Thursday, May 16, 2013

Angelina Jolie’s Reported Next Surgery

Astrid Stawiarz/WireImage(LOS ANGELES) -- Angelina Jolie‘s double mastectomy is apparently just the beginning. The Oscar-winning actress will undergo surgery to remove her ovaries as soon as she possibly can, sources tell People magazine.

Jolie implied as much in Sunday’s New York Times op-ed, in which she revealed that she had a double mastectomy after learning that she carries a “faulty” BRCA1 gene, which could dramatically increase her risk for breast and ovarian cancers.

“I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex,” she wrote.

Jolie, 37, said her doctors told her she has an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.

Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, lost her 10-year battle to ovarian cancer in 2007 at age 56.

Jolie’s partner Brad Pitt praised her decision to share her story.

“She could have stayed absolutely private about it and I don’t think anyone would have been none the wiser with such good results,” he told USA Today.  “But it was really important to her to share the story and that others would understand it doesn’t have to be a scary thing.  In fact, it can be an empowering thing, and something that makes you stronger and us stronger.”

Through the months-long mastectomies and reconstructive process, Jolie appeared anything but afraid. Two days before her first surgery on Feb. 2, 2013, to remove breast tissue, she was photographed taking her twins, Vivienne and Knox, to the Natural History Museum in New York.  In March, she traveled to the Congo on a humanitarian trip.  On April 11, she appeared at London’s G-8 summit, just 16 days before finishing the process.

Back home, Pitt told USA Today, the couple’s six children helped ease Jolie’s recovery.

“We set up our own little post-op recovery that became pretty fun.  You make an adventure out of it,” he said.

He called the experience “an emotional and beautifully inspiring few months.”

“It’s such a wonderful relief to come through this and not have a specter hanging over our heads,” Pitt told USA Today.  “To know that that’s not going to be something that’s going to affect us.  My most proudest thing is our family.  This isn’t going to get that.”
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

100 Lbs. Weight Loss Challenge.

Kurriosity Korrespondent Brittany Cascone and Fitness America Bikini Contestant  Stacy O'Nell continue her path to lose 100 lbs before November 22nd to take her place on stage in Las Vegas, Nevada.  With the help of professional personal trainer Ashley Sica from The Gym 111 to make this into a reality and kurriosity with her the whole way. We will be showing you an update  every two weeks as well as an exercise breakdown for any of you at home wanting to shed some pounds! In two weeks Stacy has lost 4 inches off of her hips, 6 inches off of her abdomen,  and an inch off of her arms! Keep up the great work Stacy!!

 
 

Swimming Pool Danger

 With summer approaching, researchers caution that swimming pools may pose a risk to patients with irregular heartbeats who‘ve received implantable defibrillators.
 
The issue: a danger that electrical currents linked to standard pool utilities such as lighting may "leak," causing a defibrillator to misread the status of a patient‘s heart.
 
Implanted cardioverter defibrillators continuously monitor and control a patient‘s heart rhythm. 
 
"How common this is, we don‘t know," said Dr. John Day, second vice president of the Heart Rhythm Society, a group representing arrhythmia specialists. "It‘s quite possible that there‘s underreporting going on, because when we see patients and we see noise recorded on their device we can‘t account for where it‘s coming from."
 
The concern stems from a few recent incidents that have been documented. In two cases, people with defibrillators experienced device misreadings while in a private family or hotel pool, and in another two cases, people experienced unwarranted shocks from their defibrillators while in public pools.
 
The cases all involved younger arrhythmia patients between the ages of 8 and 23. However, the investigators said there‘s no reason to believe that patients of all ages would not face a similar risk if they had such devices.
 
"I don‘t want to be an alarmist, because I do think we would have heard about this sort of thing happening much more often than we have if it were a really widespread problem," said study lead author Dr. Daniel Shmorhun, a pediatric cardiologist-electrophysiologist with Children‘s Cardiology Associates, an affiliate of the Dell Children‘s Medical Center of Central Texas in Austin.
 
"The nice thing about defibrillators is that they put a time-stamp on all activity," he noted. "So we were able to ask questions and delve into this after two patients came in with interference noise on their devices. And we found that both had been in pools at the time their defibrillators read the interference."
 
Shmorhun and co-author Dr. Arnold Fenrich are slated to present their findings at the Heart Rhythm Society meeting taking place this week in Denver. Findings presented at medical meetings are typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
 
Arrhythmia is a chronic condition in which the heart‘s electrical system has the potential to go awry -- on occasion beating too fast, too slow, or irregularly. While many instances of arrhythmia pose little harm, severe cases can be life-threatening.
For such patients, implanted defibrillators can be life-savers, continuously surveying a patient‘s heartbeat for signs of trouble and instantaneously correcting for problems as they arise by sending out a corrective electrical pulse.
 
