Fish taco bowls with three salsas recipe

 

Get your Mexican fix with this fish taco recipe by pro surfer Sally Fitzgibbons. 

 

What you'll need (serves 4)

• 8 flour tortillas
• 600g white fish fillets
• Canola oil spray
• Flour (for dusting)
• Butter (for frying)
• 1⁄2 iceberg lettuce, finely chopped

 

Guacamole

• 2 ripe avocados 1⁄2 red onion, finely diced 1⁄2 red chilli, deseeded, pith removed, finely sliced 1⁄2 cup coriander leaves, finely chopped
• Juice of 1⁄2 lime Juice of 1⁄2 lemon.

Tomato salsa

• 4 fresh tomatoes, diced 1⁄2 cup coriander leaves, finely chopped 1 red chilli, deseeded and pith
• removed, nely sliced

Mango salsa

• 1 ripe mango, diced 1⁄2 red chilli, deseeded and pith removed, finely sliced Juice of 1 lime 1⁄2 cup mint leaves, finely chopped

Method

1. To shape the tortilla bowls, preheat your oven to 180°C. Wrap four of the tortillas in foil and place on oven tray for 10 minutes just to warm them up.

2. Remove tortillas from foil and spray lightly with oil. Place them between the holes of an upside-down muffin tray, lightly pressing them down in the centre to form the base of the bowl. Repeat with three remaining tortillas. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden. Remove from oven, allow to cool, and repeat with the other four tortillas.

3. To fry the fish, coat both sides of the fillets with our. Heat 2 tbsp of butter in a pan and cook 2 fillets at a time on medium-high heat, 2 minutes per side. The fillet will fall apart when cooked.

4. Serve fish in the tortilla cups with chopped lettuce and salsas.

*If you prefer to a hit of chilli, add the chilli as you go to suit your tastes. 

Catch Sally at the Perth Fitness & Health Expo, August 20-21 at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre and the Brisbane Fitness & Health Expo, October 22-23 at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. For more information visit the official website.

 

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Repaired ACL More Likely to Tear Again in Young Women

THURSDAY, July 7, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Female athletes younger than 25 have the highest risk for a repeat tear of the knee’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) after surgery to repair it, a new study says.

The study included just over 500 male and female athletes who underwent ACL reconstruction with a hamstring graft and were followed for two years. Their average age was 27. They were allowed to return to sports six to 12 months after surgery if they were pain-free, had equal quadriceps/hamstring strength, and had finished a rehabilitation program.

“Our research noted that female patients under the age of 25 with a [smaller] graft size of less than 8 millimeters have an increased chance of re-tearing their ACL following reconstruction,” study lead author Dr. Duong Nguyen said in an American Orthopaedic Society of Sports Medicine news release. He is an orthopedic surgeon and adjunct clinical professor at McMaster University in Toronto.

Nguyen said factors such as estrogen levels, anatomical differences and decreased knee strength might also contribute to repeat tears in some female patients. More research will be needed to determine the exact causes, he added.

“Given the results of our study, we feel that surgeons should counsel their younger, female patients accordingly and consider modifying their surgical techniques to utilize larger size grafts and/or rehabilitation strategies to lessen the chance of a re-tear,” Nguyen said.

The study is scheduled for presentation July 7 at the society’s annual meeting in Colorado Springs, Colo. Research presented at medical meetings is typically considered preliminary because it’s not subject to the same scrutiny as studies in peer-reviewed medical journals.

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more on ACL injury.

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New Drug Eases Huntington’s Disease Symptoms: Study

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 7, 2016 (HealthDay News) — An experimental drug may help control the involuntary, sudden muscle movements associated with Huntington’s disease, with fewer side effects, according to the results of a small trial.

“Deutetrabenazine is not yet FDA-approved, but assuming it becomes available, practicing clinicians may have another choice for their individual patients,” said lead researcher Dr. Samuel Frank. He is a neurologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

The involuntary movements associated with Huntington’s disease are called chorea.

Huntington’s disease is a fatal genetic disorder. It causes the progressive destruction of nerve cells in the brain. Symptoms vary from person to person. People who have Huntington’s lose their physical and mental abilities over 10 to 25 years. The disease has no cure, according to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA).

Every child with a parent with Huntington’s disease has a 50 percent chance of carrying the faulty gene. Approximately 30,000 Americans have symptomatic Huntington’s disease. More than 200,000 are at risk of inheriting the disease, the HDSA says.

The choice of drugs to treat chorea should be based on safety, effictiveness, cost to patients and the best chance of compliance, Frank said.

“The opportunity to possibly improve quality of life should be part of the decision-making process as well,” he said. “If approved by the FDA, deutetrabenazine may provide another treatment option, making Huntington’s disease an increasingly treatable condition.”

Funding for the trial was provided by the maker of the drug, Auspex Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd.

Currently, tetrabenazine (Xenazine) is the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating chorea in Huntington’s disease, the study authors said.

Although the drug is effective, tetrabenazine often has to be taken three times a day and can cause side effects, such as sedation, fatigue, anxiety or nausea, the researchers said.

For the new study, Frank and his colleagues randomly assigned 90 patients with Huntington’s disease and chorea to receive either deutetrabenazine or a placebo.

Over eight weeks, the dose of deutetrabenazine was increased to a level at which it was most effective. That dose was maintained over four weeks, the study authors said.

“We found that deutetrabenazine reduces chorea, the hallmark movement disorder in Huntington disease,” Frank said. “There was also an overall improvement in participants’ condition and improvement in a quality-of-life measure. There was, however, no improvement in balance.”

The rate of side effects was similar for the drug and a placebo, which included depression, anxiety and akathisia (a movement disorder), the researchers found.

Frank said larger trials are underway to assess the long-term safety and effectiveness of deutetrabenazine.

The study findings were published July 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One neurologist said he would like to have seen a head-to-head comparison between deutetrabenazine and tetrabenazine.

“I wish they had included a tetrabenazine arm and a placebo arm,” said Dr. Michael Geschwind. A professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, he co-wrote an editorial accompanying the study results.

Such a trial is needed to see which drug is superior, Geschwind said. “But for FDA approval, they only have to show it’s better than placebo,” he said.

Looking at this trial and another that compared tetrabenazine with a placebo, Geschwind found that both drugs appeared to be equally effective. However, deutetrabenazine had fewer side effects, he said.

“If a patient is doing well on tetrabenazine and tolerating it well, I wouldn’t consider changing it,” Geschwind said. “But if I were starting a new patient and the drugs were similar in cost, I’m probably going to go to the new drug because out of the starting gate I’m probably going to have less side effects.”

More information

To learn more about Huntington’s disease, visit the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

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U.S. Teens Less Sweet on Soft Drinks

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 7, 2016 (HealthDay News) — American teens are turning their backs on soft drinks, says a new government survey that shows soda consumption among youth declined by almost a third in just two years.

Instead, bottled water has become the drink of choice for many, the researchers found.

“Over the past 15 years, a great deal of research has demonstrated that sugar drinks promote weight gain and obesity, diabetes and heart disease,” explained Michael Jacobson, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “That evidence has fueled campaigns to reduce consumption.”

These efforts have led to sugary drinks being banned from schools, government agencies reducing or eliminating sugar-sweetened beverages from cafeterias and vending machines, and adoption of sales taxes on sugary drinks, said Jacobson, who was not involved in the survey.

Even the beverage industry has joined up. In 2014, the three largest soda companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group — pledged to cut the amount of calories that Americans get from sugary drinks by one-fifth over the coming decade.

The government survey, conducted recently by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, revealed that in 2015:

• 20 percent of students reported drinking a sugar-sweetened beverage one or more times per day during the previous week, down from 27 percent in 2013 and 34 percent in 2007.
• 26 percent of teens said they had not consumed any sugary soda at all in the previous seven days, up from 22 percent in 2013 and about 19 percent in 2007.

Public campaigns appear to be convincing kids that they shouldn’t guzzle soda loaded with empty calories, experts said.

The banning of sugary sodas from vending machines has also played a large role in reducing soft drink consumption, said Dr. Ronald Tamler. He is medical director of the Mount Sinai Clinical Diabetes Institute in New York City.

“If you go to Mount Sinai Hospital, you literally cannot get a sugar-sweetened soda from the vending machine,” Tamler said. “Increasingly, there are schools that have the same model, so children find it more difficult to get sodas.”

In the meantime, water appears to have become a popular alternative to soft drinks.

The CDC survey found that in 2015, nearly 74 percent of students drank one or more glasses of water per day during the previous week, and 64 percent said they drank two or more glasses of water.

A recent industry report from the Beverage Marketing Corp. revealed that bottled water consumption grew 120 percent in 15 years, between 2000 and 2015. At the same time, soft drink consumption fell by 16 percent.

But Tamler is concerned that students might be picking up other sugar-loaded drinks as an alternative to soda — energy drinks, fruit juice or sweetened coffee products among them.

“The question is, are they swapping out sodas for something else?” he said. “Are they switching to other high-calorie beverages such as sugar-sweetened iced tea? That’s something that requires further drilling into the data.”

The Beverage Marketing Report indicated that people likely aren’t substituting another sugary beverage for soda. It found that between 2000 and 2015, individual Americans decreased their consumption of all alternatives to water.

In the United States, consumption of these alternatives — including soft drinks, fruit juice, energy drinks, sports drinks, bottled tea and coffee, and all forms of milk — dropped from 95.7 gallons per person in 2000 to 80.1 gallons per person in 2015. Overall consumption dropped from 27 billion gallons to 25.8 billion gallons.

According to Jacobson, “Overall, there’s been a 27 percent per-capita decline in carbonated sugar-drink consumption since 1998. A one-third decrease for Coke, and a 54 percent decrease for Pepsi. It’s especially gratifying and important to see major decreases among high school students.”

Jacobson believes that soft drinks are on the way out, although he shares Tamler’s concerns about sugar-loaded alternatives.

“I think that soda consumption will continue to decline, because it’s increasingly not cool to drink soda, though energy drinks are still growing in popularity,” he said.

Kristi King, a senior dietitian with Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, said she’s seen a promising change in the way teens approach their own health.

“As a society as a whole, we’re having more of a focus on being healthier, and we have to give teenagers credit,” said King, a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “I’m starting to see a lot more teenagers wanting to take responsibility for their health. I see that on a daily basis here in clinic.”

More information

For more on sugary soft drinks, visit the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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How to Stay Safe When the Power Goes Out

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sudden power outages can be frustrating, but what if your power is knocked out for a prolonged period? Would you be ready?

The American Red Cross recommends preparing for emergency outages by putting together a kit that contains these essentials:

• Water (each person in the household needs one gallon per day),
• Non-perishable, easy-to-prepare foods,
• Flashlights (avoid candles, which could start a fire),
• Battery-powered or hand-crank radio,
• Extra batteries,
• First aid kit,
• A week’s supply of medications and required medical items,
• Multi-purpose tool,
• Sanitation and personal hygiene items,
• Copies of personal documents, such as a list of medications and medical information; deed/lease to home; birth certificates; passports; insurance policies,
• Cellphone with chargers,
• Family and emergency contact information,
• Extra cash.

People who are being evacuated should have a three-day supply of these items, according to the Red Cross. Those staying at home should store a two-week supply.

Provide a backup power source if someone in the home is dependent on electric-powered, life-sustaining equipment.

It’s also a good idea to keep the gas tank of at least one car full and to have a non-cordless telephone at home. It will probably work during a power outage.

Perishable food isn’t apt to spoil if an outage lasts less than two hours, the Red Cross noted in a news release. For prolonged outages, you should have at least one cooler on hand.

Surrounding food with ice in a cooler or in the refrigerator will keep it colder for a longer time. Use a digital quick-response thermometer to check internal food temperatures and make sure food is cold enough to use safely.

More information

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security provides more power outage safety and preparation tips.

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Men With Advanced Prostate Cancer Might Consider Gene Test

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Men with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of their body should be considered for genetic testing, a new study suggests.

Testing for inherited abnormalities in DNA repair genes could provide patients and family members important information about their health and cancer risk, the study authors said.

“With the exception of some cancer syndromes in children, prostate cancer is the most heritable of human malignancies,” said the study’s co-lead author, Dr. Michael Walsh. He is a geneticist and pediatric oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York City.

