to help this most wonderful shopping time of the year go with a swing …

• Sales are a great time to try out something new and different
• Before buying picture an item with at least three outfits you already own
• Go through your wardrobe and spot any ‘gaps’ then put together a shopping list
• Avoid buying things just because they are half price, new purchases need to fit in to your life
• Look for pieces that will translate in to next season
• Think ahead to when it’s warmer and what you might need for summer

LOUISE ROE’S TOP SALES BUYS FROM STYLISTPICK.COM

Olsen boot WAS £40 NOW £25 Wear with leather look trousers and a matching mohair jumper

Belita boot WAS £35 NOW £20 Wear with a loose knit jumper tucked into leather shorts

Harlow-Taupe WAS £38 NOW £25 Wear with a pair of chic cigarette trousers and a cherry red shirt

Brooklyn bag WAS £40 NOW £20 Wear with a tweed jacket with jeans and ballet flats

Anna bag WAS £35 NOW £22 Wear with a pair of mint skinny jeans and a Peter Pan collar shirt

Perpetua bag WAS £40 NOW £25 Wear with a double denim outfit paired with patent brogues

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‘Try something new’: TV fashion guru and red carpet regular Louise Roe shares her sales tips for stress-free style is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

• Shortage follows a recall by one pharmaceutical company of 88 per cent of its typhoid vaccine stock in October
• Typhoid fever occurs mostly in developing countries in areas with poor sanitation
• Proves fatal in up to 30 per cent of cases if left untreated

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 06:54 EST, 26 December 2012 | UPDATED: 06:55 EST, 26 December 2012

Holidaymakers escaping the British winter to exotic climes may struggle to get immunised against typhoid, doctors have warned.

There is a UK shortage of the vaccine for the potentially lethal disease, following a recall by pharmaceutical company of 88 per cent of its stock.

Now travellers are finding that while the immunisation is usually provided free of charge by local GP surgeries many are running out of the vaccine.

Noone is a fan of injections. But some travellers may struggle to get the vaccine they need for typhoid fever before going abroad

Typhoid fever can be found throughout the developing world, most commonly in South Asia and South East Asia. The UK see around 350 cases a year the majority of which are contracted by those returning from a trip to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The life-threatening bacterial infection is contracted from contaminated food or water and is seen in areas with poor sanitation.

It can cause serious complications such as internal bleeding or splitting of the bowel and can prove fatal if not promptly treated with antibiotics. Typhoid fever kills around 200,000 people around the world each year.

Salmonella typhi is the bacteria that causes typhoid fever. Complications can include internal bleeding

Manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur MSD recalled 16 batches of Typhim Vi vaccine in October because tests found some samples were too weak.

It meant as many as 730,000 people vaccinated between January 2011 and October 2012 could have received only partial protection.

‘Stocks of Typhim Vi are still in short supply and this may continue into the early part of 2013,’ a Sanofi Pasteur spokesman told The Guardian.

The shortage has been compounded by a decision by manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline to concentrate on products for other childhood vaccination programmes. Its typhoid vaccine, Typherix, will not be available until Summer 2014.

Reports also suggest that travel clinics, which charge around £25 per vaccination only have stocks of the oral vaccine Vivotif. Its effectiveness is reduced if a patient is also taking antimalarials or antibiotics.

A Department of Health spokesman, told Mail Online: ‘Typhoid is rare in this country and is usually associated with travel to countries where sanitation is inadequate.

Shortage: Sanofi Pasteur had to recall 88% of its stock of Typhim Vi in October this year

Vaccine is still available and we are working with manufacturers to help ensure that current supply problems are resolved as soon as possible.’

Travellers can also help themselves by drinking only bottled water and avoiding raw vegetables and drinks with ice cubes.

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Doctors warn travellers of vaccine shortages for the potentially deadly typhoid fever is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 08:05 EST, 24 December 2012 | UPDATED: 09:55 EST, 24 December 2012

A Kentucky Fried Christmas? Orders for the Christmas Party Barrels are taken from October in Japan

As one of the culinary staples of the year, we Brits take the traditional turkey dinner for granted.

But for those living in Japan, getting hold of a turkey roast with all the trimmings is more of a challenge.

As a result, in Japan, it has become it has become customary for families to indulge in a KFC takeaway on Christmas Eve.

Over the past few years, the fast-food chicken has become such a firm festive favourite that orders for Christmas Party Barrels are taken as far in advance as the end of October.

Branches of the fast-food chain, of which there are more than 1,200 in the country, report queues around the block as families line up to grab their fix of fries and wings.

The KFC Christmas trend began following a successful advertising campaign in 1974, which coined the phrase ‘Kentucky For Christmas’, after an expat customer observed that in a land lacking Yuletide turkey, fried chicken was the next best thing.

It was a smart move – and the tills in Japan have been jingling merrily ever since.

In further proof of the nation’s fondness for the Colonel’s secret recipe, it was announced at the end of last month that Japan Airlines was to serve KFC on its flights for three months across the festive period.

Festive fare: The Air Kentucky meal will be served on board Japan Airlines and some flights to the U.S. and Europe over Christmas

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Hold the turkey: Have a very merry Kentucky Fried Christmas is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Growing up I thought I was special because on Christmas Eve every year Santa Claus would visit my grandparents house in East L.A. The evening would go something like this. I’d open the screechy white metal door to my grandparents house that protected the actual wooden door– and the delicious familiar smells of pozole and frijoles de la olla would give me a great big olfactory hug. Then my abuela and abuelo and all my aunts and uncles and cousins would individually give me a great big hug. Then I’d make a big paper plate of cookies and see how many I could eat without getting trouble. After a few hours, the phone would ring. Only one person would ever call my abuelos’ house on Christmas Eve, and that’s Santa Claus.

“Hello, SANTA!?” Whoever answered the phone would say– loud enough to get the kids to stop chasing each other or showing off any early presents they’d negotiated opening. “Where ARE you!? How DID you find time to CALL!?” My entire family has a penchant for the dramatic. The phone would then be passed around to all the children who were old enough to hold a phone. Santa would have the same conversation with all of them, “How are you? Have you been good?” “I’m flying over China!” That was Santa for you, always flying over China. However formulaic, this conversation made me feel the most special I’d felt all year. We’d chat a little more about the health of his reindeer and how I was doing in school, and then he’d always end the conversation by telling us to go to sleep and that he’d see us soon.

Then we’d all run into my Mom’s old bedroom, piling one on top of one the other on the bed, and pretend to be asleep for about 30 minutes until Santa came. As kids we never cared that this part made no logical sense. This is how it had always been and this was how it always would be.

No one ever slept. Instead, in between excited squeals and the shushing of said squeals, one of the older kids would retell the legend of how grampa saved Santa’s life. The story was different every time. Most of the time the narrative involved wars and trenches but the point of the story was to explain that because abuelo saved Santa’s life, as a token of immense gratitude, Santa came to my grandparents house in East L.A. every year on Christmas Eve. The story was full of plot holes, of course, but before any kid could ask something like, “When was grampa in a war? I thought he was a barber?” Santa’s actual arrival would interrupt the story.

When Santa arrived, he often smelled like my Grampa’s pomade. He was short, about 5’4″, just like my grampa. His white beard contrasted with his brown skin– and when you sat on his lap, his breath didn’t smell like milk or cookies, but Folger’s, my grampa’s brand of coffee. But we suspended our disbelief. Even one year when Santa’s red furry trousers fell down and my abuela shrieked, “Ramon! Your pants!” My cousin rushed to Santa’s aid, holding the back of his pants as one would a bridal train, and Santa merrily waved goodbye out the screechy white metal gate of my grandparents house. No kid suspected a thing.

The toys Santa gave were often unimpressive (one time I got batteries). But it didn’t matter because actually seeing Santa Claus was the best present any kid could get for Christmas. There was something about that fact growing up that comforted me and led me to believe my life was charmed. Going back to school after the holiday break, maybe other kids got the Power Wheels Barbie Jammin’ Jeep I wanted but never got, maybe they got to fly somewhere far away that had snow like Nevada, maybe they got to see Santa at the mall, but no one got to see Santa in their house. Except me. I’d even talked to the real Santa while he flew over China. So by the associative property, I kinda flew over China, too. I always thought I had better Christmases than any of my friends. Until last year.

Two Novembers ago my grampa, now 84, had to have heart surgery. I got so scared that I didn’t visit him in the hospital. When I was little, I thought my grampa was beyond magical — after all, he saved Santa’s life. But when I got a got a picture text from my Mom of a half-conscious old man, thinner than I remember, with tubes coming out of him every which way, I panicked. I didn’t want it to be real. Couldn’t Santa return the favor now? Didn’t he remember the trenches?

It’s funny. Sometimes crisis can turn us back into children.

The surgery was fortunately a success. And I later apologized to my abuelo for not being there for him. He forgave me, saying, “Don’t worry hita, I’m still around, causing trouble.” I cried. It was at my Mom’s birthday dinner. The waitress asked, “How’s the steak?” I couldn’t taste it.

My mother and maternal grandparents in East L.A. in the 1950s. My grandfather is on the far left.

Santa didn’t come last year. There was no phone call, no cramming into my Mom’s old bedroom. No story of how Santa saved my abuelo’s life. Instead my grama passed out bars of chocolate shaped like Santa, his cartoon image printed on foil covering the hollow chocolate. I MAY have been disproportionately upset about the whole thing. “How could this happen?” I asked my grama. “Santa can’t not come!” But the answer of course was obvious. People get older; people get tired. People have heart surgery. People pass on their traditions, and traditions make us feel like were special. Now it’s more up to me than it is to them to keep those traditions alive. Only for a variety of reasons, I’ll never be able to be my 5’4″ Santa with the Folger’s breath.

I’ll be in Pittsburgh with my boyfriend’s family this Christmas Eve, trying to balance tradition with change. I’m trying to figure out if I should go through the trouble of making tamales, if frijoles de la olla and pozole would have crossover appeal to Pittsburg German-Italians. I’m trying to figure out where to put my Santa. Until I can figure out how to bring him around again for Christmas Eve, I will have a story, because stories are as much part of tradition as anything else. It begins, “My grandfather’s not just a barber, he’s also a a great Christmas hero.”

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/my-grampa-saved-santas-life/266516/

Carey Lowell other facts

My Grampa Saved Santa’s Life is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

That builds on previous research that found no short-term survival differences in adult victims given compression-only CPR instead of the standard kind, which includes mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

And it supports an American Heart Association recommendation that the simpler form of CPR is appropriate for bystanders, who may feel so intimidated by the prospect of combining chest compressions with rescue breathing that they give no aid at all.

This study shows “we were on the right track in 2008,” said Dr. Roger White of the Mayo Clinic, who was on the advisory group that wrote the AHA’s statement.

The recommendations don’t apply to CPR performed in the hospital, nor in the community by medical personnel or people who are proficient in rescue breathing. They also apply only to adult, not pediatric, victims.

Some 383,000 people in the U.S. suffer cardiac arrests every year, and only about 10 percent survive.

The study looked at data from two randomized trials that were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 and covered more than 3,200 adults whose cardiac arrests were likely due to heart problems rather than trauma, suffocating or drowning. Dispatchers instructed bystanders via phone to use either the standard or compression-only form of CPR.

The new study’s authors, who were from Seattle, France and Sweden, were able to follow up on longer-term outcomes for 78 percent of those participants.

The one-year survival rate was about 12 percent for chest compression alone and about 10 percent for compression plus breathing, said Dr. Florence Dumas, an author of the study, in an email to Reuters Health. After adjusting for different factors, mortality in the compression-only group was 9 percent lower than in the standard CPR group. The survival benefit persisted over five years, according to findings published in the journal Circulation.

That suggests “that potential short-term outcome differences do translate to meaningful long-term public health benefits,” said Dumas.

ALLAYING CONCERNS

In 2008 the AHA said compression-only CPR was an option for bystanders who aren’t trained or who aren’t confident in their ability to perform the compressions combined with rescue breathing.

Some people have worried that collapsed victims of non-cardiac events such as drug overdoses or a blood clot in the lungs might not get the oxygen they need with the compression-only approach, he said.

