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February 7th, 2012
News for people at risk of blood clots from flying
An expert panel has just released new guidelines to help people who may be at risk of suffering a blood clot in a deep vein in the legs, what doctors call a deep vein thrombosis or DVT, during or after a long flight (usually determined as one of 4 hours or more, although this can happen even on shorter flights).
The reason a DVT can be dangerous, even life-threatening, is that if a piece of that clot breaks off, it travels upwards in the venous system and then can lodge in the lungs, where it’s known as a pulmonary embolus, which has a substantial mortality rate associated with it.
The other term for this condition, the one used by most lay people, is economy class syndrome, but these experts point out that there is nothing special about sitting in economy seats on a flight that raise the risk of a DVT.
Rather, it’s the long period of sitting in a confined space without getting up or moving the legs that raises the risk of a DVT which means that anyone confined in such a space and situation – even in business class or first class but also on a bus or in a car – is at risk of a DVT.
So this is something everyone wants to prevent, but some of us are more at risk than others.
According to these just-released guidelines, among the more important risk factors are these:
• Previous DVT or known blood clotting disorder
• Malignancy
• Recent surgery or trauma
• Immobility
• Estrogen use, including the use of oral contraceptives
• Pregnancy
• Sitting in a window seat
• Obesity
Bottom line, though: everyone wants to prevent this, whether you have risk factors or not, so pay attention to what you need to do to lower your risk (in the next blog).
I’m Dr Art Hister
February 6th, 2012
News about risk factors for premature strokes
2 studies about strokes that will be important news for some of you were presented at the just-completed annual meeting of the American Stroke Association.
First, a study showing that people who had a parent who suffered a stroke before the age of 65 have a higher than average risk of having a premature stroke themselves.
In this study, when subjected to fancy MRI brain scans, such people under the age of 65 – those with a parent who suffered a stroke early in life – already had some damage to their brains, even if they had no symptoms, and they also had a diminution in certain cognitive abilities, although again, none of them had noticed those changes as yet.
Bottom line: a parent with a stroke means you’re at higher risk than average so do everything else you can to lower your risk.
The second study showed similar early “silent stroke” changes in the brains of people who suffer from sleep apnea, and the worse the apnea, the more changes that were found.
Same bottom line, of course, for such people, too.
I’m Dr Art Hister
February 5th, 2012
Massage is good for you in more ways than you think
For many and variable reasons nearly everyone likes a good massage.
And now there’s some good proof from a terrific little study that massage is also good for what ails you, so long as what ails you is some kind of muscle pain or discomfort.
In this study, done at McMaster University in Hamilton and published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers studied the effects of massage therapy on leg muscles in 11 young active men by taking samples from those muscles after exercise on both legs, only one of which was massaged.
They conclude that massage not only had an anti-inflammatory effect, which means it helps the muscle tissue recover more rapidly after exercise and likely with less discomfort, but there was also a huge potential long-term benefit from massage in that the massage stimulated the muscle cells to develop more mitochondria, which are usually referred to as the engines of cells.
If that’s true and it can be confirmed in larger, more elaborate studies, especially ones done on non-athletes, it opens up a huge potential area for treatment of all sorts of muscle-related problems, particularly, one would hope, in the elderly.
I’m Dr Art Hister
February 2nd, 2012
Testosterone
Something all women have known, well, since at least the woman who came right after Eve: most men don’t tend to co-operate in tasks as well as most women do, and the answer likely lies in biology.
That is, it’s most likely that hormone differences account for the differences between the two genders in the ability to co-operate, and most researchers would put their bets on the higher levels of testosterone that men have which makes many men – take your pick here - more aggressive, more assertive, more confident in their own abilities, bigger jerks when it comes to working with others, etc.
So, here’s the deal: in some ingenious research involving 17 pairs of women, on one day, researchers gave the women a placebo pill before making them do an experiment that involved co-operating to solve properly.
With a placebo pill, the women were quite able to co-operate and solve that problem.
On another day, however, the researchers gave those same women some testosterone instead of placebo, and on that day, the women’s level of co-operation needed to solve the problem dropped dramatically.
The studies appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society .
I’m Dr Art Hister
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