Kurriosity

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.”

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!!

Your Kurriosity's 100 lbs weight loss challenge

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.

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

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Hector Picard Triathalon

Cardiovascular Exercise Benefits & Hazards

Cardiovascular (CV) exercise is important. It has a boatload of benefits and rewards. Also, like any other reward, there are risks. Below is a list of the benefits and hazards of CV activity.

CV Benefits

1. Strengthen heart

2. Lower blood pressure

3. Reduce risk of heart disease

4. Improve circulation

5. Increase energy

6. Improve CV health

7. Improve recovery

8. Decrease body fat

9. Change body composition

10. Increase endurance

CV Hazards

1. Repetitious (lacking variety)

2. Veering from center of treadmill

3. Losing focus and falling

4. Poor running form

5. Improper footwear

6. Missing step on stepmill

7. Running heavy on feet

8. Running loaded

9. Loose form on rower (using lower back)

10. Improper biomechanical alignment (bike, elliptical, etc)

CV activity is an important component of wellness. I prefer to do cardio training (intervals, circuits, boxing, etc.) over cardio equipment (treadmill, bike, etc). Regardless of the mode and type, we all must improve our health with a stronger heart.

Marc D. Thompson, owner of VirtuFit^TM, is a prominent fitness trainer and personal coach with a background in medicine and exercise physiology. He has pioneered virtual training and teaches via Skype one-on-one and group classes. Approaching fitness holistically, Marc believes the fusion of creativity and practicality is essential in moving each individual toward their fitness goals. Along with over 25 years of experience, he draws from thousands of exercises, fitness disciplines, sports psychology techniques and nutritional principals to empower each individual client.

Brain Differences Seen in Kids

The brains of children with conduct problems don‘t react in a normal way when they see images of other people in pain, a new study finds.

Conduct problems include antisocial behaviors such as cruelty to others, physical aggression and a lack of empathy (callousness).

In this study, U.K. researchers used functional MRI to scan the brains of children with conduct problems and a control group of normally behaved children as they viewed images of other people in pain.

The children with conduct problems showed reduced responses to others‘ pain, specifically in regions of the brain that play a role in empathy. Among the children with conduct problems, those who were the most callous had the lowest levels of activation in these brain areas, according to the study. It was published May 2 in the journalCurrent Biology.

This pattern of reduced brain activity in children with conduct problems may be a risk factor for becoming psychopaths when they‘re adults, said Essi Viding, of University College London, and colleagues. Psychopathy includes traits such as callousness, manipulation, sensation-seeking and antisocial behaviors.

The researchers noted, however, that not all children with conduct problems are the same, and many do not continue their antisocial behavior as they get older.

"Our findings indicate that children with conduct problems have an atypical brain response to seeing other people in pain," Viding said in a journal news release. "It is important to view these findings as an indicator of early vulnerability, rather than biological destiny. We know that children can be very responsive to interventions, and the challenge is to make those interventions even better, so that we can really help the children, their families and their wider social environment."

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about conduct disorder in children.

School Sports may cut rates of violence

Playing school sports is known to have many benefits for teens, but researchers have found a new reason to encourage kids to take up a sport: It may reduce teen girls‘ likelihood of being involved in violence and some teen boys‘ risk of being bullied.

In the study, researchers examined data from about 1,800 high school students, aged 14 to 18, who took part in the 2011 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and found that 25 percent played team sports, 9 percent took part in an individual sport, and 17 percent played both team and individual sports.

Girls involved in individual or team sports were less likely to have been in a fight in the past year than girls who didn‘t play sports (14 percent versus 22 percent, respectively). Girls who played sports were also less likely than nonathletes to have carried a weapon in the past 30 days (6 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

However, boys who played individual or team sports were no less likely than boys who did not play sports to fight or carry a weapon. About 32 percent of boys in the study reported fighting and 36 percent reported carrying weapons in the past 30 days, according to the study presented Sunday at the Pediatric Academic Societies‘ annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"Athletic participation may prevent involvement in violence-related activities among girls but not among boys because aggression and violence generally might be more accepted in boys‘ high school sports," senior author Dr. Tamera Coyne-Beasley, a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in an American Academy of Pediatrics news release.

The researchers did find that boys who played team sports were less likely to be bullied than boys who played individual sports.

"Though we don‘t know if boys who play team sports are less likely to be the perpetrators of bullying, we know that they are less likely to be bullied," Coyne-Beasley noted. "Perhaps creating team-like environments among students such that they may feel part of a group or community could lead to less bullying."

The data and conclusions of research presented at medical meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The Nemours Foundation explains how parents can teach kids not to bully.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Pets a Boon for the Human Heart

That four-legged friend of yours may be more than a companion -- he also may be boosting your heart health, experts say.

An official statement released Thursday by the American Heart Association says there is evidence that having a pet, particularly a dog, may lower your risk of heart disease.

Cardiology specialists weren‘t all that surprised.

"Pets really might be man‘s best friend," said Barbara George, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Lifestyle Medicine at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y.

"Studies have shown people who own pets, particularly dogs, have lower blood pressure, increased mood-related brain chemicals, better cholesterol numbers, lower weight and improved stress response," George said.

Members of the American Heart Association (AHA) committee that wrote the statement reviewed data from an array of relevant studies. They found that pet ownership appears to be associated with a reduction in heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol levels and obesity -- and improved survival among people with heart disease.

Dog ownership in particular may help reduce heart risk, the statement said. People with dogs may get more exercise because they take their dogs for walks. A study of more than 5,200 adults found that dog owners did more walking and physical activity than those who didn‘t own dogs, and that dog owners were 54 percent more likely to get the recommended level of physical activity.

"Walking your dog is a healthy chore; it is a great way to exercise without thinking about it," said Dr. Nieca Goldberg, clinical associate professor in the department of medicine at the Tisch Center for Women‘s Health at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. "Pet owners increase their physical activity simply by walking their dogs."

Pets can also have a positive effect on the body‘s reactions to stress, according to the AHA. George agreed, saying pets can be "a tool for weight loss, socialization, calming our nerves and easing anxiety and depression."

The AHA stressed, however, that the studies they reviewed cannot prove that owning a pet directly reduces heart disease risk.

"It may be simply that healthier people are the ones that have pets, not that having a pet actually leads to or causes reduction in cardiovascular risk," statement committee chairman Dr. Glenn Levine, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in an AHA news release.

"There probably is an association between pet ownership and decreased cardiovascular risk," he said. "What‘s less clear is whether the act of adopting or acquiring a pet could lead to a reduction in cardiovascular risk in those with pre-existing disease. Further research, including better quality studies, is needed to more definitively answer this question."

In the meantime, George said, humans can benefit from the mental and physical rewards of furry companions. "Pets tug at our heartstrings," she said. "But they also improve our health -- both mental and physical -- helping us to live longer and happier lives."

The AHA statement was published online May 9 in the journal Circulation.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health outlines what you can do to reduce heart risk.