Eating disorders are usually associated with teenagers, but they are also common among older Americans. Such eating disorders include bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and anorexia.
Avoiding some tests and practices often done in hospitals can save money, without affecting quality of care, an expert group says. The Journal of Hospital Medicine published the recommendations online August 19. The advice comes from the Choosing Wisely campaign, an alliance of doctors. The group recommends ways to reduce waste in medicine. It has focused on releasing lists of tests, procedures and treatments that often are not needed. The list just published comes from the Society of Hospital Medicine and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation. It lists five items that often are not needed for children in the hospital. For example, the group says not to order chest X-rays for most children with asthma or bronchiolitis. Drugs to suppress acid in babies with reflux also don’t work, the group says. Five more items are listed for adult patients.
Cutting off blood supply to the arm, briefly, before heart surgery may improve survival by reducing injury to the heart. That’s the conclusion of the first study to look at results of the technique after a year. The study included more than 300 people who were scheduled to have heart bypass surgery. They were randomly divided into 2 groups. People in the first group received remote ischemic preconditioning. Right after they received anesthesia for surgery, a blood pressure cuff was applied to one upper arm. The cuff was inflated and kept in place for 5 minutes to restrict blood supply to the arm. Then it was removed for 5 minutes. This was done 3 times in a row before surgery. The other group did not have preconditioning. Three days after surgery, researchers measured troponin, a protein that indicates heart muscle damage.
A drug used to treat an enlarged prostate also reduces prostate cancer cases by nearly one-third and does not affect the risk of death, a new study finds. The research is an 18-year follow-up on an earlier study. Nearly 19,000 men were randomly assigned to receive either finasteride (Proscar) or placebo (fake) pills. The first phase of the study showed fewer prostate cancers for men who took finasteride. But they had a higher rate of high-grade cancers, which are more likely to spread. The new study looked at what happened to these men over time. Prostate cancer diagnosis was reduced by about 30% for those who got the real drug. About 3.5% of the cancers in this group were high-grade, compared with 3% in the placebo group. But death rates were the same whether men received the real drug or not. The drug also did not change death rates for men with high-grade cancers.
People who had a pet as a child usually have no shortage of stories — and warm memories — to tell about the experience. Movies, television shows and other media are filled with adorable images of children and their pets: Dogs waiting outside school windows, birds helping lonely little girls to talk, happy children playing with kittens. It's enough to make every parent run to the pet store and buy their child some sort of animal today. But timing and picking the appropriate pet for the family are key.