New Guidelines for Prostate Cancer Screening
I’m about to make an appointment for my yearly physical. This year is especially important because I just turned 50. I could not help but to notice about new guidelines that were issued last week on prostate cancer screenings that emphasize that physicians should better educate men about both the risks and benefits of using the PSA test for screening. (I got this information from the LA Times)
They also call for cutbacks in the use of digital rectal exams to find tumors and recommend the end of mass prostate screening programs at health fairs and other sites. The revised guidelines issued by the influential American Cancer Society come on the heels of several studies suggesting that large numbers of tumors identified by PSA screening are inconsequential and that biopsies and treatment produce more harm than those tumors would.
Because of such findings, the new guidelines emphasize the importance of physicians explaining both risks and benefits to the patients more fully so that each man can make an informed decision about whether to get tested.
Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said the new guidelines are not that different from earlier ones issued in 1997 and 2001. “I think (earlier panels) meant to say what we are saying now, but they were interpreted by people to say we were encouraging screening,” Dr. Brawley said. “They were trying to encourage informed decision making.”
Skip Lockwood, president of Zero: The Project to End Prostate Cancer, said that calls to end the digital rectal exam are “kind of nuts. … The whole concept that you would do anything to reduce the amount of information you have does not make sense to me.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men after skin cancer, affecting 192,000 men each year and killing 27,000. And while all the parties may not totally agree on how and how often PSA screening should be used, they are in unanimous agreement on one point. As Mr. Lockwood said, “We need a better test.”
After reading this information, I ask myself “What am I going to do?” I think I will ask my doctor. And what about you? I would love to hear from other men out there about what they think or what they plan to do.
Read the full artice: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10063/1040197-84.stm#ixzz0hS7JW9mU
Finding the Fountain of oomph!
When searching for the “fountain of youth,” or the “fountain of oomph!” one of the biggest mistakes that people make is thinking there is an easy way and try to discover it in an expensive bottle of whatever. They buy expensive anti-aging creams and lotions and call it a day (not that I’m against using any creams. In fact I do use a good body cream everyday). But the most important key to delaying the effects of aging is found in your lifestyle.
According to the National Institute on Aging, exercising regularly is the first step in fighting the effects of aging. Exercise helps you maintain healthy bones and joints, control weight, improve your mood and strengthen your muscles. Experts say that exercise also conditions the skin to make collagen, the support fibers that help keep wrinkles and lines under control.
The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion suggests eating a balanced diet that’s low in saturated fats and contains at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
Also things like amino acids can help your overall health as well as your age appearance. A great advantage of amino acids is that they can be found in many everyday foods we eat. Below is a list of the most important amino acids that help ward of the signs of aging.
Arginine can be food in foods high in protein such as eggs, fish, nuts, and beans and is just one of the amino acids that can help anti aging. It has been proven to help with heart related health conditions and clogged arteries, in addition it is thought to be a natural anti coagulant. Research on Arginine suggest it may possibly assist in lowering cholesterol, and help in the prevention of both strokes and heart attacks.
Leucine is another amazing anti aging amino acids, which is found in high protein foods such as red meat and eggs. It supports the body in repairing injuries and helps cells growth and repair, which is vital for those who are combating the effects of aging.
Cysteine a very important amino acid has many beneficial advantages and one the most important of the amino acids. This amino acid is supplied to our bodies through our diet, and can be found in foods such as broccoli, dairy products, soy beans, and Brussels sprouts. Cysteine plays an essential part in anti aging, because its helps our bodies to metabolize the fats in our diets better. In addition, it is also proven to help prevent damage caused by smoking and alcohol. Cysteine has other great effects such as, the ability to help prevent cancer and heart disease; it also helps boost your immune system causing you to be less susceptible to viruses. One of the most serious effects of aging is the ability to fight of disease and infection. This amino acid can help restore that ability and keep your body working to its best.
So the key to “fountain of youth” or should we say “fountain of oomph!” is simply taking care of yourself and eating the right foods and not necessarily found in an expensive bottle of some cream or lotion.
Watching TV Could Take Oomph Out of You
An article I read last month by Jeannie Stein of the Los Angeles Times, describes some negative effects of watching TV. I have noticed myself that the more I find time for some form of exercise, the less time I have for watching television and it looks like that is a good thing.
Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn’t the best way to spend leisure time. Inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing’s effect on risk of death.
Researchers found that each hour a day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer.
As the article stated, researchers found a statistical relationship between long hours of TV viewing and a shortened life span, but the study did not go so far as to find a direct cause.
A journal of the American Heart Assn., looked at health data among 8,800 men and women older than 25 who were part of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study. Participants recorded their television viewing hours for a week, and researchers separated the results by amount of viewing: those who watched less than two hours of TV a day, those who watched two to four hours a day, and those who watched more than four hours a day.
Researchers found a strong connection between TV hours and death from cardiovascular disease, not just among the overweight and obese, but among people who had a healthy weight and exercised.
“What we showed was that irrespective of a person’s exercise level, sitting for four or more hours watching television was linked to a significant increase in risk of death compared to watching lower amounts of TV,” said Dr. David Dunstan, lead author of the study and professor and head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia. “The message here is that in addition to promoting regular exercise, we also need to promote avoiding long periods of sitting, such as spending long hours in front of the computer screen.”
To him, the results weren’t unexpected. “When we’re in that sitting posture, we’re not using our muscles, and we know from extensive evidence that muscle contractions are important for the body’s regulatory processes, such as the ability to break down glucose and use it as energy.”
