Women’s Faces Are Redder During Ovulation, Study Says

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Women’s faces are redder than usual during ovulation, but this subtle change isn’t detectable to the human eye, new research shows.

This change may be a possible signal of peak fertility, and it may have evolved to become less noticeable since controlling or hiding ovulation has greater benefits, the researchers suggested.

In primates, males only express interest in females when it’s apparent they’re ovulating. Among humans, however, ovulation is not obvious and sex is not limited to the period of time when women are ovulating.

Researchers investigated changes in the color of women’s faces over the course of a month. The study involved 22 women. They were photographed daily without makeup using a scientific camera able to capture color more accurately than a typical camera.

“We were able to recruit undergraduates in a number of colleges and photograph the women just before they had dinner in the college hall every evening. The collegiate routines and networks were vital to collecting data with such regularity,” the study’s leader, Hannah Rowland, from the zoology department at University of Cambridge in England, said in a university news release.

A computer program then selected the same patch of cheek from each woman’s photo. The images were converted into red, blue and green values to assess changes in color levels.

Meanwhile, the women tested themselves for hormonal changes at specific intervals during the month. The researchers identified when the women were most fertile based on these levels. Those who experienced a spike in their luteinizing hormone level were expected to ovulate within 24 hours.

Redness in the women’s faces changed significantly throughout the month, but peaked at ovulation, the study published online June 30 in PLOS One found.

The women’s faces remained extra red until after estrogen levels fell. The largest average difference in redness, however, wasn’t a level high enough to be detected by the human eye.

Once menstruation began, the redness in women’s faces dropped to much lower levels. The researchers said this redness closely matches changes in body temperature throughout an ovulation cycle.

“Women don’t advertise ovulation, but they do seem to leak information about it, as studies have shown they are seen as more attractive by men when ovulating,” said Rowland. “We had thought facial skin color might be an outward signal for ovulation, as it is in other primates, but this study shows facial redness is not what men are picking up on — although it could be a small piece of a much larger puzzle.”

Since people — and other primates — are attracted to red, women may subconsciously enhance this naturally occurring facial redness with makeup or red clothes, the researchers suggested.

“As far back as the 1970s, scientists were speculating that involuntary signals of fertility such as skin color changes might be replaced with voluntary signals, such as clothing and behavior,” the study’s co-leader, Robert Burriss, a psychologist from Northumbria University in England, said in the news release.

“Some species of primate advertise their fertility through changes in the color of their faces. Even if humans once advertised ovulation in this way, it appears that we don’t anymore,” he said.

Another theory is that women blush more often when they are in the company of attractive men, the study authors said.

“Other research has shown that when women are in the fertile phase of their cycle they are more flirtatious and their pupils dilate more readily, but only when they are thinking about or interacting with attractive men,” said Burriss. “We will need to do more research to find out if skin redness changes in the same way.”

More information

The American Pregnancy Association has more about ovulation.

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Did One Gene Mutation Launch the Black Death?

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — One small genetic change may have transformed Yersinia pestis — the plague bacteria — from a relatively mild germ into the deadly bug that killed millions in the Black Death and other historic epidemics, scientists report.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, humans can contract Y. pestis after being bitten by a flea carried by a rodent or by handling the rodent themselves. While antibiotics can effectively treat plague today, an epidemic in the mid-1300s wiped out up to 60 percent of Europe’s population, the CDC said.

But what made the germ — which can trigger bubonic, pneumonic or septicemic plague — so lethal?

To find out, a team led by Wyndham Lathem, an assistant professor in microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, examined ancestral strains of Y. pestis in mice.

They wanted to learn when and how the bacterium evolved from a bug that primarily caused an illness in the digestive tract, to one that could infect the lungs and cause the most severe form of plague, pneumonic plague.

The oldest ancestor of currently existing strains of the bacteria can infect the lungs, but it doesn’t result in the deadly respiratory disease that killed so many, Lathem’s group said.

The main difference between this strain and others that could cause pneumonic plague is a gene known as Pla, the study revealed.

The researchers theorized that the acquisition of this gene not only helped the bacteria infect the lungs, but also enabled it to cause a more serious, often fatal infection.

To test the theory, the team inserted the Pla gene into the less-lethal ancestral strain of the bacteria. They then watched how it affected the lungs.

As expected, the mutated strain became more deadly and was able to cause respiratory infections as serious as modern-day strains of Y. pestis.

The bacterium has gained and lost numerous genes over thousands of years, but the Pla gene was all it took for the bacteria to become so deadly, the Chicago team said.

After examining variations of the Pla gene, the study’s authors also found a gene tweak only found in more modern strains of the bacteria — this change enabled it to spread to the lymph nodes, causing bubonic plague.

“Our data suggests that the insertion and then subsequent mutation of Pla allowed for new, rapidly evolving strains of disease,” Lathem said. “This information can show how new respiratory pathogens could emerge with only small genetic changes.”

“Our findings demonstrate how Y. pestis had the ability to cause a severe respiratory disease very early in its evolution,” Lathem said in a Northwestern news release. “This research helps us better understand how bacteria can adapt to new host environments to cause disease by acquiring small bits of DNA.”

They concluded their findings could also help explain how Y. pestis infections advanced from small, local outbreaks of plague to pandemics like the sixth century’s Justinian Plague and the fourteenth century’s Black Death.

The study is published June 30 in the journal Nature Communications.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on the Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague.

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Under-the-Tongue Hay Fever Pills Offer Little Benefit: Study

By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Under-the-tongue pills for hay fever sufferers provide little symptom relief and often come with bothersome side effects, new research finds.

Under-the-tongue, or sublingual, therapy is widely used in Europe as an alternative to allergy shots. In the United States, two such “immunotherapy” pills have been approved recently by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for grass allergies.

For this study, Italian researchers looked at 25 clinical trials that evaluated the treatments’ effectiveness in reducing symptoms and the need for other allergy medications.

“The major finding here is that the benefit of SLIT [sublingual immunotherapy] tablets is very small, compared to placebo,” said Dr. Gabriele Di Lorenzo, of the department of internal medicine at the University of Palermo, who led the study. It was published online June 29 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Di Lorenzo said some previous trials overestimated the drugs’ benefit because of the way differences between active medicine and placebo were calculated. For the new analysis, the researchers said the real difference was estimated correctly.

Many people with seasonal allergies — characterized by sneezing, itchy, watery eyes and congestion — get temporary relief from antihistamines and nasal corticosteroids. Allergy shots and sublingual therapy are different in that they expose the user to small amounts of allergen, in the hope of reducing allergic response over time.

Oralair, one of the drugs approved for use in the United States, includes freeze-dried extracts from the pollen of five grasses: Kentucky blue grass, orchard, perennial rye, sweet vernal and timothy. Another drug, Grastek, includes timothy extract.

In the analysis, when the pills were compared with placebo, symptom scores differed by just 1 point.

“Consider that the symptom score scale is 18 points,” Di Lorenzo said. “So, less than 1 point difference is not clinically significant. This means that the treatment alone is not sufficient to control symptoms.”

Study participants could also take allergy medicine, such as antihistamines, and this is what mainly controlled symptoms, Di Lorenzo said.

Side effects, reported by more than 61 percent of those taking the under-the-tongue pills, included swelling of the mouth, throat irritation and itchy skin. They were mostly mild to moderate, but some patients stopped the sublingual medicine because of them.

Di Lorenzo concluded that allergy injections at a doctor’s office, although less convenient and riskier, are more effective.

Referring to the concept of under-the-tongue allergy treatment, Dr. Gaston De Cardenas, ear, nose and throat chief at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, said that “the idea is great.” However, ”they need to develop something that works better,” he said. De Cardenas was not involved in the study.

Doctors do have another alternative, said Dr. Jordan Josephson, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “It’s possible for a doctor to formulate sublingual drops to target a specific allergy,” he said.

Some doctors do this in their office, he said, while others send the prescription to a special compounding pharmacy. This type of off-label use is legal.

More information

For more about seasonal allergies, see the American Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology.

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Why Is It So Hard to Get a Lyme Disease Diagnosis?