But the study authors wrote that, “importantly, we did not observe evidence of harm among those for whom oxygenation and ventilation might in theory be more important” such as non-cardiac causes or an unwitnessed cardiac arrest.

There is likely some oxygen remaining in the blood when a victim’s heart has stopped for a short period of time, and the compression-only technique can distribute it to vital organs. If a person has been down for a longer or unknown period of time, it’s more likely that they’ll need fresh oxygen through rescue breathing, said White, an anesthesiologist and cardiac care specialist who was not involved in the new study.

That’s why the AHA’s recommendations apply when bystanders actually witness an adult suffering cardiac arrest with no obvious non-cardiac cause such as drowning. (Kids suffering cardiac arrest need rescue breathing.)

“The vast majority (of events) are likely to be cardiac in origin,” said White. “So proceeding with chest compression is likely to be beneficial in the vast majority of cases,” he said.

One limitation of the study was that it tracked survival only; it couldn’t assess patients’ level of function or quality of life. In addition, the original trials the study drew from weren’t designed to track long-term outcomes.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/UdlXKb Circulation, online Dec. 10, 2012.

Jessica Stroup Sherilyn Fenn

Chest compression-only CPR shows long-term benefit is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/how-much-should-a-dogs-ability-to-drive-a-car-affect-your-level-headed-assessment-of-readiness-to-own-a-dog/266485/

Last week this campaign in New Zealand showed how some dogs have been trained to drive cars, in order to promote animal welfare agency SPCA Auckland. The dog in the video above is called Porter. He is a previously abandoned Beardie mix, he drives a MINI Countryman, and he is, objectively speaking, the greatest thing.

In an interview with ESPN, one of Porter’s trainers, Mark Vette, said, “When I realized they wanted to teach the dogs for real, I was shocked and slightly apprehensive, but to satisfy my own curiosity we had to give it a go.”

I think that didn’t come out right. Either way, the training worked, and the response has been great. “It has gone way beyond what we hoped for,” Vette said. “From what I have heard, animal shelters around the world have seen a huge increase in adoption inquires.”

Meanwhile, Clive Wynn at the New Scientist is unmoved, a perpetual rain cloud hovering over him:

The Auckland SPCA, and a lot of the media coverage of their training, emphasise the intelligence that their three dog drivers have demonstrated. … I think it is important to distinguish between dogs that have been trained to do something remarkable, and the much thornier question of canine intelligence. … Following commands moment by moment is only a small part of what we usually mean by intelligence. “Intelligence” involves thinking for oneself, reasoning, and most of all, finding solutions without continuous direction. … Ask any dog owner whose best friend has become tangled with the leash on the wrong side of a lamppost: Dogs do not make a good job of figuring out how to untangle themselves. Without a scent cue, they are rotten at finding hidden objects. … In general dogs are poor at solving puzzles.

Aw, don’t listen to the man, Porter. You are the smartest dog! Yes you ARE! 

Let’s take a cue from dogs on this one and not over-think it. It’s more about dogs’ amenability to training than it is about their capacity to reason. No one wants dogs to be too intelligent, anyway. As soon as they start reasoning, they will question their unwavering allegiance to us, deeply flawed as we are, and we’ll lose the best thing about them. 

Highlighting an awesome thing about dogs is a welcome change from guilt-based campaigns about how they’ll be killed if no one adopts them. Dog ownership is best approached out of excitement, not obligation. So, get excited:

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/how-much-should-a-dogs-ability-to-drive-a-car-affect-your-level-headed-assessment-of-readiness-to-own-a-dog/266485/

Lisa Snowdon see more

How Much Should a Dog’s Ability to Drive a Car Affect Your Level-Headed Assessment of Readiness to Own a Dog? is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

No fiscal policy event is complete without the plaintive cry that health care costs are out of control. The phrase has become a form of rhetorical boilerplate that is often used to imply that policy makers are helpless in the face of market forces, and that the only way to reduce “costs” is either cutting benefits or rationing.

Let’s take a look at what the phrase “health care costs” really means. It turns out, everybody uses the term to mean something different. Politicians talk about costs in reference to federal and state spending on health care. When hospital administrators and physicians talk about health care costs, they are usually referring to their costs of production, the money they spend on the resources needed to care for patients. Business leaders use the term health care costs when what they really mean is the price of insurance, or the amount they spend on their employees’ health care insurance plans. Meanwhile, everybody bemoans out of pocket costs, the amount patients must fork over at the doctor’s office and pharmacy counter over and above whatever portion of the bill their insurance covers.

And cost is just one more of the terms that means something different depending upon who happens to be using it. This creates confusion even among experts, to say nothing of the public, and it is getting in the way of a frank discussion about how the nation can address the central challenge: that we are spending more and more on health care without seeing equivalent improvements in health.

In the interests of clear communication, we propose three distinct definitions for three words: cost, price, and spending. We’ll start with cost. The simplest and most sensible use of “health care costs” is in reference to the cost of production of health care services. In order to give a patient a CT scan, a hospital has to have purchased a scanner. It must also pay a technologist to perform the scan and a radiologist to read it — to say nothing of paying for the hospital building itself, chairs in the waiting room, a receptionist at the information desk, and the parking lot outside, all of which are components of the cost of a scan.

Price is how much the hospital pays for the scanner, or how much an insurer pays the hospital for the patient to get the scan. In the U.S., prices for everything from a CT scan to an office visit to a stay in the ICU are higher than anywhere else in the world. Even within the U.S. and within the same community, different hospitals can charge wildly different prices for the same service.

To make matters worse, prices for medical goods and services have little to do with their true value in terms of improving health. To take just one of any number of examples, elective angioplasty (surgery to reopen narrowed blood vessels in the heart) doesn’t prevent heart attacks or reduce angina (chest pain) any better than drug treatment alone, and you already need to be on drug treatment in order to get the surgery. Yet the price of angioplasty is tens of thousands of dollars higher than drug therapy. If we were paying for value in healthcare, two equally good options would fetch about the same price.

The last term is spending, probably the most important of the three. The easiest way to define it is the total number of dollars paid for a particular group of people over a set period of time. The most common example is total national health care spending over a year, which last year amounted to $2.7 trillion. You can also talk about spending on a particular type of service, say all CT scans delivered over the course of a year. In that case, the amount we spend depends upon both the price we pay for a scan, and the number of scans we get, or price times quantity.

Here’s why these distinctions matter. The reason we should be worried about our rising national health care bill is that health care spending is going up faster than the rest of the economy. At current rates, the Congressional Budget Office estimates we’ll be devoting the pretty much the entire federal budget and about 50 percent of GDP to health care by 2080. When you think about the federal debt, think health care.

Of course, part of the reason health care spending is going up so fast is prices for everything from health care labor to drugs to CT scanners are skyrocketing. But the more worrisome reason for rising spending is the quantity of high technology specialty services we undergo. We get more high tech imaging studies, more days in the ICU, more robotic surgeries than we did 40 years ago, or even 14 years ago. Sometimes that high-tech medicine leads to better outcomes, but a lot of the time it does not — it just means we spend more.

Given this increasing use of high-tech services, it should be easy to see why the “rising healthcare costs” frame is misleading: if we’re using more and more services each year, it’s hardly reasonable to blame rising costs of production. It wouldn’t make sense for a family to buy a fleet of luxury cars and then say that they can’t afford to pay for their children’s education because the cost of gasoline and oil changes has gone up.

There may be benefits to owning a fleet of cars. You have your choice every morning of which one to take to work. You can tinker with them on weekends. But unlike owning several cars, there are significant downsides to more and more technological health care, a vast amount of which is simply waste. As much as 30 percent of our health care spending goes towards things that don’t make patients healthier, and in fact can harm them. To take just one recent example, a new analysis suggests that most of the recent increase in breast cancer diagnoses are leading women to be diagnosed with and treated for cancers that would never have caused them harm. We also waste money on new, expensive drugs that don’t work any better than older, cheaper medications, and on spectacularly pricey procedures, like proton beam therapy for prostate cancer, that have no demonstrated benefits over lower-tech alternatives.

The real problem, then, isn’t merely that we’re spending a larger and larger percentage of our income on healthcare — it’s that we are spending indiscriminately. Yet when healthcare spending rhetorically becomes healthcare costs, it implies that overconsumption of useless, overpriced services is not part of the problem.

For now, our plea is simple: politicians, speechwriters, researchers, and others, be clear in your language. It’s fine to talk about the cost of production in health care, particularly since most hospitals are shockingly inefficient. And it’s fine to talk about prices, especially since there is such a disconnect between the price of many health care products and their value in terms of health. But the most important thing we need to worry about now in terms of the country’s long-term fiscal and economic health is rising health care spending.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/what-health-care-costs-really-means/266522/

Nathalie Oberman Diamond

What ‘Health Care Costs’ Really Means is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Heidi Klum Denise Van Outen

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/how-much-should-a-dogs-ability-to-drive-a-car-affect-your-level-headed-assessment-of-readiness-to-own-a-dog/266485/

Last week this campaign in New Zealand showed how some dogs have been trained to drive cars, in order to promote animal welfare agency SPCA Auckland. The dog in the video above is called Porter. He is a previously abandoned Beardie mix, he drives a MINI Countryman, and he is, objectively speaking, the greatest thing.

In an interview with ESPN, one of Porter’s trainers, Mark Vette, said, “When I realized they wanted to teach the dogs for real, I was shocked and slightly apprehensive, but to satisfy my own curiosity we had to give it a go.”

I think that didn’t come out right. Either way, the training worked, and the response has been great. “It has gone way beyond what we hoped for,” Vette said. “From what I have heard, animal shelters around the world have seen a huge increase in adoption inquires.”

Meanwhile, Clive Wynn at the New Scientist is unmoved, a perpetual rain cloud hovering over him:

The Auckland SPCA, and a lot of the media coverage of their training, emphasise the intelligence that their three dog drivers have demonstrated. … I think it is important to distinguish between dogs that have been trained to do something remarkable, and the much thornier question of canine intelligence. … Following commands moment by moment is only a small part of what we usually mean by intelligence. “Intelligence” involves thinking for oneself, reasoning, and most of all, finding solutions without continuous direction. … Ask any dog owner whose best friend has become tangled with the leash on the wrong side of a lamppost: Dogs do not make a good job of figuring out how to untangle themselves. Without a scent cue, they are rotten at finding hidden objects. … In general dogs are poor at solving puzzles.

Aw, don’t listen to the man, Porter. You are the smartest dog! Yes you ARE! 

Let’s take a cue from dogs on this one and not over-think it. It’s more about dogs’ amenability to training than it is about their capacity to reason. No one wants dogs to be too intelligent, anyway. As soon as they start reasoning, they will question their unwavering allegiance to us, deeply flawed as we are, and we’ll lose the best thing about them. 

Highlighting an awesome thing about dogs is a welcome change from guilt-based campaigns about how they’ll be killed if no one adopts them. Dog ownership is best approached out of excitement, not obligation. So, get excited:

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/how-much-should-a-dogs-ability-to-drive-a-car-affect-your-level-headed-assessment-of-readiness-to-own-a-dog/266485/

Melissa Gilbert Tonya Harding

How Much Should a Dog’s Ability to Drive a Car Affect Your Level-Headed Assessment of Readiness to Own a Dog? is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Annalise Braakensiek Venus Williams

Senators like Kerry for State Department is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Sam Lewis turned 65 just in time. For a year, he’d been broke. His Brentwood, California, general contracting business had gone bankrupt. He couldn’t make payments on his home, and lost it. He couldn’t make payments on his health insurance, so he let it lapse.

The day after his birthday in October, when he qualified for Medicare, Lewis got a checkup. Days later, he had open-heart surgery, a triple-bypass — three arteries blocked with plaque, one of them, 99 percent. “If I’d had to wait until 67 for Medicare,” Lewis said, “I’d be dead.”

A proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 to ratchet down spending is one of the more explosive ideas in the fiscal talks between House Speaker John Boehner and the White House. The negotiations are aimed at a deficit deal to avert automatic tax increases and spending cuts slated to take effect January 1. Liberal Democrats say they loathe the Medicare proposal, but the White House has not taken a public position on it.

