MCN | Medical Consultants Network

The Power of a Second Look

Home / MCNTalk / Tag: Lifestyle and habits

Viewing items tagged:

Lifestyle and habits

60,000 Additional Deaths a Year Attributed to Smoking

A study entitled “Smoking and Mortality – Beyond Established Causes” appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. The study followed almost a million people over the course of ten years. Researchers found that compared with people who had never smoked:

  • Approximately 17% of the excess mortality among current smokers was due to associations with causes that are not currently established as attributable to smoking.

  • Smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure.
  • Smokers were also six times more likely to die from a rare illness caused by insufficient blood flow to the intestines.

The study also found small increases in the risks of breast and prostate cancer among smokers. Dr. Brian Carter, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, notes that those findings were not as strong as the others, adding that additional research could help determine whether there were biological mechanisms that would support a connection.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 42 million Americans smoke — 15 percent of women and 21 percent of men.

 

American Addiction Centers Goes Public

In October American Addition Centers, which runs 8 facilities in 6 states, went public. Currently valued at about $588 million, the company’s stock price has almost doubled since its IPO, from $15 to $28. In 2013 its revenue was $116 million, up from $28 million in 2011.

AAC’s IPO underwriters estimate there are 8,100 substance-abuse treatment enterprises across America, operating 16,700 clinics and centers. The market is estimated to be worth $35 billion.

This month’s Bloomberg Business has an in-depth story on AAC, “Addiction Treatment Goes Public: AAC’s Recovery-Center Empire” and its founder Michael Cartwright  as well as a look into the history of treatment centers in the U.S.

New federal and state laws are improving addicts’ treatment options. In 2008, Congress passed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which requires health plans to provide the same dollar limits for mental-health benefits as for medical and surgical benefits. This is a step in the right direction, as are the additional beds AAC and others have added: while almost 23 million Americans suffer from addiction, only about 4.1 million receive treatment each year, according to 2013 data from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Read more…

Count Down to Sunday!

FullSizeRenderMCN’s Seattle-based corporate office staff share a quick morning break and show their excitement over the Seahawks’ second straight Super Bowl appearance this coming Sunday.

Though our 26 offices nationwide may be fully integrated in terms of training, security policies and procedures, and of course one operational database, we also recognize that many of our team members live in the northeast including in New England. Abby PatsSo thank you Abby and JeffJeff patriot for sharing your spirit with us and our many New England-based clients. We welcome your visits in mid-May when the Red Sox are in town!

Not to be outdone by the corporate office, members of MCN’s client services staff and NW operations management, as well as team members in Tri-Cities (Richland, Eastern Washington) and family members Hunter (pictured with family friend Russell Wilson) and Baby Beau show their colors!seattle

baby Beauhunter with russell wilsonseahawkseastern wa

Food for Thought

So, like many people, your New Year’s resolution is to go on a diet. But what are you doing for your mind? This editorial gives readers something to think about as the author discusses his dietary journey for both body and mind.

Pico Iyer, author of The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, did not hear from his doctor to cut down on junk  food after an annual physical. And yet nonetheless he did, noticing that his not paying too much attention to his food intake was part of his not paying enough attention to what he put into his overall being, including his mind:

I was, in short, what I’d call an externalist — a person who’ll exercise great care over what he puts into his body and never think about what he puts into his mind. Who will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends. Who will fill his head with so much junk that he can’t remember that wolfing down Buffalo wings is not the problem, but a symptom.

Food for thought indeed. Read more…

New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Have an Annual Physical

It may sound a little odd to suggest not going to the doctor. But this editorial does just that. About 45 million American adults have a basic annual check-up. However, a study has indicated that those check-ups for adults — with no specific symptoms to discuss — are not particularly useful. In fact, the Canadian guidelines have recommended against these exams since 1979.

In 2012, the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of medical researchers who systematically review the world’s biomedical research, analyzed 14 randomized controlled trials with over 182,000 people followed for a median of nine years. Their findings? Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered, studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease.

There are many reasons why the annual physical is not productive; it does little to avert death or disability from acute problems; it does little for chronic conditions without significantly useful interventions; and, sadly, an early diagnosis might extend the time patients know they have cancer but is unlikely to extend their lives.

This is not to suggest skipping doctor visits altogether: get your flu shots, stay up-to-date on vaccines, discuss symptoms with your doctor.

But consider this from Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, oncologist and vice provost at U. Penn: Those who preach the gospel of the routine physical have to produce the data to show why these physician visits are beneficial. If they cannot, join me and make a new resolution: My medical routine won’t include an annual exam. That will free up countless hours of doctors’ time for patients who really do have a medical problem, helping to ensure there is no doctor shortage as more Americans get health insurance.

Dr. Oz: Only a Third of Claims Backed by "Believable" Evidence?

His credentials are impressive: Vice-Chairman, Department of Surgery, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgery; he has a long list of publications; and he holds three degrees from Ivy League Colleges. He’s also won a few Emmys and was one of the Time 100, The World’s 100 Most Influential People, in 2008.

Yet Dr. Oz, host of The Doctor Oz Show  since 2009 and The Doctors doesn’t do so well when it comes to fact checking. Following a June 2014 Senate subcommittee hearing in which he was taken to task for unsubstantiated claims made on his show, a group of Canadian researchers and physicians fact checked many claims he has made on his shows.

Researchers randomly selected 80 claims from each show and looked to see what evidence, if any, could back them up. Two team members conducted independent searches, spending up to an hour on each one. “In an attempt to be as fair as possible” to the shows, they wrote, they “used a relatively broad definition of support.” Still, only 21% of the recommendations on “The Dr. Oz Show” could be supported by what the researchers considered “believable” evidence. Another 11% were supported by “somewhat believable” evidence. Given that his shows’ viewership averages just under 3 million people per day, that’s a lot of people being exposed to a lot of apparently unsubstantiated medical advice.

Fewer People Taking Prescription Narcotics —but Abuse Remains a Problem, Study Suggests

Last week pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts released a study of 6.8 million Americans who had at least one prescription for an opioid filled between 2009 and 2013. The findings? One piece of good news and a lot of red flags related to a medication that was involved in 16,000 overdoses in 2012 alone.

  • Nearly 60 % of patients taking the painkillers to treat long-term conditions were also being prescribed muscle relaxants or anti-anxiety drugs that could cause dangerous reactions.
  • Nearly one-third of patients were prescribed an opioid and a muscle relaxant in the same month, and around the same percentage were prescribed a muscle relaxant and an opioid at the same time.
  • About 8% of patients were taking all three types of drugs — a combination known as a “Houston cocktail,” which gives a heroinlike high — during the same period.
  • 27% were taking more than one opioid at a time, another hazardous combination.
  • Of the patients taking the mixtures, two-thirds were being prescribed the drugs by two or more doctors
  • Nearly 40% filled their prescriptions at more than one pharmacy.
  • Overall use of opioids had fallen, especially for people using them to treat short-term ailments.

“Not only are more people using these medications chronically, they are using them at higher doses than we would necessarily expect,” said Dr. Glen Stettin, a senior vice president at Express Scripts. “And they are using them in combinations for which there isn’t a lot of clinical justification.” Read more…

 

Bogus Theories on Bugs, Yawns and Belly Fat

Ever heard of BAHFest? It stands for Festival of Bad Ad-Hoc Hypotheses, a satirical conference on evolutionary biology held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in October. The event’s popularity led an additional  BAHFest held in San Francisco, also held this past October.  The concept was originally proposed in a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip proposing that human infants have been evolutionarily optimized for long-distance dispersal by catapult.

At each festival, six presenters, each armed with reams of research, vied to win over a panel of judges with a different bogus scientific theory. The winner got a statue of Darwin looking dubious—shoulders shrugging, hands turned upward.

Selection readers and judges graded theories on four criteria:

  1. Force of Science – how much “scientific” information was brought to bear (graphs, real citations, “research” etc.).
  2. Artistry – how unexpected and clever the idea and presentation were, and how well the presentation was delivered.
  3. Parsimony – the simplest theory that explained the most data is best.
  4. Strength of Defense – how well views were defended to the judges.

Presentations this year included “Influenza Knows When You’re Doing Yoga” from Barbara Vreede, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary biology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as well as one exploring why we yawn, from Emma Kowal of Harvard University. (The answer? To catch bugs. Flying insects are high in protein. They gather in dense swarms most frequently at dawn and dusk, not-so-coincidentally the times of day when we are most likely to yawn.)

The winner of the BAHFest trophy was Michael Anderson, a Boston lawyer specializing in First Amendment cases, for his theory on ubiquity of belly fat in middle-age men.

In ancient times, men’s “spare tires” served as a flotation device for them to rescue their families in times of flooding. Primitive art supports the theory, he said. The earliest depictions of humans were mainly stick figures. But when people began to settle down near rivers and other bodies of water, human images began to take on abdominal bulges, Mr. Anderson claimed.

In addition to the fun of the event, coming up with obviously wrong scientific hypotheses helps us think about how evidence can be used/misused in reaching conclusions.

Happiness Is Love. Full Stop.

In 1938 Harvard University began following 268 male undergraduate students (including future President John Kennedy) and kicked off the longest-running longitudinal study of human development in history, The Grant Study.  The study’s goal was to determine as best as possible what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing.

George Vaillant, who directed the study for more than three decades, published the study’s most recent findings in the his book Triumphs of Experience. Earlier work on the study include Adaptation to Life, 1977, and Aging Well, 2002. Triumphs of Experience has been widely reviewed, and with good reason.The book and the study are fascinating and informative.

Vaillant raises a number of factors such as the powerful correlation between the warmth of relationships and health and happiness in your later years as well as how significant men’s relationships with their mothers are in determining their well-being in life.  For example, Vaillant notes that Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers took home $87,000 more per year than men whose mothers were uncaring.  Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old. Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers — but not their fathers — were associated with effectiveness at work.

Vaillant also notes that what separates those who viewed themselves as truly happy from those who did not was not in the events that made up their lives — it was in how they responded to those events. The key difference between the happy person and the unhappy one was that one viewed themselves as a victim to their circumstances, while the other sought ways to use their circumstances to their advantage. The degree to which happiness was attained was in the adaptations the participants employed to deal with and shape their reality.

In Vallant’s own words, the #1 most important finding from the Grant Study is this: “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points to a straightforward five-word conclusion: Happiness is love.  Full stop.”

 

80,000,000 Bacteria Per Kiss?

A 10-second “intimate kiss” can transfer a whopping 80,000,000 bacteria from one mouth to another, according to a new report in the journal Microbiome. The related study was completed by Dutch researchers at Artis Royal Zoo in Amsterdam and involved 21 couples.

The more often a couple kissed, the more similar the bacteria in their saliva samples, with the researchers concluding that couples needed to kiss at least nine times a day to achieve notably lower bacteria levels. The men said they kissed their partners an average of 10 times a day, while the women recalled kissing only five times a day. The researchers concluded that the men were most likely exaggerating the frequency of their romantic encounters. Read more…