Because golf is a leisurely sport, many people don’t think of it as promoting heart health. Conversely, since it is easygoing, injuries are believed to be rare. The August issue of the Harvard Men’s Health Watch debunks these myths and advises readers how to benefit the most from their golf game.
Golf can be good for your health and safe for your heart. These health benefits don’t come from swinging your club, but from walking. Walking an average course for a round of golf can be as
After years of keeping your high blood pressure in check with diet, exercise and medication, you learn that yours suddenly is too high.
The August issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter discusses why you and your doctor will want to find the reason for the sudden jump, called secondary hypertension.
Usually, high blood pressure has no known cause. Hypertension of this sort is called essential hypertension and develops gradually over many years.
Secondary hypertension
Men, if you’re trudging to the bathroom four or five times a night, it might be more than an inconvenience.
With age, many men develop an enlarged prostate. Symptoms such as frequent urination or difficulty starting urination may seem like nuisances you can tolerate. But if left untreated too long, an enlarged prostate can damage your bladder muscle and your kidneys.
The August issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter recommends that men see their doctor sooner rather than later
If your travel plans include a Caribbean cruise or another tropical destination, the August issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter offers a convincing reason to pack the mosquito repellant — dengue fever.
Certain mosquitoes spread dengue (DENG-gay) fever, a severe flu-like illness that leaves you feeling miserable for one to two weeks. Dengue fever is a major health concern, with an estimated 50 million dengue infections occurring every year. There’s no treatment other than bed rest,
Reviewing the last 10 years of cancer research much as they might the production of a play complete with cast members, opening acts and an ever-twisting plot, two of the most cited names in science say that one of the most promising roles that newly discovered cancer genes may perform is in early detection, which likely will be as important as new treatments.
In an editorial review that is the centerpiece of Nature Medicine’s 10th anniversary August issue, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer
Blood pressure readings recorded in a computerized database provide as much valid information on care as doctor’s notes, suggesting that automated health databases can help physicians monitor chronic diseases like hypertension, according to new research.
Extra information contained in doctors’ notes changed the assessment of whether or not high blood pressure was controlled for a given patient in fewer than 2 percent of the cases examined by Ann Borzecki, M.D., M.P.H., of the Bedfor
Today, adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends. In the bridge to adulthood, also referred to as early adulthood, many more young people are caught between the demands of employment (e.g., the need to learn advanced job skills) and economic dependence on their family to support them during this transition.
While most young adults are physically mature and possess the intellectual, social, and physiological skills needed for adulthood, many lack the economic independence to be
Everyone knows not to get between a mother and her offspring. What makes these females unafraid when it comes to protecting their young may be low levels of a peptide, or small piece of protein, released in the brain that normally activates fear and anxiety, according to new research published in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience.
“We see this fierce protection of offspring is so many animals,” says Stephen Gammie, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of zo
Herbivores’ fear of predators influences vegetation growth, ecologists state
The 1995 reintroduction of wolves in the northern range of Yellowstone National Park has led to increased growth of willow and cottonwood in the park by causing fear responses in elk and other ungulates, according to William J. Ripple and Robert L. Beschta of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Ripple and Beschta, writing in the August 2004 issue of BioScience, argue that fear of predation when wolves are present
A study published today in the August edition of the Journal of Cataract & Refractive Surgery reports that wavefront technology, a new way of measuring how vision is distorted by irregularities in the eye, offers a widely accepted means for corroborating cataract patients’ vision complaints, which may lead to earlier treatment with attendant enhanced patient safety and less loss of quality of life.
The study, Higher-Order Aberrations of Lenticular Opacities, by N. Sachdev, S
Mayo Clinic and British researchers have developed a new approach to cancer vaccines that purposely kills healthy skin cells to target the immune system against tumors. The new approach has eradicated skin cancer tumors in mice. The approach and results challenge conventional thinking on the creation of cancer vaccines. Their report on the “heat shock” vaccine therapy appears in the August issue of Nature Biotechnology, Results are promising because multiple rounds of treatment eradicated skin cancer
MRI reveals that greater trochanteric fractures of the hip that are diagnosed as isolated on X-ray are frequently underestimated and are neither isolated nor minor, say a pair of researchers from Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY.
Frieda Feldman, MD, and Ronald B. Staron, MD, analyzed 37 patients over the age of fifty who had fallen and fractured their hip. All patients were diagnosed on X-ray as having greater trochanteric fractures, an injury to one of the bony protrusions
Events like the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, immortalized in “The Grapes of Wrath” and remembered as a transforming event for millions of Americans, were regular parts of much-earlier cycles of droughts followed by recoveries in the region, according to new studies by a multi-institutional research team led by Duke University.
Some of those prehistoric droughts in the northern Great Plains of what is now the United States also lasted longer than modern-day dry spells such as the 19
In a study with implications for how North American trees might respond to a changing climate, molecular information collected by Duke University researchers refutes a widely accepted theory that many of the continent’s tree species migrated rapidly from the deep South as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age.
“When you put the molecular data together with other lines of evidence, it suggests that maybe they didn’t move as fast as we previously thought,” sai
Independent research groups have discovered novel therapeutic targets in the battle of the bulge
Independent research groups have discovered novel therapeutic targets in the battle of the bulge. By altering the expression of a single — albeit different – gene, Drs. Roger Davis (UMASS Medical School, USA) and Ying-Hue Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) have succeeded in creating two different strains of transgenic mice that don’t gain weight, even when fed fat-laden, high calorie die
Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have made the unexpected discovery that significant differences can exist in the overall content of DNA and genes contained in individual genomes. These findings, which point to possible new explanations for individual uniqueness as well as why disease develops, are published in the September 2004 issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics (available online August 1
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