Health | 100 Tips

Cheap Tape May Keep Blisters Off Runners’ Feet

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Blisters are the bane of every runner, but a new study suggests that surgical tape may solve the problem.

“It’s kind of a ridiculously cheap, easy method of blister prevention,” said study author Dr. Grant Lipman. The tape is easy to find and a roll that costs about 69 cents should last a couple of years, he added.

As well as preventing blisters, the low-cost paper tape is only slightly sticky so it won’t tear blisters if they do occur, said Lipman, a clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University in California.

“People have been doing studies on blister prevention for 30 or 40 years and never found anything easy that works,” he said in a university news release.

Lipman and his colleagues placed surgical tape on blister-prone areas of the feet of 128 runners in a 155-mile, seven-day ultramarathon. If the runners had no history of blisters, the tape was placed on random areas of the feet.

The tape was applied in a smooth, single layer before the race and at later stages of the event.

Among 98 runners, no blisters formed where the tape was applied, while 81 got blisters in untaped areas, according to the study published online April 11 in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.

“The best way to make it to the finish line is by taking care of your feet,” Lipman noted.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more on foot health.

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Ridding U.S. of Hepatitis B, C as ‘Public Health Problem’ Possible: Experts

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Experts say there’s real hope in someday ridding the United States of the “public health problem” of hepatitis B and C infection.

The two viral strains cause serious, often fatal, liver disease for tens of thousands of Americans each year.

The comprehensive new report is from a panel of experts at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. They believe that the advent of a powerful new vaccine and medicines could help drastically lower hepatitis B and C rates across the country.

Still, to reach that goal will take time and considerable resources, the report said.

“Ending illness and deaths from hepatitis C depends on both stopping the disease’s progression in its early stages and reversing the course of advanced disease,” the committee said in a news release.

According to the report, between 700,000 and 1.4 million Americans have chronic hepatitis B, and between 2.5 million and 4.7 million have chronic hepatitis C. Between them, the two viruses kill about 20,000 people a year in the United States.

Eliminating hepatitis B and C as a public health problem is not the same as completely eliminating them from the country, the panel stressed. Instead, it means stopping their transmission in the United States and preventing signs and symptoms of the disease in people who are still infected.

Hepatitis B can be transmitted from an infected mother to child, through contact with infected blood and through unprotected sex with an infected person.

Transmission in the United States can be halted with universal immunization of children and adults, according to the report. The three-dose vaccine provides long-lasting, 95 percent immunity. And while current treatments do not cure hepatitis B infection, they do prevent disease progression and deaths from cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Hepatitis C is transmitted through contact with infected blood (for example, through needle-sharing) and less often through unprotected sex or from an infected mother to child. There is no vaccine for hepatitis C, so preventing transmission is vital, the experts said.

People born between 1945 and 1965 account for the majority of Americans with chronic hepatitis C, but most new infections are occurring among injection drug users. Hepatitis C can be cured, however, and curing infected injection drug users could reduce transmission and lower disease rates between 20 and 80 percent.

However, outreach and intervention involving injection drug users is challenging, the report acknowledged.

Some research suggests that programs such as needle exchanges might help reduce hepatitis C transmission among injection drug users. Efforts to curb drug addiction rates could also lower hepatitis C rates, the report said.

The report is the first of two. The second, scheduled for release in early 2017, will outline ways to achieve the goals listed in this report, which also outlined a number of barriers to eliminating this public health problem.

One barrier is that most state and local health offices can’t identify hepatitis B and C infections, the report’s authors said. Another barrier is that about two-thirds of Americans with chronic hepatitis B and half of those with chronic hepatitis C do not know they are infected because both diseases do not cause symptoms until the later stages.

Stigma about the hepatitis-linked diseases can also prevent people from getting testing and receiving care. Also, the report notes that most new cases of chronic hepatitis B in the United States occur in foreign-born people, who may face language or social problems in seeking care.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about hepatitis.

