Nicotine residues and other chemical traces “don’t stay in the smoking rooms,” lead researcher George Matt, chairman of the psychology department at San Diego State University, told USA Today. “They end up in the hallways and in other rooms, including nonsmoking rooms,” he said.

The study, published last week in the journal Tobacco Control, found smoke residue on surfaces and in the air of both smoking and nonsmoking rooms in 30 California hotels where smoking was allowed. Levels were highest in the smoking rooms, but levels in nonsmoking rooms were much higher than those found at 10 smoke-free hotels.

Even the hallway surfaces outside of smoking rooms showed higher nicotine residue than the hallways outside of nonsmoking rooms, the researchers wrote.

Volunteers who stayed overnight in the smoking hotels ended up with nicotine residues on their fingers, whether or not they stayed in smoking rooms. Urine tests found additional evidence of nicotine exposure in those who stayed in hotels that allowed smoking, though not in those who stayed in the smoke-free hotels, according to the study.

Smoke-free hotels are becoming more common, yet they’re not as common as smoke-free restaurants and bars. Only four states — Indiana, Michigan, North Dakota and Vermont — have laws banning smoking in hotels, Matt said.

The American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation told USA Today that many large chains, including Marriott, Westin and Comfort Inn, have gone smoke-free. But a recent survey by a hotel trade association found that only 39 percent of economy hotels ban smoking.

For travelers with breathing problems who are trying to avoid any secondhand smoke residue, staying in a nonsmoking room in a hotel that also has smoking rooms may not be a wise choice. Seek out completely smoke-free hotels instead.

As Matt told the New York Times, “Smokers leave a legacy behind that they cannot control.” The tobacco residues permeate the fabrics, the blankets, the upholstery, the drywall “and you can’t just take them out.”

Photo:  Drongowski/flickr

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In fact, the new Institute of Medicine report says that cutting sodium to 1,500 milligrams (mg) daily — the current government recommendation for older adults (ages 51 and up), African Americans and those with diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease — can actually increase the risk for heart attacks and stroke.

The committee of experts, which was convened at the request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at the most recent research and concluded there’s no reason to reduce sodium consumption lower than 2,300 mg daily (about a teaspoon of salt), the general level the government recommends for most Americans.

“As you go below the 2,300 mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit,” Brian L. Strom, M.D., chairman of the committee and a professor of public health and preventive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times. He also noted that there’s some evidence that a lower level can increase heart attacks and risk of death.

Some prominent health organizations, including the American Heart Association, have taken a tougher stance, urging all Americans to reduce their sodium intake to the lower 1,500-mg level.

In a statement calling the committee report “incomplete,” the heart group said it wasn’t changing its recommendation. The group’s chief executive, Nancy Brown, said that “well-established evidence … links too much sodium to high blood pressure and heart disease.”

Most Americans exceed all recommended levels, consuming an average 3,400 mg daily, most of it from processed and restaurant food.

A separate report published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, by researchers at Northwestern University and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, found that sodium levels in processed foods have declined by 3.5 percent, but they rose by 2.6 percent at fast-food restaurants, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Institute of Medicine said people with very high sodium intake would benefit from reducing it, but the report didn’t recommend a specific amount to consume.

Current government recommendations for sodium are based on a 2005 Institute of Medicine report that said consuming between 1,500 and 2,300 mg daily will not raise blood pressure.

Photo:  Colin McKie/Istockphoto

Jolie, 37, revealed in a moving essay in the New York Times today that her own mother died of ovarian  cancer at 56, which is why Jolie got genetic testing that revealed she has the BRCA1 gene mutation. This “faulty” gene, as she put it,  greatly increases a woman’s cancer risk.

Jolie’s doctors told her she had an 87 percent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. “Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy,” Jolie wrote.

The Oscar-winning actress said that she made the choice because she didn’t want her six children to lose their mother at a young age, as she did.

Although she kept her decision and the subsequent surgery and breast reconstruction private for several months, she decided to write about it now “because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. … Today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”

Charis Eng, M.D., founding director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute, tells AARP that she hopes Jolie additionally considers having her ovaries removed in the next three years. Age 35 is when the risk of ovarian cancer begins to climb for women with the BRCA1 gene, Eng says.

“It’s something she needs to think about because there’s no good screening available for ovarian cancer,” she adds.

For older women with a family history of breast cancer, Eng strongly recommends seeing a geneticist, who can determine the correct gene test for screening. “Older women who had cancer 20 years ago when they didn’t have these tests should also consider having it done,” she says.

With the advent of genetic testing, as well as improved reconstructive-surgery techniques that allow a woman to conserve more of her breast skin and nipple area, there has been a big jump in women choosing preventive mastectomies.

The increase has been both among women who have had breast cancer in one breast and chose to have both removed, and women like Jolie who chose a preemptive double mastectomy.

Fellow actress Christina Applegate, who had a BRCA1 gene mutation as well, had a similar procedure in 2008. And 24-year-old Miss USA contestant Allyn Rose, 24, who was 16 when her mother died of breast cancer, also opted for a preventive double mastectomy last year when genetic testing revealed she had the same faulty BRCA1.

Jolie wrote that her decision might not be right for every woman. She urged women, especially those with a family history of cancer, to seek out medical experts to determine possible options, and Eng agrees.

“Older women may elect to have MRI scans for early detection” instead of opting for preventive surgery, Eng says. “There is no one right answer.”

Photo: Dan Steinberg/AP Images

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The investigative journalism group ProPublica, together with the Washington Post, has now launched a database called Prescriber Checkup, which allows users to search doctors’ names and see which ones are frequently prescribing potentially dangerous drugs, such as narcotics and antipsychotics.

ProPublica’s report makes public for the first time the prescribing practices and identities of 350,000 doctors and other health care providers. The search of hundreds of millions of records for 2010 revealed that some doctors are using drugs in unapproved ways that may be unsafe or ineffective.

The data, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal patient names.

ProPublica has also provided a list of Medicare’s top OxyContin prescribers in 2010, plus a list of risky drugs for older adults.

The Post published a story on ProPublica’s findings and a Q and A about the Prescriber Checkup.

Reporters interviewed many of the doctors to ask about their drug-prescription decisions. One was the Miami psychiatrist who has given hundreds of elderly dementia patients the same antipsychotic, despite the government “black box” warning that it increases the risk of death. He told reporters he believes he has no other options.

In addition, reporters found widespread prescribing of drugs such as carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant also known as Soma, which is banned in Europe and is on the American Geriatrics Society’s list of drugs seniors should avoid.

In response to the analysis, Medicare officials said the job of monitoring prescribing falls to the private health plans that administer the program, not the government. It’s up to the physician to determine if a drug is safe, they said.

It’s also, apparently, up to patients to check up on their doctors’ drug choices — a task made easier with this database.

Photo: Ron Chapple/Getty Images

That’s what a super-smart 14-year-old discovered in a preliminary study of 26 patients age 50 or older with heart devices, such as an implanted cardioverter defibrillator for protecting against arrhythmia.

High school freshman Gianna Chien of Stockton, Calif., did the research with some assistance from her cardiologist father, Walter Chien, M.D., according to the Heart Rhythm Society. Her study was presented last week at the society’s annual meeting in Denver.

The teen found that the magnets embedded in the iPad 2 and its cover may cause electromagnetic interference that can disrupt or turn off a cardiac-rhythm device. These devices contain specialized magnets that allow doctors to adjust their setting. The danger occurs when the iPad is placed directly on the chest — particularly if patients fall asleep with it lying there.

“Since tablets are becoming more common, I hope these findings will encourage patients who have or may be a candidate for implantable defibrillators to talk to their doctor about precautions if they use a tablet like the iPad 2,” Gianna Chien said.

Her study found that 30 percent of participants had interference with their heart devices when the iPad 2 was placed on their chest. There was no electromagnetic interference, however, when the iPad was kept at normal reading distance from the chest.

According to the National Institutes of Health, other equipment with imbedded magnets — like cellphones, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and metal detectors — can also disrupt defibrillators and pacemakers.

The problem is that people don’t even realize their heart device has been affected. “There is no trigger, no light goes off [to alert you],” Salvatore Insinga, a neurosurgeon at the Cushing Neuroscience Institute at North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, New York, told HealthDay News.

“With all the tech devices people are using and all the implanted things in patients, this is more of an issue now,” he added.

An Apple spokesman said the iPad 2′s instruction book suggests that patients with pacemakers keep the iPad at least 6 inches away.

Photo: krossbow /flickr

He said it was his desire to stay healthy for his four kids — not plans for a future presidential campaign –that made him decide to undergo gastric-band surgery in February, he told the New York Post.

This is his latest strategy in a 20-year battle with his weight. So far, he’s shed nearly 40 pounds and says he feels less hungry.

But will the band really help him keep the weight off? A weight-loss surgeon tells AARP that the procedure has been steadily dropping in popularity over the past five years.

Laparoscopic gastric banding — Lap-Band is the trade name — is generally considered the least risky and invasive weight-loss surgery, but also the least effective for long-term weight loss. The procedure involves a silicon band that cinches the stomach, reducing the space for food. People feel fuller more quickly, so they eat less.

Patients typically lose 30-60 percent of their excess weight, says Brian Long, M.D., medical director of the Sibley Center for Weight Loss Surgery in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, once the band is removed, “there is a significant risk of regaining weight,” he says.

While the band is in place, it requires regular adjustments — it can be tightened or loosened — and frequent follow-up visits to the doctor, which can be inconvenient. For all these reasons, the gastric band has dropped in popularity.

Long, who was not involved in Christie’s care, says that nationally, gastric-band surgery now represents only about 20 percent of all bariatric surgery. At his center, Lap-Band has dropped to “probably about 5 percent of our total cases.”

“What we have found is that for most morbidly obese patients, the band is just not a strong enough tool to help them get the weight off and keep it off,” Long says. “The band tends to be more effective for smaller, younger and healthier patients, and it is less effective for larger, older and sicker patients.”

What’s more, some 10-25 percent of band patients require further surgery either to treat a complication related to the band or to remove it completely, Long adds.

Gastric bypass remains the most common weight-loss surgery, he continues. It involves stapling the stomach to create a very small pouch and rearranging the small intestines — the most drastic but also the most effective of the weight-loss-surgery options.

For Christie the relatively quick gastric-band procedure, done on an outpatient basis, fit into his busy schedule. In addition, it initially let him keep the surgery hush-hush. Plus, it helped that New York Jets coach, Rex Ryan, who lost more than 100 pounds after having the procedure in March 2010, encouraged Christie to try it.

So far it seems to be taming the governor’s appetite, if not his choice of food. He told the New York Post, “A week or two ago I went to a steak house and ordered a steak and ate about a third of it and I was full.”

Photo: creative commons/commons.wikipedia.org

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What made the decision difficult is that there’s been no good way to tell which kind of cancer a man might have — slow-growing or aggressive — but a new gene-analysis test introduced this week may make the decision clearer.

The test, called Oncotype DX Prostate Cancer Test and developed by Genomic Health, could save men from unnecessary operations on slow-growing tumors that will never harm them. It is the second such test introduced in the past year; both are among a dozen coming to market, according to the New York Times.

The test analyzes the genes in a biopsy sample and gives a score for tumor aggressiveness, similar to tests used now for certain breast and colon cancers, the Associated Press reported.

This offers men and their doctors important information for deciding on treatment, said Peter Carroll, M.D., chairman of urology at the University of California, San Francisco, who led a study of the new gene test’s effectiveness. Currently, men have only the unreliable PSA test, which measures the level of a prostate protein in the bloodstream but doesn’t indicate the type of tumor the patient has.

Initial study results suggest the test could triple the number of men who could safely monitor their tumors instead of undergoing risky surgery and radiation to eradicate them. About 240,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. annually.

Experts caution, however, that it’s still too early to tell how accurate the test really is, or whether it will persuade more men to take a wait-and-see attitude toward treatment.

Even with the test, there is still uncertainty, and many men may not want to take any chance that a tumor could quickly turn fatal.

Photo:  Creative Commons/commons.wikipedia.org

Courtesy Newtown grafitti — Flickr photostream

Which do you think keeps your brain sharper — completing a leisurely crossword puzzle on the computer or playing a fast-paced computer video game that requires you to match fleeting images?

Sorry, crossword puzzlers, but the quick-thinking skills needed to play a video game could help slow age-related cognitive decline, a new study finds.

Researchers from the University of Iowa tested 681 healthy adults over age 50 who were assigned to play either a video game called “Road Tour” (since renamed “Double Decision”) or to complete a computerized crossword puzzle. (The video game was provided by Posit Science, which also provides brain fitness exercises for AARP.org. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.)

The game is designed to improve the speed and accuracy of mental processing skills. Players must find matching road signs among a series of constantly changing images. The more you play, the less time you’re given to complete the matches.

The game group was required to play 10 hours total over the course of five weeks, either in the lab or at home. In addition, part of the group was given four hours of booster training 11 months after the study ended. All participants were given cognitive tests at the end of the study and a year later.

The result, researchers found, was that the game-players showed “small to medium size” improvements in their cognitive skills, compared with the puzzle people. Playing the video game seemed to give participants more protection against declines in memory and other functions, such as planning and reasoning.

On average, the game players’ minds were three years “younger,” researchers said, and those who got the extra booster training showed even more improvement.

Plus, researchers found that the game training worked equally well in both middle-aged participants (ages 50 to 64) and those 65 or older.

“The bad news about brain plasticity is that … we start slowing down in our early 30s, and it continues. The good news is, with the right kind of training programs, we can regain what we’ve lost and maybe get people to higher levels,” study author Fredric Wolinsky, Ph.D., professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health, told HealthDay News.

Compared with the crossword group, the gamers scored higher on tests of concentration, and were able to switch between different tasks and process new information more quickly — abilities that could help older adults with everyday skills, including driving and avoiding accidents, researchers wrote.

“We know that we can stop this decline and actually restore cognitive processing speed to people,” Wolinsky said in a statement. “So, if we know that, shouldn’t we be helping people? It’s fairly easy, and anyone can go get the training game and play it.”

The study was published May 1 in the journal PLOS One. 

 

 

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May is Healthy Vision Month, and the National Eye Institute is encouraging Americans to take the necessary steps to protect their vision. According to the institute, about 38 million Americans over age 40 have glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration or cataracts. And that number is projected to rise to 56 million by 2030.

The special eyedrops the doctor uses to dilate your eyes cause the pupil — the dark opening in the center of the colored iris — to widen so the retina and the optic nerve at the back of the eye are more easily seen. These two parts are crucial for clear vision.

Granted, the dilation exam is inconvenient because your eyes remain sensitive to light for hours afterward (you’ll need dark sunglasses) and it’s hard to focus for reading until the dilation effect wears off.

But this exam allows your eye doctor to see more of the eye’s interior and possibly spot diseases and conditions that could threaten your eyesight. There are often no warning signs or pain in the early stages of many eye diseases, so regular checkups are important.

By getting your eyes dilated, your doctor can diagnose problems such as these at an early, more treatable stage:

• Diabetes-related eye problems: People who have diabetes are at risk for eye disease that can cause vision loss or blindness.
• Tumors: Brain tumors can often cause changes in the eye or vision problems.
• High blood pressure: Damage to the eye’s blood vessels from hypertension could indicate a higher risk of stroke, especially for women.
• Macular degeneration: This is the most common cause of blindness in older people, and catching it early can slow its progress.
• Detached retina: A serious condition, it occurs when the retina separates from the back wall of the eye. To avoid vision loss, this must be repaired immediately.
• Cataracts: The slow clouding of the eye’s lens makes it difficult to see, especially at night.
• Infection or inflammation: Infectious diseases and retinal vasculitis, an inflammation of the retina’s blood vessels, can threaten eyesight. Vasculitis can also be a complication of other immune disorders, like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.

Photo: cursedthing /flickr

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There are plenty of theories for why new government figures show the suicide rate for middle-aged Americans — adults ages 35 to 64 — jumped nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010.

The increase was even higher — a 40 percent rise —for white, middle-aged men and women. Among men, the increase in suicide was highest for those in their 50s — a jump of 50 percent; among women, those ages 60 to 64 saw a 60 percent rise. Overall, more men took their own lives than women, by more than 3 to 1.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which published its findings in the May 3 issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, more people died from suicide than from car accidents. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 from suicides.

The question is, why? As the New York Times reports: “Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-age Americans is surprising.”

Officials acknowledge that the reasons for suicide are complex, but there are lots of theories for the increase — from easy access to opioids like OxyContin, to emotionally and financially burdened boomers.

One theory is that white baby boomers have always had higher rates of depression and suicide, and that has remained true as they have entered middle age, notes the Associated Press. During the 11-year period studied, suicide went from the eighth leading cause of death among baby boomers to the fourth — behind cancer, heart disease and accidents.

In addition, boomers have had to deal with the stress of being the so-called sandwich generation — caring for aging parents while still providing financial and emotional support to adult children — something past generations haven’t felt. “It may not be that [boomers] are more sensitive or that they have a predisposition to suicide, but that they may be dealing with more,” the CDC’s deputy director, Ileana Arias, Ph.D., told the New York Times.

Add to that the dramatic economic downturn during the past decade, and it’s not hard to see why suicide rates might have been affected. Historically, suicide rates rise during periods of severe financial hardship and setbacks, the CDC finds. Plus, there’s been the rising amount of chronic health conditions among the middle-aged, as CNN reports.

At least one expert told the Times that the risk for suicide is not likely to decrease in the near future, as the next generation faces the same pressures. A Rutgers University sociologist who has studied suicide rates observed, “All these conditions the boomers are facing, future cohorts are going to be facing many of these conditions as well.”

Photo: bogenfreund /flickr

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