 

Photo: Getty Images

Avril Lavigne opened up again this week about her struggle with Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness she says left her bedridden for months and desperate for answers. The 30-year-old singer told Good Morning America this week that she saw many doctors and underwent a battery of tests in the last year, but that it wasn’t until she found a Lyme disease specialist that she was given a correct diagnosis.

“I was in Los Angeles, literally, like the worst time in my life and I was seeing, like, every specialist and literally, the top doctors. It’s so stupid,” Lavigne said in an interview televised yesterday. She says that some misdiagnosed her symptoms—debilitating pain and fatigue—as chronic fatigue syndrome or depression, while others told her she was simply dehydrated or exhausted from touring.

“This is what they do to a lot of people who have Lyme disease,” she said. “They don’t have an answer for them so they tell them, like, ‘You’re crazy.'”

Lavigne began to suspect she had Lyme disease—the number-one insect-borne disease in the United States—a few months after she began feeling exhausted and lightheaded. Her symptoms eventually got so bad she felt like she couldn’t breathe, talk, or move. “I thought I was dying,” she told People in April.

RELATED: 15 Diseases Doctors Often Get Wrong

So why did it take so long for Lavigne to get answers? And could her experience happen to others, as well?

Fortunately, most cases of Lyme disease are caught and treated much earlier, says Anne R. Bass, MD, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, and this degree of misdiagnosis isn’t very common. But pinpointing this type of infection is not an exact science, and symptoms are not always crystal clear.

“Many people will develop a bulls-eye rash, which makes it fairly easy to diagnose,” she says. But this telltale symptoms is sometimes faint or on hidden parts of the body, and some people don’t get one at all.

“Other early symptoms, like fever or aches and pains, could be attributed to a virus or flu,” says Bass. “So if you don’t see a rash, you might not even go to the doctor—or it’s possible your doctor might not recognize it.” (Some Lyme disease cases go away on their own, she adds, so it’s possible to have had it and never known.)

RELATED: 13 Conditions That Mimic Fibromyalgia

Most physicians, especially those who practice in tick hot-spots like the northeastern United States, know to look out for Lyme disease symptoms during spring and summer months. But the disease is less prevalent in Southern California, where Lavigne says she was seeking treatment. If a patient hasn’t had a rash and doesn’t remember being bitten, doctors there may be slower to identify ticks as a potential factor.

Bass says that anyone who’s experienced fatigue or joint pain for several months should think back to when their symptoms started, and whether they spent time in area of the country known for Lyme disease outbreaks. A blood test cannot confirm whether you are currently infected, but it can tell if you have been exposed to Lyme bacterium in the past. (It actually tests for antibodies, which develop a few weeks after a person has been infected and remain in the blood forever.) Doctors can use these test results, along with a person’s current symptoms, to make a diagnosis.

“But even these test results can be complex and confusing, especially for physicians who aren’t used to dealing with Lyme,” Dr. Bass says. Some doctors also believe that Lyme disease can be diagnosed without a positive blood test, she adds—although there’s no evidence that these methods are accurate or that antibiotics, in these cases, work any better than placebo.

RELATED: The Latest on Lyme Disease

(Lavigne did not reveal exactly how she was diagnosed or whether she tested positive for Lyme antibodies, although she did say she had blood tests when she first became ill.)

Once Lyme disease is diagnosed, two to three weeks of oral antibiotics usually help patients feel better and eliminate all symptoms. If it goes untreated for several months, however, a longer course of drugs—usually four weeks—is often needed. In extreme cases, antibiotics may also be given through an IV.

Bass says that it’s uncommon for patients to be prescribed antibiotics for more than a month, even if they continue to experience fatigue and pain. “It does take longer for them to get better when there is a delay in diagnosis, but it doesn’t really change our duration or course of treatment,” she says. “They may just need to rest and take it easy a bit longer until they have their energy back.”

RELATED: 10 States Where Rare and Exotic Diseases Lurk

Lavigne is finally feeling better, and says she expects to make a full recovery. That’s a good thing, since 10 to 20 percent of people with Lyme disease continue to experience symptoms for months or even years after treatment. This condition is sometimes called chronic Lyme disease, although it’s technically known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.

Doctors aren’t sure what causes post-Lyme syndrome (some believe that symptoms are due to other tick-borne illnesses, or to chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis), and treatments like long-term antibiotic therapy are controversial. But a recent study from Johns Hopkins University showed that one thing is clear: Prolonged Lyme-related illness is more common than was once believed.

“Our data show that many people who have been diagnosed with Lyme disease are in fact going back to the doctor complaining of persistent symptoms, getting multiple tests, and being retreated,” the study authors said in a news release. “It is clear that we need effective, cost-effective, and compassionate management of these patients to improve their outcomes, even if we don’t know what to call the disease.”

RELATED: What You Should Do If You Find a Tick

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The Strange Link Between Junk Food and Depression

Photo: Getty Images

Of our many modern diseases, one of the biggest burdens on society is an unexpected one: depression, according to the World Health Organization. And what we eat may be contributing, finds a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

James E. Gangwisch, PhD, assistant professor at Columbia University in the department of psychiatry, wanted to find out whether foods with a higher glycemic index (GI)—a scale that ranks carbohydrate-containing foods by how much they raise your blood sugar—would be associated with greater odds of depression. “When I was a kid, I was almost like a candy junkie,” Gangwisch says. “I noticed for myself, if I eat a lot of sugar, it makes me feel down the next day.” Gangwisch says he stopped eating added sugar years ago but remained curious about whether a junk food diet could make people depressed.

He and a team of researchers looked at data from food questionnaires and a scale that measures symptoms of depressive disorders from postmenopausal women in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study. The data came from roughly 70,000 women, none of whom suffered from depression at the study’s start, who had baseline measurements taken between 1994 and 1998, and then again after a three-year follow-up.

Diets higher on the glycemic index, including those rich in refined grains and added sugar, were associated with greater odds of depression, the researchers found. But some aspects of diet had protective effects against developing depression, including fiber, whole grains, whole fruits, vegetables and lactose, a sugar that comes from dairy products and milk that sits low on the glycemic index.

Added sugars—but not total sugars or total carbohydrates—were strongly associated with depression.

Though the authors couldn’t pinpoint a mechanism from this study—it was associative—they note that one possibility is that the overconsumption of sugars and refined starches is a risk factor for inflammation and cardiovascular disease, both of which have been linked to the development of depression.This kind of diet could also lead insulin resistance, which has been linked to cognitive deficits similar to those found in people with major depression.

Further research is needed, Gangwisch says, and it’s not yet known whether the results would translate to a broader group of people, including men and younger women. But even now, diet may be worth discussing with people who suffer from depression, Gangwisch says—even though doing so may be difficult. “It’s hard enough to get the general public to avoid those kinds of foods, but it’s even harder to get someone who suffers from depression to avoid them and give them up,” he says. “You don’t want people to feel guilty either…to say, ‘Your diet’s bad and you should change it,’ would take kind of a soft sell approach.” Still, he believes the effort is worth it. “I think it’s important and I think it has a big effect on your mood and how you feel and your energy level,” he says. “If it’s something that people can change, they really would benefit from it.”

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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Umbilical Cord ‘Milking’ May Help Preemies Delivered by C-Section

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) —
Gently massaging the umbilical cords of preterm infants delivered by C-section may improve their blood pressure, boost blood flow and increase levels of red blood cells, a new study finds.

Researchers suggest this technique could offer these preemies greater health benefits than the current method of delaying cord clamping for up to one minute after delivery.

“The study results are very encouraging,” Dr. Tonse Raju, chief of The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch, said in an agency news release. “The findings need to be confirmed in a larger number of births, but at this point, it appears that umbilical cord milking may prove to be of great benefit to preterm infants delivered via cesarean.”

The study involved 197 infants born at or before 32 weeks. Of these infants, 154 were delivered via C-section. Researchers at the Neonatal Research Institute at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Newborns in San Diego and Loma Linda University in California divided the babies into two groups and randomly assigned them to receive either delayed cord clamping or umbilical cord milking.

Cord milking involves massaging the umbilical cord with the thumb and forefingers to slowly push blood through the cord into an infant’s belly. This technique increases blood flow from the cord into an infant’s circulatory system.

The 43 infants delivered vaginally were also randomly assigned to receive either delayed clamping or cord milking.