“Historically, the main benefit of identifying cancer-causing mutations has been prevention and early detection in families. Now we can use inherited genomic information to target treatment, with specific therapies shown to be effective in those with specific genomic subsets of prostate cancer,” Walsh said in a cancer center news release.

The research team found a link between advanced prostate cancer and mutations in DNA repair genes.

The mutations occur far more often in men with advanced disease than in those with prostate cancer that hasn’t spread, the study authors said.

In addition, men with the abnormal repair genes are more likely to have close relatives with cancers other than prostate cancer compared to men without the mutations. These findings could help identify families that are at high risk for cancer and help prevent it in future generations, the researchers said.

The findings are of interest for two reasons, study co-senior author Dr. Kenneth Offit said in the news release. Offit is chief of clinical genetics and head of the Niehaus Center for Inherited Cancer Genomics at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

“First, these findings potentially change clinical practice because we now show that testing for these DNA repair genes should be offered to all men with advanced prostate cancer,” he said. “The second important finding is that we see clusters of cancers other than prostate, breast, ovarian, and pancreatic in these families that were not expected and that will stimulate further research.”

More study is needed to determine whether abnormal DNA repair genes could help predict disease outcomes, the scientists said.

The study team consisted of researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the University of Washington School of Medicine, the University of Michigan and the Institute of Cancer Research, London.

The findings were published online July 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about prostate cancer.

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Don’t Blame the Media for Teen Sex, Study Says

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sexy movies, television and other media have little effect on teens’ sexual behavior, according to a study that challenges a common belief among parents and policymakers.

Researchers analyzed 22 studies of the influence of media on teens’ behavior, including when they start having sex and whether they engage in risky sex. The studies, which also examined teen pregnancy, included more than 22,000 participants younger than 18.

The researchers found only a weak link between media and teen sexual behavior.

“Evidence for an association between media and sexual behavior is minimal,” said study co-author Christopher Ferguson, co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla.

Parents and peers have a much greater influence on teens’ sexual behavior, he said.

The findings were published recently in the journal Psychiatric Quarterly.

But media may influence at-risk children who lack other sources of information about sexuality, according to Ferguson.

“That is to say, when information from parents or schools are lacking, media may become the only source of information on sexuality,” he said in a journal news release.

Blaming the media might distract parents and policymakers from more significant issues related to teen sexuality, the researchers said. Parents should be encouraged to discuss sexuality with their teens; schools must offer appropriate sex education programs; and the use of peer networks to promote safe sex must be explored, Ferguson said.

“The encouraging message from our results is that the media is unlikely to thwart parental efforts to socialize children should parents take the initiative to talk directly to their children about sex,” he concluded.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on teen sexuality.

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ER Death Rate in U.S. Drops by Nearly Half

By Maureen Salamon
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Hospital emergency room deaths in the United States plummeted by nearly half over a 15-year period, with several factors likely accounting for the drop, a new study indicates.

The upshot: It’s unlikely you’ll die in the ER, say researchers who analyzed almost 368,000 emergency department visits by adults between 1997 and 2011. They found a 48 percent reduction in deaths over that period.

Increasing use of home hospice care and improvements in emergency medicine and public health are among the factors that might help explain the results, study author Dr. Hemal Kanzaria said.

“This was a descriptive study, essentially looking at trends,” said Kanzaria, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at University of California, San Francisco. “Finding a nearly 50 percent reduction was thought-provoking, and I think there are many possible explanations. [But] dying in an emergency department is rare, and it’s important to highlight how rare an event it is overall.”

More than 136 million emergency room visits took place in the United States in 2011, the latest year for which data are available, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 40 million of those visits were injury-related, and almost 12 percent resulted in hospital admission.

Kanzaria and his team analyzed data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. They found that ER mortality rates fell from 1.48 per 1,000 U.S. adults in 1997 to 0.77 per 1,000 U.S. adults in 2011.

Compared to ER patients who survived, those who died tended to be older, more likely to be male and white, and were more severely ill or injured when brought into the emergency room.

In nearly 63 percent of ER visits in which patients died, they were in cardiac arrest, unconscious or dead on arrival, according to the study. The most common reasons for other ER visits ending in patient death included shortness of breath, injury or chest pain.

