Site About Cialis Pills.

In news that’s sure to delight chocolate lovers, a Harvard study finds that a couple of squares of dark chocolate a day might reduce the risk of a hemorrhagic stroke, by 52 percent.

Unfortunately for chocolate fans, though, the same research also found that chocolate does not appear to have a protective benefit for the most common type of stroke.

People who have a stroke have either an ischemic or a hemorrhagic stroke. An ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel that supplies blood to the brain becomes blocked, either partially or completely. This type of stroke accounts for about 80 percent of all strokes, according to the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Hemorrhagic strokes, which occur when a blood vessel in the brain bursts and bleeds into the brain, make up about 20 percent of all strokes.

“There are several possible mechanisms, but the effect of rich cocoa on cardiovascular health seems to be through its effect on blood pressure, and the capacity to improve the flexibility of the blood vessels,” said study author Dr. Martin Lajous, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

“In the context of an appropriate intake, eating small amounts of cocoa could be beneficial,” Lajous said.

But Lajous added that “it’s difficult to understand why it appears to just benefit hemorrhagic stroke.”

The findings were to be presented Wednesday at the American Heart Association’s conference on cardiovascular disease epidemiology and prevention in San Francisco.

The benefit attributed to cocoa stems from substances it contains known as flavonoids, which are believed to help protect against certain cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as blood pressure and blood clotting.

In the study, the researchers reviewed data from 4,369 middle-age French women, none of whom had any evidence of heart disease at the start of the study in 1993. The women’s average body-mass index was 23, a number that’s considered normal weight.

When the study began, the women provided a detailed account of the foods they’d eaten over a 24-hour period. The researchers calculated the cocoa intake by looking for seven foods in particular: plain chocolate bars, candy bars, chocolate drinks, chocolate mousse, chocolate-filled croissant, cookies with chocolate and cakes containing chocolate.

In the next 12 years, 493 of the women were diagnosed with some type of cardiovascular disease: 200 had heart attacks and 293 had a stroke. Of the strokes, 189 were ischemic and 91 were hemorrhagic.

After adjusting the data to account for known cardiovascular disease risk factors — such as smoking, physical activity, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and diabetes — the researchers found no statistically significant association in the risk for cardiovascular disease between the highest levels of cocoa consumption and the lowest.

However, when they broke down the data by type of stroke, they found a statistically significant reduction for women who’d had hemorrhagic strokes and had consumed the most chocolate. In women who ate more than 9 grams of chocolate daily, the risk for hemorrhagic stroke was 52 percent lower than it was for those who consumed less than 0.1 grams of chocolate a day.

Lajous said that 9 grams is about two or three squares of chocolate, and he noted that the French women in the study usually consumed dark chocolate, containing about 35 percent cocoa.

“Our results are intriguing, but need to be confirmed in other studies,” he said.

And not everyone is on board with the concept.

“It would be great if chocolate really worked to prevent heart disease and stroke, but I think it’s wishful thinking,” said Dr. Keith Siller, medical director of the Comprehensive Stroke Care Center at the New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City. “Although the idea that flavonols — the bitter part of the chocolate — can help your cardiovascular health may have some merit, there’s no strong scientific proof.”

Also, he’s puzzled by the study’s finding that cocoa might protect against one type of stroke but not the other. “It’s hard to understand why there’s no benefit for heart disease and ischemic stroke,” Siller said. “Anything that helps stroke should help both types.”

People who add such things as chocolate or red wine to their diet with the hope of helping to prevent heart disease, he said, also need to be aware that they’re taking in additional calories. “If you start adding weight, you may give yourself additional risk factors for stroke and heart disease,” Siller said.

SOURCES: Martin Lajous, M.D., doctoral candidate, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston; Keith Siller, M.D., medical director, Comprehensive Stroke Care Center, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York City; presentation, American Heart Association’s Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention Annual Conference, San Francisco

To prevent contamination, breast milk must be handled and stored properly before feeding to baby.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers these suggestions:
Wash your hands before you pump or handle breast milk.
Make sure you store the milk in containers that are clean and have a tight seal. Examples may include bottles with a screw cap, plastic cups with lids that fit tightly, or bags that are designed for use with milk and bottles.
Label the container of breast milk with the date, so you know which containers to use first. Include baby’s name if it will be taken to your child’s care provider.
Never add fresh breast milk to frozen milk that is already stored.
Never save or re-feed milk from a partially consumed bottle.

Indigestion may be the upshot of overeating or gobbling up too much food that “disagrees” with you.

In addition to avoiding foods that you don’t tolerate well, the American Academy of Family Physicians says you can also help prevent indigestion by:
Limiting greasy, high-fat foods.
Limiting consumption of chocolate.
Eating slowly without rushing.
Not smoking.
Managing stress and relaxing.
Resting at least an hour after a meal before starting strenuous activity or exercise.

A wide array of food products are being recalled after traces of salmonella were discovered in a common ingredient, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced late Thursday.

Salmonella Tennessee has been found in a widely used brand of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, a common flavor enhancer that is added to processed foods, the FDA said.

Products such as dips, salad dressings, pre-packaged meals, snacks and soup mixes from a variety of makers are included in the recall. A full list of the items involved in the recall can be found at Foodsafety.gov.

“At this time, there are no known illnesses associated with this contamination,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said during the news conference.

The FDA said the problem was identified after a customer of the manufacturer, Las Vegas-based Basic Food Flavors Inc., notified the FDA in early February that they found salmonella in one lot of the company’s hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

The FDA collected and analyzed samples at Basic Food Flavors’ plant and found Salmonella Tennessee in processing equipment. Based on this finding, Basic Food Flavors is recalling all hydrolyzed vegetable protein in powder and paste form that was produced since Sept. 17, 2009.

Dr. Jeffrey Farrar, FDA’s Associate Commissioner for Food Protection, said that although the contaminated product is in potentially thousands of food items, it poses a low risk to consumers.

The risk remains low because the ingredient makes up less than 1 percent of any foods. In addition, these foods often go through a cooking step, which kills the bacteria, Farrar noted.

“We believe the risk represented by this recall is very low to consumers,” he said. “Many of the foods that incorporated this product, at a very low level, have ‘kill steps’ in place that would eliminate salmonella.”

Only those products that do not have a “kill step” will be recalled, Farrar said.

The FDA has advised companies that the recalled product should be destroyed or reconditioned according to the agency’s protocol. For products that may already be in consumers’ kitchens, the FDA is advising that they check the recalled product list and follow “cooking instructions for all foods.”

In addition, the agency is asking anyone who had symptoms of salmonella to contact their doctor.

Salmonella can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Healthy people infected with salmonella often have fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain, according to the FDA.

Most healthy people recover from salmonella infection within four to seven days without treatment. However, in rare cases, the bacterium can get into the bloodstream causing severe illnesses, such as arterial infections, infection of the lining of the heart and arthritis, the agency noted.

SOURCES: 2010, teleconference with: Margaret Hamburg, M.D., FDA Commissioner, Jeffrey Farrar, D.V.M., Ph.D., M.P.H., FDA Associate Commissioner, Food Protection

Breast cancer survivors who take aspirin regularly may be less likely to die or have their cancer return, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday.

The study of more than 4,000 nurses showed that those who took aspirin — usually to prevent heart disease — had a 50 percent lower risk of dying from breast cancer and a 50 percent lower risk that the cancer would spread.

“This is the first study to find that aspirin can significantly reduce the risk of cancer spread and death for women who have been treated for early stage breast cancer, ” said Dr. Michelle Holmes of Harvard Medical School, who led the study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

“If these findings are confirmed in other clinical trials, taking aspirin may become another simple, low-cost and relatively safe tool to help women with breast cancer live longer, healthier lives,” Holmes added in a statement.

Holmes and her team studied 4,164 female registered nurses taking part in the Nurses’ Health Study, an ongoing analysis of a wide range of health issues.

They started in 1976, looking at who took aspirin, watching for breast cancer and all causes of death until 2006.

Over this time, 341 of the nurses died of breast cancer.

Women who took aspirin two to five days a week had a 60 percent reduced risk of their cancer spreading and a 71 percent lower risk of breast cancer death. Six to seven aspirins a week lowered the risk of spread by 43 percent and the risk of breast cancer death by 64 percent.

Most of the women were taking low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and stroke.

Other drugs in the same class as aspirin also apparently lowered the risks, too. These drugs, called non-steroidal inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs, include ibuprofen and naproxen but not acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol.

But there was not enough data on these drugs to give a clear answer.

The researchers said they are not sure how aspirin and other NSAIDS may affect tumors but it could be by lowering inflammation. Other studies have shown that aspirin and ibuprofen can lower colon cancer risk, for instance.

“Aspirin has relatively benign adverse effects compared with cancer chemotherapeutic drugs and may also prevent colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, and stroke,” the researchers wrote. It affected both estrogen-positive tumors and those not fueled by the hormone.

Holmes’ team stressed that patients should not take aspirin while undergoing radiation or chemotherapy because of the risk of side effects.

And aspirin can cause stomach bleeding so it should not be taken without a doctor’s supervision.

Adding the drug daclizumab to standard treatment with interferon beta may reduce multiple sclerosis disease activity more than interferon beta alone, a new study reports.

Previous non-randomized studies found that daclizumab — a humanized monoclonal antibody — reduced MS disease activity.

This new phase 2 study at 51 centers in the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy and Spain included 230 patients with active relapsing MS who were taking interferon beta. They were randomly selected to also receive either high-dose daclizumab (2 milligrams/kilogram every two weeks), low-dose daclizumab (1 milligram/kilogram every four weeks) or an inactive placebo. The combined treatments continued for 24 weeks.

MRI scans of the patients’ brains were taken every four weeks between weeks 8 and 24 of the study in order to determine the number of new or enlarged gadolinium contrast-enhancing lesions, which indicate MS disease activity.

By the end of the study, the adjusted mean number of new or enlarged gadolinium contrast-enhancing lesions was 1.32 in the high-dose group (75 patients), 3.58 in the low-dose group (78 patients) and 4.75 in the placebo group (77 patients).

Levels of CD56bright natural killer cells were seven to eight times higher in patients taking daclizumab than in those taking the placebo.

“This study provides confirmatory data that daclizumab treatment causes an expansion of CD56bright natural killer cells and adds support to the theory that expansion of CD56bright natural killer cells might mediate some of the effects of daclizumab on reducing multiple sclerosis lesion activity. In addition to the results of previous trials of daclizumab in multiple sclerosis, several lines of evidence have suggested a potential immunoregulatory function for CD56bright natural killer cells: they are expanded during conditions of natural immune tolerance, for example, pregnancy,” the researchers from the Neurovirology Research Laboratory at the VA Medical Center in Salt Lake City, and the University of Utah, reported in a news release.

“This randomized controlled trial indicates that daclizumab can reduce new lesion formation in relapsing multiple sclerosis compared with interferon-beta alone,” the researchers concluded. “Multiple sclerosis treatments that have the potential to improve in risk-benefit ratios when compared with available treatments are needed; thus, additional studies to define the long-term clinical risks and benefits of daclizumab are warranted.”

If your little one gets a lot of sweetened liquids — including juice, formula and even some brands of milk — the sugars from these liquids can cling to the teeth and cause “baby bottle” tooth decay.

The American Dental Association offers these preventive suggestions:
Wipe baby’s gums with a clean gauze pad after a feeding.
As soon as the first tooth breaks through, start brushing baby’s teeth. Begin flossing when baby has all of his or her teeth.
Don’t let your child take a bottle of juice, milk, formula or anything sweet to bed.
Don’t give your baby a bottle with soda or sugar water.
Talk to your dentist about ways to give your child fluoride if it isn’t in your local water supply.
Schedule regular dental visits for your child, starting at the first birthday.

While many people can develop thick, blue and swollen blood vessels called varicose veins, there are risk factors that may them more likely.

The National Women’s Health Information Center offers this list:
Aging.
Having a family history of varicose veins, or having weak vein valves.
Changes in hormones caused by pregnancy, puberty, menopause or taking certain medications.
Pregnancy itself.
Obesity, an injury to the leg, or other factors that weaken vein valves.
Significant sun exposure.

Using mail-order pharmacies makes it easier for people to stick with their doctor’s prescribed medication regimens, a new study suggests.

Researchers analyzed medication refill data from 2006 and 2007 from 13,922 people with diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol. Good adherence was defined as having prescribed medication on hand at least 80 percent of the time.

People who ordered their medications by mail were more likely to take them as prescribed by their doctors than were people who bought their medications at local pharmacies — 84.7 percent vs. 76.9 percent, the study found. The results were consistent for medications used to control diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Among the other findings:
About 24 percent of whites used mail-order more than two-thirds of the time, compared with 8 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders, 5 percent of Hispanics, 4 percent of blacks and 8 percent of those of mixed race.
People who used mail-order pharmacies were more likely than those who used local pharmacies to have a financial incentive to fill prescriptions by mail (about 50 percent vs. 23 percent) and to live a farther from a local pharmacy (8 miles vs. nearly 7 miles).

“The field of medication adherence research typically focuses on patient factors for poor adherence, leading to a ‘blame-the-patient’ approach for non-adherence,” the lead researcher, Dr. O. Kenrik Duru, an assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, said in a university news release.

“Our work helps to place this issue in a larger perspective,” Duru said. “Our findings indicate that mail-order pharmacies streamline the medication acquisition process, which is associated with better medication adherence.”

The study appears online in the American Journal of Managed Care.

One of the largest analyses of the effect of statin drug therapy on the risk of stroke confirms the benefits of these widely used drugs.

Much of the benefit from statins such as Crestor, Lipitor and Zocor appears tied to the drugs’ lowering of blood levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, the researchers found.

Data from clinical trials including almost 267,000 participants showed an overall 12 percent reduction in stroke incidence among those taking statins, with each 1 percent reduction in total cholesterol predicting a 0.8 percent relative risk reduction of stroke.

The report, published in the Jan. 19 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, was led by physicians at G. d’Annunzio University in Chieti, Italy.

“This is consistent with prior studies and reinforces the benefit of statin therapy in preventing stroke in selected populations of patients,” said Dr. Larry B. Goldstein, director of the Stroke Center at Duke University.

But the report contains hints that the reduction of stroke risk is not entirely explained by the cholesterol-lowering effect of statins, added Dr. Brendan M. Everett, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and attending cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The JUPITER study, which he helped conduct, found a benefit for people with high levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation.

“There are many possible explanations for the reduction in stroke risk observed in actively treated patients, and one of those is a reduction of inflammation with statin therapy,” Everett said. “In JUPITER, we observed a 48 percent reduction in total stroke and 51 percent reduction in ischemic stroke among patients with a normal LDL cholesterol at baseline.”

An ischemic stroke, the most common form, occurs when a blood clot blocks a brain artery.

“We took people with normal cholesterol levels and saw a reduction in stroke similar to that in trials that selected people with higher levels of cholesterol,” Everett said. “That suggests to me there’s something else going on there.”

That’s possible, Goldstein said. “In clinical trials you measure LDL cholesterol, but many other things are going on at the same time,” he said. “Still, the amount of benefit is directly related to the amount of cholesterol lowering.”

While the JUPITER researchers focused on inflammation, “they still reduced LDL cholesterol levels significantly,” Goldstein said.

There was no debate about the value of statin therapy in reducing other cardiovascular risks in people with high LDL levels. The Italian analysis found more benefits from statins than from other cholesterol-lowering regimens.

“Statins really ought to be our first choice for cholesterol reduction,” Everett said. “That is true for heart disease and true for stroke. We showed that even patients with normal cholesterol levels may benefit from statins.”

“The most gratifying thing reported by this meta-analysis is that statins among all lipid-lowering therapies appear to be the most effective,” said Dr. Robert D. Brown, chairman of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “The use of statin therapy is particularly important among people who have had a stroke. They are being used more aggressively in people who have had a stroke in an attempt to prevent another.”

At least one trial has shown a significant reduction in second strokes among people taking statins, Brown noted.

SOURCES: Larry B. Goldstein, M.D., director, Duke Stroke Center, Durham, N.C.; Brendan M. Everett, M.D., instructor, medicine, Harvard Medical School, and attending cardiologist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston; Robert D. Brown, M.D., chairman, neurology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn;