Move of the Week: Hula Hoop Pump Ab Exercise
Hula-hoops aren’t just for kids—they’re actually great tools for toning your abs. So grab a hoop and watch Kristin McGee, Health’s resident fitness expert, demonstrate the best way to execute this exercise. Who knew working out your core could be so fun?
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Here’s how to do it: Stand with your feet a little wider than hip width apart, get those abdominals in and up. Start out with 30 seconds and build up to a minute or as long as you possibly can.
Trainer tip: Don’t worry if you can’t get the movement perfectly right the first time you try—just practicing is going to work your abs.
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How Your Yoga Class Might Actually Save You Money
Photo: Getty Images
And now for some more good news for the yogis and meditators out there—but this time it has nothing to do with awesome arms or your libido. New research suggests that practicing these mind-body techniques may actually translate to major healthcare savings later on.
The study, published recently in the journal Plos One, followed more than 17,000 people for roughly 4 years. Over that time period, about 4,500 of the participants were enrolled in an 8-week program offered at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, which teaches complementary mind-body tools such as yoga, meditation, cognitive behavioral skills, and mindfulness; the rest were a control group. For both sets of participants, the researchers tracked how often they used healthcare services, everything from regular doctor’s appointments to tests and hospital or emergency room visits, and why.
In the end, they found that on average, those who got the mind-body training used their healthcare 43% less compared to the control group, which translated to an estimated average savings each year of $2,360 per person in emergency room visits. Furthermore, the team estimated that mindfulness training could mean savings of anywhere from $640 to $25,000 per patient per year.
RELATED: 25 Surprising Ways Stress Affects Your Health
Why? You probably know that stress can affect your health, but you might not realize that stress-related health problems account for the third biggest chunk of healthcare expenditures in the United States—only after heart disease and cancer. In fact, according to a 2013 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, 40–60% of primary care visits have a stress-related component.
Stress-related disorders include things like depression and anxiety, but stress can also manifest physically as back pain, headaches, insomnia, gastroesophageal reflux disease, irritable bowel, chest discomfort, and more.
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This latest study shows that mind-body interventions offer a way for patients to engage in their own treatment, thus reducing doctors visits and nipping problems in the bud, lead author James E. Stahl, MD, associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, explains to Health. This is especially important, considering the JAMA study showed that of those stress-related primary care visits, only 3% of doctors actually spoke to the patients about ways to manage their stress.
In the long-term, Dr. Stahl hopes to see mind-body interventions and wellness-oriented programs become more widely available and covered by healthcare plans. But in the meantime, the good thing about mind-body exercises and stress relief practices is that there are a number of ways to create your own program. You can start with these great at-home (or work!) yoga sequences, and a goal to do 10 minutes of meditation per day.
Says Dr. Stahl, “Consistency and practice is the key—even doing something for just 10 minutes per day can have a big impact on your health—they all have a cumulative benefit.”
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Face Mites Might Give Clues to People’s Ancestry
FRIDAY, Dec. 18, 2015 (HealthDay News) — In news that’s sure to make your skin crawl at least a little bit, a new study reports that everyone has microscopic face mites, and the critters may offer clues to each person’s family tree.
These microscopic face mites — known as Demodex folliculorum — live in the hair follicles on the face, and the type of mite varies from population group to population group.
Scientists now know that distinct lineages of face mites follow families through generations. And, these mites don’t easily transfer from one population to another, the new research found.
These findings shed light on human evolution and could help scientists understand how mites influence human health, the study authors said.
“It’s shocking that we’re only just discovering how deeply our histories are shared with the mites on our bodies,” the study’s senior author, Dr. Michelle Trautwein, a curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, said in a news release from the organization.
“They aren’t just bugs on our faces, they are storytellers. Mites tell us about our own ancient history — it’s a complex story, and we’ve only just scratched the surface,” Trautwein said.
Face mites are related to spiders, but aren’t visible to the naked eye. These miniscule parasites feed on skin cells and oils on eyebrows, eyelashes and other hair follicles. They’re usually harmless. For some people, however, mites can cause certain skin and eye conditions, such as rosacea and blepharitis (inflamed eyelids), the researchers explained.
The study authors used genetic testing to link the evolution of mites to human evolution. After examining genetic material called mitochondrial DNA in mite samples taken from 70 people around the world, the researchers found people in different parts of the world harbor different mites that are passed down through generations.
“We discovered that people from different parts of the world host different mite lineages,” said Trautwein. “The continent where a person’s ancestry originated tended to predict the types of mites on their faces. We found that mite lineages can persist in hosts for generations. Even if you move to a faraway region, your mites stick with you.”
The study, published in the Dec. 14 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that black Americans living in the United States for generations still had African mites. This suggests that some mites are more likely to survive and reproduce on people from specific parts of the world.
The researchers pointed out that the differences they found in mite lineages reflect the divergence of human populations, supporting the “Out of Africa” hypothesis — the theory that every living person today is descended from a group that evolved in Africa before dispersing throughout the world.
“Another exciting mite revelation from our work is that mites aren’t shared easily,” said Trautwein. “Mites are not casually transferred to passersby on the street. We seem to share mites primarily with our family, so it likely takes very close physical contact to transmit mites.”
More information
The National Rosacea Society has more about human face mites.
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FDA Proposes an Age Limit for Tanning Beds
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released proposed rules on Friday to restrict the use of indoor tanning among minors. Indoor tanning is a known risk factor for skin cancer.
The proposed restrictions are also intended to reduce the risk of indoor tanning for adults. The rule proposed by the FDA would restrict the use of sunlamp products, including tanning beds, to people age 18 and older. The rule also suggests that adults age 18 and older must sign a risk acknowledgement certification before their first tanning session, and every six months after that, stating they have been informed of the risks of indoor tanning.
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The second proposed rule requires manufacturers to implement more safety restrictions. The changes include making warnings easier to read on the devices, requiring emergency shut-off switches and adding restrictions to the amount of light allowed through protective eye wear people use during tanning. The FDA reports that there are about 18,000 to 19,000 indoor tanning salons and 15,000 to 20,000 other facilities like spas that offer tanning.
Indoor tanning exposes users to both UVA and UVB rays, which harm skin and can cause skin cancer, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The FDA reports that 1.6 million minors indoor tan each year. Initiating indoor tanning at an early age increases a person’s risk for getting melanoma, likely due to greater use, and the effects of UV ray exposure are known to amass over time. In a statement about the proposed rules, the FDA reports that people who are exposed to radiation from indoor tanning are 59% more likely to develop melanoma compared to people who have never used indoor tanning.
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In addition, the CDC says indoor tanning also causes premature skin aging, changes in skin texture and a higher risk for eye diseases.
The proposed rules are available online for public comment for 90 days.
This article originally appeared on Time.com.
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Pooches May Give Food to Their Pals, Study Shows
FRIDAY, Dec. 18, 2015 (HealthDay News) — The tough, “dog eat dog” view of the canine world may be misguided: A new study finds that dogs can freely give food to other pooches, with no expectation of a reward for themselves.
But there’s a catch: Dogs studied in these experiments typically shared food only with dogs they knew, not with unfamiliar dogs.
“Dogs truly behave prosocially toward other dogs. That had never been experimentally demonstrated before,” study lead author Friederike Range of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria, said in a university news release.
According to her team, “prosocial” behavior — animals cooperating with each other when there’s no direct personal benefit — is known to occur in certain species beyond humans, such as other primates.
Dogs are highly social animals, but could they exhibit such behaviors as well? To find out, Range and her colleagues watched the behaviors of 16 dogs. The dogs were placed in an enclosure where they could use their mouths to pull a string, which would then bring a tray toward another dog in an adjoining enclosure.
The dog pulling the string (the donor dog) had the choice of an empty tray or one containing a yummy treat for the other dog. By a series of experiments, the researchers were able to confirm that the donor dogs were pulling the string not just “for the fun of it,” but to help the other dog get a treat.
The donor dogs — who did not receive any treat themselves as a reward for their actions — selected the tray with the treat on it more often for familiar dogs than for ones they did not know, the researchers reported Dec. 16 in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
“The degree of familiarity among the dogs further influenced this behavior,” Range noted. Dogs were more “reserved” in pulling a treats tray for an unfamiliar dog. In fact, donor dogs typically gave the cold shoulder to stranger dogs, “only rarely” interacting with them during the experiments, Range said.
Not surprisingly, when a dog was offered the chance to move a treat tray toward itself, it readily did so, the researchers said.
But it’s the prosocial, generous interaction between dog “friends” that was most striking, Range said.
“Dogs and their nearest relatives, the wolves, exhibit social and cooperative behavior, so there are grounds to assume that these animals also behave prosocially toward [familiar individuals],” she said. “Additionally, over thousands of years of domestication, dogs were selected for special social skills.”
More information
The Humane Society has more about dogs and their behavior.
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Toxic Chemicals May Weaken Infants’ Response to TB Vaccine
FRIDAY, Dec. 18, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Exposure to toxic chemicals while in the womb or in early life may weaken a baby’s immune system response to the tuberculosis (TB) vaccine, researchers say.
The study focused on two common toxins: PCBs, an industrial chemical; and DDT, used in pesticides. These so-called “persistent” pollutants are not easily broken down and remain a health threat years after being banned.
PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979. DDT is banned in the United States, but is still used in some countries to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes, the study authors, from the University of Rochester in New York, said in a university news release.
