Younger women prone to breast cancer

Amit Bhargav, consultant oncologist at the Max Healthcare hospital in the capital, said that in his career, the age group vulnerable to breast cancer has dropped drastically.

"When I started practicing oncology about 15 years back, women mostly in the age group of 50-55 were most vulnerable to breast cancer. But these days the incidence of the disease has become common amongst women aged between 35-45," Bhargav told IANS .

Saturday was observed as Breast Cancer awareness day and doctors like Bhargav said that they are doing their bit to spread as much awareness on the disease so that early detection was possible and improve chances of recovery.

"Breast cancer is mostly an urban disease. The maximum incidence of the disease is seen in metropolitan cities where life is fast. Most girls work, have late marriages and then have children even later. All these factors work at increasing the chances of breast cancer," Bhargav said.

Harish Chaturvedi, a cancer expert, added: "High pollution level in cities also contribute to higher chances of breast cancer. Smokers and those who consume alcohol are also a high risk group. Junk food is also a threat."

Stress and obesity are other factors that can increase the chances of having breast cancer.

While genetics - if a woman below 45 years of age has breast cancer, her daughter's chances for the same rise - puts women in the high risk group, those who have had an early menarchy or have attained menopause are also a vulnerable group.

According to B.Niranjan Naik of Dharamshila hospital, a cancer speciality hospital, almost 75,000 new cases of breast cancer are detected in India every year.

"20-25 percent of cancer cases in Indian women is that of breast cancer. The main symptoms which one should look out for are a lump in the breast, discharge from the nipples, skin retraction or thickening, ulceration and skin irritation.

"Early detection is the key to avoid breast cancer. Women in the high risk group must go for breast screening tests when they touch 30," Naik said.

Bhargav added: "Although there is no study done, an estimated 50,000-70,000 women die every year due to breast cancer in India".

Try Iyengar yoga to lift your moodTry Iyengar yoga to lift your moodTry Iyengar yoga to lift your mood

Who would have though yoga would help you feel good about yourself? But here is proof: people who did them for 5 weeks reported a lift in their moods and more spring in their steps. Simple yoga-style stretches and poses could do the trick.

Positive poses
A type of yoga that focuses on mood-boosting poses seemed to be particularly helpful in raising spirits in a recent study. In fact, people's moods not only generally improved about halfway through 5 weeks of doing Iyengar yoga, but posers also felt a bit better after class, too. Talk about instant gratification. Try doing some of these simple yoga moves at your desk right now.

If yoga doesn't fit into your feel-good plans, try one of these better-mental-place lifestyle changes:

Put on your walking shoes. You could start to feel better after just 30 minutes of walking briskly. Find a walking buddy to walk with and see the bad spell as well as calories melt away!

Think fish, nuts, and flaxseeds . They are great for your skin, stomach and memory.

Indulge in a snooze. Skimping on sleep opens the door to blue moods.

Ten tips to avoid back pain

Marcus, who is the director of muscle pain research at the New York University School of Medicine said on "The Early Show," that people seek medical advice for back pain most than for anything else.

Also, the National Institutes of Health revealed that four out of five Americans would suffer from disabling back pain during their lifetime, reports CBS News.

However, Marcus offered tips to prevent back pain:

1. Your bed does matter- The physician advised tossing and turning at night and getting rid of sagging mattress if you have one.

2. What you do in bed matters- Reading or watching television while lying down is best avoided as when you lift your head to view the screen your muscles may contract causing pain in the neck.

3. Don''t just sit there- Apparently, staying in a particular position for too long stresses the postural muscles in your body. Hence, one should frequently change positions.

4. Cross your legs- The doctor advised alternately crossing a leg if you are sitting for long hours in a particular place, like while in a theatre, as it helps move back and hip muscles.

5. Around the house: Regularly used household items should be preferably kept on easily accessible shelves, as it can help avoid bending and stretching movements.

6. Watch where you put your wallet: Marcus advised men to completely stop sitting with wallet in the back pocket as it can result chronic pain.

7. Just say no- Lifting heavy weights should be avoided. Marcus added: "Ask for help, wait for help, hire help -- or walk away."

8. When you do have to lift a heavy object, bend with your knees and hips -
While lifting heavy objects it should be brought close to the body, such that leg muscles bear maximum pressure.

