Ways to help prevent acne

Acne is caused by factors including hormonal changes, certain medications, and the use of certain products.

Acne is a term that’s used to describe whiteheads, blackheads, and pimples. (You may well recognize slang terms like spots, or zits). Most teenagers get the type of acne called acne vulgaris, which can show up on the face, neck, shoulders, back, and chest. Skin pores contain oil glands which naturally lubricate your skin and hair. But sometimes if a pore gets clogged beneath the skin with excess oil and bacteria, the dreaded acne is caused...

Whiteheads happen when a pore gets clogged, closes, and then bulges out. If a pore gets clogged but stays open, the top may darken and you've got a blackhead. A pimple happens when dead skin and bacteria work their way under live skin. This leads to a small infection that makes your skin look red. Get glowing!

Although everyone is different, acne is usually caused by the build up of oil and dead skin in a pore. This build up of oil and dead skin is caused because of:

• Natural hormones. These are particularly active in your teens.
• Plugged skin. Lots of skin cells can close the oil glands or pores, creating blackheads or whiteheads, (as mentioned earlier).
• Bacteria. Bacteria can easily infect oil glands and pores and grow very quickly.
• Family background. If you have acne, your kids are more likely to have it too.

Here are skin-care suggestions to help reduce acne, courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine:

• Wash your face once or twice a day with a gentle, mild soap or cleanser that won't dry the skin. Always wash your face after sweating or exercising, but don't wash excessively or more than a few times a day.
• Wash your hair with shampoo each day, particularly if you have oily hair.
• Keep oily hair pulled back and away from your face.
• Don't touch your face with your hands or fingers.
• Don't pick at, scratch or pop any blemishes, as this can cause infection and scarring.
• Avoid any makeup or face creams that are greasy or oily.
  

Source: www.medical-health-care-information.com

Wine may curb cavities

Even with the alcohol removed, red wine and white wine may fight bacteria that cause cavities, a study shows.

Before you toast the findings, remember that the study was done in test tubes. So it's too soon to count on a glass of wine to chase your cavities away.

The researchers, who work at Italy's University of Pavia, included Gabriella Gazzani, PhD.

First, they went to a local grocery store, where they bought some valpolicella (an Italian red wine) and pinot nero (an Italian white wine).

Back at their lab, the researchers stripped the alcohol out of the wine. They did that to prevent ethanol from interfering with their lab tests.

Next, the researchers marinated cavity-causing streptococcal bacteria in the wines. Both types of wine countered those bacteria and other streptococcal bacteria that cause some cases of throat infection.

Red wine might have had more antibacterial properties than white wine, but that wasn't certain, Gazzani's team notes.

The researchers also isolated acids found in red wine and white wine and tested those acids against the same bacteria, which are called S. mutans and S. pyogenes.

The isolated acids were more effective against the bacteria than the wines. So the researchers reason that while wine fights S.mutans and S. pyogenes, wine also contains compounds that dilute those benefits, to some extent.

Source: www.medical-health-care-information.com

Stroke drug may also help with frostbite

An anti-clotting drug used to treat strokes and heart attacks can also restore blood flow to frostbitten fingers and limbs, greatly reducing the need for amputation, according to a new study.

Doctors at the University of Utah who conducted the research on a small sample of patients hope it marks the start of a move beyond the traditional — and limited — treatment for frostbite.

"What it does is help to rescue that tissue that is damaged but not yet dead," said Dr. Stephen Morris, one of the authors of the study, which was released Monday in the Archives of Surgery medical journal.

Patients who received the thrombolytic therapy at the university's burn center were more likely to keep their frostbitten fingers and toes than patients who went without the drug.

All patients had similar degrees of frostbite.

Thrombolytic therapy is not new, but has been difficult to study because not every frostbite victim is a candidate. For instance, people already on blood thinners or someone who has suffered a head injury would be at risk for serious complications from the anti-clotting drug.

Dr. John Twomey, burn director at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, first tried the therapy on a patient about 20 years ago and has treated 18 other patients with it since.
Twomey, whose early findings are mentioned in the Utah study, said the treatment for frostbite has been limited to warming the affected tissue and waiting to see how much would survive.

"We saw all these frostbitten patients come in, and there was absolutely nothing we could do to alter their disease," Twomey said. "That was pretty discouraging and disheartening to see that happening, and it happened repeatedly."

In the Utah study, six patients who were treated with a drug called tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, within 24 hours of injury were compared with 25 other patients who did not receive the drug, and one patient who got the anti-clotting drug later than the 24-hour window.
Among the patients who received tPA within 24 hours, only six of 59 frostbitten fingers or toes were removed, or about 10 percent. In the other group, 97 of 234 affected digits were amputated, or about 41 percent.

The sample used for the study was small and taken only from one geographic area. The study was also based only on the one anti-clotting drug. Those are just a few of the variables that leave questions to be answered by future research.

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com

River blindness may resist drug

The parasite that causes river blindness, a crippling disease endemic in Africa, may be developing resistance to the one drug used to treat it, according to research published Friday in The Lancet.

The discovery could force public health officials to rethink strategies for controlling river blindness, also known as onchocerciasis.

In The Lancet study, researchers tested 2,501 people in disease-endemic regions of Ghana from 2004 to 2005, and found 19.5 percent had the worms that cause river blindness.

Doctors treated 342 people, from 10 communities within the regions, with ivermectin, and then tested them to see if immature worms were still in their system. Ivermectin only acts to kill young worms, so any adult worms in patients would still be present, even after treatment.
In four of the 10 communities, people were shown carrying a higher number of immature worms - the opposite result expected from the drug - suggesting the parasite was developing immunity.

"This finding represents a wake-up call that any parasite-control program that relies on a single antimicrobial agent is always at risk of derailment," wrote Dr. Peter J. Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, in an accompanying commentary in The Lancet. Hotez was not linked to the study.

River blindness is caused by a thin worm that's transmitted to humans by black flies. The worms can cause intense itching, elephantiasis of the genitals and blindness if they reach the eyes.

Officials said there were currently there are 18 million cases in 36 countries worldwide, including in tropical regions of the Americas.

Every year, public health officials give out more than 20 million doses of ivermectin, used to treat river blindness since 1987. Experts estimate the drug has prevented nearly 40,000 cases of blindness a year. To date, nearly $600 million has been spent trying to eliminate river blindness from the world.

"It's not surprising that we're seeing some drug resistance," Hotez said. "You can't rely on a single tool without any backup." The emerging problem of resistance to this drug underlines the need to find new drugs and possibly even vaccines, he said.

Experts have acknowledged that relying exclusively on ivermectin was not the best strategy.
"It's been taken for granted for years that the river blindness problem has been solved because we have ivermectin," Prichard said. "But the problem has not been solved. We need another drug."

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com

Antipsychotic drugs raise death rates in elderly

A new study adds to growing evidence that antipsychotic drugs raise death rates among elderly people, who are sometimes given them when their behavioral problems become too much for doctors or families to handle.

"For individual patients, the risk is small," said study author Dr. Sudeep Gill, an assistant professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Still, "patients and their families need to talk to their doctors about the potential risks and benefits, and this study would suggest only using these drugs when other less risky approaches have been exhausted."

Antipsychotic drugs have been around since the 1950s and are typically used to treat people with mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Over time, Gill said, doctors began using them to treat behavioral problems associated with senility, also known as dementia.

The drugs had some side effects -- including Parkinson's disease-like symptoms -- but then a new generation of the medications known as atypical antipsychotics appeared. In the 1990s, they were thought to be better for elderly people and their use increased, according to Gill.
In fact, a Canadian study found that the percentage of elderly adults using antipsychotics grew from 2.2 percent in 1993 to 3 percent in 2002.

But then reports appeared suggesting the drugs were dangerous. In 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned doctors about atypical antipsychotics, specifically olanzapine (Zyprexa), aripiprazole (Abilify), risperidone (Risperdal), and quetiapine (Seroquel).
Fifteen of 17 studies of elderly patients with dementia -- which included more than 5,100 patients -- found a 1.6- to 1.7-fold increase in death rates in those who took the drugs. Heart problems and infections like pneumonia were the most common causes of death.

For the new study, researchers looked at the risks of both the newer atypical antipsychotics and the older "conventional" drugs -- haloperidol (Haldol), loxapine (Loxitane), thioridazine (Mellaril), chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and perphenazine (Trilafon). The study authors followed 27,259 pairs of older adults in the province of Ontario who were treated for dementia between 1997 and 2003.

The patients were "paired" so the researchers could compare the death rates of patients who took atypical antipsychotics to those who didn't, and those who took conventional antipsychotics to those who took atypical antipsychotics. The researchers looked at the risk of death 30, 60, 120 and 180 days after the drugs were first given to the patients.

The researchers found that both types of antipsychotics appeared to boost death rates by 1.31 to 1.55 times. Conventional antipsychotics seemed to be the more dangerous of the two types of drugs, the researchers said.

However, the researchers said the study had limitations because it didn't look at the causes of death, and many patients didn't keep using the drugs after 30 days.

The study findings were published June 4 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com

Women warned on iron 'overdose'

Healthy pregnant women should think twice before taking iron supplements, say researchers who have linked high doses to blood pressure problems.

Iron is often given to combat anaemia in pregnancy, but many women take extra iron, on its own or in a multivitamin.

The Iranian university study, published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, gave some women a 30mg daily dose as part of its research.

UK experts say that this amount should only be taken on GP advice.

The UK Food Standards Agency says that lower doses in UK multivitamins are unlikely to harm women.

Anaemia is a common condition in pregnant women, which, if left unchecked, can contribute to premature births and low birthweight babies.

It is caused by a lack of red blood cells, and taking iron on prescription helps the body produce more.

The researchers from Tarbiat Modarres University wanted to check the effect of iron supplements on women whose red blood cell level was normal.

They gave 370 women a 150mg dose of ferrous sulphate, which equates to approximately 30mg of actual iron, every day throughout their pregnancy.

A similar number of women were given a "placebo" dummy pill containing no iron.

Routine pills
The number of women with diagnosed high blood pressure - a disorder which can also cause problems for mother and baby - was higher in the women given the iron pills than in the other group.

Many countries still offer iron pills as a routine measure for all pregnant women, and lead researcher Professor Saedeh Ziaei said: "Our trial suggests that administering it even may have some disadvantages in non-anaemic women."

Professor Philip Steer, the editor of the BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said: "Anaemia is often associated with low birth weight and preterm births, but this does not mean that women should be popping iron pills, or any vitamin pills indiscriminately, to prevent poor pregnancy outcomes."

A spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said that women should avoid taking extra iron unless recommended by their doctor or midwife.

Routine iron supplementation is not practised in the UK, but blood is tested for signs of anaemia more than once during pregnancy as a matter of course.

However, many healthy pregnant women take once-a-day multivitamin pills that contain smaller doses of iron - normally around 100% of the recommended dose of 15mg.

Official bodies such as the Food Standards Agency recommend that pregnant women take extra vitamins such as folic acid and vitamin D, but don't encourage any other vitamin supplementation, saying that a balanced healthy diet provides all the vitamins needed.

However, they said that taking 17mg or less a day - the amount UK multivitamin brands contain - was 'unlikely to be harmful'.

A spokesman for the baby charity Tommy's also stressed the importance of a healthy diet, but added that women were free to take supplements if they chose.

"We consider that the supplements available in this country are safe, and it is up to the individual woman to choose."

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com