We Can! Program Takes Aim at Childhood Obesity

(HealthDay News) -- The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Association of Children's Museums are teaming up on a program to combat the obesity epidemic among America's children.

The program -- called We Can! (Ways to Enhance Children's Activity and Nutrition) -- was introduced Thursday in Boston, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, which have been designated as We Can! cities.

Other We Can! communities include Armstrong County, Pa.; Carson City, Nev.; Gary, Ind.; South Bend, Ind.; and Roswell, Ga.

"I am really confident that this partnership among the federal government, the We Can! program, the Association of Children's Museums and civic organizations is ultimately going to lead to healthier children in the United States, healthier families and better health-care outcomes for everybody," acting U.S. Surgeon General Rear Admiral Dr. Steven K. Galson said during an afternoon teleconference.

Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, said childhood obesity has reached "crisis" proportions.

"We are facing a crisis, and we must find ways to change the tide that is facing us and affecting our children," Zerhouni said during the teleconference.

There are more than 12.5 million overweight children and teens in the United States. Galson said obesity is a big contributor to such childhood health problems as high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and asthma.

"Chronic diseases cause seven out of 10 deaths," Galson said. "And the costs are staggering."

Galson noted that portion sizes have increased while life in America has become more sedentary. "Our kids are growing up with unhealthy lifestyles, the consequences of which could be with them for the rest of their lives," he said.

"Reversing this epidemic does not have one answer," he added. "It's going to take a concerted action by all of us. We need to focus our activities on prevention -- on what we can do today."

We Can! can be a model for overcoming the challenges of childhood obesity and overweight, Galson said. "Its partnerships are demonstrating how physical activity and sound lifestyle choices can make a difference and how communities can work together to make those lifestyle choices real," he said.

We Can! is an education program to help children aged 8 to 13 years old to maintain a healthy weight. It's being implemented in more than 450 communities in 44 states.

Zerhouni said getting kids away from the TV and the computer is key to improving their health. Increased activity, better food choices and smaller portions complete the arsenal for fighting the obesity epidemic, he said.

The three new We Can! cities announced Thursday are introducing the program to city employees, community groups, corporate wellness programs, health professionals and schools.

While improvement in childhood obesity is vital, the results may not be seen for decades, Galson said.

"It's a national necessity with profound implications -- we all have a stake in the outcome," he said. "The result may not be apparent for many years, but it's going to be a fitter, healthier, more physically active nation in which the epidemic of childhood obesity slows down."

In addition to the Association of Children's Museums, 40 national and corporate partners are starting We Can! programs in community centers, schools, health-care settings, corporate wellness programs and faith-based organizations, officials said.

A study this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that after increasing for the last 25 years, the prevalence of obesity among adults has not risen in the past few years. Still, 34 percent of Americans aged 20 and older are obese.

"In view of these alarmingly high rates of obesity in all population groups, [the] CDC has made the prevention of obesity one of its top public health priorities," Janet Collins, director of CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, said in a prepared statement. "We are actively working in partnership with state and local public health agencies, the nation's schools, community organizations, businesses, medical systems and faith communities to promote and support healthy eating, physical activity and healthy weight."

More information
To learn more about the We Can! program, visit the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Health Tip: Caring for a Sprain

(HealthDay News) - Sprains are often caused by twisting, straining or stressing ligaments that connect bones. Areas most prone to sprains include the ankles, knees and wrist.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons offers these suggestions for taking care of a sprain:

• Rest the sprained area.
• Ice the injury.
• Keep the area wrapped with a bandage.
• Keep the injured area elevated.
• As it's starting to heal, lightly exercise the injured area.
• If possible, wear a brace for support until the injury has healed.

Radiancio

Try a Proprietary Formula for Health And Beauty based on Ayurveda - the Oldest and Most Holistic, Comprehensive Medical System Available.

If you want to maximize your beauty and eliminate dull and fatigued looking skin tone, acne, dry and lackluster hair, or weak and cracking nails, there is proven help available. India's men and women have been reaping the powerful benefits of Ayurveda for the past 5,000 years!

Radiancio is a natural supplement geared towards optimizing and enhancing the appearance and condition of your hair, nails, and skin while strengthening the body and overall well-being.

It will help you: Increase Keratin Formation. Enhance Collagen Synthesis. Reduce Elastin Breakdown. Improve Cellular Regeneration. Reduce Formation of Sebum. Clear Pores and Eradicate Acne. Renew Confidence and Esteem.


more information:
http://www.radiancio.com/index.htm?aff=dreddyclinic

Migraine Tied to Thickening in Brain Area

(HealthDay News) -- People who suffer from repeated migraines have a thickening in an area of their brains that's involved in processing pain, researchers report.

But exactly what this means, or whether the migraines or the brain-thickening come first, is not yet clear.

"We don't know if it's a cause or a consequence" of migraines, said study senior author Dr. Nouchine Hadjikhani, an associate professor of radiology at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, affiliated with both the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"What we need is more people and also more time points. If we could follow people over a few years of migraines and see if we can see changes going one direction or the other, that would be something in the direction of an answer," she said. "For the moment, we have one snapshot in time. We see a difference. We don't know why."

"The authors suggested that it may be that repeated attacks of migraine lead to the changes in the brain, although another possibility is that these alterations in the brain structure predispose to migraine," added Dr. Richard Lipton, director of the Montefiore Headache Clinic in New York City. "I have a bias in favor of the hypothesis they present -- that recurrent migraines alter the brain --- because I want to believe that if patients get treated with preventive medication and acute treatments, maybe this thickening could be prevented."

The study is published in the Nov. 20 issue of Neurology.

Some 28 million Americans suffer from migraines, debilitating headaches that usually strike on one side of a person's head and can also involve nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light. Some migraines are accompanied by "aura," or changes in vision.

Previous researchers have noted changes in the frontal and temporal cortices of the brain in individuals with chronic pain disorders, such as migraine and back pain.

Hadjikhani and her colleagues had previously found changes in the brain's white matter (which consists of nerve fibers) in people suffering from migraines.

"We found changes in migraineurs compared to controls in the white matter pathways that are important for the somatosensory processing of pain," she explained. "That's why we decided to look at cortical thickness, to see if white matter had any bearings on the gray matter [which consists of cell bodies]."

The somatosensory system includes sensations from the body -- including touch, pain and pressure -- that do not involve the organs devoted to sense, such as the eyes and ears.
The researchers used brain scanning to examine 24 people with migraine, 12 with aura and 12 without. They then compared those scans to scans of 12 people without migraine.

The cortical thickness of the somatosensory cortex area (SSC) of the brain was an average of 21 percent thicker in individuals with migraine, the team found.

It's not clear why this thickness varies in people with and without migraines.

"The brain is a plastic organ, and its structure can change depending on whether you're using it or not," Hadjikhani said. "Now, the question is, do we see the increase in thickness because we have repetitive attacks of migraine? That's our interpretation. The idea is, if you are stimulating this system three or four times a month since you were a teenager, maybe it makes it bigger."

And changes in the brain induced by repetitive migraine attacks may make sufferers more prone to suffering from other pain disorders, the researchers theorized. This would explain the high number of people with migraine who also suffer from such conditions as fibromyalgia and back pain.

More information
There's more on migraine at the National Headache Foundation.

Health Tip: Controlling Body Odor in Teens

(HealthDay News) - As teen hormones begin to kick in and interact with common body bacteria, young adults may begin to notice body odor.
The Nemours Foundations offers these suggestions on how teens can keep body odor at bay:
Shower daily with soap and water.
Wear clean clothes and underwear every day, and change socks frequently. If you've been sweating, change into clean, dry clothes.
Wear all-cotton t-shirts, underwear and socks, which absorb sweat better.
Apply deodorant (masks odor from underarm perspiration) or antiperspirant (helps prevent underarm perspiration altogether).

Health Tip: Suggestions for Healthy Skin

(HealthDay News) - It's never too late to begin a regimen to preserve one of your body's most important organs -- your skin.

Here are some suggestions, courtesy of the Cleveland Clinic Health System:

• Drink plenty of water every day.


• Wash your skin daily, using a gentle cleanser and lukewarm water.


• If you wear makeup, be sure to remove it carefully each day by thoroughly washing your face.


• Always wear sunscreen when you go outside -- even when it's cloudy and during winter months.


• If you have problems with your skin, see a dermatologist.


• Take care of special needs, such as acne, dry skin or aging skin.

Botox Offers Shot in Arm for Arthritis Sufferers

(HealthDay News) -- Botox seems to relieve shoulder pain in arthritis sufferers, a preliminary study found.

"We don't recommend people start using it until we have the definitive study," said study author Dr. Jasvinder Singh, a staff physician at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. He said his study was small, and more patients needed to be assessed before the treatment could be recommended.

Singh was to present his findings Friday at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting, in Boston.

Singh and his colleagues randomly assigned 43 patients with moderate-to-severe osteoarthritis pain in their shoulders to one of two groups. One group received a single dose of the botulinum toxin type A and lidocaine, a local anesthetic. The other group got a dose of saline (salt water) plus the lidocaine. Neither group knew what they were receiving.

Osteoarthritis is the "wear-and-tear" type of arthritis, and the risk for it increases with age, obesity and other factors. About 21 million Americans have this form of arthritis, according to estimates from the Arthritis Foundation.

More than 5 percent of adult Americans suffer shoulder pain lasting more than a month in a given year, according to Singh. At the start of the study, the participants' pain levels were greater than 4.5 on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the worst pain.

The researchers compared the pain levels before the botulinum treatment to levels assessed 28 days later. They found that 38 percent of the botulinum group had a 30 percent or better reduction in their pain scores, compared to 9 percent of the saline group. Those who got botulinum also reported more improvement in shoulder function than the saline group.

The toxin may work, Singh speculated, by reducing the release of certain proteins from nerves in the joint. And that, in turn, may decrease the pain sensation.

Dr. John Hardin is chief science officer at the Arthritis Foundation, and a professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City. He agreed that more study of botulinum for arthritis pain was needed but was optimistic. "It appears very promising, that this is useful in achieving pain relief," he said.

Hardin added a caveat, however: "It probably needs to be made clear this is not thought of as an intervention that stops the progression of the disease." And he warned those who might get the treatment that just because the pain was reduced didn't mean the disease had gone away.

"It's still in the experimental stage," Hardin said.

Besides easing facial wrinkles, Botox is also used to treat bladder problems, migraine headaches and excess sweating, among other conditions.

The new study was funded by the North Central chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, the Mayo Clinic Center for Clinical and Translational Research, and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. In the past, Singh has received travel funds for other research projects from Allergen Pharmaceuticals, which makes Botox, he said.

More information
For more about arthritis treatments, visit the Arthritis Foundation.

Training, Experience Can Change How Brains Work

(HealthDay News) -- Training and experience can affect how a person's brain is organized, says a U.S. study that compared 20 music conductors and 20 people with no music training.

All the participants were between the ages of 28 and 40. The conductors had an average of more than 10 years experience as a band or orchestra director in middle or high school.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the participants' brain activity while they performed a difficult hearing task that involved listening for two tones. They had to keep their eyes opened while doing the task.

Initially, both the conductors and non-musicians showed reduced activity in the brain's visual processing area and increased activity in the auditory part of the brain. But as the task became harder, only the non-musicians tuned out more of their visual sense. This suggests that the conductors' music training and experience altered the way their brains work, the researchers said.

"Because the task was equally difficult for everybody, the difference observed between conductors and non-musicians must be related to a change in how they deal with irrelevant sensory information and not just their ability to do the task," lead author W. David Hairston, a postdoctoral fellow in radiology at the Advanced Neuroscience Imaging Research Laboratory at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a prepared statement.

"In general, based on the non-musicians, we suggest that the brain actively increases how much information from other senses gets filtered out or ignored when you have to concentrate really hard on one sense," Hairston said.

He noted that conductors routinely must differentiate between subtle differences in sounds and often have to do this while reading scores and watching/communicating with their musicians. This leads to an ability to focus on a difficult auditory task without having to increase suppression of visual information.

The study results "show how the brain filters information from different senses is very flexible and adaptive and changes with the demands of the task at hand. Additionally, how this operates can change with highly specialized training and experience," Hairston said.

The study was presented Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

More information
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association explains how hearing works.

Successful Breast-Feeding

(HealthDay News) -- More American women are choosing to breast-feed. That's the good news.
The discouraging news is that the percentage of women breast-feeding still falls short of national objectives, often because they experience problems or difficulties that are easily overcome, according to lactation experts.

Seventy-four percent of women who gave birth in 2004 initiated breast-feeding, up from 70.9 percent of women who delivered babies in 2000, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that was still a bit short of the objectives set by the federal government's Healthy People 2010 initiative, which had hoped to have 75 percent of new mothers breast-feeding in 2004.

The number of women who were breast-feeding exclusively was even smaller. Just 30.5 percent of the women who delivered babies in 2004 breast-fed exclusively through age 3 months of age, although the national objective was 60 percent.

So, why aren't more women breast-feeding and for longer periods? Experts say that even new mothers who know all about the benefits of breast-feeding for their baby -- including protection from lower respiratory and middle-ear infections as well as a reduction in the risk of childhood obesity -- can get discouraged and give up.

Some of the most common reasons cited for stopping breast-feeding include sore or cracked nipples, not producing enough milk, a baby having difficulty feeding, or the perception that the baby wasn't satisfied by breast milk.

But breast-feeding also provides the mother with benefits. It helps speed the recovery of her body after birth, and recent studies have suggested that breast-feeding may lower a woman's risk of certain cancers, including breast cancer, and type 2 diabetes.

Here are some experts' best tips on succeeding with breast-feeding -- even if you're a beginner:

• Don't assume breast-feeding is "innate."

"Breast-feeding is not instinctive," said Katy Lebbing, a board certified lactation consultant in Villa Park, Ill., and a leader for La Leche League International, which promotes breast-feeding.

• "That's a myth. It's kind of like thinking all men can fix all cars."

Mothers who choose to breast-feed need education and support, agreed Karen Bonuck, associate professor of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, who has published studies on breast-feeding practices.

• Get help -- early.

Ask your health-care provider for information about breast-feeding early in your pregnancy, Bonuck advised women. Don't wait until you're six months or more along, she said. Too many other activities -- baby showers, getting the nursery ready, thinking about names -- take your attention during those final months of pregnancy.

• Take a breast-feeding class.

Ask your doctor if your hospital has one. Or see a lactation consultant -- you can ask your doctor or the La Leche League for a referral. You should make these preparations before you'll be ready to breast-feed, Lebbing and Bonuck advised.

Just a few sessions with a lactation consultant can pay off, Bonuck said. "You will understand the normal physiology of how the milk is produced," she said. The consultant, working with a doll, can help women practice the best positions to breast-feed and get comfortable with the concept.

• Be sure the hospital personnel know you want to breast-feed.

"Make your wishes known," Bonuck said. "Some [hospitals] have cards that say, 'Breast-feed only.' " That reduces the risk of confusion and your baby mistakenly getting a bottle of formula, Bonuck said. She also advises mothers-to-be to tell the hospital staff about other preferences, such as no pacifiers.

• Breast-feed as soon as your baby is born.

Breast-feeding immediately after birth -- even before the baby is cleaned up -- is preferable, Bonuck said. "Bring an advocate with you," she suggested. This person will help to make sure your wishes are carried out.

• Keep the baby with you as much as possible while in the hospital.

"Make your wishes known," Bonuck advised. She prefers keeping the baby in the mother's room, not in the nursery, because it gives mother and baby a chance to practice breast-feeding. "It's not a spa," she said of the hospital stay.

• Get help once you return home.

Enlist the support of family members or friends once you are back home, Lebbing advised. "You need someone to cook and help around the house, especially in the first month," she said. If you have other children, get some child-care help. Relieving some of the stress of a newborn can help new moms focus on the important task of breast-feeding, Bonuck and Lebbing said.

More information
To learn more about breast-feeding, visit La Leche League International.