President Barack Obama was open to a similar proposal last year during his failed effort to reach a “grand bargain” with Republicans. And many expect it to pop up again in next year’s discussions about curbing entitlement costs if it is not included in this year’s deal.

Whatever the politics, those approaching retirement are responding with anger and fear, while employers see themselves stuck holding the bag on long-ago social commitments made by the federal government.

“All they’re doing is shoving the cost onto the backs of business,” said Don Marks, president of Uesco Industries in Alsip, Illinois, a family-owned company that assembles overhead cranes and hoists used in manufacturing plants.

Uesco employs 45 people and pays some medical expenses of retirees that are not picked up by Medicare. With no set retirement age, the company would pay health insurance costs for older, likely sicker workers who might no longer retire at 65 because they would not be eligible for Medicare.

In his business, Marks sees little good coming from that. “We are a heavy metal manufacturer,” he said. “It’s big and heavy pieces of steel that we move around, that we grind, that we weld, that we cut with torches. It’s heavy labor. The older (the workers) get, the more it costs for health insurance. And we have an aging workforce.”

Kevin Kelly, CEO at Emerald Packaging in Union City, Calif., is also unhappy about the proposal. “I don’t think the government or legislators are thinking about the impact this will have on business,” he said.

Emerald employs 225 workers to manufacture plastic bags for produce sold at grocery stores — five of them between the ages of 63 and 65.

Kelly figures it would cost him an extra $120,000 annually to pay for health insurance for those five workers for another two years. “It comes right out of profit,” he said. “It’s not like I can raise prices because the government decided not to cover people between 65 and 67. If I try to pass the cost to the retailers, it just gives them one more reason to look to China.”

Proponents of the idea such as Gail Wilensky, who oversaw Medicare and Medicaid for the first President George Bush, say people are living longer than when the program was enacted in 1965 and it’s important to raise the eligibility age gradually to change younger Americans’ perceptions about what they can expect from entitlement programs.

“If I’d had to wait until 67 for Medicare, I’d be dead,” Lewis, 65, said. [Alison Yin/KHN]

“What we need is to try to find ways to try to encourage people to participate in the labor force longer, and not only for our sake but for their sake as well,” Wilensky said at a forum this week, noting the number of beneficiaries is expected to double over the next two decades as Baby Boomers retire.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the potential net savings to the federal government from gradually raising the eligibility age to 67 beginning in 2014 at approximately $113 billion over 10 years, as older workers remain in the work force longer, and pay Medicare taxes while giving up benefits for two more years.

But cost shifting to workers and employers would increase out-of-pocket costs for 65- and 66-year-olds by $3.7 billion a year and boost employers’ health care costs by $4.5 billion, according to a 2011 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation).

The potential human toll is harder to figure. Like Sam Lewis says, many in their early sixties who lack insurance are “crossing fingers, walking on tiptoes, and making sure not to break any eggs,” until they turn 65. Some may not be as lucky as him.

The left-leaning Center for American Progress projects that raising the Medicare age could put up to 435,000 older people at risk of having no insurance at all, even with the protections afforded by the health care law – although the CBO’s estimate is far lower.

The health law changes the equation after 2014 since insurers will no longer be able to refuse applicants because of pre-existing health conditions, or charge older people more than three times what they charge young people.

In addition, the state and federal health insurance marketplaces planned for 2014 will offer subsidies to help those with low-incomes buy health insurance, and states that expand Medicaid will cover single adults.

But will it be enough to tide people over until they qualify for Medicare — especially since some governors say they won’t expand Medicaid and the effect of the exchanges on insurance affordability remains untested?

Realtor Mary Nishiyama, 57, a friend of Lewis, is not confident. “There is going to be a big wave of us,” she warned. “Don’t they know our parts aren’t working as well as they used to?”

Nishiyama pays $800 a month for coverage which she buys at group rates through her former employer, Chevron, and has recently started saving in case she has to wait another two years before qualifying for Medicare benefits. “If you don’t have money to put away, how are you going to pay for your health care?”

Even some who consider themselves physically and financially healthy say they’re furious about upending a social contract they’ve spent a lifetime paying into – and expecting to be there for them.

“They’d be pulling the rug out from under us,” said Chuck Hinkle, 56, a gas pipeline electrician in Illinois, who points out he’s been paying into Medicare his whole working life.

The fact that increasing health costs are threatening to consume the federal budget, especially as people live longer and millions of Baby Boomers retire, is an abstraction. “I’m still planning to retire at 65,” Hinkle said. “I’m hoping to be in a financial position where I can just cough up the money for those two years.”

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/for-medicare-67-could-be-the-new-65/266483/

Betty White George Lucas

For Medicare, 67 Could Be the New 65 is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Zooey Deschanel Sara Cox

Don’t Miss Ulta’s Biggest Cyber Monday Ever! is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

If you haven’t tried DL1961 jeans, try it!  Great stretch without loosing its shape and very flattering!

Josie Bissett Holly Combs

I Love My DL1961 Emma Legging Jeans is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Over the last two years, the field of psychology has endured a wave of scandal bookended by fraud cases involving Harvard primatologist Marc Hauser and Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. Even researchers desensitized by scandal-fatigue did a double take when the final report on Stapel’s case came out last month. The extent of his creative misinterpretation of the facts make the Hauser case look like child’s play. Stapel not only manipulated and fabricated data, he invented entire schools where said data was allegedly collected.

As if the fraud files weren’t enough, then come the mea culpas — salt in the wounds for students and colleagues still recovering from shattered reputations and a shaken faith in science. The two men released two very different statements telling very similar stories of reckless, ruthless ambition and playing the odds against getting caught. Stapel’s “narcissistic wail” was so emotional and contrite as to seem a bit unhinged, while Hauser’s read as a cold, calculating non-admission of guilt.

Hauser deftly concedes chagrin for errors made within his lab “whether responsible for them or not,” implying that the same students bullied into committing academic fraud were somehow responsible for the car veering off the cliff. Stapel faults a noxious combination of publication pressures, addictive tendencies, and assorted personality issues for his downfall. And while publication pressure was among those issues, he caps off his mea culpa with a plug for his new book — Derailment, a collection of his therapeutic diaries.

The Slippery Slope

It’s easy to revel in the high drama surrounding the downfall of a Hauser or Stapel, but what about the journals that published these scholars? Stapel was a widely cited and highly revered figure. His fraud went undetected for decades in spite of eerily perfect data sets and improbable statistical values. According to Tilburg University’s final report, Flawed Science, “There was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological requirements from top to bottom.”

Scientists fought back, noting that it is rare for reviewers in any field to detect fraud and demanding an apology for the ‘slanderous conclusions’ drawn in the report. Social psychologist Kate Ratliff, teaching at Tilburg when the scandal broke noted, ” It’s a small community and people considered Diederik a friend and mentor…No one understands why these young researchers didn’t realize that it was weird that Diederik was giving them datasets. But you learn from watching others. And if there are no others, how would you know what’s weird or not? I think that people started out being really sympathetic toward them and have gotten more and more punitive as time passes and hindsight bias kicks in. I think that’s really, really unfair.”

They managed to find statistically significant evidence for the absurd hypothesis that listening to a Beatles song could make you 1.5 years younger

Almost more alarming than the few individuals committing academic fraud are the high percentage of researchers who admitted to more common questionable research practices, like post-hoc theorizing and data-fishing (sometimes referred to as p-hacking), in a recent study led by Leslie John.

For the uninitiated: post-hoc theorizing involves creating or revising a hypothesis after you’ve collected the data; data-fishing entails running a study, continually checking the data after each participant, and stopping as soon as you see a significant result. These practices are eschewed by some, but plenty of others embrace them. Joseph Simmons and colleagues ran a simulation showing how unacceptably easy it was to attain statistical significance using these ‘degrees of researcher freedom.’ By employing four of these questionable practices at once, they managed to find statistically significant evidence for the absurd hypothesis that listening to a Beatles song could make you 1.5 years younger.

“Clearer identification of the problems associated with some research practices is incredibly helpful,” writes Linda Skitka, who sits on numerous journal editorial boards. “Because I’m guessing at least some scholars who engaged in questionable practices did not recognize the full implications of doing so. Given the intense attention these issues are now getting in the field, they certainly know better now.”

So are the social sciences more prone to misconduct and fraud than biomedicine and other fields? A recent study titled ” Scientific Misconduct and the Myth of Self-Correction in Science” found no such evidence. Even Stapel’s wildly narcissistic mea culpa can’t make you forget Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist with a record-breaking 172 retractions.

Biomedicine shares some of the more nebulous concerns regarding data transparency, collection and dissemination as well. Citing the current drama surrounding Tamiflu , Nick Genes notes, “This is a hot topic [in medicine] right now … There’s a movement to bypass what’s published and dive into the original data that’s kept by drug companies and/or given to regulatory agencies like the FDA.” Much as with the social sciences, the raw data from clinical trials is not made publicly available, and many fear that the temptation to tell a self-serving story with the data in journal articles (for individuals or pharmaceutical companies) will be too great.

The Old Guard and the New

Though a wave of ignominy is cresting at the moment, these problems are not new. Back in the “golden era” of the NIH during the fifties and sixties, David Guston writes, if fraud occurred, the director would make a few phone calls, look into the alleged misconduct, and the offending scientist would be “quickly and quietly removed from the map of science.” At that time, “the social contract for science was highly informal and contained entirely within the community.”

It’s safe to say this gentleman’s agreement handling of scientific integrity had some issues. Philip Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, insisted that the charges of misconduct sparking the first hearings on scientific integrity in 1981 were overblown, defensively declaring complete confidence in a “system that operated in an effective, democratic, and self-correcting mode.” Today the cast of characters is different, but the claims and tensions are the same.

Then as now, underlings and younger scientists were often at the forefront of reform, trying to convince their elders to take the problem more seriously. The old guard tends to claim that critiques are overblown, that outside reforms and practices will hinder or hurt science, and that science is a self-correcting process. The new guard tends to embrace transparency and openness, seeing reform as the best way to salvage damaged reputations and keep the field from falling into disrepute. Incidentally, most of the recent fraud cases were unearthed by whistle-blowers (usually graduate and undergraduate students) working within the lab or… Uri Simonsohn. But none were revealed by the “self-correcting process of science.”

Brian Nosek has emerged as one of the key reform figures with his work on the Open Science Framework and the Reproducibility Project. His professional commitment to ferreting out injustice and implicit bias (and a lifelong obsession with Star Wars) would seem to undergird a life-long fixation with good and evil. He’s the kind of man you can see investing considerable amounts of time and energy trying to save science from its own dark side.

Even before Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman issued an open letter telling researchers to embrace reform and set up a replication protocols, Nosek was hard at work on his Open Science Initiative. In one of his “Scientific Utopia” articles, he imagines a world where researchers will pre-register their hypotheses, openly share and archive raw data in one central location, and check one another’s work through replication. While fraud has captured the lion’s share of attention as of late, the more mundane matters of keeping track of research done by migrating students and post docs, tracking patient records, and modernizing the archival infrastructure for the digital age is one of the essential undertakings in 21st-century science.

The blowback to Nosek’s effort has mostly centered around the reproducibility project. “People are mostly afraid that the replications won’t pan out, and that could look bad for the field; but no one is opposed to the Open Science Framework,” Nosek says. “I don’t know how any scientist in good conscience could be opposed to transparency.”

The Problem of Frogishness

Social psychology is perhaps best known for examining the implicit roots of human error and bias; so there’s a sad but all-too-human irony in the wave of suspicion emerging around scandals based on human error and bias. But with vulnerability also comes strength. “Social psychology already has the tools at its disposal to confront these issues and lead the pack when it comes to reform,” Nosek enthuses. But even if every study was conducted in a digital-age utopian orgy of scientific openness and transparency, some would doubt the accuracy of the field’s claims, likening it to pseudoscience — a faddish line of inquiry walking a fine line between frontier and fringe.

The social sciences don’t have the luxury of physical object variables like frogs; the components of studies are often more abstract concepts like morality or intelligence. “There’s no such thing as ‘frogishness,’” sighs Nosek, addressing the issue. “Well,” he recants, ever the scientist, “I suppose you could have differing degrees of frogishness; but basically, everyone agrees on what a frog is.”

