Pharmacy Archives - Page 37 of 41

Dr Art Hister – Coffee and Brain Cancer

The hardest thing I have to do in my regular health talks to the public is convince that legion of coffee-haters out there (you know who you are) that coffee is actually a health drink.

So while most anti-coffee folks consider coffee to be nothing more than a vehicle to deliver caffeine, coffee is in fact a health drink loaded with minerals, anti-oxidants, and god-knows-what-else that goes into a good cup of coffee (and I for one don’t consider that brown fluid that you get from most coffee outlets to be real coffee; real coffee for me is a good hand-ground espresso, or even a double).

Studies have shown that coffee drinkers have lower risks of lots and lots of adverse health consequences such as two that stand out for me: Type 2 diabetes and dementia.

And you can now add brain cancer to that pro-side of the coffee ledger.

According to a recent huge multi-country study of over 400,000 individuals which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, people who drink as little as one-half cup of coffee a day had up to a 34 % lower risk of being diagnosed with a type of brain cancer known as a glioma (and yes, I have to grudgingly admit that those who drank tea regularly also seemed to get the same benefit in this study).

I’d tell you more but to be honest, I have got to go and enjoy another brain-saving double cappuccino!

Dr Art Hister – Gluten Free Diets

Here’s an important warning for anyone who has been diagnosed with celiac disease, and perhaps even for those who have never officially been diagnosed as celiac but who still think they may be: stick to your gluten-free diet.

According to a small study (17 people) presented at a recent meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology, celiac disease may be becoming refractory in some people. Meaning that, for a few people, even if they are on a gluten-free diet, their symptoms do not abate and they require medical therapy (drugs to alleviate the symptoms and to reduce the inflammation).
So why this advice to stick to a gluten-free diet, you may well ask , seeing as it doesn’t work for these refractory cases.

Because the researchers believe that it’s much more likely that the disease becomes refractory in people who don’t stick to a gluten-free diet in the first place.

In other words, if you’re a celiac, the more you cheat on your diet (which is pretty easy to do by people who have few or minimal symptoms), the more likely it is that the disease will become refractory.

So, if you don’t want to battle with a condition that ends up controlling you rather than you controlling it, stick to a gluten-free diet from the moment you think you may be a celiac.
Besides, there are so many great gluten-free recipes and foods available these days.

Dr Art Hister – Why Women Live Longer

Here’s a poser for which there are no easy answers, although there’s a Nobel Prize in it for the person who comes up with a way to counteract it: why do women outlive men?

This is true in every single country in the world (I believe that the Maldives, wherever those are – or that is – was the last place in the world, according to WHO, where men still outlived women. But that reversed sometime last year, much to the chagrin, no doubt of Maldivean men).

Here in Canada, by the way, the difference in life expectancy between men and women is just under 5 years, a gap that has narrowed a bit over the last decade, and each time the new statistics come out, some headlines (particularly from more liberal publications and media groups) imply that this narrowing is actually not a good thing for women, in that it means we are doing a better job at keeping men alive than we are doing at keeping women alive.

Speaking as man, though, I say, “Hey, it’s about time we started doing that.”

Anyways, all this was brought up because a survey from New York City found that while women in the Big Apple can expect to live to 82 (the overall American life expectancy for women is 81), men in Gotham live only to 76 on average.

But here’s the thing: the researchers believe that most of that gap is due to preventable causes. In other words, men in NYC die much earlier from all sorts of things they can actually do something about, something that I think is also true for men in every culture and every country.

These preventable factors include: heart disease (90% of heart attacks are linked to poor lifestyle habits), AIDS, murder (this is New York, after all), obesity (a staggering 71% of men in NYC are overweight or obese compared to only 57% of women) , poor nutrition, being sedentary (more than NYC women, clearly), and (this is a big one for Americans, where health care costs so much, although every male should think about this one because men are reluctant in general to follow health advice or to see a doctor regularly) not attending a health care professional on a regular basis.

Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

There is no such thing as ‘minor’ surgery.

For obvious reasons – we are nearly all always hopeful of the best happening to us – most of us don’t often hear the potential negative consequences of some choice we’re making: a big mortgage, a new stock purchase or surgery we are going to get.

Now when it comes to mortgages and stocks going bad, all we lose is money; when it comes to surgery not working out as well as we’d hoped, we can have problems for the rest of our lives.