Among the preterm babies born via C-section, those in the cord milking group had greater blood flow between the brain and the heart. These babies also had increased blood flow from their heart, and higher blood pressure and more red blood cells, the study published online June 29 in the journal Pediatrics revealed.

But cord milking was no more beneficial than delayed cord clamping among preterm infants born vaginally.

In 2012, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended a 30- to 60-second delay before clamping the umbilical cord in all preterm deliveries. This is supposed to allow blood from the umbilical cord to fill the blood vessels in the infant’s lungs, Raju said. It can help prevent bleeding in the brain among preterm infants, which can cause developmental delays, cerebral palsy or even death.

Some studies, however, show delayed cord clamping doesn’t reduce bleeding among some preterm infants delivered by C-section. Anesthetics used during these deliveries eases contractions of the uterus, which may prevent blood from flowing from the umbilical cord, the researchers explained.

Cord milking could help offset this reduced blood flow and increase infants’ blood volume, they noted.

More information

The March of Dimes provides more information on premature babies.

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Too Few Men With Low-Risk Prostate Cancers Get ‘Watch and Wait’ Approach

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A wide majority of U.S. men with low-risk prostate cancer are being treated for the disease even though “active surveillance” is an option, a new report finds.

Active surveillance — or watchful waiting — is the careful monitoring of prostate cancer for progression of the cancer that would indicate a need for treatment. Men in the Northeast and on the West Coast were especially likely to have active surveillance rather than cancer treatment, potentially sparing them from complications associated with treatment.

The study data was collected in 2010 and 2011, and a lot has changed since that time in regard to the popularity of active surveillance, experts noted.

Active surveillance is “gaining acceptance among urologists and patients,” said study co-author Dr. Hui Zhu, chief of urology at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio.

“Age-appropriate men should discuss the risks and benefits of screening with their physicians, and men with newly diagnosed localized prostate cancer should ask their physicians whether active surveillance is a good option for them,” he added.

There’s been controversy for years about diagnosing and treating prostate cancer. Tumors considered to be low-risk may never spread, but men have often been treated anyway. But, those treatments aren’t without risk. Prostate cancer treatments can cause serious and lasting side effects, such as incontinence and erectile dysfunction, according to the American Cancer Society.

In 2011, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force discouraged the use of routine prostate cancer testing. One reason why was because of the odds that low-risk tumors would be treated. But, despite that recommendation, many doctors continue ordering the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests. Supporters of the test suggest that if the PSA leads to an overdiagnosis of low-risk prostate cancers, that problem can be countered with active surveillance, the study authors noted.

The new report examines a national database that includes about 70 percent of cancer cases in the country.

Of nearly 190,000 mean diagnosed with prostate cancer, between 11 percent and 40 percent would be considered low-risk enough to be eligible for watch-and-wait approach. (There isn’t a consensus about which patients should consider this strategy, and the report looks at different cut-off points.) Of those men, just 7 percent to 12 percent had active surveillance, the study revealed.

Older men — those over 60 — were more likely to have active surveillance. Men without insurance were also more likely to have active surveillance, the study said.

The researchers found that watchful waiting was most common on the West Coast and in the Northeast. The states with the lowest levels — under 5 percent — were Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Dr. Stephen Freedland, a urologist and director of the Center for Integrated Research in Cancer and Lifestyle at Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, pointed out that the report’s data is outdated. The situation has “changed dramatically” over the past few years, with early research suggesting that many more men are choosing the surveillance option.

Before, he said, doctors chose treatment instead of monitoring because they weren’t comfortable with watchful waiting and “didn’t fully appreciate how well the patients do; how safe it is to do that.”

He said it’s rare for patients to simply never come back after being diagnosed.

Also, he said, “there was no imperative, no push to do it. It’s a counterintuitive thing to say ‘You have cancer, but I’m not going to do anything.'”

So, where does that leave men with low-risk prostate cancers?

“Prostate cancer, even the lethal form, is highly treatable when it is detected at an early stage through the use of screening,” Zhu said.

“Men aged 55 to 69 years who are considering being screened for prostate cancer should have a discussion with their physicians which involves weighing the benefits of preventing death from prostate cancer against the known potential harms associated with screening and treatment,” Zhu added.

