Alert!! bạn có thể bị "Stroke" nhẹ mà bạn không biết!!!

Study Shows Some People Have Mild Strokes That Aren't Diagnosed

By Miranda Hitti WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Oct. 9, 2006 -- Many U.S. adults aged 45 and older may have had a stroke without realizing it, a new study shows.
People should learn stroke's warning signs and immediately seek emergency medical help if those symptoms appear, write the researchers.
Before you read about their study, which appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine, review stroke's possible warning signs:
- Sudden weakness or numbness in the face, arm, or leg on one side of the body Abrupt loss of vision, strength, coordination, sensation, speech, or the ability to understand speech. These symptoms may become more marked over time.
- Sudden dimness of vision, especially in one eye
- Sudden loss of balance, possibly accompanied by vomiting, nausea, fever, hiccups, or trouble with swallowing

- Sudden and severe headache with no other cause followed rapidly by loss of consciousness -- indications of a stroke due to bleeding
- Brief loss of consciousness
- Unexplained dizziness or sudden falls

If you or someone with you shows any possible signs of stroke, don't hesitate. Get emergency medical care right away.
Some stroke medicines must be given shortly after stroke symptoms start, and those drugs can make a big difference in the outcome of a stroke.

Nên ăn bốc hay ăn bằng đũa!!

OTTAWA, Canada (KL) – Các bạn tin hay không tuỳ ý, bạn hãy thử những đôi đũa có sẵn như sau:

Đôi đũa có sẵn ngâm vào nước đang sôi khoảng từ 3 tới 5 phút. Một chất mầu trắng sẽ hiện ra trước mắt và tan ngay vào trong nước đang sôi. Chính đôi đũa này đã tiết ra một hóa chất thuộc loại thuốc tẩy trắng.

Trong cuộc vận động giữ gìn sức khoẻ được lành mạnh mới đây tại Singapore, giáo sư Jakson Mathis lưu ý dân chúng Singapore không nên dùng một số loại đũa được chế tạo và nhập cảng từ Trung quốc. Giáo sư này đã giải thích, quy trình sản xuất tại Trung quốc ngay trước khi những đôi đũa được sản xuất, tất cả các nguyên liệu làm đũa đã mang sẵn mầm bịnh trong trạng thái đang phát triển. Nguyên vật liệu như gỗ của Trung quốc bao phủ nhiều mầu của các loại nấm độc sau khi cây được đốn và chờ để mang ra khỏi rừng. Chính vì thế các hãng sản xuất tại Trung quốc đã làm chuyện kinh khủng như ngâm gỗ vào các thùng rất lớn chứa hoá chất rất độc hại với mục đích để làm cho gỗ đỡ bị mục. Sau khi ngâm gỗ làm đũa trong vài ngày, các hãng này còn rửa nguyên liệu gỗ bằng các hoá chất độc hại như thuốc tẩy. Hoá chất độc hại này đã để lại một lượng lớn gấp hơn cả ngàn lần theo như tiêu chuẩn quốc tế cho phép. Bạn hãy đoán thử cái gì sẽ xẩy ra? Chính những hoá chất này vốn đã không tốt cho cơ thể lành mạnh của bạn, chúng là những chất dễ sinh ra bịnh ung thư.

Cách đây 5 năm giáo sư Jackson Mathis đã có dịp tham quan các hãng sản xuất đũa tại Trung quốc. Giáo sư đã khủng khiếp và từ ngày đó, giáo sư không còn dùng các đôi đũa do Trung quốc sản xuất trong các bữa ăn.
Mỗi lần đi các nhà hàng Trung quốc tại Singapore. giáo sư đều không quên mang theo đôi đũa riêng của giáo sư.
Giáo sư cho biết: “Nếu bạn đã từng dùng những đội đũa này và vẫn tiếp tục dùng chúng. Bạn hãy tạm dừng lại để suy nghĩ. Tại sao bệnh ung thư phát tán nhanh như ngày nay trên khắp thế giới cho bất cứ tầng lớp nào?
Sau một phút suy ngẫm về những đôi đũa được sản xuất tại Trung quốc. Câu trả lời: Chính những đôi đũa này đang phát tán bịnh ung thư, có thể bạn đang mang mầm bịnh này mà bạn không biết.”

Liver Cancer Appears to Be Rarer in Coffee Drinkers Than in People Who Don’t Drink Coffee

Xin các bác XNL đọc bản tin này trướớc khi đi quán Paloma hay trước khi pha cafe buổi sáng.
By Miranda Hitti WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Aug. 2, 2007 -- Could a cup of coffee cut your risk of developing liver cancer? Maybe, but don't bet your next latte on it just yet.
A new report, published in the August edition of the journal Hepatology, boils down the findings from 10 studies on coffee and liver cancer.
The studies were reviewed by researchers including Francesca Bravi, ScD of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri" in Milan, Italy.
Together, the studies included 2,260 people with liver cancer and nearly 240,000 people without liver cancer. Participants lived in Greece, Italy, or Japan.
Participants reported their coffee-drinking habits. The data show that coffee drinkers were 41% less likely to have been diagnosed with liver cancer than people who don't drink coffee.
For every daily cup of coffee people drank, their odds of having been diagnosed with liver cancer dropped by 23%, compared with people who never drink coffee.
People who drank a lot of coffee were 55% less likely to have been diagnosed with liver cancer than those who didn't drink any coffee.
What's a lot of coffee? That depends on which of the 10 studies you look at. Some of the studies defined high coffee consumption as three or more daily cups. Others set the bar lower, at more than one daily cup.
The fact that liver cancer was rarer among coffee drinkers a world apart -- in Greece, Italy, and Japan -- suggests that the coffee findings weren't a fluke or a local phenomenon, note Bravi and colleagues.
They speculate that coffee perks up liver enzymes and may cut cirrhosis and liver cancer.
But Bravi's team doesn't promise that drinking coffee will prevent liver cancer. They note that people with various digestive and liver diseases might choose not to drink coffee for reasons that aren't reflected in the data.
Whether or not coffee prevents liver cancer "remains open to discussion," write Bravi and colleagues.

SOURCES: Bravi, F. Hepatology, August 2007; vol 46: pp 430-435. News release, Hepatology.

Tin lượm: Người vợ hiền lành

*Jealous wife chops off half of husband's penis in Vietnam*
Hanoi - Police in southern Vietnam are investigating a case where a man had his penis chopped in half by his wife when he was sleeping, officials said Wednesday. The man, identified as BT Hai, 44, was admitted to hospital early Sunday with half of his penis having been cut off, according to Pham Quoc Viet, a local policeman.
Police said Hai's wife was angry, suspecting that he had a mistress, and cut off his member with a 20-centimetre knife, throwing the severed piece into a drainage ditch near their house in Ca Mau, a Mekong Delta province 350 kilometers south-west of Ho Chi Minh City.
"He was bleeding badly when admitted to the hospital, but he is in stable condition now," said Dr Huynh Truong Son of Ca Mau General Hosptial
"His friends found the piece and brought it to the hospital four hours later, but we decided not to conduct an operation to rejoin it because the piece was dirty with mud and had not been properly preserved," Son said.
Son said Hai will be discharged from the hospital in a few days and that the remaining part of his penis will still function.
Hai's wife has not been arrested, but she may face charges of deliberately injuring other people, which carries a prison sentence of three years, the policeman said.

Copyright (c) 2007 Respective Author

Cholesterol Drug Zocor May Lower Risk of Both Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Diseases

By Daniel J. DeNoon WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
July 18, 2007 -- Zocor - but not sister cholesterol-lowering drugs Lipitor or Mevacor -- may cut the risk of both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, a new study suggests.

It's not the first time that the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins have been linked to Alzheimer's disease. A small clinical trial in 2005 suggested that Lipitor might improve mental function in people with early Alzheimer's disease.
Both Lipitor and Zocor are in clinical trials to see whether they really do help people with Alzheimer's disease. But now there's compelling evidence that Zocor may actually prevent not only Alzheimer's disease, but Parkinson's disease, too. The provocative new data come from Boston University researcher Benjamin Wolozin, MD, and colleagues.

"Many people are looking at whether statins might prevent the progression of dementia in people with Alzheimer's disease," Wolozin tells WebMD. "But a lot of people in the field think that if you start statin treatment at the time you already have the disease, it might be the wrong time. It might be nice to talk about how to prevent the disease."

To see whether taking statins had any effect on Alzheimer's disease, Wolozin's team used the immense U.S. Veterans Affairs database, with detailed information on 4.5 million patients. Some 727,000 of these patients took Zocor, about 54,000 took Lipitor, and about 54,000 took Mevacor.
In patients over age 64, those who took Zocor were 54% less likely to get Alzheimer's disease and 49% less likely to get Parkinson's disease than were matched patients not taking statin drugs.
Those who took Lipitor were 9% less likely to get Alzheimer's disease, a finding that was not statistically significant. Lipitor did not affect Parkinson's disease risk.

Mevacor had no effect on risk of either Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease.
D. Larry Sparks, PhD, director of the Roberts Laboratory for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Ariz., is involved in clinical trials of statins for Alzheimer's disease but was not involved in the Wolozin study.
"This study keeps alive the idea that statins may be of benefit in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and maybe even in mild cognitive impairment," Sparks tells WebMD. "But the most important part is that this addresses the role of cholesterol-lowering medications as a way to combat Parkinson's disease."

The study does not offer answers to the question of why Zocor seems to work better than Lipitor in preventing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
Is it time to start taking Zocor to prevent neurodegenerative diseases? Wolozin says people should take statins only to lower high cholesterol levels.

"If your parents got Alzheimer's disease and you have high cholesterol, you might want to talk with your doctor about whether you should take Zocor or Lipitor," Wolozin says. "If your parents don't have Alzheimer's disease, but, say, your dad had a heart attack, you should probably take Lipitor, because it is somewhat better at preventing some of the [problems ] associated with heart disease. You have to look at your own personal risk factors."

Proof of whether statins affect risk of Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease can come only from controlled clinical trials. But as such trials would be extremely lengthy and expensive, Wolozin doubts they will be undertaken.

Help may come from ongoing trials looking at whether Lipitor or Zocor can help people who already have Alzheimer's disease. Those trials are nearly over; results are expected next year.

The Wolozin study appears in the July issue of the online journal BioMed Central Medicine.

Những khuôn mặt lịch sử

Miếng dồi

Một nǎm, thêm mấy tháng rồi
Thu đi, đông lại, bồi hồi sắp xuân
Gặp em, em gặp mấy lần
Tưởng quen mà lạ, tưởng gần mà xa
Ai làm cách trở đôi ta
Vì anh vụng ngượng, hay là vì em?
Trǎng còn đợi gió chưa lên
Hay là trǎng đã tròn trên mái rồi?
Hằng ngày em nói bao lời
Với cha, với mẹ, với người xung quanh
Với đường phố, với cây xanh
Sao em chưa nói với anh một lời?
Tương tư ǎn phải miếng dồi
Đứng đi trên lửa, nằm ngồi trên sương
Phải duyên, phải lứa thì thương
Để chi đêm thấm dồi trường, hỡi em!

