Americans Embraced Record Number of Lip Procedures in 2015

MONDAY, April 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Hoping to look more kissable perhaps, Americans underwent a record number of lip procedures last year.

“We live in the age of the selfie, and because we see images of ourselves almost constantly on social media, we’re much more aware of how our lips look,” Dr. David Song, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said in a society news release.

There were more than 27,400 lip implants performed in 2015 — a 48 percent increase since 2000. That averages out to one lip implant every 19 minutes, the society said, noting the procedure became more popular among both men and women.

Lip injections, which include Botox and various soft-tissue fillers, also rose steeply last year, reaching nearly 9.2 million. That’s an increase of more than 1,000 percent since the year 2000, the plastic surgeons said.

Lip procedures have been the second-fastest-growing facial procedure in the United States since 2000. Only dermabrasion procedures have climbed more rapidly.

Dr. Robert Houser, a plastic surgeon in Westerville, Ohio, said that lips are an easy place for people to start. “A patient may not be ready to commit to something as dramatic as a facelift or eyelid surgery, but there are a variety of ways you can change the shape of your lips,” he said.

Some people prefer the temporary nature of injections, Houser said. “If a patient doesn’t like the injections, it’s fine, because within a few months they wear off and everything is back to normal,” he explained. “But if they do like what injections do for their lips, they have to keep coming back every few months to maintain them.”

The alternative, Houser said, is a more permanent but still reversible lip implant.

More information

The U.S. Office on Women’s Health has more about cosmetic surgery.

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Many U.S. Adults Think Kids’ Health Is Worse Today

MONDAY, April 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — More than half of American adults believe children have worse emotional and mental health than children in previous generations, a new survey shows.

Many of the nearly 2,700 respondents also believe youngsters today have higher stress levels, less quality family time, and poorer coping skills and personal friendships, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. Mott is part of the University of Michigan.

The survey, published April 18, also found that 42 percent of the adults believe children today have worse physical health than when the adults were children. Respondents aged 18 to 69 were more likely to think that than respondents 70 and older.

“We have seen major advances in medicine and public health over the last century that have greatly reduced children’s illness and death. On the other hand, conditions like childhood obesity, asthma and behavior problems have become more common,” poll director Dr. Matthew Davis said in a university news release. Davis is a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at C.S. Mott.

Mark Wietecha, CEO and president of the Children’s Hospital Association, which collaborated on the poll, added that “the dominant view from this poll is that children’s health is worse today than it was for generations past, and we need to more urgently address these challenges.”

Previous polls by the hospital have found that adults consider bullying, stress, suicide and depression to be leading child health concerns in the United States.

More information

The American Academy of Pediatrics offers resources on child health.

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Drug Seems to Extend Survival for Advanced Melanoma Patients

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — More than one-third of advanced melanoma patients were still alive five years after starting therapy with the cancer drug nivolumab (Opdivo), researchers are reporting.

“In 2012, we saw some very promising early evidence that this drug could not only cause the regression of very advanced cancer in patients with melanoma, lung or kidney cancers that had not responded to other forms of therapy, but we also saw that these responses appeared to be very durable,” said lead researcher Dr. Suzanne Topalian. She is a professor of surgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore.

Opdivo was approved for the treatment of advanced melanoma by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2014.

The results of this follow-up study, funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb, which makes Opdivo, were to be presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting, in New Orleans. Research presented at meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

According to U.S. National Cancer Institute data, only 16.6 percent of patients with advanced melanoma diagnosed between 2005 and 2011 survived five years or more.

In this follow-up of a trial started in 2008 of 107 patients, the researchers found Opdivo was effective over the long term.

In 2014, Topalian and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that showed some patients had lasting responses that continued even after stopping the drug.

A year after starting treatment, almost 65 percent of patients were still alive. After 48 months, survival dropped to 35 percent, where it remained, the researchers found.

In the latest report, researchers also compared the drug with another FDA-approved melanoma drug, ipilimumab (Yervoy). About 21 percent of patients treated with Yervoy were still alive as much as 10 years after treatment, Topalian said.

She added that Opdivo and Yervoy are approved to be used together, and the response rate with the combination is over 50 percent.

However, mixing the drugs can produce toxic side effects, Topalian said. “There may be better ways to give the combination, and that is now in clinical testing,” she explained.

Opdivo’s side effects include inflammation in normal tissue in other organs caused by the drug’s effect on the patient’s immune system, Topalian said. However, these side effects can be diagnosed early and treated aggressively, she added.

“We are now at a point where these drugs are quite safe. The risk-to-benefit balance appears to be favorable,” she said.

“Opdivo releases the brakes on the immune response against cancer by blocking this molecule called PD-1,” she explained. This allows the immune system to “do its job and kill the cancer.”

In addition to advanced melanoma, Opdivo is being tested in patients with less advanced disease, as well as in patients with advanced lung and kidney cancer, Topalian said.

She considers Opdivo a breakthrough in the treatment of melanoma. However, it is expensive, costing more than $103,000 over seven months, according to a 2015 presentation at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The drug is covered by most insurance plans, including Medicare, after an initial co-pay.

“We are all hoping for a cure,” Topalian said. “Cure is always the ultimate goal in oncology. Other things may result from this form of therapy that are good outcomes — that would be turning cancer into a chronic, manageable disease that people can live with for a very long time.”

One expert said melanoma is no longer a death sentence.

“The average survival for a patient with advanced melanoma was six months,” said Dr. Craig Devoe, acting chief of the division of hematology and oncology at Northwell Health Cancer Institute, in Lake Success, N.Y.

“This is more support to prior data that we can see long-term remissions and ostensible cures,” Devoe added.

More information

Visit the American Cancer Society for more on melanoma.

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3 Things You Can Do to Increase Your Chances of Living to 100

Photo: Getty Images

More Americans than ever, especially women, are celebrating the big 1-0-0. The number of centenarians has spiked by nearly 44 percent in recent years. And the folks who do make it to 100 are surviving many years past the century mark, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Increase your chance of joining the club with these tenets of longer life.

RELATED: 16 Unexpected Ways to Add Years to Your Life

1. Follow the MIND diet

This eating plan, which emphasizes consuming healthy grains, vegetables and fish and limiting red meat and sweets, has been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s—a leading cause of death in people over 100, per the CDC findings.

2. Work out harder

A recent study found that middle-aged or older people who do high-intensity exercise that makes them sweat may reduce their risk of dying early by up to 13 percent, compared with those who stick to moderate activity.

RELATED: 21 Reasons You’ll Live Longer Than Your Friends

3. Find a sense of purpose

Researchers followed 136,000 people in the U.S. and Japan for seven years and learned that those who reported feeling a strong sense of meaning in life had a roughly 20 percent lower risk of death over the course of the study than those who didn’t.

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Regular Exercise May Boost Prostate Cancer Survival

MONDAY, April 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sticking to a moderate or intense exercise regimen may improve a man’s odds of surviving prostate cancer, a new study suggests.

The American Cancer Society study included more than 10,000 men, aged 50 to 93, who were diagnosed between 1992 and 2011 with localized prostate cancer — meaning it had not spread beyond the gland. The men provided researchers with information about their physical activity before and after their diagnosis.

Men with the highest levels of exercise before their diagnosis were 30 percent less likely to die of their prostate cancer than those who exercised the least, according to a team led by Ying Wang, senior epidemiologist at the cancer society’s epidemiology research program.

More exercise seemed to confer an even bigger benefit: Men with the highest levels of exercise after diagnosis were 34 percent less likely to die of prostate cancer than those who did the least exercise, the study found.

The findings were to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in New Orleans.

While the study couldn’t prove cause-and-effect, “our results support evidence that prostate cancer survivors should adhere to physical activity guidelines, and suggest that physicians should consider promoting a physically active lifestyle to their prostate cancer patients,” Wang said in an AACR news release.

The researchers also examined the effects of walking as the only form of exercise. They found that walking for four to six hours a week before diagnosis was also associated with a one-third lower risk of death from prostate cancer. But timing was key, since walking after a diagnosis was not associated with a statistically significant lower risk of death, the study authors said.

“The American Cancer Society recommends adults engage in a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week,” Wang said, and “these results indicate that following these guidelines might be associated with better prognosis.”

Two experts in prostate cancer care said the findings shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

“Physical activity helps all aspects of health,” said Dr. Elizabeth Kavaler, a urology specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “This study reinforces that a healthy lifestyle, including exercise, is one of the few aspects of post-cancer outcome that a patient can control.”

Dr. Manish Vira, of Northwell Health’s Smith Institute for Urology, in New Hyde Park, N.Y., agreed.

The study “adds to the growing body of evidence that regular exercise is associated with better prostate cancer outcomes,” he said. “Multiple studies have shown improvements in other cancers as well, including breast, colon and lung cancer.”

