Health News - Thursday, February 15, 2007
The FDA is warning people not to eat certain jars of Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter. The peanut butter may be contaminated with salmonella, bacteria that cause food poisoning.
Suspect jars bear a number on the lid beginning with the digits "2111." Any peanut butter carrying that number -- and bought since May 2006 -- should be discarded immediately. All the peanut butter included in the warning was made at a ConAgra plant in Sylvester, Ga. Continue reading
Drawing this special comb over a balding pate could restore some real hair - according to a Florida company. The Food and Drug Administration has cleared for sale a handheld laser device to promote hair growth.
Called the Hairmax Lasercomb, it increases the numbers of thick hairs on the scalp, according to 26-week clinical trials conducted by its manufacturer, Lexington International LLC. As the device's name suggests, it combines a low-level laser with a comb. When drawn through the hair, the laser strikes the scalp to promote hair growth, according to the company. Continue reading
American teens are cutting back on their use of marijuana, but their abuse of prescription drugs in recent years has stayed the same or increased. That's the conclusion of a report released Wednesday by White House drug czar John Walters.
From 2002 to 2005, rates of marijuana use declined from 30.1 percent to 25.8 percent. Over that same period, the use of the prescription painkiller OxyContin increased from 2.7 percent to 3.5 percent, and the use of Vicodin, another painkiller, increased from 6 percent to 6.3 percent, the Associated Press reported. Teens are also abusing anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax and stimulants like Adderall, Walters said. Overall, 2.1 million American teens abused prescription drugs in 2005. Continue reading
Breast-fed babies are more likely to have high-octane social ambition than those who are bottle-fed, a research published in UK suggested Wednesday. The conclusion is based on a long-term research focused on 1,414 people now aged in their 60s and 70s as part of the Boyd Orr Study of Diet and Health in Pre-War Britain (1937-1939).
The research led by Richard Martin of the University of Bristol traced them to determine whether their subsequent status was linked to their nutritional start in life. The prevalence of breastfeeding varied from 45 percent to 85 percent but was not dependent on household income, expenditure on food, number of siblings, birth order or social class in childhood. Continue reading
A tiny electrical implant that attaches to the retina may someday restore partial sight to millions of patients blinded by age-related macular degeneration, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. The device, in the early stages of human clinical testing, is part of a new class of so-called "smart" prostheses that link with the brain and nervous system to restore function lost to disease or injury, the researchers told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.
Similar electrical stimulation devices known as cochlear implants have been used to treat deafness, and scientists are developing others to restore bladder control and movement to patients with spinal cord injury. The artificial retina is designed to take the place of photoreceptor cells in the brain that are charged with capturing and processing light. Continue reading
New evidence shows that the human brain can manufacture fresh brain cells, researchers said on Thursday in a study that may lead to better ways to treat brain damage and disease. Scientists had known that other animals, such as rats and mice, make new brain cells throughout their lives and there had been indirect evidence that humans being can, too.
Using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans and electron microscope images of tissue donated from the brains of people who died, Maurice Curtis of the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Peter Eriksson of Sahlgrenska Academy in Goteborg, Sweden, and colleagues found the elusive cells. Just as in mice and rats, these cells are born in one part of the brain and then migrate to the olfactory bulb, where smells are processed. They mature into neurons on the way. Continue reading
A new study in identical twins confirms that excess weight and cigarette smoking increase the risk of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). While strenuous physical activity on the job also increases GERD risk, leisure-time exercise decreases the risk, Dr. Zongli Zheng and colleagues from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, report in the medical journal Gastroenterology.
A number of previous studies have tied these factors to GERD, but the current investigation is the first to include identical twins. Because identical twins have exactly the same genetic make-up, this allowed the researchers to separate the effects of genetics from environmental factors. Zheng and colleagues evaluated 27,717 men and women, including 869 sets of identical twins. In each twin pair, one twin had GERD, while the other did not. Continue reading