Birth Weights Fell From 1990 to 2005
January 22, 2010
The Washington Post
By Lauran Neergaard
U.S. newborns are arriving a little smaller, says puzzling new Harvard research that can’t explain why. Fatter mothers tend to produce heavier babies, and obesity is soaring. Yet the study of nearly 37 million births shows newborns were a bit lighter in 2005 than in 1990, ending a half-century of rising birth weights.
The change isn’t big: The average birth weight of full-term babies is just under 7 1/2 pounds, a drop of about 1.8 ounces, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
That’s surprising considering doctor warnings about 9-pound, or bigger, babies. So the researchers double-checked.
The proportion born large for their gestational age dropped about 2 percent, which is good.
“What physicians are responding to is that the bigger babies are getting bigger,” said lead researcher Dr. Emily Oken of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Plus, “babies are still bigger than they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. It’s just the trend seems to have flattened or reversed itself.”
That’s particularly true for women at lowest risk for too-small babies: White, well-educated, married non-smokers who got early prenatal care. Still, their babies, on average, weighed 2.8 ounces less over the study period.
Babies born too big are at increased risk of obesity and diabetes later in life. On the other hand, babies born too small may require intensive care right away and also be at risk for later chronic diseases. The proportion of babies small for their gestational age did increase slightly, by 1 percent, Oken said.
Moreover, babies’ length at birth suggests even full-term pregnancies are 2.5 days shorter than they used to be. That can’t account for all the weight change, and Oken couldn’t find a full explanation from the birth certificates she studied.
Oken excluded premature babies, as well as twins or other multiples, from her study. (Obese mothers also are at higher risk of having a preemie.) Yes, there are more scheduled cesarean sections or induced labors now, but her analysis concluded that wasn’t to blame.
But that’s not clear as induction often isn’t listed on birth certificates, and the study found a drop in babies born at 40 or 41 weeks gestation, noted Dr. Joann Petrini, an adviser to the March of Dimes.
Regardless, it’s too soon know what this drop means for babies but “we should keep vigilant” about any decline among the smallest newborns, Petrini said.
The study uses the most recent data available from official U.S. birth certificates.
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Traffic Noise Increases Blood Pressure
December 28, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Living in areas with high traffic noise may lead to higher blood pressure and a concurrently higher risk of heart attack or stroke, according to a study conducted by researchers from Lund University Hospital in Sweden and published in the journal Environmental Health.
“Road traffic is the most important source of community noise,” said lead author Theo Bodin. “We found that exposure above 60 decibels was associated with high blood pressure among the relatively young and middle-aged, an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke.”
Previous studies have found connections between living near airports and higher blood pressure. Scientists believe that constant noise may place the body in a state of chronic stress, leading to higher heart rate and blood pressure. It may also harm health by disturbing sleep patterns.
Researchers examined health and residence data on more than 24,000 adult residents of Sweden, using their home addresses to determine the average level of ambient traffic noise in their neighborhoods. Young and middle-aged adults being regularly exposed to average noise levels between 45 and 65 decibels were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure than those in quieter neighborhoods, with risk increasing proportionally to noise level.
Among the middle-aged, 28 percent of those living in areas with noise averaging above 64 decibels reported high blood pressure. Only 17 percent of adults in the same age group and quieter neighborhoods suffered from hypertension. The numbers in younger adults were similar.
The researchers did not know why there appeared to be no link between noise and blood pressure in the elderly.
“The effect of noise may become less important, or harder to detect, relative to other risk factors with increasing age,” Bodin said. “Alternatively, it could be that noise annoyance varies with age.”
Sixty-five decibels is a little louder than a normal conversation. Recent data suggest that 30 percent of the European Union’s population is exposed to average traffic noise of 55 decibels or higher continually.
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New Human Sensory System Found Under Skin
December 11, 2009
Examiner
By Meg Marquardt
Researchers have found an entirely new system related to touch hidden beneath our skin. The study, published in the journal Pain, suggests that this network may play a pivotal role in diseases that cause chronic pain, such as intense migraines and fibromyalgia.
The sensory network is completely separate from the long nerves nestled beneath our skin that send back signals of textures, temperature, and pain to our brains. That traditional system is a workhorse, gathering in all the data in such an effective manner that someone with a normally functioning touch system would never know that a second one was there.
But what about someone without a functioning touch system? When David Bowsher, MD, of University of Liverpool’s Pain Research Institute diagnosed two patients with a rare form of an already rare disease, it was clear that something odd was happening. The patients had congenital insensitivity to pain. Most who have the condition struggle to feel anything, have injured themselves severely, and have some form of a mental handicap. But besides a lack of pain, the only issue with these patients was excessive sweating.
“For all intents and purposes, they had adequate sensation for daily living and could tell what is warm and cold, what is touching them, and what is rough and smooth,”said Bowsher. [EurekAlert]
He decided to send samples of the patient’s skin across the Atlantic to Frank Rice, PhD at Albany Medical College, who specializes in pain studies. Inside that skin, there was a mystery. There weren’t any of the normal nerves that tell us when something is frigid to the touch or that our cell phone is vibrating. But others were there, sensory nerves on the blood vessels and sweat glands.
“For many years, my colleagues and I have detected different types of nerve endings on tiny blood vessels and sweat glands, which we assumed were simply regulating blood flow and sweating. We didn’t think they could contribute to conscious sensation. However, while all the other sensory endings were missing in this unusual skin, the blood vessels and sweat glands still had the normal types of nerve endings. Apparently, these unique individuals are able to ‘feel things’ through these remaining nerve endings,” said Rice. “What we learned from these unusual individuals is that there’s another level of sensory feedback that can give us conscious tactile information.” [EurekAlert]
Though discovered in those who feel little pain, researchers wonder if the new system can help explain problems in those that feel too much pain. Diseases with chronic pain like fibromyalgia and migraines have unknown causes, which makes thier treatments fairly ineffective. More research into the sensory system is needed, though, for it is a truly unique phenomenon.
“It’s almost like hearing the subtle sound of a single instrument in the midst of a symphony,” said Rice. “It is only when we shift focus away from the nerve endings associated with normal skin sensation that we can appreciate the sensation hidden in the background.” [EurekAlert]
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Vaccinations Doing More Harm Than Good
November 20, 2009
Vactruth
By Andrew Moulden MD, PhD
This is a stern, yet humble, warning to all citizens of the globe. It is now proven that we are all being harmed by repeat vaccinations. This evidence must be circulated broadly in light of the imminent Fall, 2009 plan to turn North American schools into MASS vaccine centers to institute triple flu vaccine to us all. Children will be the first to be injected with experimental flu vaccines. The entire vaccine industry, as it turns out, has been experimental. We did not know that we were causing damages – for us all.
In case you are wondering what will happen, the answers are contained in this article. The same thing will happen as has been happening with all vaccines. Clinically silent ischemic brain and body damages will happen. The only difference is that you can now see these damages, with your own eyes, in the here and now, in real time, and in your family photos going back fifty or more years if you have to.
ALL vaccines are causing immediate and delayed, acute and chronic, waxing and waning, impairments to blood flow, throughout the brain and body. This IS causing us all to become chronically ill, sick, and causing brain damages along a continuum of clinically silent to death. This is causing ischemic “strokes”. In some respects, this is also “aging.” Since the damages are microscopic, we cannot see them as they occur. However, we can now see the neurological aftermath of these damages – within hours and days of vaccination – all vaccinations.
[View with PicLens]
In Revelations 18:4 by the epistle of Saint John we are told: “And I heard another voice from Heaven saying “Come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues.” All vaccinations, as you can now clearly see, are causing chronic illness and mass disorders on mass scales. The global health consequences clearly amount to plaques.
As a medically trained Doctor, a PhD trained neuroscientist/neuropsychologist, with a Masters degree in Child/language neurodevelopment, I have been trained to follow clinical observations to empirical assessment couched within the scientific model we rely upon to answer questions of: What is normal and what is not? What is cause? What is coincidence? What is factual? What is fancy? What is reproducible? What is random? What is measurable? What is predictable? What is truth? What is consequence? What is “going on”?
Science is only a man made truth-seeking tool. It is fallible. It is a statistical, probabilistic mathematical model. It has limitations. Wielded for profit – truth can become lost.
Scientific methods, design, and analyses can just as soon hide the truth as they can discover truth, or create “truth” de-novo.
Science cannot replace God-given tools of common sense and observation we all have. You do not need statistical probabilistic mathematical models, wielded by experts, to deny what you can see with your very own eyes.
If you place your hand on a hot stove element, you will be burned. If you do not experience pain and you cannot see the burn, then you will not learn that touching hot stove elements is harmful.
All vaccines have been causing “burns” to body and brain. The brain has no pain receptors. You will not feel the pain. You can, however, see the footprints of these “burns” immediate and delayed, from each vaccination. The evidence was before our eyes all along. We simply did not appreciate what these “burns” meant let alone that they were emerging, after each vaccination. The “burns” are largely to internal organ systems. We can ALL now see the damaging effects of these “burns” with our own eyes.
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Eliminate Diet Soda and Excess Salt to Keep Kidney Disease at Bay
November 13, 2009
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
According to the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), the number of people in the US diagnosed with kidney disease has doubled over the past 20 years. About 20 million Americans are at risk for developing kidney disease and the ASN web site states another 20 million Americans already have some evidence of chronic kidney disease. And when chronic kidney disease progresses, it often leads to kidney failure or end stage renal disease (ESRD) — resulting in ongoing, expensive dialysis treatments or even kidney transplants.
But like countless other diseases and conditions, kidney disease doesn’t just strike out of the blue. It is often the result of what people do to their own bodies. And researchers have just reported two direct ways diet appears to be associated with declining kidney function. The culprits? Eating food high in sodium (like the fast foods and processed junk snacks Americans love) and drinking artificially sweetened sodas.
Those are the findings of two new studies, both conducted by Julie Lin, MD, and Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which were recently presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting held in October in San Diego, California. The first study, entitled “Associations of Diet with Kidney Function Decline,” examined the impact of specific dietary components on declining kidney function over 11 years in more than 3,000 women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study. Dr. Lin and Dr. Curhan found that “in women with well-preserved kidney function, higher dietary sodium intake was associated with greater kidney function decline, which is consistent with experimental animal data that high sodium intake promotes progressive kidney decline.”
In previous research, scientists using information collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a long-term collection of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the US, had found a link between sugar containing sodas and urinary protein. However, they did not collect data on any kidney function changes related to drinking sweetened sodas. So, in their second study, Dr. Lin and Dr. Curhan, decided to specifically check for any kidney function decline in women who drink sodas regularly. Once again, they used data from the Nurses’ Health Study.
In a statement for the media, Dr. Lin reported they found “a significant two-fold increased odds, between two or more servings per day of artificially sweetened soda and faster kidney function decline; no relation between sugar-sweetened beverages and kidney function decline was noted.” Moreover, this association persisted even when the researchers accounted for age, obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, physical activity, calorie intake, diabetes and cigarette smoking. Clearly, artificially sweetened sodas are detrimental to kidney health.
“There are currently limited data on the role of diet in kidney disease,” said Dr. Lin in a statement to the press. “While more study is needed, our research suggests that higher sodium and artificially sweetened soda intake are associated with greater rate of decline in kidney function.”
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AMA Now Promoting Medicinal Marijuana
November 12, 2009
L.A. Times
By John Hoeffel
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.
The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.
In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.
“Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked cannabis,” said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that the limited number of studies was “insufficient to satisfy the current standards for a prescription drug product.”
The decision by the organization’s delegates at a meeting in Houston marks another step in the evolving view of marijuana, which an AMA report notes was once linked by the federal government to homicidal mania. Since California voters approved the use of medical marijuana in 1996, marijuana has moved steadily into the cultural mainstream spurred by the growing awareness that it can have beneficial effects for some chronically ill people.
This year, the Obama administration sped up that drift when it ordered federal narcotics agents not to arrest medical marijuana users and providers who follow state laws. Polls show broadening support for marijuana legalization.
Thirteen states allow the use of medical marijuana, and about a dozen more have considered it this year.
The AMA, however, also adopted as part of its new policy a sentence that admonishes: “This should not be viewed as an endorsement of state-based medical cannabis programs, the legalization of marijuana, or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product.”
The association also rejected a proposal to issue a more forceful call for marijuana to be rescheduled.
Nevertheless, marijuana advocates welcomed the development. “They’re clearly taking an open-minded stance and acknowledging that the evidence warrants a review. That is very big,” said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. “It’s not surprising that they are moving cautiously and one step at a time, but this is still a very significant change.”
Advocates also noted that the AMA rejected an amendment that they said would have undercut the medical marijuana movement. The measure would have made it AMA’s policy that “smoking is an inherently unsafe delivery method for any therapeutic agent, and therefore smoked marijuana should not be recommended for medical use.”
Dr. Michael M. Miller, a psychiatrist who practices addiction medicine, proposed the amendment. “Smoking is a bad delivery system because you’re combusting something and inhaling it,” he said.
Reaction from the federal government was muted.
Dawn Dearden with the Drug Enforcement Administration said: “At this point, it’s still a Schedule I drug, and we’re going to treat it as such.” The Food and Drug Administration declined to comment.
