30 September, 2013

Heart disease kills 17.3 million each year

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including heart disease and stroke, cause 17.3 million deaths each year worldwide, and by 2030 it is expected that 23 million people will die from CVDs annually, a report said.

Sunday is being observed as World Heart Day. Every year since 2000, Sep 29 has been observed by the World Heart Federation as World Heart Day to spread awareness about the rising instance of heart disease. 

‘Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including heart disease and stroke, take lives prematurely. In fact, they cause 17.3 million deaths each year and the numbers are rising. By 2030, it is expected that 23 million people will die from CVDs annually,’ said Rishi Sethi, associate professor, Department of Cardiology, King George’s Medical University, Lucknow.

The intervention cardiology data compiled by Rishi Sethi revealed that over 4,500 lifesaving angioplasty procedures and almost 2,000 lifesaving pacemaker implantations have been performed in 2011-12 in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The number of these procedures has increased by almost 30 percent over the last year, he said.

‘Children are vulnerable too, the risk for CVDs can begin before birth, during foetal development, and increase further during childhood with exposure to unhealthy diet, lack of exercise and smoking,’ the doctor said.

The doctor also underlined how simple lifestyle changes like giving up tobacco could make a big difference to cardiovascular health.

‘The tobacco industry interference in public health policy has been recognised as the biggest obstacle in enforcing tobacco control laws. Strengthening tobacco control is one of the evidence-based ways to reduce CVDs,’ said Ehsaan Latif, director, Tobacco Control, at the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

It is an international voluntary scientific organisation working in low- and middle-income countries to fight HIV/AIDS, TB, lung disease, tobacco-related morbidity and non-communicable diseases.

Source: http://health.india.com                   

30.09.2013

Low treatment costs attract foreign heart patients to India

Low treatment costs and high levels of expertise have made India a leading destination for heart treatment for people from West Asian and African countries, doctors said. According to doctors, the rates of heart treatment are 1/10th to 1/15th times lower as compared to the United States and Britain.

‘India has now become a hub for heart treatment in Southeast Asia and people have been flying in from foreign countries and undergoing treatment for various cardiovascular diseases here’, Subhash Chandra, associate director (Interventional Cardiology), Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, told IANS.

People visiting India for treatment are not only from neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal but also from far off countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Kazakhstan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Oman.

Subhash Chandra said close to 500 patients had undergone treatment in Delhi alone in the last one year. ‘Compared to global standards, the rates for any kind of cardiovascular surgery are very minuscule in our country,’ said Anil Bansal, chief cardiologist at Columbia Asia Hospital.

Coronary angiography (a test that uses dye and special X-rays to show the insides of coronary arteries, the tube that carries blood to heart) costs around Rs.10,000 to Rs. 15,000 in India and around 500 dollars (Rs. 32,000) in the US. ‘I underwent an implant here in just Rs.7 lakhs, while I was quoted Rs. 30 lakhs for this in Europe,’ said Bardhan Sarkar from Bangladesh, who was treated by Bansal.

The most popular treatments availed of by people who come to India are angioplasty, where the blockage in the coronary artery is opened and a thin coil, called a stent, is implanted; open heart surgery where the heart holes are closed and narrow valves opened; and the installation of artificial pacemakers for slower heart rates. Low treatment costs are definitely one of the major factors attracting people to India, but the expertise and trust in the quality of treatment is another reason for the growth of foreign patients.

‘All the latest high quality treatment is available in our country and with high expertise we have been able to establish trust among foreign patients,’ said Chandan Kedawat, senior consultant cardiovascular disease at Pushpawati Singhania Research Institute (PSRI). Similarly, even for treatment of congenital heart disease (diseases affecting infants and children and present since birth) several hospitals are attracting a lot of patients from abroad.

‘Treatment of heart disease in children costs 10 to 15 times less here than that in any European country,’ said Shreesha Maiya, pediatric interventional cardiologist at Bangalore’s Narayana Hrudayalaya. In private hospitals, open heart surgery costs Rs.1.5 lakh to Rs.2.25 lakh; for children, open heart surgery costs Rs.1.25 lakh to Rs.2 lakh; valve surgeries cost between Rs.2.5 lakh and Rs.2.75 lakh.

The treatment is even cheaper in government hospitals, with the difference being usually between Rs.75,000 and Rs. 1 lakh.

Source: http://health.india.com                    30.09.2013

Dedication is not what others expect of you, it is what you can give to others

Henry Miller

28 September, 2013

Portable devices can save lives in sudden cardiac arrests

New Delhi: Nimit Ahuja, a 35-year old software professional, was shopping at a mall when he suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. He had suffered from what doctors call a sudden cardiac arrest.