In the new study, Shmorhun and Fenrich reviewed the cases of two female patients (one aged 8 years and one aged 23 years), in which their defibrillators registered so-called "noise reversions" directly linked to time spent in swimming pools.
In each case their devices picked up the reversion, classified it as an outside interference, reverted to a mode that actively ignored noise, and thereby prevented any accidental shock.
 
After the lighting system was repaired in the family pool in which the 8-year-old had swam, the girl did not experience any further defibrillator trouble, the researchers said. The older patient, however, simply decided to no longer use public pools, and has experienced no further problems.
 
Others were not so lucky. For example, in the past year a 21-year-old male -- a competitive college swimmer and lifeguard -- experienced not one but two shocks while swimming in a public pool. "He remembers that he had his back against the pool wall, quite close to lights in water," said Shmorhun. "And as he was moving away from the light he got shocked."
Shmorhun and Fenrich believe that low-level electrical current leaking from swimming pool wiring might be an "underappreciated cause" of unwarranted defibrillator shocks.
 
"Water is an attractive source for electrical activity," Shmorhun explained. "We don‘t think there would be an issue at all in, say, the ocean or bay. But in a pool, where you have wires coming into the water from the outside, from the house, from an aging utility system, or an improperly grounded system, there is a potential for this kind of problem. Or if a pool is not properly bonded -- meaning the pool circumference is not intact -- there could be a problem," he noted.
 
"I‘m not sure anybody can really predict up front what pools are an issue, and there‘s no practical means by which to easily test pools for this," Shmorhun added. "At the same time, we don‘t know the overall incidence, although three cases in the Austin area in one year seems like a lot to me. But at minimum, [defibrillator] patients need to be counseled about the risk."
For his part, Heart Rhythm Society vice president Day said the finding should not deter patients from swimming.
 
"We want our cardiac patients to be physically active. We don‘t want to restrain them and we don‘t want to create alarm," Day said.
 
"But in each of these cases we had these underwater pool lights that had an alternating current pool leak that could trigger a shock," noted Day, who is also director of Heart Rhythm Services at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah. "So, I think we certainly need pool safety. And clinically this is just one more thing that should be considered as a potential source of a problem for any patient with an implantable defibrillator."
 
More information
Find out more about heart arrhythmias at the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Health News Copyright © 2013 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
 
 
 

Let Them Cry

Nearly half of mothers with babies over six months of age report problems with their baby's sleep. This common problem not only leads to sleepless nights for parents, but it also doubles the risk that moms will suffer from feelings of depression. 

Now, a new study released today in the journal Pediatrics suggests it is OK to let babies cry while trying to fall asleep -- a finding that may help settle a long-running debate among both parents and experts over whether allowing a baby to cry itself to sleep harms the child in the long run.

Australian researchers looked at 225 babies from seven months to 6 years of age to compare the difference between parents who were trained in sleep intervention techniques and those who were not. Specifically, researchers allowed parents in the sleep intervention group to choose one of two sleep training techniques to use with their baby. Parents who chose "controlled crying" responded to their infant's cry at increasing time intervals. Parents who chose "camping out," also called "adult fading," sat with their infant until they fell asleep, removing themselves earlier each night over three weeks.

Parents in the control group were not taught the sleep training techniques and instead provided their own routine care.

What the researchers found was that children and mothers in the sleep training group had improved sleep, and the mothers were less likely to experience depression and other emotional problems. These benefits lasted up to the time the babies turned 2.

Moreover, the study looked at various factors to determine whether harm was done to children in the sleep training group, including mental and behavioral health, sleep quality, stress, and relationship with their parents. They found no differences between children in the two groups, leading researchers to conclude that these sleep training techniques are safe to use.

"Parents can feel confident using, and health professionals can feel confident offering, behavioral techniques such as controlled comforting and camping out for managing infant sleep," the researchers write in the study.

Experts not involved with the study said the findings make sense.

"It's kind of like having the ability to get a rental car at the airport, but why would you get one if a limo shows up?" said Dr. Ari Brown, an Austin, Texas-based pediatrician and author of Baby 411. "The parent is the limo."

"While stressful for the infant, it almost certainly falls under the 'positive stress' heading," said Rahil D. Briggs, director of the Healthy Steps program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. "Positive stress creates growth in the child, in the form of coping skills and frustration tolerance that serve to be critically important throughout the life span."

But for parents, the message may be even more important.

"This study empowers parents to be active in shaping their infant's behavior to be consistent with appropriate developmental milestones," said Dr. John Walkup, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at NY-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio