Generic Allegra

High exposure to certain now-banned industrial chemicals may lead to fewer female births, a new study suggests.

The findings, reported in the journal Environmental Health, add to evidence that the two groups of related chemicals — polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — may affect human reproduction.

PBBs were once widely used as flame retardants in plastics, electronic and textiles, while PCBs were used in everything from appliances and fluorescent lighting to insulation and insecticides.

While the chemicals were banned in the 1970s as potential health hazards, they remain a public-health concern because they linger in the environment and accumulate in the fat of fish, mammals and birds.

For the current study, researchers used data from a group of Michigan residents who, in the early 1970s, had been inadvertently exposed to high levels of PBBs; the chemicals had been accidentally mixed into animal feed, leading to human exposure through contaminated meat, eggs and milk.

The researchers observed that, from 1975 to 1988, women in the study group had a higher-than-average rate of male births, relative to the national average.

There was also a suggestion of increased odds of a male birth when both parents’ combined PBB exposure was particularly high — above the midpoint for the study group — compared with couples whose PBB exposure was lower.

Similarly, couples with high PCB levels had a higher rate of male births.

What this all means for the public at large, however, is unknown, according to lead researcher Metrecia Terrell, of Emory University in Atlanta.

“This was a unique situation, so it’s very difficult to extend the findings to people with everyday exposures,” she said in an interview.

“Exposure in the general population would be much lower,” Terrell pointed out, “and we just don’t know if there are effects on sex ratio.”

Male births have always outnumbered female ones, but some research suggests that the male-to-female birth ratio is declining in the U.S. and elsewhere. One recent study found that in the U.S. in 2001, there were 104.6 boys born for every 100 girls; that compared with a ratio of 105.5 male births for every 100 female ones in 1970.

The researchers speculate that environmental toxins might be playing a role. Certain chemicals may, for example, affect the viability of sperm that bear the Y chromosome — which determines male sex — or the viability of male fetuses.

In this study, however, high exposure to PBBs and PCBs was linked to an increase in male births. Exactly why is unclear, according to Terrell.

Certain PBBs and PCBs have been shown to alter levels of male and female sex hormones, she and her colleagues note. But whether they promote the survival of Y-bearing over X-bearing sperm, or affect the survival of female fetuses is unknown.

Terrell said that continuing research on the chemicals’ potential reproductive effects is needed.

New research has uncovered possible causes of epilepsy related to signals in the brain that go haywire.

It suggests that when a certain protein is missing in the brains of mice, the animals have epileptic seizures. The protein appears to be important to the brain’s ability to calm and fine-tune itself.

The researchers, who report their findings in the Sept. 18 issue of Cell, found that neural connections in the brain were excitable in the mice even though connections appeared normal.

When the protein was restored, the brains of the mice began acting normally again.

The specific protein referred to is one encoded by plasticity related gene-1 (PRG-1) and is found only in the brain, according to the researchers. Its calming effect depends on how the protein interacts with lipids that provide a signaling function in the brain.

Epilepsy occurs when signals in the brain become disrupted. People with the condition can suffer from a long list of symptoms, including seizures, strange behavior and emotions, and loss of consciousness.

There’s no cure for the disorder, but it can be controlled by medicine and surgery in an estimated 80 percent of cases. In recent years, people with epilepsy have turned to a device that stimulates the body’s vagus nerve.

With the H1N1 swine flu virus lurking in every nook and cranny, all Americans should be on guard this coming flu season.

But experts say those living and working in crowded locales — schools, colleges, prisons, cruise ships, airplanes, military barracks — need to be extra careful.

“Any crowded place carries a heightened risk,” said Dr. Melinda Moore, a senior health researcher at the Rand Corp., in Arlington, Va. “It really has to do with people being in close quarters and having disease-transmitting behaviors such as coughing and sneezing.”

“The virus is mainly spread the respiratory route, and it’s also on inanimate objects like doors and knobs and handles and desktops and telephones,” added Dr. Stuart Beeber, attending pediatrician at Northern Westchester Hospital Center, in Mount Kisco, N.Y. “It’s mainly in close quarters where a lot of people are together, such as in classrooms or offices, potentially even movie theaters.”

The danger of transmission lies not only in the fact that hordes of people are together for long periods of time, but that those hordes may not be practicing good hygiene.

“Any environment in which people are crowded together with compromised hygiene carries a heightened risk,” said Dr. Dean Blumberg, an associate professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, Davis, Children’s Hospital. “It’s when people don’t have access to hand washing or shower facilities.”