Cardiologists say young lives like these can be saved if there are facilities like Automated External Defibrillators (AED) available at public places in India. An AED is a portable device that can automatically diagnose a sudden cardiac arrest and help save life with the press of a button. It sends an electric shock to the heart to restore its normal rhythm and bring a person back from the verge of death.

"An AED, if used during a cardiac arrest within the first 4-6 minutes, can save more than 95 percent of lives," Bipin Kumar Dubey, director, department of cardiology in the Rockland group of hospitals, told IANS.

"There should be at least one AED available at all public spaces like shopping malls and airports. The government should make it mandatory for builders to set up at least one AED in all public buildings," he said.

Doctors said Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is a leading cause of death and account for greater than 50 percent of cardiovascular deaths in India. More than 660,000 deaths occur every year in India alone as a result of SCA. The SCA is a condition in which the heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating. If this happens, blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organs.

Experts said people who have heart disease are at a higher risk for SCA. SCA can however happen in people who appear healthy and have no known heart disease or other risk factors like hypertension.

Ram E. Rajagopalan in the department of critical care medicine in Sundaram Medical Foundation of Chennai said if an AED is used on a patient suffering with a sudden cardiac arrest his chances of survival will grow by more than 60 percent.

"We definitely need the common man to be aware of what an AED is, as anyone anywhere with access to an AED can save a life," Rajagopalan told IANS.

Lamenting that very few people know how to respond to emergency situations like SCAs in India, Anil Bansal, chief cardiologist at Columbia Asia Hospital in Gurgaon, said people have to be trained to use an AED. "The need of the hour is to make AED devices available at all public spaces and to train people on how to use them," he added.

A recent study in medical journal Lancet said that by 2010, 60 percent of the world's heart patients would be in India. As per World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, mortality due to cardiac causes has overtaken mortality due to all cancers put together across the world.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com/news/health

28.09.2013

Alternative to open-heart surgery performed

London: Doctors in the US have successfully performed an alternative procedure to open-heart surgery.

The doctors at the UCLA Medical Centre, California, performed the pioneering procedure on a man to remove a 24-inch blood clot -- stretching from his legs to the heart, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

Todd Dunlap, 62, became the first person to successfully undergo the procedure after it was offered to him instead of the more critical open-heart surgery, the report said.

Doctors said the procedure could be used more widely in future as an alternative to the open-heart surgery as it was a great option for the older, frail person who wouldn't survive open-heart surgery, added the report.

A tiny camera was slid down into Dunlap's oesophagus to monitor his heart before putting a coiled tube though his neck artery to plug one end into his heart, against the clot.

Doctors threaded the other end through a vein at the groin and hooked the tube up to a powerful heart-bypass device in the operating room to create suction.

"Once in place, the AngioVac (the device used to vacuum out the clot) quickly sucked the deadly clot out of Dunlap's heart and filtered out the solid tissue," said Moriarty, who offered the procedure to Dunlap.

"The system then restored the cleansed blood through a blood vessel near the groin, eliminating the need for a blood transfusion," the Daily Mail quoted Moriarty as saying.

The procedure lasted three hours.

Murray Kwon, cardiothoracic surgeon at the UCLA, said: "Retrieving a clot from within the heart used to require open-heart surgery, resulting in longer hospitalisation, recovery and rehabilitation times compared to the minimally invasive approach provided by the AngioVac system."

Source: www.zeenews.india.com/news/health

28.09.2013

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead

Fannie Flagg,

27 September, 2013

Will you sacrifice your health for a smartphone?

Mobile phones can be included as basic necessity, along with food, water and shelter. Will you buy a cheap phone rather than buying a branded, safe and reputed phone? 

Smartphones are the cell phones to have, but choosing the right phone is important as it is what separates you from developing healthproblems. We dig deeper to find you a safe phone.

Satish Nikam - Technology Expert says - "Before buying any cell phone, one key aspect all consumers should beware of is its SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) value. It is the measure of the amount of energy absorbed by your body when it is exposed to radio frequency (RF) waves. Radio waves are one, which are emitted by mobile phones.

One should prefer cellphones, which has lower SAR value, because the lesser the SAR value, the better it is for your health. Each mobile phone emits radio waves while connecting to the mobile towers, which itself also emits these waves. A part of the energy of these waves is absorbed by the body tissue, and this amount is depicted by the SAR value.