A reminder of that comes from a study in the British Journal of Surgery in which researchers talked to over 400 people in the Netherlands who’d had various types of surgery (cosmetic procedures, neurological operations, etc) a year after the surgery had been completed.

And a surprisingly high number of people were not satisfied with the results:

17 % reported more pain that they had had before their operations
14 % said their functioning had deteriorated
16 % had “poorer mental health”
24 % complained of less vitality

What really caught my eye, though, is that 47% said they had ‘achieved near optimal recovery’, which I presume meant they were nearly completely better, but that means that 53% – over half – still had significant problems, and a large 15% claimed to have less than 50% recovery.

Surgery can be life-saving, it’s often the only option, and sometimes the best option, but it’s always good to remember that surgery also carries significant risks and doesn’t always lead to improvement, so if someone tells you that you are about to have only ‘minor’ surgery, especially if it’s an elective procedure, just remind yourself that the best definition of ‘minor’ surgery is surgery done on someone else.

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

If you want to run a marathon, get tested first.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, so many baby boomers have set themselves a goal of running a marathon (or several) before they pass into older age. Unfortunately, many have set out to do this without first determining if they are fit enough to undergo the load that marathon-running puts on their no-longer-that-young hearts.

So a recent study presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2010 should get at least a few marathon-hoping individuals to sit up and take note.

In this study that used MRIs and a sophisticated battery of tests on a group of amateur marathon runners both before and up to 8 weeks after the race, the researchers found that “abnormal heart segments (are) more widespread and significant” in non-fit runners (presumably, more widespread than most people or doctors think).
And the lead researcher concludes that “marathon runners can be a lot less fit than they think” (which if you’ve ever been to a marathon and watched the parade of runners that come by is absolutely no surprise). He goes on to advise that everyone who is thinking of running a marathon should seriously consider getting a test known as Vo2 max, which measures oxygen consumption by the heart while the person is working out.

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Bad news for those of you who swear you can’t lose weight because of your genes: you’re probably wrong.

Lots of people swear that no matter what they do, they can’t lose weight, even if they “don’t eat more than a mouse eats, honest”, even if they “exercise till I can’t stand it any longer”.

But the brutal truth is that even though there are a few people out there who indeed cannot lose weight easily, most of us can, and when we don’t lose weight on a diet or from exercise, it’s very likely because we are eating too much or not working out enough, or more often than not, both of those combined.

And if you believe the data from a study published in PLoS Medicine, even most obese people who are genetically prone to becoming massively overweight can nonetheless overcome their genetic predisposition and still lose a significant amount of weight.

In this study, even in obese people who had inherited “17 variants” of genes leading to obesity (in other words, the dice were really loaded against these folks staying slim), those who did the most exercise tended to weigh much less than those who were sedentary, and some were even able to maintain normal weights by doing enough exercise.

Bottom line: if you want your bottom not to grow too large, do more, eat less.

Sorry, but I just report em as I see em.

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

At least one of the reasons we are getting so much fatter on average is that we’re so surrounded by people who are overweight that we’ve lost the sense of what a normal weight should be.

At least that seems to be the case in the US, and I am sure it’s not much different up here.

A recent Harris Interactive/Health Day survey asked a representative group of American adults how much they weighed and how tall they were. The respondents were then asked whether they thought, by BMI status, if they were normal weight or overweight.

A substantial number of the survey takers – 30% – who were overweight by BMI criteria (a BMI over 25) replied that they felt they were normal weight, while 70% of those who were obese thought they were “merely overweight”.

BMI is not a perfect measure of weight. For example, since muscle weighs a lot, a very muscular person can have a high BMI but be normal weight.

That said, most of us are not too muscular (some of us – me, for example – aren’t even slightly muscular) and so for us, BMI is a pretty good measuring rod for what our weight should be.
Most experts say that you should be aiming for between 20 and 25, although I am a lot more liberal than that, so I figure that if you’re working out or just being quite active, you can allow yourself a few extra pounds without worrying about it (never mind “allowing” yourself; how about “accepting” instead because honestly, how do you keep those (few?) extra pounds off anyway as you get older, eh?)

Dr Art Hister – Coffee and Brain Cancer

Dr Art Hister – Gluten Free Diets

Dr Art Hister – Why Women Live Longer

Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

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Dr Art Hister – Coffee and Brain Cancer

Dr Art Hister – Gluten Free Diets

Dr Art Hister – Why Women Live Longer

Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

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