“As a practicing emergency physician, I feel the ED isn’t an optimal place for either a patient to die or a family member or loved one to experience such an event,” Kanzaria said. “We were interested in looking at how often this actually occurs.”

Several societal and health care shifts may contribute to the findings, Kanzaria said. These include greater use of palliative care services, in which patients typically die at home or in hospice settings instead of a hospital emergency room or as inpatients.

“Based on our analysis, it doesn’t appear patients are dying more elsewhere in the hospital, but it’s reasonable to think they’re dying in other settings,” Kanzaria said.

“There also have been pretty tremendous improvements in emergency medicine over the past couple of decades, so there have been significant gains in the management of conditions such as heart attacks, strokes, trauma or serious infections,” he added.

Dr. Kevin Rodgers, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, praised the research. “It’s a good study that used a really good database to get at the best statistics,” he said.

But Rodgers, also a professor of clinical emergency medicine at Indiana University, said the research couldn’t decipher how many patients who once might have died in the ER are now being revived, only to end up “in terrible neurologic condition and counted as survivors.”

“Are we really doing a better job?” Rodgers asked. “We might be, but it’s hard to know.”

The study is published in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shares statistics on ER visits.

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Gene Test Might One Day Gauge Alzheimer’s Risk in Younger Adults

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A gene test may one day be able to predict the risk for Alzheimer’s disease in young adults, a new study suggests.

People without any thinking impairments, but with a high number of gene mutations linked to Alzheimer’s, developed worse memory over time and had a smaller hippocampus — the part of the brain associated with memory and emotion, the researchers found.

“This implies that genetic risk of Alzheimer’s disease may exert an effect on the hippocampus very early in life, which may make those individuals more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease late in life,” said lead researcher Elizabeth Mormino. She is an instructor in neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Charlestown, Mass.

Although the effects were small, they offer the possibility that genetic mutations may help spot people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease decades before symptoms start, she added.

But Dr. Sam Gandy, director of the Center for Cognitive Health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, said people should not be rushing out to get tested to see if they have a high risk of Alzheimer’s.

“It’s only for research at this point,” he said. “It’s potentially very useful in designing super early interventions, but not clinically useful yet.”

For the study, Mormino and her colleagues calculated a genetic risk score based on whether a person had several high-risk gene mutations. The participants, average age 75, included 166 people with dementia and more than 1,000 people without dementia.

In addition, Mormino’s team looked for markers of Alzheimer’s, including memory and thinking decline, disease progression and the size of the hippocampus. They also looked at links between the risk score and hippocampus size in more than 1,300 healthy 18- to 35-year-olds.

The investigators found that among older people without dementia, a higher genetic risk score was associated with worse memory and a smaller hippocampus at the start of the study, accounting for 2 percent of the total variance in memory and 2 percent of the variance in hippocampus size.

Over a three-year follow-up period, a higher risk score was tied to greater memory and thinking decline and disease progression, the researchers reported.

Moreover, the risk score was linked with overall Alzheimer’s progression. Among the 194 participants who were healthy at the start of the study, 15 developed mild thinking impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Of 332 patients with mild thinking impairment at the start of the study, 143 developed Alzheimer’s disease, the findings showed.

With each increase in the Alzheimer’s genetic risk score, the odds of the disease progression increased nearly two times, the study authors said.

Among the younger participants, a high risk score was linked to a smaller hippocampus. However, the risk score accounted for less than 1 percent of the difference in hippocampus size between those with high and low scores, the researchers noted.

The findings were published online July 6 in the journal Neurology.

“We are starting to put the pieces of the puzzle in place that look at what these genetic risk factors might mean,” said Heather Snyder, senior director for medical and scientific operations at the Alzheimer’s Association. “It’s a first step in that direction, but it’s not ready for prime time — we still have a ways to go.”

If you have a parent or a sibling that has Alzheimer’s disease, you are at an increased risk, and “there is nothing more that a genetic test will tell you about your risk,” she said.

In the future, genetic testing might predict risk and there may be ways to stop or slow the progression of the disease, Snyder said. “But we are not there yet.”

More information

Visit the Alzheimer’s Association for more on Alzheimer’s disease.

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Does Medical Marijuana Reduce Need for Other Meds?

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, July 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — People are actually using medical marijuana as a treatment for health problems, not simply as an excuse to get high, a new study suggests.

States that pass medical marijuana laws tend to experience a significant decline in prescriptions for ailments that could be treated with cannabis, said study senior researcher W. David Bradford. He’s the chair of public policy with the University of Georgia’s Department of Public Administration and Policy.

At the same time, there hasn’t been a decline in prescriptions for drugs that treat conditions for which marijuana wouldn’t help much or at all, Bradford said.

“There was a substantial shift away from the use of [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved drugs when states turned their medical marijuana laws on,” Bradford said.

Patients most often use medical marijuana to treat pain, causing a large decrease in the average daily doses of prescription painkillers, the researchers reported.

Given this, medical marijuana could play a role in reducing overdose deaths caused by prescription opiates, such as oxycodone (Oxycontin), hydrocodone (Vicodin), morphine and codeine, Bradford said.

“If you never start using an opiate, then you’re not put on the path to opiate misuse, opiate abuse and death,” he said.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from Medicare Part D, a federal program that covers prescription drugs for seniors. The study included all prescriptions filled by Medicare Part D enrollees from 2010 to 2013.

The investigators compared states that had legalized medical marijuana against states that hadn’t, to see if the availability of pot to patients made any difference in prescription drug trends.

The research team specifically looked at nine conditions for which marijuana might be considered a substitute for FDA-approved medications — anxiety, depression, glaucoma, nausea, pain, psychosis, seizures, sleep disorders and spasticity.

Pain is the condition for which there’s the strongest medical evidence recommending marijuana use, the researchers said. Accordingly, they found that legal pot had the greatest effect on prescriptions for painkillers.

There were 1,826 fewer daily doses of painkillers prescribed on average per year in states with medical marijuana laws, compared to states where pot is outlawed, the findings showed.

That’s three to four times greater than the reductions found in prescriptions for other marijuana-treatable conditions, including anxiety, depression, nausea, psychosis, seizures and sleep disorders, Bradford said. Reductions for those conditions were significant, but averaged between 265 and 562 daily doses annually.

The only drugs not significantly affected by medical marijuana laws target glaucoma and spasticity. Those two diseases have shown the least proven benefit from cannabis, the researchers said.

For example, marijuana can decrease eye pressure caused by glaucoma by about 25 percent, but the effect lasts only an hour. That makes pot an unrealistic option for glaucoma treatment, the study authors said. Their data showed that daily doses of glaucoma medication increased by an average 35 daily doses per year in states with medical marijuana laws.

The researchers also found that medical marijuana laws caused no change at all in drugs for which cannabis cannot be considered a substitute, including antibiotics and antivirals, Bradford said.

According to Dr. David Katz, these results show that marijuana — “not a dangerous drug, in the grand scheme of things” — could serve as a valuable alternative to FDA-approved drugs that come with worse side effects. Katz is director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn.

“What we want in medicine is to use the right thing for the right patient at the right time — something that relieves a disease, does it more effectively than anything else, and does it with a high margin of safety,” Katz said. “This research indicates that marijuana is populating exactly such a niche.”

Medical marijuana “is not the right choice for everybody, but there will be people for whom it is the right choice,” he continued. “We’re counting on well-trained physicians to apply sound judgment.”

Medical pot also appears to have saved taxpayers some money. By 2013, 17 states and the District of Columbia had implemented medical marijuana laws, and lower prescription drug use in those states added up to $165 million in savings, the study authors reported.

Marijuana could help treat pain for the same reason that it also can help treat depression and anxiety, by altering a person’s mood, said Dr. Daniel Carr. He is president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and director of pain research at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

“Pain wouldn’t be pain unless there was an unpleasant emotion tagged onto it. This emotional aspect of pain is as important as the sensory aspect of pain,” Carr said. “Marijuana’s effects on mood could also alleviate the experience of pain, from the patient’s point of view.”

However, Carr said more research needs to be done on marijuana for it to serve as a true alternative to prescription drugs.

“The quality of the evidence for medical marijuana is really rudimentary,” he said. “I don’t think we have a full grasp yet on the long-term risks and benefits of medical marijuana.”

The new study was published in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.

More information

For more on medical marijuana, visit the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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