Improving PET scans are good news for doctors and patients alike
A recent blog post discussed a newly approved imaging agent with an unwieldy name: gallium-68 PMA-11. Delivered in small amounts by injection, this minimally radioactive tracer sticks to prostate cancer cells, which subsequently glow and reveal themselves on a positron emission tomography (PET) scan. Offered to men with rising PSA levels after initial prostate cancer treatment (a condition called biochemical recurrence), this sort of imaging can allow doctors to find and treat new tumors that they might otherwise miss. With currently available imaging technology, such tumors could potentially escape detection until they we...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - February 3, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Charlie Schmidt Tags: Health Prostate Knowledge HPK Source Type: blogs
Harvard Health Ad Watch: Can an arthritis drug help you become a morning person?
Perhaps this is obvious, but drug ads are not intended to inform you about the best way to treat a condition you may have. Their primary purpose is to sell a product, as explained in an earlier blog on direct-to-consumer drug ads. And the newest drugs tend to be the most expensive, even though some aren’t much better than older drugs.
So the ads you see for medications are usually not promoting the latest and greatest as much as they are promoting the newest and most expensive. And these ads vary widely in how much accurate, useful information is included and what information is left out. A recent ad for Xeljanz (tofacit...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - February 2, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Robert H. Shmerling, MD Tags: Arthritis Health Healthy Aging Source Type: blogs
3 easy ways to get active — right now
New year, new you? Forget the mindset that January 1 is the only time to restart your commitment to being active. Don’t wait. Begin today, right now. Jumping right into exercise is often the best way to push past any mental or emotional barriers. Or, as the famous slogan reminds us, “Just do it.”
Still not sold? Try this: you don’t have to embrace a complex workout program or a strict exercise schedule. Instead, begin small and focus on making regular activity a daily habit.
Three easy ways to add activity to your day
Here are three strategies you can adopt to get active and help build discipline and confidence. Tr...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - February 1, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Matthew Solan Tags: Exercise and Fitness Health Source Type: blogs
How does sleep affect your heart rate?
Even if you don’t wear a smartwatch or fitness band to track your heart rate, you can often sense your pulse fluctuating throughout the day. During your waking hours, the number of heartbeats per minute when you’re just sitting quietly is known as your resting heart rate. In most adults, resting heart rates range between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
Once you stand up and move around, your heart rate goes up. And exercise boosts it further still. Even intense emotions — fear, anger, or surprise — can cause your heart rate to spike. But what happens when you lie down to sleep? The answer differs depending on the phas...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 29, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Julie Corliss Tags: Exercise and Fitness Health Heart Health Sleep Source Type: blogs
Are early detection and treatment always best?
Throughout my medical career, I’ve heard statements like these:
Early detection offers the best chance of cure.
If you wait for symptoms, you’ve waited too long.
Knowledge is power, and the sooner you have the information, the better.
Over time, I’ve realized they are often untrue. Many health conditions go away on their own. In such cases, early testing may amount to wasted effort, time, and medical cost. Some testing is invasive and has a significant risk of complications. And minor abnormalities may lead to more testing. There’s also the anxiety of waiting for results, or learning you have an abnormality of unce...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 28, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Robert H. Shmerling, MD Tags: Back Pain Heart Health Managing your health care Prevention Screening Tests and procedures Source Type: blogs
Shingles of the eye can cause lasting vision impairment
Shingles, or herpes zoster, is a viral infection known for its characteristic painful, burning, or itchy rash. This rash appears along a particular affected nerve, for example in a band on one side of the chest or abdomen that extends around to the back. In fact, the name shingles comes from cingulum, the Latin word for girdle, belt, or sash.
Shingles is caused by reactivation of the varicella zoster virus, the virus that causes chickenpox. After the initial chickenpox infection resolves the virus lives on in nerves all over the body, but is kept in check by the immune system. The risk of shingles therefore increases with ...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 27, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Miriam Barshak, MD Tags: Eye Health Healthy Aging Vaccines Source Type: blogs
New dietary guidelines: Any changes for infants, children, and teens?
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has published new dietary guidelines to help Americans get and stay healthier across all parts of the lifespan. Babies and toddlers are included for the first time, because the recommendations cover our full lifespan.
The guidelines are called “Make Every Bite Count.” If we want to get and stay healthy, we shouldn’t be eating foods that are basically empty calories — or worse, foods that actually do us harm.
Because foods can do us harm. Eating an unhealthy diet can lead to obesity, with the cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and everything else...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 26, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Claire McCarthy, MD Tags: Adolescent health Children's Health Healthy Eating Parenting Source Type: blogs
3 simple strategies for stress relief
The last few months of any year, with deadlines and holidays, often create a harried pace. The beginning of a new year can give you a chance to exhale. But even if you experience a few serene days or weeks, tight shoulders and tension are never far off.
