2, September 2014

Medicines may help you quit drinking!

If you wish to stop drinking, visiting the doctor may be the last thing in your mind as you hardly come across doctors prescribing pills that can keep you away from visiting the bars in the evening.

This may change soon as researchers have now identified a few medicines that can work wonders in when used in conjunction with behavioural therapies.

"We have medications that can help," Daniel Jonas, an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was quoted as saying.

The medications (namely naltrexone, acamprosate, topiramate, and nalmefene), appear to help curb drinking problems by fighting the biology of alcohol addiction, the researchers said.

Unlike Antabuse (a medication used for decades to treat alcoholics) that makes people wretchedly ill if they drink, these medicines do not make people so sick.

Instead, these are drugs that address the brain chemistry that gets messed up by alcohol.

In an analysis of 122 randomized controlled trials, both acamprosate and naltrexone helped people either quit drinking or cut back substantially.

The study also found benefits in nalmefene and topiramate, two medications that are also prescribed for alcohol dependence.

The study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

02.09.2014

Complex heart tests up cancer risk

Radiation from standard X-rays do not significantly raise cancer risks for young children, in general, but children undergoing more complex procedures with higher radiation have higher risks, says a study.

"Cancer risk overall is relatively low, but we hope that this awareness will encourage providers to limit radiation exposure in children, when alternative procedures can offer the same benefit with less radiation," said Jason Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in the US.

Researchers reviewed medical records to find the most common imaging procedures, calculated how much radiation organs absorb during each procedure and then used a report from National Academy of Sciences in the US to analyse lifetime cancer risks based on the amounts of each procedure's exposure.

Lifetime cancer risk increases ranged from 0.002 per cent for chest X-rays to 0.4 per cent for complex CT scans and cardiac catheterisations.

The study appeared in the journal Circulation.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

02.09.2014

Life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change