Most of the smartphones, which are unbranded, have no information on the radio waves being emitted by the mobile set. Thus be cautious while buying a smartphone, because a higher SAR value can mean a potential health hazard.

At present, the SAR value limit in India is set at 1.60 W/kg in 1g tissue mass. Besides, a phone stating a higher SAR value does not really mean that it is always more unsafe to use as the phone operates on highest rate only when linking a call. Otherwise, it operates on low SAR values.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

27.09.2013

Women develop heart disease 10 yrs later than men

A new research has revealed that a biological ability to compensate for the body's reduced response to insulin could help explain whywomen typically develop heart disease 10 years later than men. 

Lead author, Sun H. Kim, MD, MS, of Stanford University School of Medicine, said that among men and women ages 50 or younger with comparable levels of insulin resistance, their study found women experienced fewer complications than men did. 

She said that this ability to deal with the fallout from insulin resistance was no longer present when we examined women who were 51 and older. 

Kim asserted that this gender difference may illuminate the 'female advantage' - a phenomenon where the onset of cardiovascular disease tends to happen a decade later in women than in men. 

The cross-sectional study also examined insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease risk in 468 women and 354 men. 

Among participants ages 50 or younger, women had lower blood pressure and fasting blood sugar levels than their male counterparts. 

In addition, women had lower levels of triglycerides, fats in the blood that can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. 

The study has been published in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

Source: www.timesofindia.com

27.09.2013

For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward

Jim Rohn

26 September, 2013

‘India needs to strengthen doctor-patient communication’

There is an urgent need to bridge the communication gap between patients and doctors in India to improve the country’s healthcare system, experts said in Kolkata on Tuesday.

According to these experts, with the advent of modern technology in healthcare, physicians are becoming increasingly dependent on machines and this has created a vacuum in doctor-patient communication.

Compared to countries like Britain and the US, where doctors forge a strong relationship with their patients, India lags behind. 

Another aspect to this is the lack of initiative on the part of doctors to gain detailed knowledge about the case history of their patients.

‘We are indeed facing a lag in the communication area. Unless you know how the patient is feeling and unless you explain the diagnosis and other details to him or her, then the treatment is not complete. It is not simply about writing down a prescription,’ said S. Kar Purkayastha, consultant physician and gastroenterologist, Peerless Hospitex Hospital and Research Centre Ltd., Kolkata.

‘Modern equipment is necessary but the role of the doctor as a detective is crucial,’ Purkayastha said. 

To circumvent this, especially for busy medical heads at private establishments, Purkayastha suggested forming a team of six to eight doctors who would keep in regular touch with patients and report to the head periodically.

‘Indian physicians have to do a lot in this respect,’ he added.

Debashish Datta, consultant in gastroenterology, hepatology and Internal Medicine, Fortis Hospital, said keeping tabs on patients’ case histories was crucial to prevent wrong diagnosis and negligence.

These issues would be debated at the two-day conference organised by the Royal College of Physicians London, Peerless Hospital and B.K. Roy Foundation in Kolkata beginning on Oct 19.

Source: http://health.india.com

26.09.2013

India working on developing strips to test diabetes:

Ghulam Nabi Azad

India is working on a host of innovative technologies, including developing strips to test diabetes, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said in New Delhi on Tuesday.

The health ministry has launched a programme to encourage development and introduction of affordable and indigenous technologies for public health applications, Azad said after giving away awards to scientists of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in New Delhi.

The country is indigenously developing testing strips for diabetes — work on which is in an advanced stage — along with methods of mosquito control and diagnostic tests for TB, dengue and several other diseases, he said.

Terming the progress on the projects as ‘very satisfactory’, Azad said work on 30 such technologies is expected to be completed by 2014.

He said the department of health research has launched several innovative schemes to expand the research base both in terms of infrastructure and human resource.

Azad said that during this year itself, three new schemes have been rolled out. 

‘These schemes aim to establish multi-disciplinary research units in medical colleges to considerably strengthen the fight against non-communicable diseases.

‘In 35 government medical colleges, multi-disciplinary research units will be established in the current year, of which 21 have already been approved,’ Azad said.

The health minister presented the ICMR Awards to 51 outstanding scientists for the years 2009 and 2010 for their work in communicable and non-communicable diseases, maternal and child health and various other medical and bio-medical fields.

He expressed happiness that a good number of the awardees were women scientists.

India has been producing excellent human resource in the health field, he said.

The ICMR is the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination and promotion of bio-medical research. It is one of the oldest medical research bodies in the world.