People have different concepts of what intelligence is. “There are more and less useful ways of trying to define these things,” says Nosek. But basically, the intellectual subjectivity inherent in the social sciences leaves more room for self-serving interpretation of the data than with hard variables. “When you’re operating on the frontiers of what is known, you’re going to make mistakes,” Nosek explains. “Knowledge acquisition is messy…but science doesn’t become pseudoscience unless people stop questioning themselves, stop seeing the need for criticism and correction.”

Science 2.0

While it’s too early to tell where the chips will fall, signs of consensus between the old guard and the new are on the horizon. Even researchers who think the scandal blowback is overblown are fairly well convinced that the issue isn’t going away on its own. As Barbara Spellman, the editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science writes, “The tumbrels have rolled, the guillotines have dropped, and I’m hoping that the publication of the Stapel report represents the end of Revolution 1.0.”

If Revolution 1.0 was about head-rolling, Spellman (like the vast majority of “law-abiding” scientists) hopes that Revolution 2.0 will be the quieter work of enacting reforms while getting back to science 2.0 — a science with greater emphasis on replication and transparency. Maybe these scandals can result in a little scientific utopia to ring in the New Year.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-myth-of-self-correcting-science/266228/

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(Reuters) – Struggling to describe her son, Suzanne Kolen of Long Island, New York, uses a friend’s recent description: He’s the 13-year-old boy bouncing down the road in the rain looking very much like Winnie the Pooh’s friend, Tigger.

“He’s a genuinely happy kid,” Kolen says of her son, a bright boy who loves nature and paleontology and has never been defined by his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism marked by social awkwardness and narrow interests that make personal relationships challenging.

Matthew’s diagnosis will soon be dropped in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic reference book, to be subsumed into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder.

Although autism can range from highly functioning individuals like Matthew to those with severe speech and intellectual disabilities, in general individuals struggle with difficulties in communication, behavior and social interaction.

Dropping the Asperger’s diagnosis in the new DSM, due out this spring, has caused consternation for some families.

“One of the biggest concerns is that some who are higher functioning will no longer meet the more stringent criteria and will therefore have difficulty getting services,” says Dr. Elizabeth Laugeson, an autism researcher at the University of California Los Angeles.

An analysis by Dr. Fred Volkmar of the Yale School of Medicine released earlier this year suggested as many as 45 percent of those currently diagnosed with autism or a related disorder would no longer qualify under the new definition.

Laugeson said Volkmar’s analysis was based on a review of older medical records that might not have captured all of the symptoms that would qualify a person for an autism diagnosis under the new standard.

The jury is still out in terms of how the change will play out in routine practice, she said: “We really need to see it in action.”

To ease fears that some individuals will no longer be eligible for services and insurance coverage, the APA task force recommends that people already diagnosed with an autism-related disorder, such as Asperger’s, would be grandfathered in.

Kolen, who has never been caught up in labels, says she is not concerned about the change.

Although Matthew was officially diagnosed with Asperger’s in second grade, his preschool teachers were the first to point out his differences. By age 4, he began applied behavior analysis or ABA therapy, a specialized type of therapy used to treat autism.

“That really put us on a good path,” Kolen says, adding that at that age, “no one was willing to put a label on him, but they would treat what they saw.”

In addition to Asperger’s, Matthew is now being treated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD and has recently developed some issues with anxiety – conditions that commonly accompany autism spectrum disorders.

Like many on the autism spectrum, Matthew finds it difficult to make eye contact. “I can’t stare into someone’s eyes,” he says. “It just hurts.”

On Wednesdays, Matthew attends a social group with other young people on the autism spectrum, where they work on improving their social skills.

While they all have the same or similar difficulties, they can recognize social awkwardness in others.

Kolen says her son still struggles with the give and take of conversation. “It’s very difficult for him to allow the other person to speak. He’s still tends to dominate.”

But Matthew is bright, and she believes with enough practice, he will learn how to respond appropriately to social cues, even if he’s “a little rough around the edges.”

“My goal is to make sure that in the end, he has a place to work, earning a living and supporting himself in what he loves to do,” says Kolen.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Todd Eastham)

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(Reuters) – The European Medicines Agency said it has launched a review of Merck & Co Inc’s cholesterol drug Tredaptive after the medicine failed a U.S. trial assessing its effectiveness and safety.

Although the commercial fallout from any decision to pull the drug from the market in Europe would be limited, it would be a blow to Merck’s reputation.

Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson estimates that Tredaptive sales in Europe and other non-U.S. markets are running at only around $50 million a year, compared to Merck’s overall revenue of $47 billion.

The drug is designed to raise “good” HDL cholesterol but the 25,000 patient study found it didn’t do better at preventing heart attacks, deaths or strokes than traditional statin drugs that lower “bad” LDL cholesterol.

The large-scale trial also found that patients taking the drug suffered more non-fatal but serious side effects than those only taking statins.

The medicine was approved for use in Europe in 2008, but U.S. regulators were unwilling to approve it until Merck conducted the costly long-term study to better assess its safety and effectiveness.

Merck said on Thursday that it no longer planned to seek regulatory approval for the drug in the United States and recommended that doctors did not start new patients on Tredaptive in countries where it is already available.

The regulator backed that advice on Friday, but added that patients currently using the drug should speak a doctor at their next appointment but not stop their treatment.

Tredaptive is sold under the brand name Pelzont in Italy and Trevaclyn in both Italy and Portugal. A decision on the future of the drug in Europe is expected in January.

(Reporting by Chris Wickham; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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(Reuters Health) – People who suffer cardiac arrest – in which the heart stops beating – were less likely to die in subsequent years when bystanders performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation using chest compressions only, a new study found.

That builds on previous research that found no short-term survival differences in adult victims given compression-only CPR instead of the standard kind, which includes mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

And it supports an American Heart Association recommendation that the simpler form of CPR is appropriate for bystanders, who may feel so intimidated by the prospect of combining chest compressions with rescue breathing that they give no aid at all.

This study shows “we were on the right track in 2008,” said Dr. Roger White of the Mayo Clinic, who was on the advisory group that wrote the AHA’s statement.

The recommendations don’t apply to CPR performed in the hospital, nor in the community by medical personnel or people who are proficient in rescue breathing. They also apply only to adult, not pediatric, victims.

Some 383,000 people in the U.S. suffer cardiac arrests every year, and only about 10 percent survive.

The study looked at data from two randomized trials that were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 and covered more than 3,200 adults whose cardiac arrests were likely due to heart problems rather than trauma, suffocating or drowning. Dispatchers instructed bystanders via phone to use either the standard or compression-only form of CPR.

The new study’s authors, who were from Seattle, France and Sweden, were able to follow up on longer-term outcomes for 78 percent of those participants.

The one-year survival rate was about 12 percent for chest compression alone and about 10 percent for compression plus breathing, said Dr. Florence Dumas, an author of the study, in an email to Reuters Health. After adjusting for different factors, mortality in the compression-only group was 9 percent lower than in the standard CPR group. The survival benefit persisted over five years, according to findings published in the journal Circulation.

That suggests “that potential short-term outcome differences do translate to meaningful long-term public health benefits,” said Dumas.

ALLAYING CONCERNS

In 2008 the AHA said compression-only CPR was an option for bystanders who aren’t trained or who aren’t confident in their ability to perform the compressions combined with rescue breathing.

Some people have worried that collapsed victims of non-cardiac events such as drug overdoses or a blood clot in the lungs might not get the oxygen they need with the compression-only approach, he said.

But the study authors wrote that, “importantly, we did not observe evidence of harm among those for whom oxygenation and ventilation might in theory be more important” such as non-cardiac causes or an unwitnessed cardiac arrest.

There is likely some oxygen remaining in the blood when a victim’s heart has stopped for a short period of time, and the compression-only technique can distribute it to vital organs. If a person has been down for a longer or unknown period of time, it’s more likely that they’ll need fresh oxygen through rescue breathing, said White, an anesthesiologist and cardiac care specialist who was not involved in the new study.

That’s why the AHA’s recommendations apply when bystanders actually witness an adult suffering cardiac arrest with no obvious non-cardiac cause such as drowning. (Kids suffering cardiac arrest need rescue breathing.)

“The vast majority (of events) are likely to be cardiac in origin,” said White. “So proceeding with chest compression is likely to be beneficial in the vast majority of cases,” he said.

One limitation of the study was that it tracked survival only; it couldn’t assess patients’ level of function or quality of life. In addition, the original trials the study drew from weren’t designed to track long-term outcomes.

SOURCE: Circulation, online December 10, 2012.

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By Ruth Styles

PUBLISHED: 14:11 EST, 20 December 2012 | UPDATED: 18:03 EST, 20 December 2012

 After a busy year and an even busier run up to the festive season, you could be forgiven for wanting to spend the festive season curled up in your pajamas.

And it would seem that designer and former Spice Girl, Victoria Beckham, is no exception.

Instead of diamonds, sports cars or luxe designer handbags, she’ll be unwrapping a pair of pajamas from husband, David this Christmas.

Not that the famously fashionable Victoria will be getting run-of-the-mill pajamas from Next or an Asda onesie.

Instead, she’s set to receive two pairs of luxe silk pajamas by British designer, Olivia von Halle.

According to fashion industry bible, Women’s Wear Daily, husband David put in a call to Harrods last week, in which he requested two sets of the luxury nightwear.

The Newcastle-born von Halle was working in China as a trend forecaster when fashionable inspiration first struck, courtesy of the mannish silk trousers sported by the likes of Coco Chanel in the 1920′s.

Luxury: Olivia von Halle’s gorgeous silk pajamas don’t come cheap at £260

Von Halle wanted to create something luxe but glamorous that she and her friends could lounge about in at home and her luxury pajama line was the result.

She returned to London in 2010 carrying a bulging order book and launched her line, which is now stocked retailers including Harrods and Fenwick in the U.K., and at Brown Thomas in Ireland.

Prices for Von Halle silk pajamas start at £260 – small change if your name is David Beckham.

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(Reuters) – A major trial of Merck & Co Inc’s Tredaptive medicine to increase “good” HDL cholesterol has raised safety concerns and showed it was no better at preventing heart attacks, deaths or strokes than traditional statin drugs that lower “bad” LDL cholesterol, the company said on Thursday.

Merck said the experimental medicine had significantly raised the incidence of some types of nonfatal but serious side effects in the study, which followed more than 25,000 patients for almost four years.

Merck shares fell 2.5 percent to $42.56 in midday trading on the failure of one of its most closely watched experimental drugs.

Tredaptive combines an extended release form of niacin, a nutrient that has been used for decades to raise HDL cholesterol, with a drug called laropiprant, which is meant to reduce the incidence of facial flushing that is a side effect of niacin therapy.

Merck said it no longer planned to seek regulatory approval for the drug in the United States and is advising doctors in other countries against starting new patients on it. The medicine was approved in the European Union in 2008, but U.S. regulators were unwilling to approve it until Merck conducted the costly long-term study to better assess its safety and effectiveness.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been especially concerned about potential heart risks from laropiprant.

The failed study, called HPS2-THRIVE, is the latest high-profile trial that has called the heart-protective value of niacin into question.

Merck said Tredaptive had sales of about $13 million for the first three quarters of 2012 in the 40 countries where it is already sold. Had the drug been successful in the HPS2-THRIVE study, brokerage Cowen and Co predicted its annual global sales would have jumped to $300 million by 2016.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson had forecast Tredaptive sales of $1.1 billion by 2020, had it been approved in the United States.

“It seems conceivable that the drug could be removed from the market” overseas, he said in a research note.

Merck is developing another drug, anacetrapib, which raises HDL cholesterol by a greater magnitude than niacin, to see if it can reduce risks of heart attacks and stroke. If that trial is successful, many industry analysts believe anacetrapib could become a huge seller.

Anderson said data from late-stage testing of anacetrapib should become available in 2017, while results from trials of evacetrapib, a similar drug from Eli Lilly, should be unveiled in late 2015.

Garret FitzGerald, chairman of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, said negative findings for Tredaptive should not lessen enthusiasm for anacetrapib and evacetrapib because they raise HDL through a different mechanism from niacin. Instead, they block a protein called CETP.