The researchers analyzed blood samples and immune responses from 516 pairs of mothers and infants in an area of Slovakia heavily contaminated with environmental toxins. Each baby received the tuberculosis vaccine in their first four days of life, and their immune system (antibody) response to the vaccine was assessed six months later.
Harmful chemicals were detected in more than 99 percent of the blood samples. But infants with the highest levels of PCBs and other chemicals had the lowest antibody response to the TB vaccine, the investigators found.
Those with the highest levels of PCBs had 37 percent fewer antibodies against TB than those with the lowest PCB levels. Exposure to DDT also was tied to reduced TB-antibody levels. And infants with exposure to both chemicals had the lowest levels of TB antibodies, the findings showed.
In addition, like many chemicals, PCBs and DDT cross the placenta and are passed from mother to child through breast-feeding, the authors said in the study published online Dec. 9 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The findings have much broader significance than how exposure to these two chemicals affects TB vaccine responses, according to the researchers.
“There are thousands of pollutants similar to PCBs and DDT with unknown health implications,” study leader Todd Jusko, assistant professor in the departments of environmental medicine and public health services, said in the news release. “Our work provides a foundation for how these types of chemicals affect the developing immune system in infants around the world.”
It’s long been known that TB vaccine response varies between people, but the reasons are unclear. The effect of chemical pollutants on an infant’s developing immune system is often overlooked as a possible cause, the researchers said.
But, while the study found an association between exposure to chemicals and reduced response to TB vaccines, it did not prove cause-and-effect.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about tuberculosis.
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How to Prepare Your Child for Surgery
FRIDAY, Dec. 18, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Parents can do a number of things to prepare their children for surgery, experts say.
Children, especially younger ones, may experience separation anxiety and fear. They’re also likely to pick up on their parents’ feelings, according to Dr. Dorothy Rocourt, a pediatric surgeon at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital.
“If the parents are super nervous, the children are just as nervous. When they are comfortable with what’s going on and with the provider, they send off those vibes or cues to their child,” Rocourt said in a hospital news release.
One way to relieve anxiety is to keep the child well-informed about the surgery. This can include specialists explaining the procedure in a way youngsters can understand, such as through playful interaction.
“Parents can use simple words to help their child understand why they are going to the hospital or why they need surgery,” Ashley Kane, manager of the hospital’s Child Life Program, said in the news release.
Parents should be honest about going to the hospital and having surgery, and the situation should never be associated with doing something bad or punishment, she added.
“We want to make sure they understand that the doctors, nurses and staff are there to help them get better and not make it sound like the people a child meets in the hospital are mean or bad,” Kane said.
While in the hospital, items such as a child’s favorite stuffed toy, blanket, or sippy cup can be especially comforting, she suggested.
“It’s really important to have those familiar things along with them when they’re in a different environment and out of their norm,” Kane said.
Additional measures are needed when children with special needs are having surgery.
“When we’re assessing them in the office, we take cues from the family on how to approach the subject with such kids,” Rocourt said.
At the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, additional reading materials are provided for parents and families with older children who have autism, and multi-sensory distraction machines provide soft music, water sounds, colorful lighting or images projected on the ceiling when youngsters awaken from anesthesia, according to the news release.
“It really helps with the children with autism because it sort of puts them on a different plain, in a different world; it puts them in that comfort zone,” Rocourt said.
More information
The American College of Surgeons offers a guide for parents of children having surgery.
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How to Live to 100: Researchers Find New Genetic Clues
If you live to be 100, you’re in a special group, one that longevity scientists are eagerly studying for clues to battling aging. But are these centenarians long-lived because they don’t get the diseases that fell the rest of us—heart problems, diabetes, dementia, arthritis and more—or because they are protected somehow against the effects of aging? Based on the data so far, most experts have concluded that centenarians get to where they are because they have some anti-aging secret that shields them against the effects of aging. That’s because studies found that centenarians had just as many genes that contribute to disease as those with more average life spans.
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But in a paper published in PLOS Genetics, researchers led by Stuart Kim, professor of developmental biology and genetics at Stanford University, questions that dogma. He found that on the contrary, centenarians may have fewer of the genes that contribute to major chronic diseases. That doesn’t mean that people who live to their 100s also don’t possess some protective anti-aging genes as well, but Kim’s study shows that they don’t experience as much disease as people who are shorter-lived.
Kim’s team came to that conclusion after conducting a novel type of genetic analysis. Most attempts to look for genes related to aging compare the genomes of centenarians and people with average life spans and pick out the regions where the maps differ. Those are potential targets for aging, but, as Kim notes, they could also be red herrings. “Because you search through hundreds of thousands, and now millions of variants, there is a lot of noise. So it makes it difficult to see the signal amidst all the noise.”