‘The human resource we (India) produce is being shared with other countries,’ he said, adding more than 81,000 medical professionals in the US and more than 75,000 doctors in Britain are of Indian origin. 

Source: http://health.india.com

26.09.2013

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun

Mary Lou Cook

25 September, 2013

Your smartphone is destroying your memory

Your Android and iOS phones are killing cognitive thinking and declarative memory, say experts

Dr Hozefa A Bhinderwala, psychiatrist at Saifee and Prince Aly Khan Hospital, received a call from his brother last week. "He said, 'You are the doctor, but I performed a surgery today'."

The specialist's brother was referring to having managed to get his nine-year-old son to let go off his smartphone, which he was worried had grown into "an extended limb". "As soon as my brother would get back home, his son would grab the phone and stay glued to it right until bedtime, playing games and fiddling with apps," says the psychiatrist.

This is not a lone case. Dr Sangeeta Ravat, Head of the Department of Neurology at Seth G S Medical College and KEM Hospital, says the co-relation between mild Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (significant difficulties of inattention and impulsiveness or a combination of the two) among young adults and the excessive use of gadgets has been the subject of debate at recent medical conferences.

And if the Indian smartphone user study is accurate, we have reason to worry. The survey conducted by AC Nielsen across 46 cities in September and October 2012 revealed that the number of smartphones had touched 40 million, and almost half of the users were under 25. The dramatic growth was driven by a desire 'to stay connected and have instant access to social networking sites', it said.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

25.09.2013

Skincare: Eczema causes and cure

Sadly children who develop eczema also develop asthma. Dr. Vijay Singhal, Dermatologist at Delhi based Sri Balaji Action Medical Institute explains some of the triggers for eczema and ways to prevent it.

As mentioned in Wikipedia, 'Eczema also known as atopic dermatitis is a form of chronic inflammation of the skin.' The skin turns red, itchy, dry, flaky, with blisters, and even swells up. But there are different types of eczema:

- Atopic dermatitis

- Xerotic eczema

- Seborrhoeic dermatitis

- Dyshidrosis

- Discoid eczema

- Venous eczema

- Dermatitis herpetiformis

There are several triggers or causes of eczema, Dermatologist, Dr. Vijay explains, "Triggers for eczema can be internal or external. For example, winters, woollen clothes, artificial jewellery (nickel), rubber slippers, congress grass (a type of weed) etc." Individuals are born with eczema, but internal and external factors trigger an outburst. If you experience a rash, immediate consult your physician for timely treatment.

If you are prone to experiencing eczema, then keep your skin moisturised. Dr. Vijay Singhal suggests ways to prevent eczema, "It can be prevented by keeping the skin moist by applying a moisturiser and petroleum jelly. Care should also be taken in order to keep away from the above mentioned irritants". Stay away from the triggers, change your diet and avoid scratching, these are self-care tips. Your doctor can suggest anti-allergy medication or injections to prevent eczema.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

25.09.2013

It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essence of life

Barthold Georg Niebuhr 

24 September, 2013

World Bank to invest $700 mn on women, children's health

United Nations: World Bank President Jim Yong Kim announced Monday that at least $700 million would be invested by 2015 to help developing countries reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for women and children's health.

The funding will come from the International Development Association (IDA), the Bank group's fund for the poorest countries, Xinhua reported citing a statement from the World Bank president.

It will enable national scale-ups of successful pilot projects that were made possible by support from the World Bank's Health Results Innovation Trust Fund (HRITF) and IDA, the statement said.

"We need to inject greater urgency into our collective efforts to save more women and children's lives, and evidence shows that results-based financing has significant impact," said Kim at a high-level forum at the United Nations.

"The World Bank Group is committed to using evidence-based approaches to help ensure that every woman and every child can get the affordable, quality health care necessary to survive and live a healthy, productive life," he added.

The announcement follows Kim's last year's commitment to help boost funding for the MDGs as part of the UN secretary general's Every Woman Every Child global partnership.

Reducing child mortality and improving maternal health by 2015 are two of the Millennium Development Goals, a blueprint agreed to by all the world's countries and leading development institutions.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com/news/health

24.09.2013

Universal flu vaccine closer to reality

Washington: Scientists including an Indian-origin are now closer to developing a universal flu vaccine, after they used the 2009 pandemic as a natural experiment to study why some people resist severe illness.

Lead researcher Professor Ajit Lalvani from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and his team rapidly recruited 342 staff and students at Imperial to take part in their study in autumn 2009.