Xuân Diệu

Very Low LDL May Mean More Cancer Risk

By Salynn Boyles, WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

July 23, 2007 -- New research suggests a link between very low cholesterol levels and an increased risk of cancer, but the findings are far from conclusive, researchers say.
The analysis of studies examining outcomes in patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins to lower their low density lipoprotein (LDL) "bad" cholesterol found an elevated risk of cancer among those who achieved the very lowest LDL cholesterol levels while taking the drugs.
The findings do not directly implicate statins in increasing cancer risk, but they do raise important questions, which need to be answered in future clinical trials, researcher Richard H. Karas, MD, of Boston’s Tufts-New England Medical Center, tells WebMD.
Statins like Lipitor, Pravachol, Crestor, and Zocor lower LDL levels by blocking a key enzyme in the liver responsible for making cholesterol.
“Our findings should not be seen as a reason to change clinical practice,” Karas says. “No one who needs these drugs should stop taking them based on these findings.”
Is Lower Always Better?
Millions of American take statins to lower their risk of heart attack and stroke, and in recent years an increasing number have been placed on high doses of the drugs to achieve lower LDL levels.
The “lower is better” strategy for controlling LDL has been shown to reduce cardiovascular risk, especially in very high-risk heart patients. But questions remain about the long-term safety of high-dose statin use.
Karas and colleagues did not have cancer in mind when they set out to examine the safety of the strategy. They were more focused on two more widely suspected side effects of statins -- muscle damage and elevated liver enzymes.
They found no link between very low LDL levels and either of these side effects, but a clear association was seen between statin use in high doses and liver abnormalities.
“There was an important and significant relationship between the dose of statins given and the risk of liver toxicity,” Karas says. “I think this paper establishes that point quite strongly.”
The analysis failed to show a similar link between statin dosage and muscle damage. It has long been suggested that in high doses statins raise the risk of a rare but potentially life-threatening muscle disorder known as rhabdomyolysis.
No evidence of a link was found by Karas and colleagues, but the researcher says there were too few cases of the disorder to prove or disprove the association.
Karas favors using moderate doses of statins in combination with other cholesterol-lowering drugs instead of high doses of statins to lower the risk to the liver.
"To be clear, the benefits of statins far outweigh the risks,” he says.
Statins, Cancer, and Controversy
It is not clear from the analysis if the increased cancer risk seen in patients with very low LDL had anything to do with statin use.
The study is published in the July 31 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (ACC).
In an interview with WebMD, ACC President James Dove, MD, FACC, expressed concern that it would be misinterpreted by the press and public.
“It would be wrong to conclude that the drugs are too risky because of this unproven cancer risk,” he says. “These results raise important questions, but they do not demonstrate a causal relationship between statins and cancer.”
Editors of the ACC journal expressed a similar apprehension in an editorial accompanying the research analysis.
“Given the growing public angst regarding the safety of prescription medications, all were concerned that the paper contained great potential both for harm and good,” editors Anthony DeMaria, MD, and Ori Ben-Yehuda, MD, write.
The study prompted “spirited discussions” among editorial board members, with some arguing that the paper should not be published, the editors write.
“In the final analysis, the consensus was that these findings could not be ignored, that they did indeed warrant further investigation, and that they should be aired in public,” they conclude.
Lipitor manufacturer Pfizer issued a statement late Monday in response to the study, noting that “the existing pre-clinical and clinical evidence does not support a causal association between the use of statins and the development of cancer.”
A Pfizer spokeswoman pointed to a large analysis of 26 studies including nearly 90,000 patients published last year, which showed no evidence of an increased risk of cancer with statin use.“A limitation of the current analysis is that researchers took data from clinical trials available before November of 2005,” the statement reads. “We agree with the authors that further analysis in this area is appropriate, but should include all currently available trials.”

Triglycerides: The Risk Factor Nobody Talks About

With all the news and consumer advertising about the dangers of high cholesterol, many people forget another major threat to heart health: triglycerides.
A recent survey of 2,000 patients found that just 13 percent of them knew the triglyceride goals they should be aiming for. And even though almost 90 percent of the surveyed doctors knew that triglycerides are an important risk factor for heart disease, only half of the patients surveyed remembered their doctors ever discussing triglycerides with them.
With the fixation by doctors and the public on good and bad cholesterol, you'd at least think that the cholesterol targets would be well known. Not so — only 35 percent of the surveyed patients knew the optimal level for blood cholesterol.
Are high triglycerides worth worrying about? Yes, they are. A recent analysis of 29 studies involving over 260,000 participants showed that people in the upper third of triglyceride levels had between a 58 percent and a 76 percent greater risk of coronary heart disease than those in the lowest third of triglyceride levels.
For many years, high triglycerides were thought to be a greater danger for women than for men; however, this new study found an equal risk for both men and women.
In case you've forgotten, or never knew it, normal triglycerides are defined as less than 150 milligrams per deciliter of blood (mg/dL). A survey done a few years ago estimated that more than 35 percent of all men and 25 percent of all women in the United States had triglyceride levels that were higher than the recommended goal.
The number of people with elevated triglyceride levels is rising for several reasons. First, high triglyceride levels are an important component of the metabolic syndrome, which affects nearly half of people aged 50 or older in the U.S.
Second, overweightedness and obesity, which affect over 60 percent of the American population, are often associated with elevated triglyceride levels. Third, high triglycerides are the most common blood lipid abnormality found in the more than the 18 million Americans with type 2 diabetes. One bit of good news: losing weight almost always lowers triglycerides in overweight people.
Simeon Margolis, M.D., Ph.D
Trích trong Yahoo Health
on Sun, Apr 01, 2007

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