(Reporting by Caroline Humer and Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Lisa Von Ahn)

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• Pyjamas are part of Jools’ Little Bird range for Mothercare
• Range usually only fits children aged 0-5
  
• Nightwear was specially customised for adults and two oldest daughters
  
• Youngest daughter wearing party dress because pyjamas were in the wash
• Oliver posted on Instagram and Twitter
  

By Martha De Lacey

PUBLISHED: 10:26 EST, 19 December 2012 | UPDATED: 13:40 EST, 19 December 2012

He may be 37 years old in real life, but Jamie Oliver has proved he’s still just a big kid at heart.

The celebrity chef today tweeted an adorable family photograph of his whole brood wearing matching stripey pyjamas, designed by wife Jools for Mothercare.

And since Jools’ Little Bird range is usually only large enough for children aged up to five years old, the pyjamas worn by Jamie, Jools and their two eldest daughters – Poppy Honey Rosie, 10, and Daisy Boo Pamela, nine – were specially customised by the brand.

Pyjama party! The whole Oliver family poses for a photo wearing matching customised stripey nightwear designed by Jools for Mothercare

Taken in a cosy playroom decked out with colourful bunting and toys, the soft-focus photo resembles a family Christmas card shot, and perfectly captures the fun and happiness of the Oliver household.

The famous foodie took the photograph on Instagram alongside the caption: ‘Haha the whole family in Jools PJ’s …I can’t believe Mother Care actually mad me a pair of her toddler Jim-Jams !! Very funny if not slightly strange. Although one little purple princes had hers in the wash & wasn’t very happy bless her …….big love to all you guys #jamie x x. X x xx x x. Xx x. X xx x x x x.’

The couple’s youngest child and only son, two-year-old Buddy Bear Maurice is also wearing the pyjamas in the photo, but youngest daughter Petal Blossom Rainbow, three, is wearing a bright purple party dress and crown, because her pyjamas were in the wash.

Original size: The Little Bird By Jools jersey rainbpow pyjamas usually fit children aged 0-5 years old and cost £12-£14

Model and mother-of-four Jools Oliver, 37, designed the Little Bird line for Mothercare in August, aiming to create an ‘eclectic and affordable’ collection of classic clothes, toys and bedding suitable for babies and children up to five years old.

The Little Bird By Jools jersey rainbow pyjamas are usually suitable for babies children up to five years old and cost £12-£14.

During the launch, on the Mothercare website, Jools said about the pyjamas: ‘These are my absolute favourite! I love rainbows and stripes, wish they came in my size!’

Family man: Jamie and Jools Oliver welcoming new baby boy Buddy Bear Maurice in September 2010, with daughters, from left, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom and Poppy Honey

 VIDEO  Gorgeous promo for Jools’s Little Bird collection at Mothercare 

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Earlier this year an uninsured patient at Lallie Kemp Medical Center, a small safety net hospital operated by LSU, suffered a subdural hematoma — bleeding between the brain and the skull that is treatable if given prompt attention. The hospital attempted to transfer the patient to LSU’s referral facility in New Orleans, but the hospital, with shrunken capacity, already had seven patients in the emergency department awaiting ICU beds. The doctor called 17 other hospitals that day, including some with neurosurgeons, operating rooms, and ICU beds available. None accepted the patient. He died that evening.

Unfortunately, examples like these are becoming easier to identify in Louisiana. The Institute of Medicine reports that 18,000 people a year die in the U.S. for lack of health insurance. When Louisiana’s Health Secretary, Bruce Greenstein, was asked about the patient at Lallie Kemp in testimony before the legislature a few months ago he explained that the patient could not get care because of a shortage of neurosurgeons in Louisiana. That, of course, sounded better than the fact that it is more essentially due to the state’s approach to the uninsured.

Louisiana has some serious health care challenges, with the fourth highest uninsurance rate in the country, among the highest cost and lowest quality outcomes for patients with Medicare, and among the highest rates of tobacco use, obesity, poverty, and infant mortality, to name a few. For health status and outcomes, Louisiana is among the worst in the country.

Like in other states, the health care system in Louisiana is an amalgam of private and public providers and programs loosely woven with some attempt to care for the entire population. The solutions are not simple, but in Louisiana we have perhaps the most qualified governor to address them: McKinsey consultant, Secretary of Health for Louisiana, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, and assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. However, instead of providing desperately needed leadership and clarity for his constituents, Bobby Jindal continues to confuse us.

Two recent reports in the New England Journal of Medicine indicate that Medicaid coverage results in better preventive care and is associated with lower mortality. Implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would provide Medicaid insurance to 456,000 Louisianans and reduce the uninsured in the state by 60 percent. Gaps in Medicaid coverage and care for the uninsured (350,000 of whom would remain after the expansion) are addressed by safety net systems which, according to the journal Health Affairs, can provide care at half the cost of providing insurance, an assessment consistent with an Urban Institute study done in Louisiana in 2007. The Louisiana State University Health Sciences Centers operate the statewide safety net system, serving over half a million people annually through which the uninsured and underinsured receive care from immunizations to neurosurgery, with outcomes on par with national norms for people with insurance.

The amount of state dollars spent on Medicaid in Louisiana is less than 9 percent of total state funds compared to the national average of over 15 percent. The average state spends twice as much on Medicaid as it does on prisons; Louisiana spends roughly the same amount. Since Jindal took office, Medicaid and Disproportionate Share Hospital spending (funding for uninsured care) in the public safety net system has decreased by nearly $200 million on an annual basis. In September he cut funding for the safety net by another $329 million, over half of the total funding for uninsured care.

Escalating health care spending in Louisiana and the U.S. is driven by the insured, not the uninsured. Jindal’s spokespersons, however, have characterized care for the uninsured in the safety net system — which has had flat spending in the last 10 years — as “unsustainable” while proposing an ambiguous plan to shift that care to a private sector that has demonstrated cost increases that actually are unsustainable.

Adoption of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion paired with a healthy safety net would provide the component pieces of a universal coverage model in Louisiana for the first time. However, Jindal has declared his opposition to the two major programs that would ensure care to the uninsured. He has made clear his intention to reject the federal Medicaid expansion and at the same time is dismantling the state’s public safety net. It’s a combination of blows for many of the state’s citizens who are among the lowest earners in the country and are destined to go without care.

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By refusing to participate in the Affordable Care Act, Jindal will deny access to 456,000 low income individuals through the Medicaid expansion. A recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation put the 10 year cost at less than $1 billion for Louisiana. In fact, when that expense is offset against additional savings on state funds currently spent on the uninsured, it is probable that there would be a net financial benefit to the state.

After two years as Louisiana’s Health Secretary and five years as governor, Jindal presides over a Louisiana that has one of the country’s largest uninsured populations with worsening access to care. He is now chair of the Republican Governor’s Association, with a message for the country. Those outside of Louisiana can start to get to know him better by examining his health care record back home.  

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/without-a-safety-net-abandoning-louisianas-uninsured/266346/

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A plate from the De Bononiensi scientiarum et artium instituto atque academia commentarii, produced between 1731 and 1791 (BibliOdyssey).

One night in the late 1700s, Luigi Galvani, an anatomy professor at the University of Bologna, strung up butchered frog legs on his balcony. This in itself was not unusual – they were, in all likelihood, awaiting the dinner plate. But on this night, with the air crackling with electricity from a storm, Galvani noticed something odd: when he touched the legs with a pair of scissors, they twitched. The professor’s curiosity was piqued. Soon thereafter, he hung some dissected frogs legs in his laboratory – where, as it happened, he also kept a newfangled machine that captured static electricity, known as a Leyden jar. Anytime the jar was on and someone touched the legs with a metal scalpel, they jumped. It was almost as if they were possessed. 

Galvani wondered if this strange phenomenon could be related to electrical currents. Perhaps the limbs contained some sort of charge, an “animal electricity” essential for life. He thought that this charge was undiscovered biological juice, and, while he was wrong, Galvani was perhaps the first person to purposefully stimulate exposed nerve cells with electricity. Years later, he noted his achievement in a book that recounted more than a decade of such research: “And still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friend to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone’s eyes.”

In the years that followed, Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and former assistant, went further. In 1802, he connected a primitive battery to a recently severed ox head. It was as if the animal came back to life: its eyes flew open; its ears wriggled; its tongue jerked. Aldini attempted a similar experiment on the corpse of a murderer who’d been hanged in London’s infamous Newgate Prison. The effects were much the same: “The jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horrible contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” 

These ghoulish experiments were well known in scientific and popular circles– Mary Shelley used the notion that electricity could animate life as the foundation for Frankenstein–and interest in the effects of electricity on living creatures continued for the next 150 years. Many efforts were little more than quackery. In England during the 1800s, for instance, electricity was used to treat everything from hysteria to melancholia. Yet the flegdling field of bioelectricity was stalled by a rival branch of science, not fringe thinking. DNA was discovered in the 1950s. A tidal wave of interest followed, and it swept aside the studies that descended from Galvani’s.

The search for the commands that shape our bodied became an investigation of the extraordinary interplay between genes and proteins. But as successful as the current approach has been, it does have limits. 

It is odd that electricity has been so negelected, because it is everywhere in our bodies. Ions flow in and out of our cells. Voltage pulses speed down our nerves. We are, in effect, walking electrical networks. The significance of this is readily accepted when it comes to the nervous system and the heart – think of the electrical pads used to revive someone after a heart attack. But in many ways, we remain stuck in an eighteenth century mindframe, aware of the electric signals that course through our bodies but oblivious to the ways in which they could play a subtler, and more profound, role in our development.

Not all of the blame for this is the result of the focus on proteins and DNA. There’s also the legacy of bioelectrical research, which has teetered between genuine scientific insights and frivolous nonsense. It would take someone who knew little about the field’s reputation, and who wasn’t concerned about how his interests would appear to colleagues, to pick up the line of inquiry, and return to the question of regeneration.

* * *

Michael Levin, director of Tufts University’s Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology (Kathi Bahr).

Modern medicine clutches at a number of dreams. Some, like developing an AIDS vaccine, can seem tantalisingly close. Others, like curing cancer or preventing the ravages of aging, have frustrated great minds for so many years that we’ve learned to temper our expectations.

And then there’s regeneration. The idea that humans could regrow missing or diseased organs or limbs often feels like fantasy. But why? There are, after all, many species that can accomplish the task with ease. A decapitated flatworm will grow a new head, replete with a new brain. For the first week of their lives, tadpoles can replace lost tails. And the axolotl, or Mexican salamander, has the ability to regenerate everything from its limbs and tail to its spinal cord and skin, all without any evidence of scarring. Even some mammals have limited regenerative abilities: every year, deer regrow exact replicas of the antlers they shed, and in some circumstances, young mice and rats can lose a leg and grow it back.

Humans hang onto a sliver of regenerative ability as well. If a child experiences a neat slice through the end of his fingertip, that tip will grow back — a talent that disappears sometime between the ages of seven and eleven. The Greek legend of Prometheus, the god who was cursed to have an eagle peck out his liver each day, only to grow it back every night, contains a grain of physiological truth: were you to lose part of your liver, it would, in fact, regenerate. With the exception of our skin, it’s the only human organ that has that capability.

But what if we could go further than skin and liver cells? What if we could signal to our bodies to regrow damaged retinal tissue – or even to regrow an entire eye? What if we could regrow lost limbs? Michael Levin doesn’t think this is an outlandish fantasy: in fact, he thinks he may be on the path to figuring out how to do precisely that.

Levin is director of Tufts University’s Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in Medford, near Boston. His thinks that the key to regeneration  — the key to pattern, to shape — may be found in the electrical signals that are transmitted among all our cells, much like the ones and zeros that zip along a computer’s hard drive. Manipulating these electrical signals has already led to results that seem more suited to X-Men than a scientific journal: Levin’s lab has produced four-headed flatworms and grown an eye from scratch on a tadpole’s belly. Over the course of the next year, Levin will begin experiments on mammals. Success could make human regeneration a reality in our lifetimes.

This is an exclusive extract from Electric Shock, the new article from MATTER, an online publisher focused on long-form science and technology writing. Visit readmatter.com to purchase the full article. 