The report was published online June 29 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

For more about prostate cancer, try the American Cancer Society.

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Make CPR, Defibrillator Training Mandatory for High School Graduation: Experts

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Far too few Americans are surviving cardiac arrest, and a new report issued Tuesday by a federally appointed panel of experts sets out ways to boost survival rates.

One recommendation: Make a working knowledge of CPR and the use of an automated electronic defibrillator (AED) a graduation requirement for all middle- and high-school students.

One expert in emergency care applauded the proposal.

“By teaching laypersons in public settings the proper use of such devices, we may be able to effectively increase survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

According to the new Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, less than 6 percent of the 395,000 Americans who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital each year will survive.

And even in a hospital setting, cardiac arrest survival rates are low, the independent panel said. Roughly 200,000 events occur each year in hospitals but just 24 percent of those patients survive.

“Although breakthroughs in understanding and treating cardiac arrest are promising, the ability to deliver timely interventions and high-quality care is inconsistent,” Robert Graham, chair of the study committee, said in a news release from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which oversees the Institute of Medicine.

“Cardiac arrest treatment is a community issue, requiring a wide range of people to be prepared to act,” said Graham, who directs the national program office for Aligning Forces for Quality at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Those who can help include “bystanders, family members, first responders, emergency medical personnel, and health care providers,” he said.

Cardiac arrest is not the same thing as a heart attack, according to the NAS. A heart attack occurs when blood flow to the heart is blocked due to narrow or clogged arteries. Heart attacks damage the heart muscle and can cause symptoms like pain, dizziness and trouble breathing.

In contrast, cardiac arrest occurs when an interruption to the heart’s electrical activity causes it to stop beating. A heart attack can lead to cardiac arrest, as can certain genetic mutations or severe electrolyte imbalances.

People who suffer cardiac arrest almost immediately lose consciousness, the NAS said. Their circulation and their heart’s electrical rhythm must be restored as soon as possible.

So, why is cardiac arrest survival so low in the United States?

According to the IOM report, survival depends on several factors, including where cardiac arrests occur, if there are witnesses nearby who are prepared to intervene and what resources are available to deliver timely and effective treatment.

All of these variables could be improved, the IOM panel said, and it offered up key actions that might help save lives:

• Monitor performance and track progress through a national registry of cardiac arrests, which could help health officials spot problems.
• Better educate the public on how to spot cardiac arrest, contact emergency responders, perform CPR and use an AED. The committee supports CPR and AED training as graduation requirements for all middle- and high-school students.
• Improve the performance of EMS systems, focusing on dispatcher-assisted CPR and high-performance CPR.
• Develop strategies to boost care within hospitals, including setting national cardiac arrest accreditation standards. Adopt “continuous quality improvement programs” for cardiac arrest to encourage training within hospitals.
• Promote the development of new, potentially lifesaving technologies and expand research in cardiac arrest resuscitation.
• Create a “national cardiac arrest collaborative,” to identify common goals.

These goals are based largely on the fact that following a cardiac arrest, each minute without treatment decreases the likelihood that patients will survive without disability.

The IOM notes that cutting the time that lapses between cardiac arrest and the initiation of chest compressions is essential. For every minute that passes after a person suffers a cardiac arrest and circulation is restored, the likelihood of their survival drops by 10 percent.

More than eight out of 10 cardiac arrests occur at home. Of these, 45 percent are witnessed by another person. For such event taking place outside a hospital setting at 10 different locations in North America, research shows survival rates range from more than 7 percent to almost 40 percent. Risk-adjusted survival rates for cardiac arrests that occur in the hospital also vary by about 10 percent between the lowest and best performing hospitals.

Right now, CPR training among Americans is low — less than 3 percent of the U.S. population receives such training each year, leaving them unprepared to help in the event of an emergency, the IOM noted.

Glatter believes that emerging technologies may hold the key to saving more lives.

For example, “the use of text messaging which can alert EMS systems as well as all nearby bystanders to an arrest may provide another method to activate a team-based approach to cardiac arrest in the field,” he said. Someday, robotic drones might even be used to quickly dispatch an AED to the site of a cardiac arrest, Glatter said.