In a statement, the office of the White House drug czar reiterated the administration’s opposition to legalization and said that it would defer to “the FDA’s judgment that the raw marijuana plant cannot meet the standards for identity, strength, quality, purity, packaging and labeling required of medicine.”
The DEA classifies drugs into five schedules, with the fifth being the least-restrictive. Schedule II drugs, such as cocaine and morphine, are considered to have a high potential for abuse, but also to have accepted medical uses.
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Scientists Admit Genes Don’t Predict Disease
November 09, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Genetic analysis is essentially useless in predicting a person’s risk of cancer, heart attack or other common diseases, according to a set of commentaries published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The decoding of the human genome in 2003 led to a flood of research into the contributions that genetic variation might make to the risk of various chronic diseases that tend to develop late in life, such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer. Since then, a number of for-profit companies have begun offering genetic screenings and disease risk assessments.
“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” said David B. Goldstein of Duke University, author of one of the commentaries. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”
A few diseases, such as sickle cell anemia or Tay Sachs disease, can be caused by a mutation on a single gene. Most diseases, however, are much more complex, and develop due to an interaction between environmental factors and the contributions of a variety of genes.
In order to calculate the genetic contribution to these diseases, geneticists developed the technique known as genomewide association study, in which the genomes of groups of healthy people are compared with the genomes of those with a certain disease. The hope among researchers has been that this analysis could point out genetic differences between the groups that might be linked to disease risk.
While genomewide analysis has successfully identified some differences between the genetic codes of healthy and diseased patients, these differences provide little information about disease risk. Researchers expected to find a small number of common genetic variations that were responsible for each disease. Instead, common gene variants appear to contribute to disease risk only very marginally.
Goldstein suggests that the genetic component of chronic disease risk might arise from a large number of rare genetic variants, making genetic screening far less helpful in predicting risk. If only a small number of variants are involved, they might provide information on the biological pathways that lead to the development of the disease. If many different variations are implicated, however, this would tell researchers nothing except that an error in the functioning of nearly any bodily system can contribute to disease risk.
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New Research: Yoga Better Than Western Medicine for Back Pain
September 8, 2009
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), low back pain is an enormous health and economic problem in the U.S. In fact, Americans spend at least $50 billion annually on the condition. It’s the most common cause of job-related disability and a leading contributor to missed work days.
Although most occurrences of low back pain go away within a few days, the NINDS web site states low back pain can become chronic and lead to more serious conditions. However, new research shows there’s natural, drug-free and effective help for those with chronic low back pain — the ancient practice of yoga.
A study just published in the journal Spine found that a group of low back pain sufferers who regularly practiced yoga postures had less pain, improved function, and a better mood. What’s more, they were far less likely to take drugs for their back problem than a matched group who received standard medical therapy.
“Proponents of yoga have long described its benefits in reducing back pain,” researcher Kimberly Williams, Ph.D., of West Virginia University’s Department of Community Medicine said in a statement to the media. “But not everybody was convinced. This is a much bigger, much more rigorous evaluation than had been done before.”
The $400,000 study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), covered three years and involved 90 people. All had mild to moderate functional disability from their back pain. Half were randomly assigned to study Iyengar style yoga and half received conventional medical therapy. Those practicing yoga took 90 minute classes two times a week for 24 weeks, working with postures targeted to relieve chronic low-back pain.
The classes were taught by certified instructors of Iyengar yoga. Iyengar yoga. One of the world’s most widely-practiced forms of yoga, Iyengar yoga emphasizes individualized asanas (postures) to build strength, stamina, balance and flexibility. Classes also typically end with a deeply relaxing asana.
The research team followed up on with the research participants both during the trial and six months after the medical therapy or yoga classes ended. The results were dramatic: the yoga group had far less pain, less functional disability and less depression when compared with the control group. “These were statistically significant and clinically important changes that were maintained six months after the intervention (yoga),” Dr. Williams stated.
The research team found that a significantly greater proportion of yoga subjects reported improvements in their conditions after both 12 and 24 weeks of taking yoga classes. When those in the yoga group did have pain, it was less intense. “There was also a clinically important trend for the yoga group to reduce their pain medication usage compared to the control group,” the authors of the study concluded.
The Spine study is another example of how mainstream Western medicine is finally taking a look — and validating — the health benefits of yoga. As NaturalNews previously reported, researchers have also already found yoga can help prevent middle-age weight gain, alleviate postpartum depression and treat post traumatic stress syndrome. A Wake Forest University study published earlier this year In Psycho-Oncology documented that yoga practice significantly reduced depression and increased feelings of peace and meaning in women with breast cancer, too.
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