Family stress. Work stress. Daily life stress. Self-induced stress brought on by scrolling through the news. As it turns out, stress is almost impossible to avoid. So this year, instead of waiting for your most recent stressful patch to ebb, take a different approach. Teach yourself to stay grounded and calm — regardless of what’s going on around you.
Managing stress he...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 25, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Kelly Bilodeau Tags: Health Mental Health Stress Source Type: blogs
Need surgery? Should you avoid your surgeon ’s birthday?
If you need surgery, it should reassure you to know that researchers have been studying factors that predict surgical success or failure for years. Some of the most important findings have been ones you might expect.
For example, studies have found that hospitals and medical centers that perform a lot of hip and knee replacements tend to have lower complication rates than those performing fewer operations. As a result, there is a trend for people needing these surgeries to have them performed at high-volume centers. Similarly, surgeons who frequently perform hip or knee replacement surgery tend to have better results than ...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 22, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Robert H. Shmerling, MD Tags: Health Surgery Source Type: blogs
How not to lose money because of Alzheimer ’s disease
Researchers from Maryland and Michigan recently published an article showing that six years prior to their diagnosis, individuals developing Alzheimer’s disease or a related disorder were more likely to miss paying a bill compared to older adults without such a diagnosis (7.7% versus 7.3%), and they were also more likely to develop subprime credit scores (7.9% versus 6.9%). As the authors concede, there were a number of problems with the study, including unequal matching of the average age of the groups (79.4 versus 74.0 years), which could mean that the results were actually due to age, rather than Alzheimer’s disease...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 21, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Andrew E. Budson, MD Tags: Alzheimer's Disease Caregiving Healthy Aging Memory Source Type: blogs
Do hair dyes increase cancer risk?
This study also had several limitations. First, participants were female nurses of mostly European descent, meaning the findings are not necessarily generalizable to men or to other racial or ethnic groups. Next, the study could not account for every single cancer risk factor (for example, exposure to pesticides and other environmental chemicals). Data were not collected on other hair grooming products beyond hair dyes, and subjects may have mistakenly reported use of permanent hair dyes when they were in fact using semi-permanent or natural dyes. Without data on actual color of hair dyes used, the authors assumed that hai...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 20, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Shinjita Das, MD Tags: Cancer Skin and Hair Care Source Type: blogs
More intensive treatment of DCIS reduces the risk of invasive breast cancer
This study showed that increased cancer risk persisted for more than 15 years after a diagnosis of DCIS, and that more intensive therapy than lumpectomy alone — whether with mastectomy, radiation therapy, or endocrine therapy — reduced the risk of invasive breast cancer among women with DCIS. The lowest risk of invasive breast cancer was in women who chose mastectomy.
The risk of invasive breast cancer was seen regardless of severity of DCIS. Women who had low- or moderate-grade DCIS, as well as high-grade DCIS, had long-term increased risk.
Women who are recently diagnosed with DCIS should work with their treatment te...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 19, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Kathryn Rexrode, MD, MPH Tags: Breast Cancer Women's Health Source Type: blogs
Alcohol harms the brain in teen years –– before and after that, too
If we only paid attention to ads, it might seem as though alcohol — a beer or glass of wine, a shot of fiery liquor or sophisticated cocktail — merely served as a way to bring people together and make them happy. Drink responsibly, the ads wink, without ever explaining the toll that frequent or excessive alcohol use exacts, particularly at certain stages in life. Because alcohol doesn’t just get us drunk, impair our judgment, and hurt our liver: it can have many other bad effects on our bodies — including effects on the brain.
In a recent editorial in The BMJ, a trio of scientists pointed out that there are three p...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 15, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Claire McCarthy, MD Tags: Addiction Adolescent health Brain and cognitive health Parenting Source Type: blogs
Exercise matters to health and well-being, regardless of your size
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc in our daily lives. Regardless of who you are, your life has been impacted in some way. Stress is mounting, and you may need to find a way to decompress while social distancing. Enter stage left my favorite pastime: exercise!
All right, I know what you are thinking: She’s one of those exercise fanatics who is going to tell me that I need to exercise several hours every day. Well, no. What I am going to tell you is that you can make exercise work for you. It is imperative to find your “soulmate workout” or simple activities you can do. You might thi...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 14, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, FAAP, FACP, FTOS Tags: Bones and joints Exercise and Fitness Heart Health Hypertension and Stroke Mental Health Source Type: blogs
Can I take something to prevent colorectal cancer?
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. There is compelling evidence that screening to detect CRC early to find and remove precancerous polyps can reduce CRC mortality. However, screening has associated harms, including procedural complications, and inherent limitations. For example, colonoscopy, the most common screening tool in the US, is less effective in preventing cancers of the right, or ascending side, of the colon compared with cancers of the left, or descending, side of the colon.
Moreover, only 60% of US adults recommended for screening actually follow through. Ev...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - January 13, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Andrew Chan, MD, MPH Tags: Cancer Prevention Screening Source Type: blogs