Dr. Prediman K. Shah, director of the cardiology division of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, agreed. He pointed out that muscles become deconditioned when not used, triggering harmful physiological changes. “If your activity is slowing down, you metabolize cholesterol less and synthesize it more,” he said.
Even sporadic exercisers who sit for long periods need to increase their daily activity.
“The physical activity we do over a 24-hour period is important,” says Dr. Gerald F. Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., and a spokesman for the American Heart Assn.
That means taking the stairs instead of the elevator, gardening, walking the dog . . .
“For couch potatoes, sitting on your duff is hazardous to your health,” Shah said. “The bottom line is keep moving.”
Another Reason to Love Blueberries
Many of us love blueberries. And now we have another reason to love blueberries even more. A new study suggests that drinking wild blueberry juice daily may have the potential benefits of enhancing the memory of those at the risk of dementia and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases.
Although there has been earlier research exhibiting that blueberries can improve memory in mice, this is the first time that research was conducted to demonstrate a similar effect in human beings. Robert Krikorian, psychiatrist at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Centre, one of the authors of the study stated, “The ultimate goal is to find ways to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease.” He added, “These preliminary memory findings are encouraging and suggest that consistent supplementation with blueberries may offer an approach to forestall or mitigate neurodegeneration.”
The researchers conducted a study to establish whether blueberry can help in keeping the mind sharper in those with failing memory. The investigators divided 16 participants, who showed signs of “early memory changes,” into two groups. All those recruited were in their 70’s. Nine of the subjects were asked to drink two or more cups of blueberry juice daily for two months while the remaining seven forming the control group drank a sweet placebo beverage minus the blueberry juice.
During the course of the study, the participants were closely monitored for adherence as well as any side effects. At the close of the study the subjects were once again tested on their cognitive abilities, learning skills and recall performance.
Observations by researchers:
The scientists noted that after 12 weeks, the subjects consuming blueberry juice exhibited a marked improvement in the learning and memory tests as opposed to those in the control group. In addition, the researchers observed a decline in symptoms of depression and lower glucose levels in the wild blueberry drinkers.
However, the researchers felt that there was need for more study to understand the health implications involved before confirming the results. “The important thing is that there are things people can do to prevent dementia, with little or no side effects,” said Krikorian.
Blueberries are rich in valuable nutrients, low in sugar, are healthy and have a great taste. They contain a host of wonderful ingredients from phytochemicals to vitamin C, potassium, iron, fiber and antioxidants. The properties found in blueberries have been linked to lowering cholesterol levels, encouraging heart health, protecting the body against certain types of cancers, promoting healthy aging, reducing inflammation and cataracts.
Go figure. Like I need anymore reason to love blueberries.
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How Much Exercise Do I Need?
In my last posting called “Exercise, Stress and The Brain,” I wrote about the experiment that was done at the University of Colorado on the stress-reducing changes on the brain produced by exercise. In that experiment rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, Ph.D., a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Then he goes onto say “It’s not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be.
Imagine, here we are in 2010 with all the advancements in medical knowledge and we still can’t come up with some kind of universal exercise prescription? Interesting. Perhaps coming up with an exercise prescription is not a science, but maybe an art form. However, it’s hard for me to accept that medical science does not have a great deal to say about how much we should move our bodies. Perhaps it’s a mixture of both art and science. We can look at some recent studies to help us formulate an exercise prescription for most people.
Again, I pulled some information out from an article that Gretchen Reynolds wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/phys-ed-how-much-exercise-to- avoid-feeling-gloomy/.
A reading of the latest sports science report makes it clear that the “amount of physical activity necessary to produce health benefits cannot yet be identified with a high degree of precision,” according to the authors of the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans report http://www.health.gov/PAGuidelines/, which was produced by the Department of Health and Human Services and was based on the recommendations of an advisory committee of scientists. These experts waded through dozens of studies on the health effects of exercise, looking at the impacts that exercise can have on people’s risks for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, depression and, in general, premature death.
Despite the inconsistent results, caused in some part by even more inconsistent methodologies between the different studies, the advisory committee did ultimately reach some conclusions about how much – or, really, how little – exercise we should be doing. So here goes:
The committee concluded that a person needs to accumulate a weekly minimum of two and a half hours of a moderate activity, such as walking. Or a person could spend half as much time (an hour and 15 minutes) on a more robust form of exercise such as jogging, according to this committee, to have similar health effects.
Interestingly, they did not find that exercise beyond a certain point conferred significant additional health benefits. That is to say, that people who are the least active to start with get the most health benefit from starting to exercise. People who already are fit don’t necessarily get a big additional health benefit from adding more workout time to their regimens. Which is not to say that if you are a devoted runner or cyclist, you should reduce your workout time in 2010. It’s just you’re already well ahead in terms of health benefits. According to the Physical Activity Guidelines report, “ It has been estimated that people who are physically active for approximately seven hours a week have a 40 percent lower risk of dying early than those who are active for less than 30 minutes a week.”
Now we are getting somewhere.
So what does this mean as you plan your 2010 exercise routines? First, because “activity affects so many organs and pre-disease states,” according to Frank Booth, a professor in the department of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia, who has extensively studied the health effects of exercise, “any activity is better than no activity.” The bottom line here is do something. Booth adds “Inactivity is looking more and more like the one of the underlying causes of many chronic diseases,” And lastly, he adds, “you want to live to be 100, then don’t just sit all day.” Well there you go. I guess the scientists do have something to say about exercise.
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