December 2009

Expert offers tips for coping with common scenarios

SATURDAY, Dec. 12 (HealthDay News) — With pressures from the economic hard times, dysfunctional families and countless other factors, the holidays can contribute to emotional stress and depression.

But there are ways to cope with the various scenarios that people experience at this time of year, according to Dr. Laura Miller, director of women’s mental health in the psychiatry department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

For instance, she suggests:

If seasonal depression gets worse in fall and winter …

• A therapeutic light box, which provides powerful light beyond what you can come up with yourself, might help in the morning. A doctor can help obtain one.
• exercise can also make you feel better.

If you’re busy and stressed out …

• Take time for fun activities such as walking, meditating, exercising and hanging out with friends.
• Consider buying prepared foods instead of trying to make everything yourself.
• In general, reduce the number of activities that are more stressful than joyful.    Read more…

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Surprising finding shows it reduces risk of death, recurrence

By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Dec. 8 (healthDay News) — Regular, moderate consumption of soy foods can help lower the risk of death and cancer recurrence in women who’ve had breast cancer, new research shows.

What’s more, the association between soy and a reduced risk of death held true even for women with estrogen receptor-positive cancers and women taking tamoxifen, according to the study published in the Dec. 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We found that women with a history of breast cancer who consumed moderate amounts of soy food were doing better in terms of prognosis. They had reduced mortality and reduced recurrence,” said study author Dr. Xiao Ou Shu, a professor of medicine and a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

There has been some concern that soy might increase the risk of breast cancer or worsen the prognosis for women already diagnosed with the disease because soy is what’s known as a phytoestrogen. That means that it can act like a weak form of estrogen in the body.

However, it appears those concerns may have been unfounded because Shu and her colleagues found that soy actually reduces the availability of naturally occurring estrogen by binding to its receptors.

“In our study, we found that soy food has a very similar effect to tamoxifen,” said Shu. Tamoxifen is a drug that blocks the action of estrogen in the body, which can be helpful for treating cancers that are fueled by estrogen. Read more…

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. drug regulators asked on Friday for manufacturers of prescription pain medications to provide more specifics on an industry plan to curb growing abuse of morphine, methadone, oxycodone and other opioid drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration in February had asked manufacturers including Johnson & Johnson and King Pharmaceuticals to come up with a joint plan to deal with the public health problem, particularly involving slow release and long acting versions of the drugs. This is the first time the agency has sought to develop risk evaluation and mitigation strategy for an entire class of drugs.

At a Friday meeting, industry representatives told FDA they intended to develop a phased-in approach to deal with the problem. This could include a voluntary training program for doctors to better educate them about proper use of pain killers and government certification for prescribing of controlled substances.

Currently, a physician must be certified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to prescribe this class of drugs. Congress would have to approve any requirement for physician training to receive DEA certification.

The director of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, John Jenkins, said the goal was to find a balance between reducing abuse of the drugs and maintaining access for patients who need the pain killers.

There was concern that doctors might opt out of prescribing the pain killers if the requirements are too burdensome.

FDA will hold more meetings with the industry group, doctors and the public next year.

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

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CHICAGO (Reuters health) – Add severe back pain and spine abnormalities to the list of problems overweight and obese adolescents can develop.

Among a group of young people who came to an emergency department for severe back pain, researchers found that many had abnormalities in the lower spine. Most of those abnormalities occurred within the discs, which are sponge-like cushions in between the bones of the spine.

Spinal disc abnormalities were more common in children who were overweight or obese.

“Back pain and degenerative disc disease are yet another problem associated with obesity in children, along with type 2 diabetes,” Dr. Judah G. Burns, of The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City reported here at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA 2009).

“Disc herniation and spinal disease are generally thought of as a problem of older people, but we’re seeing it in obese youngsters, too. This is the first study to show an association between increased body mass index and disc abnormalities in children,” Burns noted.  (Read more…)

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