Younger children are not naturally very hygienic, Blumberg pointed out.

College students may also engage in behaviors that are friendly to the spread of the H1N1 virus, such as kissing and sharing drinks. If those drinks are alcoholic, judgment may be affected, resulting in even more unsafe behaviors. Smoking can also compromise the respiratory system, making you more vulnerable to infection, Blumberg said.

The added problem in jails and prisons is that stepped-up hygiene needs to be balanced with safety and, in some cases, could actually compromise safety, Blumberg said. For example, “alcohol-based hand gels can be dangerous in that environment,” he said.

Budget cuts may even be contributing to a hygiene crisis. The current fiscal problems plaguing California affect all school facilities, including those related to hygiene, Blumberg said.

“The people involved may not be quite as interested in disease prevention compliance as they are with other things, but that doesn’t make it any less important,” Moore said.

The first line of protection is what experts call “respiratory etiquette.” Coughing and sneezing into your elbow or handkerchief doesn’t require any special facilities. And, as often as you can, wash your hands or cleanse them with hand foam or alcohol gel. “You may also want to wipe down surfaces that you are in frequent contact with, like door knobs,” Beeber said.

These are also messages the airline and cruise-ship industry are emphasizing more than usual right now, although, for the most part, it’s business as usual for travelers.

According to Erik Elvejord, a spokesman for Holland America Line, based in Seattle, the cruise ship industry is already bound by strict public health standards, including not letting sick passengers board a ship and isolating sick passengers who are already on board. Ships do have some flu-testing equipment on board as well as antivirals, he said. Passengers also receive notes on their pillow reminding them to wash their hands, and containers of hand sanitizer are placed all around the ships, although these measures are not new, Elvejord added. “We’ve kind of been doing what we’ve been doing all along,” he said.

Although one passenger on a recent commercial airline flight was told by the flight crew that blankets were no longer available in economy class because of swine flu concerns, David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association (ATA), said he has “not seen that wholesale.”

For the most part, the airline industry is also proceeding with travel-as-usual. “We [already] have pretty sophisticated filtering systems,” he said.

Debunking one persistent myth, Castelveter stressed that cabin air is not recirculated, but comes in the side, moves in a circular motion, then exits the plane into the great beyond. The worst danger comes from the person sitting next to you — not in front or behind, Castelveter said. “The person who sneezes in row 3 will have no impact on someone sitting in row 11,” he said.

Airlines are being more diligent in passing out hand-washing messages, and both water and antibacterial soap are available on most airplanes.

The ATA is also communicating regularly with CDC officials and will follow any recommendations they make, such as screening passengers before boarding an aircraft. So far, nothing has changed, Castelveter said.

As always, people who are sick should stay away from others. “The buzz word is social isolation, so children who have flu-like symptoms should stay home from school and workers who have flu-like symptoms should stay home from work until they have been fever-free for 24 hours without any drugs,” Beeber said.

Problems carrying out daily chores or enjoying hobbies could predict which people with “mild cognitive impairment” will progress more quickly to Alzheimer’s dementia, U.S. researchers report.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is “a condition in which a person has problems with memory, language, or another mental function severe enough to be noticeable to other people and to show up on tests, but not serious enough to interfere with daily life.” This type of mental state is considered a risk factor for dementia.

In fact, some studies have found that about 10 percent to 15 percent of those with MCI will progress to dementia each year, according to background information in the new study.

Reporting in the September issue of the Archives of Neurology, the researchers sought to determine if there were telltale signs within MCI that might spot those people who would progress more rapidly to full-blown dementia. To do so, they collected data on 111 people with mild cognitive impairment, then evaluated these individuals using brain scans and cognition tests.

Over the next two years of follow-up, 28 people did go on to develop dementia.

On their own, the tests did not predict which patients went on to develop dementia, said lead researcher Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, an associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis.

However, level of daily function was a key predictor, Farias said.

“So, if an older adult is starting to display problems in daily life, such as problems shopping independently, problems managing their own finances, problems performing household chores, and problems maintaining their hobbies, they are more likely to develop a dementia within several years,” she said.

Farias cautioned that the study involved people visiting a clinic because they were already having memory and other problems, so the implications could be different among the general population of older adults.

“If you look at individuals in the community, you see a much slower progression to dementia in those with some mild cognitive impairment,” she said. “The time to develop dementia once someone has mild cognitive impairment is probably slower in the general population of older adults than we had previously thought.”

