Health Secrets
Remember in the good old days you’d have a country doctor who would dish out his health secrets to you? Whether it was “grandma’s cure” or a little-known natural remedy, you could always count on those health secrets as just another part of maintaining good health. And the doctors at the Doctors Health Press have their own health secrets that share with their readers. Whether it’s through a monthly newsletter, a hot-off-the-press report, or from the free Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin delivered daily to your inbox, you can count on getting the latest health secrets from the doctors and editorial team who know them best. And the best part? These health secrets might actually be the answer to your long-suffering health issues or to those you love. So once you learn these health secrets, feel free to claim them as your own to help your friends and family maintain good health.
Whether you’re concerned about preventing breast cancer, lung cancer or any other form of the dreaded disease or you want to know how to prevent the onset of diabetes or properly maintain your diabetes or you simply want to maintain your healthy blood pressure, you can count on the experts at the Doctors Health Press to reveal all the health secrets to help you maintain your good health.
The Effects of Smoking on Breast Cancer
Smoking now or smoking in the past has been found to significantly increase the risk that breast cancer will spread, and eventually cause death. This finding comes from a new, large study among female breast cancer patients.
It is a stark reminder that cancer patients should not worsen their odds by taking the risky step of flooding their lungs with further carcinogens every day.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that women who are current smokers or have a history of smoking had a 39% higher rate of dying from breast cancer. That stayed true even after they accounted for a wide number of factors. The results were presented at the AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference last week.
Though smoking is linked with lung cancer and implicated in several other cancers, it is still up for debate what effect it has on breast cancer — which is one of the most common cancers in the world. More specifically, it has been unclear how long women can live after being diagnosed with breast cancer. And it has been unclear whether cigarette smoking raises the risk of mortality because it makes the breast cancer worse or if there is another link that is affecting life expectancy.
On that note, researchers set out to examine the relationship between smoking and the risk of death due to either to breast cancer or non-breast-cancer causes in 2,265 women diagnosed between 1997 and 2000. The women were followed for an average of nine years.
The results: 164 deaths from breast cancer and 120 deaths from non-breast-cancer causes occurred during follow-up.
Those women who were smokers or past smokers had a twofold higher risk for dying from non-breast-cancer-related causes compared to women with breast cancer who had never smoked.
Furthermore, they tried to see if body weight, menopause or type of breast cancer played a role. Then they found that current or past smokers who had a “HER2-negative” type of breast cancer had a 61% greater risk for breast cancer death compared to non-smokers. Overweight smokers had an 83% greater risk for breast cancer death. For postmenopausal women, the figure was 47%.
It is simply critical to try and quit smoking — for anyone. But for those with breast cancer it is, as the evidence shows, imperative. In the face of cancer, you have to do what you can for yourself.
Tags: Free Health Advice, Health Articles
Could a Cold Virus Trigger Diabetes?
Type I diabetes is also known as insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. It affects five percent to 10% of people with diabetes and can start at an early age. Type I diabetes is known as an autoimmune disease. This means that your own immune system attacks and destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Medical experts are not completely sure what causes the immune system to behave this way, but it could be triggered by something entirely unexpected: a cold-like virus.
Australian researchers recently conducted a review of a number of studies and found there was a strong association between enteroviruses and the development of type 1 diabetes. In fact, children with diabetes were 10 times more likely to have had an enterovirus infection than children without the disease!
For the study, the research team analyzed 24 papers and two abstracts involving 4,448 individuals to see if there was an association between type 1 diabetes and enterovirus (a virus that lives in the gut) infection. The data showed an especially strong association among children.
Enteroviruses usually cause cold or flu symptoms, fever, muscle aches, rash or even meningitis, they noted. Recently, there has been a worldwide increase in the incidence of childhood type 1 diabetes, especially in children under five, which the researchers now think could be the result of more exposure to these viruses.
The researchers caution, however, that they don’t yet know if enteroviruses are involved in all diabetes patients or just some. And they are still uncertain whether enteroviruses cause the onset of the disease or help in the progression of the disease. They speculate that a persistent infection or consecutive infections could play a role.
The research team hopes that this relationship between enteroviruses and type 1 diabetes might open up the possibility of developing new preventive strategies to fight the condition.
In Type 2 diabetes, which is far more common, the body produces insulin but doesn’t utilize it properly. Unlike type 1 diabetes, type 2 has been definitively linked to overeating and under-exercising.
Tags: Immune System, Infection, Insulin, Type 1 Diabetes, virus
Good News for Your Blood Pressure
Now for some very positive health news. Due to greater awareness and likely a greater focus on one’s natural health, the rates of high blood pressure appear to be improving significantly. A new study found this to be true over the past 25 years in Canada, and its results can be remodeled for Canada’s close southern neighbor as well.
Every morsel of the best health advice includes monitoring one’s blood pressure levels. Hypertension (high levels) is a risk factor for vascular disease and death, but it can be managed properly by every one of us. Recent studies have indicated improvements in the prescribing rates of drugs to treat hypertension and consequent decreases in cardiovascular events related to high blood pressure.
In the new study, researchers looked at the measurement of blood pressure in people aged 20 to 79 who were living in the community (not in institutions) and who participated in either of two national health surveys. The analysis showed decreases in the number of hypertensive Canadians between 1992 and 2009 who were not being treated or not receiving adequate treatment to control their blood pressure.
Importantly, the percentage of people who were unaware of their condition had dropped from 43% to 17%. Systolic blood pressure levels were lower in people with treated hypertension and in people without high blood pressure in 2009 compared to 1992.
This means that, in society overall, people are successfully managing high blood pressure. And they are aware of it, which is a huge step in treatment. The rates of awareness, treatment and control shown in the surveys are higher than those recently reported from physical measures surveys done in the U.S. and elsewhere during the same periods. That means, in the U.S., more can be done to educate people about hypertension.
People with high blood pressure and heart disease were more likely to have their blood pressure under control. Still, despite such improvement over the past quarter-century, one-third of Canadian adults with hypertension still have higher blood pressure than recommended. And heart disease remains the most common cause of premature death and disability in Canada.
Take hypertension seriously before it takes you to serious consequences.
Tags: best health advice, blood pressure, Health News, hypertension, natural health