RELATED: How to Live Longer
To purify the signal, Kim layered another piece of information on this comparison. He made the assumption that disease genes can reduce the chances of someone reaching their 100s, and focused just on known disease-causing genes in his analysis. “With that, we can make better guesses about what is really bad for becoming a centenarian,” he says.
The filtered analysis pumped out five major regions of interest for longevity. Four are familiar; they involve the gene connected to Alzheimer’s, an area involved with heart disease, the genes responsible for the A-B-O blood type and the immune system’s HLA region that needs to be matched for organ transplants to avoid rejection. These four have known connections to longevity. The Alzheimer’s gene, ApoE, for example, is linked to shorter life span, while the heart disease variants are involved in directing a cell’s life span and the O blood type is known to be connected to better health outcomes and survival.
RELATED: How to Live 100 Years
The fifth region was one that had never been linked to longevity before, and Kim admits that not much is known about how it might contribute to longer life, except that mutations in the gene region can contribute to neurological diseases such as ALS and that in fruit flies, other mutations help the insects to live longer.
“It seems intuitively obvious, that avoiding disease is part of the strategy of becoming a centenarian,” says Kim. “But there is a really, really strong dogma in the field that there was no depletion of disease genes in centenarians, and that all of their survival benefit was coming from protection from anti-aging genes. I think they were wrong.”
Those previous studies that pointed to this anti-aging effect over the effect of fewer disease-causing genes were generally smaller, and might not have isolated the signal from the noise.
Kim’s team shows that the way centenarians reach their second century may involve more than just being blessed with anti-aging genes. “We found that, at least in part, they live longer because they don’t get sick,” he says. He also readily admits that they may also benefit from some anti-aging factor that researchers haven’t uncovered—yet.
This article originally appeared on Time.com.
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FDA Proposes Tanning Bed Ban for Minors
FRIDAY, Dec. 18, 2015 (HealthDay News) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed that American teenagers be banned from using tanning beds.
“Today’s action is intended to help protect young people from a known and preventable cause of skin cancer and other harms,” acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Ostroff said in a statement. “Individuals under 18 are at greatest risk of the adverse health consequences of indoor tanning.”
The proposal also would require users 18 and older to sign a document that says they are aware of the health risks posed by tanning beds. They would have to sign the document before their first indoor tanning session and every six months after that, the agency said.
“The FDA understands that some adults may decide to continue to use sunlamp products,” Ostroff said. “These proposed rules are meant to help adults make their decisions based on truthful information, and to ensure manufacturers and tanning facilities take additional steps to improve the safety of these devices.”
Additional safety proposals that are aimed at tanning bed makers and facilities include:
- Making warnings on the devices more prominent and easier to read.
- A mandatory emergency shut-off switch, or “panic button.”
- Limiting the amount of light allowed through protective eyewear.
- Ensuring the use of proper replacement bulbs to reduce the risk of accidental burns.
- Prohibiting dangerous modifications, such as installing stronger light bulbs, without FDA approval.
Indoor tanning is known to increase the risk of skin cancer, but 1.6 million Americans under the age of 18 indoor tan each year, according to 2013 federal government data.
And people exposed to UV radiation from indoor tanning are 59 percent more likely to develop deadly melanomas than those who never used indoor tanning, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.
“This risk increases with each use of tanning devices,” Dr. Mark Lebwohl, president of the academy, said in a statement Friday. “Therefore, dermatologists are extremely pleased that the federal government has recognized the inherent dangers of indoor tanning and is following the lead of the 42 states that have already enacted tanning bed restrictions to potentially reduce this risk,” he added.
“Restricting teens’ access to indoor tanning and educating all users about the dangers of tanning devices are critical steps to preventing skin cancer,” Lebwohl said.
“As medical doctors who diagnose and treat skin cancer, dermatologists are committed to reducing its incidence and saving lives,” he said. “We encourage the FDA to finalize this proposed rule, as it would be a historic victory in our nation’s fight to eradicate skin cancer.”
Another expert also applauded the FDA proposal.
“These are important first steps and, if passed, will be a great help in deterring teens from using tanning beds and other artificial sources for tanning,” said Dr. Doris Day, a dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
“My hope is that these proposals will move forward in a timely manner, and will be put into effect within the next year,” Day added.
Between 2003 and 2012, the number of tanning bed-related visits to U.S. emergency departments averaged 3,000 a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the United States, there are as many as 19,000 indoor tanning salons and 20,000 other facilities — such as health clubs and spas — that offer indoor tanning, according to the FDA.
The proposed safety measures are available online for public comment for 90 days, the agency said.
More information
The Skin Cancer Foundation has more about indoor tanning and skin cancer risk.
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