Still, any kind of early warning is helpful, and Farias believes health-care providers should ask patients and those who know them well — a spouse or adult child — about how they are doing in their daily lives.

“It is important to keep in mind that sometimes individuals themselves lack awareness of some of these problems. So it is important, if at all possible, to get feedback from individuals who are familiar with how the older adult is functioning in their daily life,” she added.

If there is evidence or suspicion that an older adult has some mild cognitive or memory problems, and it is starting to interfere with their ability to do daily activities, there is a higher likelihood this individual is developing a dementia and they should be closely monitored, Farias said.

Greg M. Cole, a neuroscientist at the Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System and associate director of the Alzheimer’s Center at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, said it is crucial to be able to identify people with early Alzheimer’s disease, “if we want to test methods of preventing it.”

This study illustrates the difficulties in early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in aging people with mild problems with memory and cognition, Cole said.

“In my view, because memory and cognitive performance vary widely in our population no matter what age, the best indications of ongoing decline are going to be seen against past individual performance rather than some cross-sectional ‘normalized’ standard,” he said.

Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., agreed that, despite the lack of effective treatments, spotting Alzheimer’s disease early remains important.

“If people in the family start to recognize a change in memory/learning patterns, that might be sufficient to identify someone who could develop Alzheimer’s disease,” Peterson said. “Don’t wait until the person is having trouble driving, is having trouble paying their bills or having trouble functioning in the community — that’s dementia,” he said. “This study tells us that we can identify important symptoms earlier and it may be worthwhile doing so.”

An inadequate amount of nightly sleep on a recurring basis, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle and overeating, may fuel the development of diabetes, results of a new study hint.

“Our findings suggest that combining the unhealthy aspects of the Westernized lifestyle with insufficient sleep may add to the risk of overweight and sedentary individuals to develop diabetes,” Dr. Plamen Penev, of the University of Chicago, Illinois, and a senior author of the study, told Reuters Health.

Penev and colleagues subjected 11 healthy but sedentary middle-aged men and women to two 14-day periods of sedentary living with free access to food and either 5.5 hours or 8.5 hours of sleep each night.

As nightly sleep times changed from 8.5 to 5.5 hours, the participants went to bed later and got out of bed earlier and, as a result, average sleep duration was reduced by about two hours a day.

When the adults had their bedtimes decreased from a healthy 8.5 hours to 5.5 hours they showed changes in their response to two common sugar tests, which were similar to those seen in people with an increased risk of developing diabetes.

“If confirmed by future larger studies,” Penev told Reuters Health, “these results would indicate that a healthy lifestyle should include not only healthy eating habits and adequate amounts of physical activity, but also obtaining a sufficient amount of sleep.”

An experimental treatment that suppresses the immune system to put multiple sclerosis into remission completely reversed the disease in mice, Canadian scientists say.

In MS, the immune system attacks the central nervous system. The new treatment, called GIFT15, is composed of two proteins, GSM-CSF and interleukin-15, that are fused in the lab. Normally, the individual proteins act to stimulate the immune system, but when they’re stuck together, the proteins suppress immune response, the researchers explained.

They do this by converting B-cells — a type of white blood cell normally involved in immune response — into immune suppressive cells.

“GIFT15 can take your normal, run-of-the-mill B-cells and convert them … into these super-powerful B-regulatory cells,” study team leader Dr. Jacques Galipeau, of the Jewish General Hospital Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University in Montreal, said in a university news release.

He and his colleagues took normal B-cells from mice and sprinkled GIFT15 on the B-cells. “And when we gave them back intravenously to mice ill with multiple sclerosis, the disease went away,” Galipeau said.

The treatment was fully effective with a single dose, and no significant side effects were seen in the mice, the researchers reported.

It’s no secret that men don’t like to go to the doctor, but new research finds they’re especially likely to stay home if they’re big on being macho.

Middle-aged men who are most devoted to traditional beliefs about masculinity are half as likely as other men to get routine medical care, researchers report.

It’s not clear whether feelings about masculinity directly make men avoid doctor visits; the study only indicates that a cause-and-effect link might exist. Nor do researchers know what this might mean for men’s health.

Still, the findings suggest that “we could help men’s health if we could dismantle this idea that manhood and masculinity is about being invulnerable, not needing help and not showing pain,” said study author Kristen W. Springer, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Previous research has suggested that “men are less likely to go to the doctor than women, across the board,” Springer said — a notion she finds surprising because men are wealthier overall, potentially giving them better access to medical care.