The volunteers donated blood samples and were given nasal swabs. They were sent emails every three weeks asking them to fill in a survey about their health. If they experienced flu symptoms, they took a nasal swab and sent it back to the lab.

They found that those who fell more severely ill with flu had fewer CD8 T cells in their blood, and those who caught flu but had no symptoms or only mild symptoms had more of these cells.

Professor Lalvani said that the immune system produces these CD8 T cells in response to usual seasonal flu.

He said that unlike antibodies, they target the core of the virus, which doesn't change, even in new pandemic strains and the 2009 pandemic provided a unique natural experiment to test whether T cells could recognise, and protect us against, new strains that we haven't encountered before and to which we lack antibodies.

Lalvani asserted that their findings suggest that by making the body produce more of this specific type of CD8 T cell, you can protect people against symptomatic illness and this could provide the blueprint for developing a universal flu vaccine.

The findings have been published in Nature Medicine.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com/news/health

24.09.2013

It is not good enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well

Charles Du Bos

23 September, 2013

Beware – Facebook can cause short-term memory loss!

Are you always logged in? Take a break. A new study warns that too much time browsing social media could lead to short-term memory loss. Contrary to common wisdom, an idle brain is in fact doing important work – and in the age of constant information overload, it’s a good idea to go offline on a regular basis, according to a researcher from Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Erik Fransen, whose research focuses on short-term memory and ways to treat diseased neurons, said that a brain exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can easily become hobbled by information overload.  The result is that less information gets filed away in your memory.

The problem begins in a system of the brain commonly known as the working memory, or what most people know as short-term memory. That’s the system of the brain that we need when we communicate, Fransen said.  ‘Working memory enables us to filter out information and find what we need in the communication. It enables us to work online and store what we find online, but it’s also a limited resource,’ he said.

‘At any given time, the working memory can carry up to three or four items. When we attempt to stuff more information in the working memory, our capacity for processing information begins to fail.

‘When you are on Facebook, you are making it harder to keep the things that are ‘online’ in your brain that you need.  ‘In fact, when you try to process sensory information like speech or video, you are going to need partly the same system of working memory, so you are reducing your own working memory capacity.

‘And when you try to store many things in your working memory, you get less good at processing information,’ he said.  You’re also robbing the brain of time it needs to do some necessary housekeeping. The brain is designed for both activity and relaxation, Fransen said.

‘The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. Theories of how memory works explain why these two different states are needed.  ‘When we max out our active states with technology equipment, just because we can, we remove from the brain part of the processing, and it can’t work,’ Fransen said.

Source: http://health.india.com

23.09.2013

Now – a nano-medicine for blood cancer!

Coinciding with the 60th birthday of Mata Amritanandamayi, the Kochi-based Amrita Centre for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine has developed a nano-medicine for drug-resistant blood cancer.

This is expected to dramatically improve the treatment of drug-resistant chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), when used in combination with Imatinib, the standard drug for the disease.

In another significant invention, the 2006-founded Amrita Centre has devised a mechanism that can effectively prevent recurrence of glioma or brain tumour.

This deadly disease affects about four out of every 100,000 people in India. The life expectancy of high-grade glioma patients is about one to two years.

The two projects will be formally unveiled Sep 26 at Amritavarsham60, the 60th birthday celebrations of the hugging saint or Amma as she is popularly referred to by her devotees.

CML annually affects approximately two out of every 100,000 Indians. Almost 40 per cent of these cases are resistant to Imatinib. For such patients, treatment options are extremely limited.

‘What we have done at Amrita is to take a particular ‘small-molecule inhibitor’ class of anti-cancer drug, currently available in the market and encapsulate it into a protein nano-capsule,’ said Shantikumar Nair, the centre’s director.

‘This allows the drug to be absorbed directly into the cancer cells circulating in the patient’s bloodstream. This has a marked increase on its efficacy in killing cancer cells. Further, the circulation lifetime of the drug in the blood is increased, which also enhances its efficacy,’ he added.

The nano-encapsulated version of the drug has shown itself to be non-toxic in healthy mice in tests conducted by his department, and it has similarly demonstrated itself to be effective in tests involving blood samples of people with Imatinib-resistant CML.

Manzoor Koyakutty, professor at the Centre, says the next step is to evaluate its efficacy in fighting CML in mice. ‘If it continues to remain non-toxic and effective, we can move on to clinical trials,’ added the expert and drug co-inventor. 

Source: http://health.india.com

23.09.2013

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress.Working together is success.

Henry Ford