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/the-solution-to-human-regeneration-may-hang-in-a-long-neglected-branch-of-science/266416/

Jeri Ryan Carla Bonner

The Solution to Human Regeneration May Hang in a Long-Neglected Branch of Science is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Stephanie Powers Nicki Minaj

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

(Reuters) – U.S. health regulators have approved a new four-strain seasonal influenza vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the company said on Monday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Fluarix Quadrivalent to immunize children age 3 and older and adults against flu virus subtypes A and B contained in the vaccine.

It is the first intramuscular vaccine to protect against four influenza strains. Three-strain flu vaccines currently administered help protect against the two most common A virus strains and the B strain expected to be predominant in a given year, the company said.

Since 2000, however, two B virus strains have circulated to varying degrees each season, meaning patients infected with the B virus not contained in the vaccine were not immunized.

Fluarix Quadrivalent helps protect against the two A strains and adds coverage against a second B strain, the company said.

Three-strain vaccines “have helped protect millions of people against flu, but in six of the last 11 flu seasons, the predominant circulating influenza B strain was not the strain that public health authorities selected,” said Dr. Leonard Friedland, head of clinical development and medical affairs for Glaxo’s North American vaccines program.

“Fluarix Quadrivalent will help protect individuals against both B strains and from a public-health standpoint, can help decrease the burden of disease.”

Glaxo said it will make the vaccine available in time for the 2013-14 flu season and plans to fulfill orders for its trivalent, or three-strain, vaccines. Healthcare providers traditionally order flu vaccines about a year in advance of each flu season.

Fluarix Quadrivalent is not currently approved or licensed in any country outside of the United States.

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)

Laura Dern Malin Akerman

GlaxoSmithKline wins U.S. approval for new flu vaccine is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

• Two out of five women admitted they often avoided the gym so they wouldn’t mess up their hair dos
• These women were almost three times less likely to meet the recommended physical activity guidelines

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 05:40 EST, 18 December 2012 | UPDATED: 05:40 EST, 18 December 2012

Going for a drink after work, feeling tired and forgetting your trainers are just some of the common reasons for avoiding the gym.

Now scientists have found haircare is another major barrier to working out.

A study of women from North Carolina revealed 40 per cent admitted to avoiding exercise because they didn’t want to ruin their hair-dos.

Gym bunny: In a study nearly 40% of black women admitted to avoiding the gym to preserve their hair dos

Research leader Dr Amy McMichael, from Wake Forest University, said she had struggled to go to the gym without ruining her hairstyle.

‘As an African-American woman, I have that problem, and my friends have that problem. So I wondered if my patients had that problem, she said.

To find out if women were putting hair above their health, the team surveyed 103 black women who came to the dermatology clinic at Wake Forest University in October 2007.

They found that more than half of the women were exercising for less than 75 minutes per week – the U.S Government recommends 150 minutes. One in four admitted to doing no exercise at all.

Those who avoided exercise because of their hair were almost three times less likely to meet recommended physical activity guidelines

Those who avoided exercise because of their hair were almost three times less likely to meet the recommended physical activity guidelines.

McMichael, who published the findings in the Archives of Dermatology on Monday, said hair care can be tedious and costly for African-American women.

Hair straightening costs around $40 in Harlem, New York, and is often part of a weekly routine. Women may not want to wash their hair more than once a week to keep their hairstyle, and may avoid sweating as a result.

The survey only looked at black women so it is not yet known if the issue is shared by all women.

Salon owner Rochelle Mosley said some women scheduled their appointments around their gym visits, but she also tries to find a hairstyle that will work with physical activity.

‘If you don’t have a healthy body then you aren’t going to have any hair to fix,’ she said.

Gary Estrada Judy Landers

I can’t go to the gym – I’ve done my hair: Study finds 40 per cent women avoid exercise to keep their coiffures intact is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Liza Long recounts her long fight to help her young mentally ill son, and the great fear that he will someday harm her, her two younger children, or someone else:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me. A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan–they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me.

Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

This piece is a gripping read. I think, as parents, we think of our influence as all-powerful. When a kid succeeds, we like to point to the home; when he doesn’t, we do the same. And yet here is an illness that has no respect for the old words of “discipline” and “toughness.”

With that said, I didn’t hear any mention of a father in this piece. I don’t want to overstate the value of fathers, and some fathers (chronically abusive ones, for instance) can contribute the most by exiting the scene. Yet, on some level, parenting is work, and when all hands are called to deck (as must be the case when your son is threatening murder and suicide), a set of hands here is missing.

These spree shooting are almost wholly perpetrated by men. Perhaps this is just a matter of genes. But I also wonder about what we (as fathers) are communicating to our boys about what the world owes, and the methods they may use to secure it.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/on-parenting-a-mentally-ill-son/266338/

Jessica Drake Alex Kingston

On Parenting a Mentally Ill Son is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Zooey Deschanel Sara Cox

Okla. State questioned in sexual assaults is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

“We examined coffee drinking habits in nearly 1 million men and women,” says Janet Hildebrand, MPH, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society.

“Those who reported drinking at least four cups per day of caffeinated coffee incurred about half the risk of dying from mouth and throat cancers compared to people who did not drink caffeinated coffee daily or only drank it occasionally.”

That link held even when the researchers took into account smoking habits and alcohol use. 

Smoking and alcohol use are among the strongest risk factors for oral cancers.

About 35,000 new cases of oral cancers are expected in the U.S. this year, with 6,800 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. The new study is published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Previous research by others has linked drinking more than four cups of coffee a day to about the same risk reduction in getting a diagnosis of oral cancer.

Coffee & Oral Cancers: Study Details

Hildebrand’s team evaluated more than 968,000 men and women enrolled in the Cancer Prevention Study II. It began in 1982 and is overseen by the American Cancer Society.

At the start of the study, all men and women were free of cancer. During the 26-year follow up, 868 deaths from oral or throat cancers occurred.

The researchers evaluated the coffee- and tea-drinking habits of the men and women. They found the link between coffee and a reduced risk of dying from oral cancers.

More than 97% of the men and women drank either coffee or tea. More than 60% said they drank at least a cup a day of caffeinated coffee.

Among those who drank regularly, most had three cups a day.

The risk reduction of nearly half was similar for those who drank four, five, or six cups daily. Beyond seven cups, Hildebrand says, there weren’t enough people to gauge the effect on risk accurately.

Hildebrand found only a suggestion of a link between those who drank more than two cups of decaf daily.

No benefit was found for tea drinkers.

Why Coffee May Protect

“We really don’t clearly know the mechanism,” Hildebrand says. “But we do know that coffee contains hundreds of biologically active compounds.”

Many of them, she says, are now known to have anti-cancer properties.

The researchers can’t be sure in this study whether the coffee lowered the risk of getting the cancers or improved the odds of survival once cancer occurred. The study only looked at deaths, not the diagnosis.

“We’re not recommending people start to drink coffee or that people increase their coffee [intake] for cancer prevention,” Hildebrand says. “Much more epidemiological and scientific and clinical evidence would be needed to support such a recommendation.”

Coffee & Oral Cancers: Perspective

The new findings are ”fascinating and remarkable,” says Joel Epstein, DMD. He is director of oral medicine at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, located outside Los Angeles. He reviewed the study findings.

“It seems like there is a significant theme,” he says, citing several other studies finding a lower risk of various cancers in coffee drinkers. “They are large studies,” he says, usually funded by reputable organizations such as the American Cancer Society.

By and large, the studies are coming up with the same findings, he says, even though the researchers study different populations and different cancers. That’s a good sign, he says.

Jerri Manthey read more

Coffee May Lower Risk of Dying From Oral Cancers is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Smashbox Photo Finish Foundation Primer SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex SPF 15 With Dermaxyl Complex
I use this primer everyday!  It creates the perfect canvas for foundation application, while helping to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores for visibly softer skin.  Love it!

Yves Saint Laurent ROUGE PUR COUTURE Glossy Stain 5 Rouge Vintage
This is a new product I’m trying.  It claims that is coat your lips with this lip color that offers a lightweight texture, which immediately melts onto lips. Glossy Stain delivers intense glossy color for an extremely long-lasting shine.  So far so good.

Cle de Peau Beaute Concealer Ocher
There’s a reason why it continues to win “Best Concealer!” Moisturizing and blends perfectly to conceal dark circles, spots and imperfections.  It’s worth the premium price.

NARS Blush Orgasm
This is a staple in my beauty routine, a classic blush.

Smashbox Brow Tech
I love the angled, long-wearing waterproof gel pencil for easy filling and defining along with a brow brush applicator to groom brows perfectly into place.  No need for sharpening!

Rebekah Emily Symons

My Beauty Purchases is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Meredith Vieira Ian McKellen

Don’t Miss Ulta’s Biggest Cyber Monday Ever! is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

By Ruth Styles

PUBLISHED: 10:48 EST, 11 December 2012 | UPDATED: 08:13 EST, 12 December 2012

If you’ve ever wished you could whittle down your routine to one product, then prepare to be very excited because Japan’s coolest new beauty craze is coming to your rescue.

Beauty’s big news for 2013 is CC or ‘Complexion Corrector’ cream, a hybrid moisturiser and foundation, which offers more coverage than last year’s hit BB (Blemish Balm) creams but doesn’t cake or crease.

L’Oreal and Chanel both have CC creams in the pipeline but first off the blocks is Rodial’s sister brand, Nip+Fab, which will launch the UK’s first CC cream in January.

Natural: Amanda’s client Cat Deeley (seen here with husband Patrick Kielty) likes a fresh-faced glow

Nip+Fab’s cream, the first CC to arrive on British shores, contains a mixture of skin-boosting goodies such as hydrating hyaluronic acid and toning oat extracts, plus brightening pigment to conceal blemishes and give skin extra radiance.

‘CC’s give better coverage than BB’s,’ explains Amanda Grossman, a make-up artist whose clients include Cat Deeley, former Spice Girl Mel C, Kylie Minogue and Chloe Sevigny.

‘They’re a moisturiser, SPF30 and foundation in one. For me, while I’d use BB creams for male clients, CC creams are buildable so you don’t need powder.

‘Everyone wants younger, fresher glowing skin and that’s what CC creams will give you.’

Perfect: CC creams even out the skin without clogging it with foundation. Kylie Minogue has the look spot on

Although it’s Nip+Fab’s CC cream that’s racking up headlines, the brand is simultaneously launching a CC cream for eyes, which does the same as a regular CC cream but de-puffs as well.

Nip+Fab CC Eye Fix looks and acts like a standard under-eye concealer – even coming in a clickable pen like YSL’s ever-popular Touche Eclat – but doubles as an eye cream.

Used in combination, the effect is low-key but natural-looking with blemishes and bags carefully concealed.

Unusually, both CC cream and Eye Fix come in a very limited range of shades: two for the CC cream and three for the Eye Fix, but adapt to individual skin tones, removing the hassle, says Amanda, of trying to work out which shade of foundation you need.

‘I’m always being asked about base and which shades to use, but this works for most skin tones.

‘You can actually use both shades together because your skin changes colour throughout the year. I would mix them on the back of my hand first, then blend them out from the centre of the face towards the chin using my fingers.

‘It basically does what it says on the tin and comes with SPF, which stops pigmentation from becoming a problem in the first place, and you’re photo-ready fast.’

Nip+Fab CC Cream, £14.95, and Eye Fix, £9.95, will be available at Boots from January.

Emily Symons Melissa Gilbert

FEMAIL gets the first look at the UK’s first CC wonder cream…with a little help from Cat Deeley’s make-up artist is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

By Niamh O’doherty

PUBLISHED: 19:55 EST, 11 December 2012 | UPDATED: 19:55 EST, 11 December 2012

The slower you grow, the longer you live, a new study suggests. Scientists looking at growth patterns in stickleback fish say they discovered lifespan is affected by the rate at which bodies expand early in life.

Bodies which grow quickly accumulate greater tissue damage, with life-shortening results.

A team from Glasgow University altered the growth rate of 240 fish by exposing them to brief cold or warm spells, putting them ahead or behind their normal growth schedule.

‘You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,’ explained Professor Neil Metcalfe from Glasgow University

Researchers noticed the fish got back on track once their environmental temperature was returned to normal, but the change in growth rate affected their rate of ageing.

The slow-growing fish lived for around 30% longer than the stickleback’s two-year average, with a lifespan of nearly 1,000 days.

The lifespan of the fast-growing fish was 15% shorter than normal.

Professor Neil Metcalfe, from the university’s Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, said the ‘striking’ results occurred despite all the fish reaching the same adult size.

A team from Glasgow University altered the growth rate of 240 stickleback fish by exposing them to brief cold or warm spells

‘You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,’ he said.

‘The results of the study are striking. It appears that bodies which grow quickly accumulate greater tissue damage than those that grow more slowly, and their lifespan is substantially reduced as a result.

‘These findings are likely to apply to many other species, including humans, since the manner in which organs and tissues grow and age is similar across very different kinds of animal.

‘It has already been documented in humans, for example, that rapid growth in early childhood is associated with a greater risk of developing ailments later in life such as cardiovascular disease in middle or old age, possibly because of the way in which the tissues of a fast-grown heart are laid down.’

Earlier attempts to test links between growth rates and lifespan by altering diet proved inconclusive because the results could have been affected by the diet itself rather than its effect on growth.

The Glasgow team avoided the problem by keeping the fish on identical diets. All that changed were the temperatures to which they were exposed.

Mia Farrow Jenny Agutter

‘Slower you grow, the longer you live’: Bodies which expand early in life acquire greater tissue damage with life-shortening results is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

(Reuters) – Texas Governor Rick Perry called on state lawmakers on Tuesday to pass a bill banning late-term abortions, a controversial prohibition that has been pushed by anti-abortion activists since 2010.

Seven states – Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma – have put laws into effect in the past several years banning late term abortions, based on questionable medical research suggesting that a fetus feels pain starting at 20 weeks of gestation.

Another state, Georgia, has such a law scheduled to go into effect in January, although a lawsuit over the measure is pending in state court. Arizona also passed a similar law banning abortions 18 weeks after fertilization, but it has been blocked by federal courts.

Texas would be the largest state to pass such a measure, although Perry, a Republican, did not outline details of what he envisioned in a bill.

“We cannot, and we will not, stand idly by while the unborn are going through the agony of having their lives ended,” Perry, a failed 2012 Republican presidential candidate, said in prepared remarks for a news conference on Tuesday.

Opponents of such proposals say they are based on unfounded science.

“And yet we see these bills proliferating across the country,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “It looks like this issue is one that state legislatures are going to be wrestling with for another year.”

Arkansas, Virginia, Wisconsin and South Dakota are also expected to introduce such bills, Nash said.

The position of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is that there is “no legitimate scientific information that supports the statement that a fetus experiences pain.”

The group notes that certain brain and neurological developments, including neurotransmitted hormones, have to be in place to perceive pain. Animal studies show these hormones are developed only in the last third of gestation.

Some anti-abortion arguments on fetal pain are taken from research by Kanwaljeet J.S. Anand, a professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

Anand has said that prenatal surgeries are routinely done with anesthetic, and that despite ACOG’s 2005 statement, “the consensus opinion seems to be in favor of the fact that fetuses do perceive pain.”

In Texas, the Legislature convenes in January with Republican majorities in both chambers. In 2011, Perry successfully pushed a measure requiring women seeking an abortion to first get a sonogram.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Christopher Wilson)

Jessica Drake Alex Kingston

Texas governor seeks law banning late-term abortions is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Only imported marijuana will be available for the first year, after which the central European country’s State Institute for Drug Control will allot licenses to local growers.

“The point of the proposal is to make medical marijuana accessible to patients that need it and that already use it today, even when it is against the law,” said Pavel Bem, one of a group of deputies who created the bill.

The central European country already lets the public grow, possess, and consume – but not sell – small amounts of most illicit drugs and considers the possession of less than 15 grams of marijuana as legal.

It also tolerates the use of recreational drugs in pubs and clubs, and the sight of people rolling and smoking marijuana joints in public and outside pubs is common.

Czech lawmakers were told how the use of marijuana can help some people with debilitating medical conditions. The upper house is expected to approve the bill, which needs to be signed by the president.

Edith Evans Paula Prentis

Czech MPs vote to legalize marijuana for medical use is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Carey Lowell other facts

25 detained from smuggling boat in SoCal is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

By Sadie Whitelocks

PUBLISHED: 17:48 EST, 10 December 2012 | UPDATED: 17:50 EST, 10 December 2012

A farmer turned a 200-acre plot of land into a giant proposal message, but failed to spot that he had spelled his girlfriend’s name incorrectly.

Loren Lentz, from Deer Park, Washington, spent an hour and a half ploughing a note for his partner, Jody Schaefer, in one of his weed-ridden fields. He was attempting to write: ‘Jody will you marry me? Loren.’

But when he took Miss Schaefer up in a plane to pop the big question, he noticed that he had written the letter J backwards, and she swiftly pointed out that her name was ‘not L-O-D-Y’.

Scroll down for video

Grand proposal: Loren Lentz spent an hour and a half ploughing a message for his partner

Spelling area: As he flew over the area Mr Lentz noticed that he had written the J backwards

To Mr Lentz’s relief Miss Schaefer didn’t take the error to heart, and he told KREM.com: ‘She decided to marry me anyway even though the J was backwards.’

Mr Lentz said that he ‘wanted to do something big’ for his wedding proposal, and that’s when he came up with the idea to plough a message.

His ten-year-old daughter helped him to execute the final design, which he completed by attaching a 27-foot disc to his tractor.

Later he asked Miss Schaefer to take a flight with him, and told her that they would be out scanning the local area for one of his farm vehicles that had been stolen over the summer.

Miss Schaefer took a camera with her to capture aerial shots. She recalled: ‘I kept looking down, trying to look down.

‘I couldn’t tell the difference between a truck and a car. Anything else so I just started taking aerial photos of everything.’

As they approached Deer Park Airport Mr Lentz asked her to take photos of his haystacks, and that’s when she spotted the marriage proposal.

Cause for celebration: While they were in the air Mr Lentz pulled out an engagement ring

She said: ‘I put up the lens and through the eyelid I could see loren in dirt… And I pulled it down and sure enough, there it was.‘

Mr Lentz pulled out an engagement ring and he explained that ‘she gave me a great big hug over the seat’.

The couple plan to get married next month.

Catherine Bosley Nigel Hawthorne

Farmer ploughs ‘will you marry me, Jody?’ in 200-acre field – but manages to misspell her name is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

PROBLEM: Aging, from a strictly medical perspective, can be thought of as a losing battle against progressive decline. Aside from figuring out how to reverse the process altogether, how might we help everyone “age well”?

---

• Testosterone is Truth Serum
• Gay Adoptive Parents Make Great Adoptive Parents
• Farm Stank is Bad For Your Health

---

METHODOLOGY: In an attempt to understand the aging process from multiple angles, researchers from UC San Diego and Stanford University surveyed and spoke with over 1,000 older adults, who averaged around 77 years in age, about their experiences. This included the standard information about chronic illness and disability, along with more subjective measures: how socially engaged the participants were, or how they characterized their own overall health, was looked at as well. They also asked them flat-out: On a scale from 1 to 10, how successfully do you believe you’re aging?

RESULTS: On the medical level, the results confirmed what we know to be true about aging: a significant association was found between older age and worsening physical and cognitive functioning. But when it came to attitude, this trend was reversed: as subjects got older, their self-rating of how successfully they were aging steadily improved. This increase in well-being was still presnt once income, education, and marriage were taken into account.

When age was controlled for, self-rated successful aging increased with higher levels of education, cognitive functioning, perceived physical and mental health, attitudes of optimism and resilience, and decreased levels of depression. Resilience and depression, specifically, appeared to affect successful aging to a degree comparable to the impact of physical health.

IMPLICATIONS: The researchers had assumed the opposite of what their results ended up showing: As our physical and cognitive functioning generally declines with age, they had reasoned, so, too, should our perceptions of how successfully we are aging. The very fact that their findings appeared so counter-intuitive carries a strong message against negative societal attitudes toward aging.

They identify psychiatric guidance as one potential key to enhancing the process for older adults. When it comes to successful aging, said lead author Dilip Jeste, “Perfect physical health is neither necessary nor sufficient.”

The full study, “Association Between Older Age and More Successful Aging: Critical Role of Resilience and Depression,” is published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/study-attitude-about-aging-improves-with-age/266064/

Valeria Golino Janice Joplin

Study: Attitude About Aging Improves With Age is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

PROBLEM: Aging, from a strictly medical perspective, can be thought of as a losing battle against progressive decline. Aside from figuring out how to reverse the process altogether, how might we help everyone “age well”?

---

• Testosterone is Truth Serum
• Gay Adoptive Parents Make Great Adoptive Parents
• Farm Stank is Bad For Your Health

---

METHODOLOGY: In an attempt to understand the aging process from multiple angles, researchers from UC San Diego and Stanford University surveyed and spoke with over 1,000 older adults, who averaged around 77 years in age, about their experiences. This included the standard information about chronic illness and disability, along with more subjective measures: how socially engaged the participants were, or how they characterized their own overall health, was looked at as well. They also asked them flat-out: On a scale from 1 to 10, how successfully do you believe you’re aging?

RESULTS: On the medical level, the results confirmed what we know to be true about aging: a significant association was found between older age and worsening physical and cognitive functioning. But when it came to attitude, this trend was reversed: as subjects got older, their self-rating of how successfully they were aging steadily improved. This increase in well-being was still presnt once income, education, and marriage were taken into account.

When age was controlled for, self-rated successful aging increased with higher levels of education, cognitive functioning, perceived physical and mental health, attitudes of optimism and resilience, and decreased levels of depression. Resilience and depression, specifically, appeared to affect successful aging to a degree comparable to the impact of physical health.

IMPLICATIONS: The researchers had assumed the opposite of what their results ended up showing: As our physical and cognitive functioning generally declines with age, they had reasoned, so, too, should our perceptions of how successfully we are aging. The very fact that their findings appeared so counter-intuitive carries a strong message against negative societal attitudes toward aging.

They identify psychiatric guidance as one potential key to enhancing the process for older adults. When it comes to successful aging, said lead author Dilip Jeste, “Perfect physical health is neither necessary nor sufficient.”

The full study, “Association Between Older Age and More Successful Aging: Critical Role of Resilience and Depression,” is published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Rachael Leigh Cook Barbara Bouchet

Study: Attitude About Aging Improves With Age is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

Shirly Jones Angie Hart

Don’t Miss Ulta’s Biggest Cyber Monday Ever! is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

The nation’s highest court agreed to review a case over whether Myriad Genetics Inc may patent two genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.

In a 2-1 ruling on Aug. 16, a panel of the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the biotechnology company’s right to patent “isolated” genes that account for most inherited forms of the two cancers.

But that ruling also denied Myriad’s effort to patent methods of “comparing” or “analyzing” DNA sequences.

The Federal Circuit had ruled in Myriad’s favor in July 2011, but that ruling was set aside by the Supreme Court, which asked it to revisit the case in light of later developments.

The genes in question, BRCA1 and BRCA2, can be used to detect risk of breast and ovarian cancer and aid in treatment options. Women who test positive using Myriad’s gene test, BRACAnalysis, have an 82 percent higher risk of breast cancer and 44 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer in their lifetimes.

The appeal against Myriad and the University of Utah Research Foundation was being pursued by a variety of medical associations led by the Association for Molecular Pathology.

They contended that Myriad’s patents are illegal, prohibit standard clinical testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and restrict scientific research and patients’ access to medical care, including their own genetic information.

A decision by the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June.

The case is Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics Inc et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-398.

Michelle Johnson Suzanne Snyder

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(Reuters) – Thousands of health workers, on strike since last month, marched on Sunday in Madrid to protest against budget cuts and plans from the Spanish capital’s regional government to privatize the management of public hospitals and medical centers.

It was the third time doctors, nurses and health workers have rallied since the local authorities put forward a plan in October to place six hospitals and dozens of medical practices under private management. The plan also calls for patients to be charged a fee of 1 euro for prescriptions.

Workers launched an indefinite strike last month against the plan, which has not been endorsed by the centre-right government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Health workers in the capital are striking Monday-Thursday each week and seeing patients only on Fridays, while also responding to emergencies.

Spain’s 17 autonomous regions control health and education policies and spending. They have all had to implement steep cuts this year as the country struggles to meet tough European Union-agreed deficit targets.

Dressed in white scrubs, the protesters shouted slogans such as “Health is not for sale” and “Health 100 percent public, no to privatizations”.

“Of course, privatization can be reversed. Actually the question is not if it can be reversed, because privatization should never have a future,” said Luis Alvarez, an unemployed man from Madrid attending the demonstration.

Belen Padilla, a doctor at Madrid’s hospital Gregorio Maranon, said one million citizens had already signed a petition rejecting the plan.

(Reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Julien Toyer; Editing by Peter Graff)

source Amanda Doherty

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PROBLEM: As anyone who’s had a Man Men-style lunch followed by a Mad Men-style dinner knows, the connection between our brain and stomach is not simple or logical. 

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METHODOLOGY: University of Bristol provided 100 volunteers with lunch, with either a large or small portion of tomato soup as an appetizer. But, as with all free lunches, there was a catch: the bowls had a secret attachment capable of pumping soup in or out without the participants noticing. What they thought they were eating was therefore different from what actually ended up making it into their stomachs. Immediately following the meal, and for the next three hours, they were asked to evaluate their levels of hunger and fullness.

RESULTS: Right after they finished eating, the participants seemed to be in touch with their stomachs: They reported levels of hunger proportional to how much they had eaten. But the brain-stomach line of communication weakened as time went on, and 2 to 3 hours later, memory took over. The participants who thought they’d had a larger portion of soup felt less hungry for another meal. A full 24 hours later, when again confronted with the two portion sizes, the ones who thought they’d had the larger portion believed that it was a sufficient size for them. In other words, they remembered it as being filling, even though it wasn’t.

CONCLUSION: Memory plays an important role in our feelings of satiety, separate from the physiologic signals our stomach sends us.

IMPLICATIONS: The only problem with these findings, as with most experiments involving trickery, is how to apply it to real life. Until we can figure out how to make our food secretly disappear from our plates, we’re stuck trying to convince ourselves that the rice cakes we had for lunch were actually a big plate of spaghetti.

The full study, “Episodic Memory and Appetite Regulation in Humans,” is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

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At issue is HER2-positive breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that was difficult to treat until the FDA approved the drug Herceptin in 1998. Herceptin revolutionized the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer, reducing the risk of recurrence and prolonging lives.

Since then, two other drugs, Tykerb and Perjeta, have been approved for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer. Others are in the pipeline.

The new study involved 1,500 women found to be HER2-negative on routine HER2 testing. Genetic analysis showed 25 had HER2 mutations.

“These mutations would be missed by current HER2 testing,” says researcher Ron Bose, MD, PhD, of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“As a result, the women would not receive potentially lifesaving treatment with HER2 targeted drugs,” he says.

The findings were presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) here and published online in the journal Cancer Discovery.

HER2 Mutations

A patient must have more than the normal two copies of the HER2 gene to be classified as HER2-positive. About 20% to 25% of women with breast cancer fall into this category. The excess HER2 drives tumor growth.

The HER2 mutations stimulate tumor growth in a different way. “Many turn on HER2 activity in an inappropriate manner, which probably results in abnormal, unregulated HER2 signaling. This is likely driving the cancer cell,” Bose says.

The genetic analyses revealed that 1.5% to 2% of all breast cancer patients have these genetic mutations. With about 230,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States each year, even this modest percentage translates into more than 4,000 patients per year.

Will HER2 Targeted Drugs Help?

In laboratory tests, Herceptin and Tykerb killed many of the mutant cells. Two mutations that were resistant to Tykerb responded well to neratinib, an experimental anti-HER2 drug.

Some mutations were found to be “silent,” meaning they did not drive tumor growth and therefore would likely not respond to anti-HER2 drugs, Bose says.

Now the researchers have launched a study in which women will be screened for HER2 mutations. Those who have the mutations will be given neratinib. Doctors will follow the women to see if the drug is effective and safe.

Asked if the high cost of genetic analysis would prohibit its routine use, Bose says that it is increasingly being used in other forms of disease, such as lung cancer.

If trial results show that attacking the newfound mutations can prevent recurrences and save lives, then gene tests — and their cost — will quickly be accepted as part of the standard of care.

“In the future, we will probably be talking about panels of relevant genes that will need to be sequenced in breast cancer,” he says.

SABCS co-director Kent Osborne, MD, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says he believes even more mutations that drive breast cancer growth will be discovered in coming years.

And it’s likely the newly discovered mutations may promote growth of other types of tumors as well, he says.

Osborne says he would also like to see studies testing whether the anti-HER2 drugs already on the market benefit women with the mutations.

Hetty Baynes British Marines

Existing Breast Cancer Drugs May Help More Women is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

“For many women with PCOS, (the risks) will be small,” said Dr. Christopher McCartney, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, who was not involved in the new work. “For some women, they might be high enough to say we really shouldn’t use the Pill, such as for women over 35 who smoke.”

The three to five percent of women in the U.S. with PCOS have a hormone imbalance, which can lead to irregular periods, extra hair growth and higher risks for being overweight and developing hypertension and diabetes.

They are often treated with oral contraceptives, many of whose labels already include warnings about blood clots. A blood clot, also called venous thromboembolism, can be deadly if it spreads to the lungs, although none of the cases of blood clots in the study were fatal.

Because women with PCOS already tend to have more heart disease risk factors, researchers wanted to see if the Pill adds any additional risk.

They used medical and pharmacy information from a large health insurance database, including 43,500 women with PCOS.

On average, over the course of a particular year, about 24 out of every 10,000 women with PCOS taking the Pill were diagnosed with a blood clot, compared to about 11 out of every 10,000 women without the disorder using the contraceptive.

“Am I particularly surprised by the findings? No,” said Dr. Shahla Nader-Eftekhari, a professor at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, who treats women with PCOS but was not involved in the current study.

OBESITY PLAYING A ROLE?

The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, could not say for sure why women with PCOS are more likely to have a blood clot.

McCartney said he suspects that obesity has something to do with it.

At the beginning of the study in 2001 the percent of women with and without PCOS who were obese was the same – about 13 percent – but by the end of the study in 2009, 33 percent of women with PCOS and 21 percent of women without the disorder were obese.

“I really think that could be something that’s contributing to the risk,” McCartney told Reuters Health.

“Weight not only contributes to the risks associated with the Pill, it also contributes to some of the symptoms of PCOS and some of the metabolic problems associated with PCOS,” he added.

McCartney pointed out that the risk of developing a blood clot, even among women with PCOS, is still considered small, and shouldn’t necessarily discourage women from taking the Pill.

Steven Bird, the lead author of the study and an epidemiologist with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said that the importance of the findings is to raise awareness among women and their doctors that there is an increased risk for them if they take the Pill.

“Although the risk is small, prescribers should consider the increased risk for blood clots in women with PCOS who are prescribed contraceptive therapy,” Bird told Reuters Health by email.

McCartney agreed, and added that it’s also a good reminder for doctors of women with PCOS to discuss the importance of maintaining a healthy weight.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/VgvaOa Canadian Medical Association Journal, online December 3, 2012.

Lara Bingle Sophia Bush

Hormone disorder and the Pill tied to blood clots is a post from: Dudettes Read Here

At issue is HER2-positive breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that was difficult to treat until the FDA approved the drug Herceptin in 1998. Herceptin revolutionized the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer, reducing the risk of recurrence and prolonging lives.

Since then, two other drugs, Tykerb and Perjeta, have been approved for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer. Others are in the pipeline.

The new study involved 1,500 women found to be HER2-negative on routine HER2 testing. Genetic analysis showed 25 had HER2 mutations.

“These mutations would be missed by current HER2 testing,” says researcher Ron Bose, MD, PhD, of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“As a result, the women would not receive potentially lifesaving treatment with HER2 targeted drugs,” he says.

The findings were presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) here and published online in the journal Cancer Discovery.

HER2 Mutations

A patient must have more than the normal two copies of the HER2 gene to be classified as HER2-positive. About 20% to 25% of women with breast cancer fall into this category. The excess HER2 drives tumor growth.

The HER2 mutations stimulate tumor growth in a different way. “Many turn on HER2 activity in an inappropriate manner, which probably results in abnormal, unregulated HER2 signaling. This is likely driving the cancer cell,” Bose says.

The genetic analyses revealed that 1.5% to 2% of all breast cancer patients have these genetic mutations. With about 230,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States each year, even this modest percentage translates into more than 4,000 patients per year.

Will HER2 Targeted Drugs Help?

In laboratory tests, Herceptin and Tykerb killed many of the mutant cells. Two mutations that were resistant to Tykerb responded well to neratinib, an experimental anti-HER2 drug.

Some mutations were found to be “silent,” meaning they did not drive tumor growth and therefore would likely not respond to anti-HER2 drugs, Bose says.

Now the researchers have launched a study in which women will be screened for HER2 mutations. Those who have the mutations will be given neratinib. Doctors will follow the women to see if the drug is effective and safe.

Asked if the high cost of genetic analysis would prohibit its routine use, Bose says that it is increasingly being used in other forms of disease, such as lung cancer.

If trial results show that attacking the newfound mutations can prevent recurrences and save lives, then gene tests — and their cost — will quickly be accepted as part of the standard of care.

“In the future, we will probably be talking about panels of relevant genes that will need to be sequenced in breast cancer,” he says.

SABCS co-director Kent Osborne, MD, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says he believes even more mutations that drive breast cancer growth will be discovered in coming years.

And it’s likely the newly discovered mutations may promote growth of other types of tumors as well, he says.

Osborne says he would also like to see studies testing whether the anti-HER2 drugs already on the market benefit women with the mutations.

read other stories Lara Bingle

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By Annabelle Robertson
WebMD Feature

Reviewed by Kimball Johnson, MD

You’ve probably used one at the gym and may even have one sitting in your spare bedroom. The treadmill is the top-selling piece of fitness equipment in the U.S..

Therese Iknoian, author of Fitness Walking, says, “Treadmills are a fantastic alternative to outdoor workouts, particularly for people who feel a little unsure about being outside. They’re a safe, secure, controlled environment. The treadmill allows you to stop when you need to. You can control the hills; you can control the speed.”

But some people find the treadmill boring or wonder if they’re getting the most out of their exercise time.

If that’s you, relax. Treadmill workouts can be some of the most efficient, challenging, calorie-burning routines around.

The key is intervals. With intervals, instead of trudging along at a steady pace, you’ll mix up your speed and incorporate floor exercises into your routine. Intervals keep boredom at bay, keep the heart pumping, and increase your calorie burn, says Cindy Wasilewski, fitness manager at The Lodge at Wooloch, a destination spa in Hawley, Pa.

Intervals lend intensity to treadmill classes at the Blast900 gym in Atlanta where fitness director Jeff Baird says exercisers burn at least 900 calories in an hour.

Blast900′s boot-camp style workouts alternate 10 minutes of walking, jogging, or running with 10 minutes of weight training and floor exercises. While some students are on the treadmills, others are on the floor, sweating it out. Then they switch.

Wasilewski and Baird share five treadmill routines that deliver great workouts in 20, 30, or 60 minutes. 

Besides a treadmill, you’ll need hand weights and a stability ball for the floor exercises. As always, check with your doctor before you start a new exercise program.

60-Minute Treadmill Workouts

If you’ve got an hour, here are two different treadmill workouts to try. Wasilewski, who designed both workouts, calls the first one the “No Excuses” routine because it delivers maximum results for the time investment. The second workout is an interval trek, designed to boost cardiovascular endurance.

The perceived exertion rate referenced in these workouts is a scale of 0-10 used to measure the intensity of exercise. For example, 0 (nothing at all) is how you feel when at rest, while 10 (very, very heavy) is how you feel after extremely strenuous exercise.

No-Excuses Routine

Start on the treadmill:

Susan George Melanie Griffith

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