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Why Do Some Kids Escape Terrible Genetic Disorders?

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Some severe genetic birth defects, like cystic fibrosis, are considered inescapable, automatically dooming children to disease or disability if they inherit a mutated gene from their parents.

But researchers now have found rare instances where children have beaten the odds and defied their genetic destiny.

Analysis of nearly 600,000 people’s genetic makeup revealed 13 healthy individuals who should have suffered a terrible childhood disease due to their genetics, but for some reason did not.

Figuring out how certain people are able to dodge their genetics could provide solutions to some of mankind’s worst birth defects, said senior researcher Dr. Stephen Friend. He is the president of Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization in Seattle.

“If you want to develop therapies for prevention, if you want to come up with ways of not just finding the cause but ways of preventing the manifestations of disease, we now have tools that allow us to search for people who should have gotten sick among normal individuals,” Friend said. “Study the healthy. Don’t just study the sick. If you do, there are people who can give us insight,” he added.

Dr. Edward McCabe, senior vice president and chief medical officer of the March of Dimes, said such research could help find other “modifier” genes that protect some rare and lucky people against devastating genetic mutations.

Drugs or therapies that mimic the function of those modifier genes could help treat or prevent birth defects, he suggested.

“It’s a first step toward a new strategy to identify therapeutic interventions,” McCabe said of the new study.

The results were published online April 11 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Friend and his colleagues focused on so-called Mendelian disorders, genetic diseases passed from parent to child that can begin early in childhood and are usually caused by mutations in just one gene.

The mutated genes are assumed to be completely “penetrant” — in other words, anyone who carries the mutation will fall prey to the disease it causes.

Taking a different approach from prior researchers, Friend’s team decided to look among healthy people for those who carry a disease-causing mutation but didn’t get sick.

The researchers gathered genetic data for about 590,000 individuals, through the cooperation of a dozen other research projects that already had done genetic testing on scores of people.

The investigators checked each person for 874 genes that have completely penetrant mutations previously linked to 125 different Mendelian disorders. The health records of people carrying a mutation were checked to see if they had developed any disease symptoms, however subtle.

The analysis uncovered 13 individuals who appeared to be completely resilient to one of eight Mendelian childhood conditions.

The illnesses included cystic fibrosis, a severe pulmonary disease; Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, an often fatal developmental disorder; familial dysautonomia, a neurological disease that causes high mortality in early childhood; APECED, a childhood-onset autoimmune disease; epidermolysis bullosa simplex, which causes the skin to blister; and several skeletal disorders.

Unfortunately, the research team could not perform further study on the 13 individuals, because the people’s consent forms included a clause that does not allow researchers to recontact them.

“The reality is we could not go back and recontact any,” Friend said. “It’s almost as if I got the wrapping off the box, but couldn’t open the box to see what’s inside.”

Follow-up with these people could have shown if they have a specific gene that protected them, or if some environmental factor helped them ward off a usually unstoppable genetic disorder, he said.

Some of the study’s co-authors, who are with Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, are performing new studies based on these results in which they will follow up with other people who should have fallen ill to a genetic disorder but have not, Friend said.

“I have a feeling these prospective resilience projects will allow us to find individuals and detect genes that are going to be directly helpful in developing prevention,” Friend said.

But given the rarity of these resilient people, researchers expect they will have to analyze the genetics of many millions of people to find those lucky few, he added.

More information

For more on genetic disorders, visit the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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Besides Your Lungs, Smoking May Harm Your Job Prospects, Paycheck

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The “Mad Men” glory days of smoking at work are long gone. Today, smokers have a harder time finding jobs, and earn less than nonsmokers when they do get work, a new study suggests.

“When we studied a sample of 251 [unemployed] job seekers over a 12-month period, smokers relative to nonsmokers were at a serious disadvantage for finding re-employment,” said study lead author Judith Prochaska.

“When they did secure jobs, they were paid significantly less than nonsmokers,” said Prochaska, an associate professor with Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center in California. That difference was about $5 an hour on average — or more than $8,300 annually, the researchers found.

It’s unclear why smokers might face a penalty on the job front, and factors other than smoking could explain the difference, the study authors said.

However, smoking is tied to higher health care costs, down time and sick days, according to background notes with the study.

Prochaska said previous research has linked smoking to unemployment, but the new study is unusual because it follows unemployed people over time.

The study authors tracked the 251 people — 131 daily smokers and 120 nonsmokers — who sought employment from 2013 to 2015. The average age was 48; two-thirds were men, and 38 percent were white.

Over a year, the researchers found that 56 percent of nonsmokers got jobs compared to just 27 percent of smokers. Among those hired, smokers made $15.10 an hour on average compared to $20.27 for nonsmokers.

Although the researchers can’t prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship, they found that even after accounting for factors such as age, education and race, the smokers fared worse than nonsmokers.

Prochaska said the smokers may hurt their own chances. “Smokers in our sample tended to prioritize spending on cigarettes rather than costs that would aid in their job search, such as transportation, mobile phone, new clothing and grooming,” Prochaska said.

Might smokers have extra stress, driving them to cigarettes in the first place, that affects their job prospects? “Smokers are not inherently more stressed. Rather they experience more stress due to the effects of nicotine withdrawal,” Prochaska said.

“The power of nicotine addiction should not be ignored. If you are craving that next cigarette and unable to focus on the questions on hand, that will most certainly place you at a disadvantage in the job interview process,” she said.

Also, Prochaska said she’s heard from hiring managers that “job seekers who smell of tobacco place themselves at a great disadvantage for securing employment.” However, she said, “the extent to which this is a factor likely varies by job sector or industry.”

According to the study authors, more than 20 states allow employers to not hire smokers. Some employers directly ask about smoking, and some test applicants’ urine for traces of nicotine, Prochaska said.

Ronald Bayer, co-chair of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, disagrees with policies that discourage the hiring of smokers.

“It is unjustly coercive and a profound insult to human dignity to deny jobs to smokers,” Bayer said. “Denying work to those already at the lower end of the social ladder should be seen as a form of discrimination.”

What’s next for research?

Prochaska said a sister study is investigating bias among hiring managers against smokers. She’s working on another study, now recruiting smokers, that will test whether helping job seekers quit smoking makes it easier for them to land jobs.

The new study is published in the April 11 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

For details about quitting smoking, try the American Cancer Society.

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Rural Kids Face Special Challenges When Seriously Ill: Study

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sick children from rural areas in the United States have more complex medical problems and cost more to treat than urban or suburban kids, a new hospital study finds.

Researchers who analyzed admissions at 41 children’s hospitals found significant differences between city kids and their country counterparts. Rural children, for instance, were more likely to require readmission, tended to be from poorer homes and traveled five times as far, on average, for specialized health care.

“Children’s hospitals and rural health care providers face challenges when coordinating services for rural children, particularly children with chronic conditions,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Alon Peltz.

New, innovative approaches are needed to provide more health care supports to rural areas, said Peltz, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn.

But, this problem isn’t new, said Dr. Mario Reyes, who’s with Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, and wasn’t involved in the study. Hospitals in poor rural areas are often ill-equipped to deal with complex medical problems in children, he said.

So, the sickest kids need to go to specialized children’s hospitals, Reyes said. “And they have to travel an average of 68 miles to get there,” he added. For city and suburban kids, the average distance to a children’s hospital was 12 miles, the study found.

Complex medical conditions treated at children’s hospitals include heart problems, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, Down syndrome and various lifelong health challenges caused by prematurity, according to the Children’s Hospital Association.

Peltz believes greater coordination of services provided by community and pediatric hospitals would help.

“This may include better use of technologies, such as telemedicine, or policies that support better integration between children’s hospitals and rural doctors and community hospitals,” he said.

However, Reyes pointed out that many services that children’s hospitals could offer to rural areas, such as telemedicine, are not covered by insurance.

The report was published April 11 online in the journal Pediatrics.

For the study, Peltz and his colleagues collected data on more than 672,000 hospital admissions to 41 children’s hospitals in the United States in 2012.

They found that rural children made up 12 percent of admissions, and that 20 percent of country kids live in areas with few health professionals, compared to just 4 percent of kids in more populated areas.

Besides traveling 56 miles farther, on average, for needed care, the rural children were more than twice as likely to come from low-income communities — 53 percent versus 24 percent.

The rural children were also more likely to have complex chronic medical conditions — 44 percent compared to 37 percent of urban/suburban kids.

And, rural children cost an average of $8,500 to care for, compared to about $7,800 for their urban and suburban peers, Peltz’s team found. Rural kids also were more likely to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days.

The involvement of local doctors is critical, especially after a hospitalization, Reyes said. “We need to better connect children’s hospitals with rural health care providers,” he said.

A bill currently in Congress would provide funding to help link the two, Reyes said. The proposal — called the Advancing Care for Exceptional Kids Act — is designed to improve access and coordination of care to children with complex medical conditions on Medicaid, the publicly funded insurance program for the poor. The bill is also intended to reduce Medicaid costs, according to the Children’s Hospital Association.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics can help you prepare your child for a hospital stay.

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Your Income, Hometown May Be Key to Your Lifespan

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Where they live and how much they earn significantly affects the average American’s longevity, a new study suggests.

Income may even be a more important factor than geography, the researchers said.

“We find very large differences across areas [of the United States] for the poor but very small differences across areas for the rich,” said study lead author Raj Chetty.

In other words, “where you live matters much more if you are poor than if you are rich,” Chetty, a Stanford University economist, said in a university news release.

In the study, Chetty’s team tracked U.S. federal data from 1999 to 2014, and found that the richer people were, the longer their lives tended to be.

For example, the richest 40-year-old men could expect to live to 87, while the poorest had a life expectancy of just over 72 — the same as the average in a developing country like Sudan, according to the study authors.

Women with the highest incomes had a life expectancy of nearly 89, compared with 79 for those with the lowest incomes. That 10-year difference is equal to the decade of life typically lost to smoking, Chetty’s team noted.

The researchers also found that the rich-poor gap in life expectancy actually grew in the new millennium. Between 2001 and 2014, the average life expectancy for Americans with high incomes rose about 3 years, the study found, but it showed no improvement for people with the lowest incomes.

However, the impact of income on life expectancy also varied widely depending on where people lived, the findings showed.

For example, rich and poor people in Birmingham, Ala., benefited from similar gains in life expectancy, the study found. On the other hand, life expectancy for poor people in Tampa, Fla., has actually declined since 2000.

In another example, the expected lifespan of men in the bottom 5 percent of income in New York City was five years longer than that of men with comparable incomes in Gary, Ind.

To put that five-year difference in life expectancy in perspective, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that overall life expectancy in the nation would rise by only about three years if people no longer died of cancer.

“These are really enormous differences across places,” Chetty said. “You can think of the fact that there is a 5-year gap between Gary and New York as if low-income people in New York don’t get cancer at all while people in Gary do.”

States with the lowest life expectancies for poor people included Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Poor people did better in terms of life expectancies in California, New York and Vermont, the study found.

Lifestyle appears to play a more important role in life expectancy than access to health care insurance and medical care, according to the study authors.

“The places with shorter life expectancy tend to be places with higher rates of smoking, higher rates of obesity and lower rates of exercise,” Chetty pointed out.

He said the finding that poor people in some areas live longer than those in others suggests that the link between income and health is not rigid, and the health of poor people can be improved by focusing on the issue at the local level.

The study results could also influence national policies such as Medicare and Social Security, he suggested, including discussions about raising the retirement age.

“If we think about a policy like indexing the retirement age to life expectancy, we need to think hard about which life expectancy we are talking about. If we just use average life expectancy in the U.S., we are going to essentially start hurting the poor, especially in certain areas — like Detroit — relative to the rich,” Chetty said.