“Regular exercise improves patients’ cardiovascular health, quality of life, and likely, their overall ability to fight disease,” Vira added.

Wang stressed that further research is needed to see if the findings might differ by patient age at diagnosis, weight or smoking.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about prostate cancer.

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Toddlers’ Sweet Tooth a Weight-Gain Danger, Study Confirms

MONDAY, April 18, 2016 (HealthDay News) — In what may come as no surprise to many parents, toddlers who crave sweet-tasting foods are at higher risk for excess weight gain than those who prefer salty treats, a new study shows.

One nutritionist noted that sugary foods are everywhere nowadays, making the job of keeping kids away from them especially tough.

“The likelihood of kids eating in the absence of hunger is increased with exposure to large portions of palatable, inexpensive, prepackaged and energy-dense foods in today’s ‘obesogenic’ society,” said Pamela Reichert-Anderson, of Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

The study was published online April 18 in the journal Pediatrics and included 209 low-income mothers. All of the women were asked to keep their toddler from eating for one hour, and then provide the child with a substantial lunch.

The children — no longer hungry — were then offered a tray of sweet snacks such a chocolate chip cookies, and salty snacks such as potato chips. The kids were then allowed to eat as much of these snacks as they wanted.

The children who preferred the sweet over salty snacks were at higher risk for body fat increases by the time they were just under 3 years old, the team of University of Michigan researchers found.

“Eating in the absence of hunger is associated with being overweight among older children, but this is the first time we’ve seen this link in children as young as toddlerhood,” said study senior author Dr. Julie Lumeng. She is a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

“The tendency to eat when you’re not hungry increases with age and could have lifelong implications for weight gain. We need to explore ways to target this drive to eat before children even turn 3,” Lumeng added in a university news release.

Reichert-Anderson said there are steps parents can take to curb overeating in a child who nags for sweets.

Restricting sweets may not work, she said, because it simply makes these foods of “more interest in the future” to the child.

Instead, parents should teach kids to be “mindful” when they eat these treats, Reichert-Anderson said. “Teaching your children how to eat these foods, by taking their time to eat and enjoy the taste, as well as consuming these foods in moderation, will help develop healthy eating habits,” she said.

Dr. Ron Marino is associate chair of pediatrics at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. He agreed with Reichert-Anderson that “parents should teach mindfulness of feelings, including satiety [feeling full].”

“Obviously, sweet and salty foods are seductive and children need to learn that they cannot binge on them,” he added. “This is all part of mindfulness and limit-setting.”

He believes that there could sometimes be a psychological component to child eating behaviors, as well.

“When there are unmet emotional needs, people — both children and adults — often turn to food to satisfy those needs,” Marino said. “In this study, I wonder about the emotional and psychosocial state of the overeating toddlers.”

And Reichert-Anderson offered up one more tip for parents.

“A home stocked with foods you want to encourage the family to eat, such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains, as well as presenting them in a child-friendly manner, will also help promote healthy habits,” she said. “Parents have the job of teaching children how to eat well and being a good role model.”

More information

The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion explains how to keep children at a healthy weight.

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This Is Why Your Body Twitches When You Fall Asleep

Photo: Getty Images

Q: Why do I jerk before falling asleep?

These involuntary muscle spasms are actually very common—and harmless. Known as hypnic jerks or “sleep starts,” the spasms may make you feel as if you’re falling or have suddenly been “shocked” awake. Most experts speculate that these jerks happen as a result of your nervous system relaxing as you slip into sleep mode; it’s also possible that neurons misfire because the brain misperceives the muscle relaxation as actual falling.

RELATED: 7 Tips for the Best Sleep Ever

Hypnic jerks may occur more often when you’re stressed-out or sleep-deprived, or if you work out or have caffeine close to bedtime. If they are regularly disturbing your ability to fall or stay asleep, though, see a sleep specialist: They may be linked to an underlying disorder, like restless legs syndrome or sleep apnea.

RELATED: Best and Worst Foods for Sleep

Health’s medical editor, Roshini Rajapaksa, MD, is assistant professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine.

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Spicy pepita, kale and buckwheat salad

 

Lola Berry helps us explore new recipe ideas like this sturdy salad fully of healthy goodness that is incredibly easy to whip up.

 

What you'll need (serves 4)


Salad


• 125 g (1 cup) buckwheat

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 onion, finely sliced

• 35 g (¼ cup) dried apricots, chopped

• 1 bunch of kale, stalks removed and leaves finely chopped

• Zest of 1 lemon

Spicy Pepitas


• Drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve

• 70 g (½ cup) pepitas (pumpkin seeds)

• Pinch of paprika

• Pinch of chilli flakes

• Pinch of salt flakes

What you'll do

Tip the buckwheat into a pot with 375 ml (1½ cups) of water. Bring to the boil then lower the heat a little and simmer for about 8 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool.

Pour the extra-virgin olive oil into a frying pan, add onion and sauté until onion starts to go transparent, then add the apricots and kale and lightly sauté for 2 minutes, until kale has softened and turned bright green. Then throw in your cooled buckwheat and toss it all together.

Now put a touch of olive oil in a small frypan and toast your pepitas. They will puff up a little – this is fun – then, just before you turn the heat down, add the paprika, chilli and salt. Toast for another minute or two.

Remove salad from heat, stir in the lemon zest and toss most of the pepitas through. Serve in a big bowl, drizzle with a dash of extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle on the leftover pepitas – add a few more chilli flakes just like Lola Berry.

Recipe & image by Lola Berry.

First published at Nourish Magazine.

 

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Sunscreen Delays Melanoma in Mice, Researchers Say

SUNDAY, April 17, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Applying 30 SPF sunscreen to mice before they were exposed to ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation delayed the development of melanoma, researchers report.

The study results suggest that mice can be used to identify and develop new and more effective ways to prevent the most dangerous of skin cancers, the investigators said.

“Over the past 40 years, the melanoma incidence rate has consistently increased in the United States,” said lead investigator Christin Burd. She is an assistant professor in the department of molecular genetics and the department of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics at Ohio State University’s cancer center.

“Sunscreens are known to prevent skin from burning when exposed to UV sunlight, which is a major risk factor for melanoma,” Burd said in a university news release.

“However, it has not been possible to test whether sunscreens prevent melanoma, because these are generally manufactured as cosmetics and tested in human volunteers or synthetic skin models,” she explained.

“We have developed a mouse model that allows us to test the ability of a sunscreen to not only prevent burns but also to prevent melanoma. This is a remarkable accomplishment. We hope that this model will lead to breakthroughs in melanoma prevention,” Burd concluded.

It’s important to note, however, that animal research often doesn’t produce similar results in humans.

The researchers were to present the results Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting, in New Orleans. The findings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 76,000 Americans will be newly diagnosed with melanoma this year and nearly 10,000 will die from it.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on melanoma prevention.

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Getting Active After Knee Replacement Might Raise Hip Fracture Risk

SATURDAY, April 16, 2016 (HealthDay News) — There could be a downside to knee replacement: As people get more active, their odds for hip and spinal fractures rise, a new study suggests.

One expert wasn’t surprised by the finding.

While the exact reason for the increase in hip and spine fractures isn’t clear, it’s most likely due “to improved mobility and activity as a result of the knee replacement surgery,” said Dr. Caroline Messer, who specializes in bone loss at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

“In addition, patients who chose to have the surgery rather than conservative management of osteoarthritis may have been the same individuals who were determined to lead very active and therefore somewhat riskier lifestyles in the future,” said Messer, who directs the hospital’s Center for Pituitary and Neuroendocrine Disorders.

Almost 720,000 total knee replacements are carried out in the United States alone each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new study was led by C.H. Vala, of the Sahlgrenska Academy in Sweden, and involved the medical records of Swedes born between 1902 and 1952. More than 3,200 had a total knee replacement and a subsequent hip fracture, according to medical records dating from 1987 to 2002.

Those who had total knee replacement due to osteoarthritis had a low risk of hip and spinal fractures in the decade before their knee replacement, the researchers said.

However, after the knee replacement, their risk of hip fracture rose by 4 percent and their risk of spinal fracture rose 19 percent, compared to those who did not get a new knee.

The study was scheduled for presentation Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Osteoporosis Foundation in Malaga, Spain. It was also published in the journal Osteoporosis International.

“The increasing risk for hip and vertebral fracture in the 10 years after knee replacement may be explained by pain, increase of physical activity due to rehabilitation, and other biomechanical factors,” Vala said in a foundation news release.

The study wasn’t designed to determine cause-and-effect, however, and Messer said that she “would certainly recommend further research before concluding that total knee replacement is a risk factor for future fractures.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on hip fractures among older adults.

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