How government can address the obesity issue, without going all Bloomberg on the public

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With simple and innovative measures, public agencies at state and local levels can play a significant role in promoting healthier eating habits — steps that could make a difference in curbing the nation's obesity epidemic.

Ladies, nobody likes a 'fat-talker'

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Women who engage in "fat talk" — the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies — are less liked by their peers, a new survey has found.

Alexandra Corning, associate professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab, presented the survey results recently at the Midwestern Psychological Association annual conference.

Pets may help reduce your risk of heart disease

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Having a pet might lower your risk of heart disease, according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement.

The statement is published online in the association's journal Circulation.

"Pet ownership, particularly dog ownership, is probably associated with a decreased risk of heart disease" said Glenn N. Levine, M.D., professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and chair of the committee that wrote the statement after reviewing previous studies of the influence of pets.

Patients should have right to control genomic health information

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Doctors should not have the right or responsibility to force-feed their patients with genomic information about their future health risks, according to bioethicists writing on May 9 in Trends in Biotechnology, a Cell Press publication. They write in response to controversial recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) on the reporting of incidental findings in clinical genome sequencing.

The social needs of young people with cancer

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New Orleans, LA – Research conducted by Xiao-Cheng Wu, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of the Louisiana Tumor Registry at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, and colleagues, reports adolescents and young adults with cancer may be at higher risk for social isolation and that a substantial proportion of them have unmet social needs that could adversely affect their health. The research is published online in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology.

Obese students' childbearing risk varies with high school obesity rates

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For young women in high school, the risk of childbearing may depend on the prevalence of obesity in their schools, according to sociologists, who found that as the prevalence of obesity rises in a school, so do the odds of obese high school students bearing children.

"We did find that obese females are at lower risk of having a child while in high school," said Jennifer Buher Kane, recent Penn State Ph. D. recipient and current postdoctoral fellow at Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina. "But that relative risk depends a lot on the type of school they attend."

Toddlers from socially-deprived homes most at risk of scalds, study finds

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Toddlers living in socially-deprived areas are at the greatest risk of suffering a scald in the home, researchers at The University of Nottingham have found.

The study, published in the journal Burns, showed that boys aged between one and two years old and those with multiple siblings were statistically more likely to suffer a hot water-related injury, while children born to mothers aged 40 years and over were at less risk than those with teenage mums.

Study finds nearly 5 million asthmatics worldwide could benefit from antifungal therapy

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TORONTO, ON – An estimated 4,837,000 asthmatics with allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) could benefit substantially from antifungal treatment, say researchers from the University of Toronto and Manchester University.

Their work, published today in the journal Medical Mycology, has also re-estimated the total number of asthmatics worldwide – to reveal a staggering 193 million sufferers. Twenty-four million asthma sufferers live in the United States, 20 million each in India and China, and seven million in the United Kingdom.

Advance directives manage end of life care issues and reduce end of life medical costs

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A new article available online in the American Journal of Public Health by two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health faculty makes a compelling case that end-of-life care issues need to become an integral part of the public health agenda. Dan Morhaim, MD, and Keshia Pollack, PhD, point out that the low rate of completion of advance directives in the minority population can be identified as another health care disparity.

Time to tumor growth helps predict survival benefit of Bevacizumab for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer

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