The study was published April 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Aging has more about healthy aging and longevity.

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Marriage May Be a Cancer Fighter

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A wedding band may be powerful medicine against cancer, a new study suggests.

Married people seem to have a marked survival advantage, the researchers found: Single men with cancer had a death rate 27 percent higher than it was for married male patients, while the death rate for single female patients was 19 percent higher than their married counterparts.

“The effects that we find were actually quite notable,” said study author Scarlett Lin Gomez, a research scientist with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California. “They are comparable to some of the more clinical factors we often see that are associated with cancer prognosis, like stage of disease or certain types of treatment.”

What’s more, this advantage appears to rely solely on the emotional bonds of matrimony, and not the financial advantages that marriage offers, Gomez said.

“These patterns were very minimally explained by the married patients having greater economic resources,” Gomez said. “Specifically, we looked at health insurance and we looked at living in a higher socioeconomic status neighborhood. Even though these played a small role, they really didn’t explain the greater survival among the married.”

It should be noted that the study only found an association between marital status and cancer prognosis; it did not prove a cause-and-effect link.

Previous studies over the past 10 to 15 years have shown a similar marriage benefit for cancer patients, Gomez said, but the benefit has always been chalked up to the love and support a person receives from their spouse.

But married people also tend to have greater combined incomes and better access to insurance, Gomez said. She and her colleagues decided to see whether money played a role in the survival advantage of married couples.

For the analysis, the researchers examined health records of nearly 800,000 adults in California who were diagnosed with invasive cancer between 2000 and 2009 and were followed through 2012.

The study, published April 11 in the journal Cancer, revealed that financial resources did not have much impact on a person’s chance of beating cancer, Gomez said.

Instead, it appears that cancer patients benefit from the support that a spouse provides, such as driving them to doctor’s appointments, providing nourishing meals and making sure they take their medicine, Gomez said.

“Treatments can drag on for months and months,” she said. “It can be very difficult if you’re single and you don’t have any other means to get to the doctor.”

Married cancer patients also benefit from emotional support, which can reduce stress and improve a person’s chances, Gomez added.

“You have somebody who’s there to listen to you, to counsel you through the stress of cancer treatment,” she said. “Cancer is a very scary thing, and it’s good to have someone by your side.”

Dr. Gregory Masters, an oncologist with the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center in Newark, Del., said the study “suggests the value of a devoted caregiver in helping to improve survival in cancer patients.

“Social support provided by devoted caregivers such as a spouse may be a major component of the improved survival for these patients,” said Masters, an expert on patient care for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “It suggests that a concerted effort to evaluate a patient’s psychosocial resources may be as important as other factors in helping to improve cancer survival.”

Single people may not have someone in their lives who will automatically be by their side, but these results suggest that it is vitally important for them to reach out to family and friends for care and support when facing cancer treatment, Gomez and Masters said.

“Certainly we’re not advocating for getting married as a means to improve your outcome,” Gomez said. “But single people can help themselves by maintaining stronger social networks, and being able to rely on friends and family members for help.”

Being in a long-term relationship has been shown to improve health and quality of life across the board, said Rachel Cannady, strategic director of cancer caregiver support for the American Cancer Society.

“These findings aren’t unique to cancer,” Cannady said. “We know that people live longer when they’re couples, period, irrespective of disease. There’s something to be said about having that sort of deep and meaningful relationship.”

The beneficial effect of being married on survival differed across racial and ethnic groups, according to a companion study also published in the same issue of the journal.

Among men and women, whites seemed to benefit the most from being married, while Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders benefited less. Also, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander cancer patients who were born in the United States experienced a greater benefit than those born outside the country.

Those racial and ethnic groups with an advantage might benefit from a better understanding of the U.S. health care system, the study authors said.

More information

For more on caregiving for a cancer patient, visit the American Cancer Society.

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