Springer and a colleague launched their study to determine the role that ideas about masculinity play in the decisions men make about their health care.

Springer said she defines masculinity as a “stereotypical, old-school, John Wayne- and Sylvester Stallone-style” approach to life.

The researchers examined the results of surveys taken in 2004 by 1,000 white, middle-aged men in Wisconsin. The men answered questions about their beliefs regarding masculinity and disclosed whether they’d gotten recommended annual physicals, prostate checks and flu shots.

After adjusting the results to reduce the chance they would be thrown off by such things as a high number of married participants, researchers found that men who were the highest believers in masculine standards were 50 percent less likely to get the recommended care than other men.

Springer was unable to provide statistics about the percentage of men in each group who got the recommended care. Overall, though, fewer than half of all men did, according to the study.

There was one exception to the rule: Blue-collar workers who had a high attachment to masculinity were more likely to get the recommended health care.

The study has limitations. All participants were white, and all had completed high school. And Springer said unanswered questions remain, such as whether spouses play a role through “support or nagging.”

The findings were to be presented Monday at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in San Francisco.

Howard S. Friedman, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside, said his research has found that less masculine men live longer than masculine men. But the new study doesn’t show anything like that because it doesn’t examine long-term effects on health, he said.

As for the gap between men and women when it comes to living longer, he said, “it would be a stretch, going beyond the data, to link it closely to men’s increased mortality risk as compared to women.”

Playgrounds are great sources of fun for children — as long as they’re safe.

The U.S. National Safety Council says parents should inspect playgrounds before their children use them for the following safety features:
A soft ground surface such as mulch, sand, wood chips, rubber mats or shredded tires, instead of concrete, grass or dirt.
Soft swing seats, and swings that are set apart from other playground equipment. Look for full-bucket seats rather than partial ones that children could slide out of.
Slides that are firmly anchored to the ground with sturdy handrails and traction on the stairs. A bar at the top of every slide should force children to sit down.
Seesaws that are spring-loaded, instead of adjustable seesaws with chains.
Climbing equipment that is well secured and has sturdy handrails and steps.

Doctors treat spring allergies with a number of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. Over-the-counter allergy drugs are effective for many people and include the following:

* Antihistamines reduce sneezing, sniffling, and itching by lowering the amount of histamine (the substance produced during an allergic reaction) in the body.
* Decongestants clear mucus out of the nasal passageways to relieve congestion and swelling.
* Antihistamine/decongestants combine the effects of both drugs.
* Nasal spray decongestants relieve congestion and may clear clogged nasal passages faster than oral decongestants.
* Cromolyn sodium nasal spray can help prevent hay fever by stopping the release of histamine before it can trigger allergy symptoms.
* Eye drops relieve itchy, watery eyes.

Even though you can buy these allergy drugs without a prescription, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor first to make sure you choose the right medication. Some antihistamines can make you feel sleepy, so you need to be careful when taking them during the day (although non-drowsy formulations are also available). Don’t use over-the-counter antihistamines and decongestants for more than a few days without talking to your doctor.

If over-the-counter remedies don’t help allergies, your doctor may recommend a prescription medication or allergy shots. Prescription nasal sprays with corticosteroids reduce inflammation in the nose. Allergy shots expose your body to gradually increasing doses of the allergen until you become tolerant of it. They can relieve your symptoms for a longer period of time than oral and nasal allergy medications. Although they don’t work for everyone, in people who do see a response, allergy shots can stave off symptoms for a few years.

Well, it’s officially allergy season! If you are not affected by it, count your lucky stars. Unfortunately, mother nature has me waking up looking like Rocky after a 20 round fight with the Russian, sans the bruising. If you also wake up a little on the puffy side, I have a quick fix solution for you. The night before, take an allergy pill such as Allegra or Claritin. This will help with the swelling. ***Warning***Until manufacturers invent a better smell, I don’t suggest slathering your eyes with Preparation H, unless you want to smell like medicated hemorrhoids.
In the morning, the swelling should be subdued; however, I recommend soaking a wash cloth in ice water for a few minutes. Then just apply the wash cloth to your face for about 5 minutes. You should look “really” awake; if not… try the hemorrhoid cream!
Apply skin care products as normal, using a de-puffing eye cream. Also, eyeliner draws extra attention, so I would avoid it on mornings when puffiness is out of hand.