Dr. Evan Herzog directs the cardiac care unit at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City. “”I absolutely agree with the IOM’s new recommendations to help increase the survival of cardiac arrest victims,” he said. “The time to take greater action to save more lives is now.”

More information

The American Heart Association provides more information on the cardiac arrest.

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Cystic Fibrosis Might Be Deadlier for Hispanics, Study Suggests

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Cystic fibrosis is deadlier for Hispanic patients than others, and genetic differences may make Hispanics less likely to benefit from new treatments for the disease, researchers report.

“We need to ask if the care model for patients with [cystic fibrosis] is working for this minority group,” study author Dr. MyMy Buu, an instructor in pediatric pulmonary medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., said in a university news release. “We want to make sure that what we are doing is not inadvertently causing disparities.”

The findings reflect an urgent need to identify the factors that contribute to this health disparity, the researchers noted.

“This will be crucial to develop treatment regimens that guarantee that all children with [cystic fibrosis] can benefit from early diagnosis and the novel treatments being introduced,” study co-senior author, Dr. Carlos Milla, director of the Stanford Cystic Fibrosis Center, said in the news release.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that causes serious lung and digestive problems. Using patient data from the patient registry of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, researchers examined all California residents diagnosed with the disease as children between 1991 and 2010. Overall, more than 1,700 patients were included in the study; 28 percent were Hispanic.

During the study, 9 percent of the Hispanic patients died, compared to slightly more than 3 percent of non-Hispanic patients, according to the study published online recently in the journal Chest. The risk for death was nearly three times greater for Hispanic patients, the researchers noted.

Some plausible explanations were ruled out, including later diagnosis and less access to health care.

The only key differences the researchers found between the two groups was that Hispanics developed cystic fibrosis complications earlier and tended to have less common mutations in their disease-causing gene, known as the CFTR gene.

“We are moving in the direction of gene mutation-directed therapy,” Buu said. “The [cystic fibrosis] research community is trying to understand these mutations, and those that are most frequent in the [cystic fibrosis] population are being studied first.”

In the past, most cystic fibrosis patients died during childhood, but dramatically improved treatments have improved survival rates. More than half of all cystic fibrosis patients in the United States now live beyond 40, the researchers said.

When it comes to current treatments, however, Hispanic patients with rare mutations are at a disadvantage. “It will take longer to get to them, but there are efforts to understand all the mutations of the CFTR gene,” said Buu. “We hope to create awareness of this disparity, and we hope that it is modifiable.”

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute provides more information on cystic fibrosis.

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Americans Want Online Access to Doctors, Health Records: Survey

TUESDAY, June 30, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Internet-savvy Americans would like to add their doctors to their group of Facebook “friends” or email contacts.

In a new study, researchers analyzed more than 2,250 responses from a national survey of retail pharmacy customers.

Many of those surveyed were frequent Facebook users who wanted to be able to contact their doctor about health-related matters through this social networking site or via email.

Thirty-seven percent of participants said they’d emailed their doctor in the past six months, and 18 percent had reached out through Facebook. The researchers said this was surprising since most medical centers discourage social media contact between doctors and patients due to privacy issues and legal concerns.

Those most likely to reach out to their doctor electronically are non-whites, people younger than 45 and those with higher incomes, according to the study recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Caregivers and patients with chronic illnesses are also more likely to use email or Facebook to communicate with their doctor. People with less education and lower incomes were less likely to reach out to their doctor online, the findings showed.

Accessing health information electronically is also preferred, survey results revealed. Up to 57 percent of respondents reported wanting to use their doctors’ websites for this purpose. About 46 percent also wanted to track their health progress or access health information through email.

Electronic health records have made these options available to patients at many hospitals, but few patients actually use them. Only 7 percent of those polled ever access their own heath information on their doctors’ website and only 7 percent order drugs by email, the survey showed. This suggests patients may not know about the online health services available to them, the study authors suggested.

“The findings highlight the gap between patient interest for online communication and what physicians may currently provide,” study author Joy Lee, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said in a journal news release.

“Improving and accelerating the adoption of secure web-messaging systems is a possible solution that addresses both institutional concerns and patient demand,” Lee said.

More information

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has more on ways to improve communication between patients and doctors.

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