9. Shoveling snow: A short walk to warm up before beginning to shovel may be a good idea. Also, a smaller blade can help limit each load¸ as snow is pretty heavy.

10. For women only: Women should try to lose weight after pregnancy and strengthen key postural and abdominal muscles, as it is weakened and stretched.

Apart from all the above advice, Marcus also suggested not putting computer keyboards on top of the desk in office to be handy for office employees.

He said: "To avoid neck, shoulder and back muscle strain, your arms should be positioned so that you reach down to use the keyboard, which is the reason keyboard trays can be found under desktops."

Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors

Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors, a type of medication for type 2 diabetes, slow the breakdown of starches in the intestine, blunting the excessive rise in blood glucose that occurs after eating. Taken with the first bite of a meal. Possible side effects: digestive problems, including gas and diarrhea. Medications available: acarbose (Precose) and miglitol (Glyset).

Underestimating Obesity in Children

Overweight moms often don’t notice their children’s chubbiness, and overweight young people are likely to underestimate their own weight, too, according to two studies. In one, mothers of 3- to 6-year-olds were shown nine silhouettes, representing different ages, genders, and body mass indexes. Overweight mothers of overweight children were less likely to pick a body shape that accurately depicted their child. The other study found that 61 percent of overweight boys and 31 percent of overweight girls with an average age of 12 listed their weight as normal or underweight.
Sources: Pediatrics, July 2009; BMC Public Health, June 12, 2009

0Kids, Weight, and Health

Type 2 diabetes doesn’t come out of nowhere. Imagine a cosmic card game where the deck includes diet and weight, genes and geography—even ethnicity. Some people are dealt a bad hand right from the beginning. Latinos, for example, have the highest risk of developing diabetes of any minority group in America: Epidemiologists estimate that half of the Latino children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in their lives.

It’s a mystery researchers are eager to figure out. Diabetes is extremely common among Latinos, and becoming more so all the time. In 2000, nearly three-quarters of Latino children between the ages of 12 and 19 were overweight or obese, more than double the number in the white population. “It’s sociocultural, possibly genetic, definitely physiological and metabolic,” says Michael Goran, PhD, a researcher at the University of Southern California’s Department of Preventive Medicine in Los Angeles. “It varies tremendously between ethnic groups. Different ethnic groups are more insulin resistant than whites,” even controlling for the differences in average weight between different groups.

Yet relatively little is known about why members of America’s largest and fastest-growing minority group are so much more likely to be overweight and to develop diabetes than the rest of the population. For almost a decade, the ADA has supported Goran’s research into the question by funding postdoctoral researchers who work with him on the problem of pediatric obesity. (For Goran, the focus on ethnicity is no accident: USC is located in east Los Angeles, which is 98 percent Latino.) Goran wanted to know if childhood obesity automatically led to pre-diabetes, a condition a step below full-blown type 2 diabetes that involves resistance to insulin and blood glucose levels somewhat higher than normal. A third factor doctors look at is the body’s beta cells, which are responsible for producing insulin. In people with pre-diabetes, the beta cells struggle to secrete enough insulin to compensate for the body’s growing resistance. Over time, all these factors can play a big role in the development of type 2 diabetes.

To look at the connections between childhood obesity and pre-diabetes, Goran has spent the past decade examining the way risk factors play out as Latino children grow up. In 2000, Goran recruited more than 200 kids between the ages of 8 and 13 from clinics near USC. Children selected for the study had to be Latino, overweight, and have a family history of type 2 diabetes. Every year, Goran’s lab brought the kids in for a complete checkup, including a metabolic assessment that measured things like insulin sensitivity and glucose levels—both key indicators of pre-diabetes.

The kids in his study were selected because their weight was extreme, especially when measured against their peers. “Body weight in children is a moving target,” Goran says. “In childhood we can’t use a fixed body mass index, so we use a percentile.” Most of the children were in the heaviest 3 percent for their age, topping 140 pounds at 10 years old, for example.

Children's Self-Image Can Affect Their Ability to Lose Weight000

When Jacksonville, Fla., psychologist Amanda Lochrie, PhD, decided to study children at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, she was immediately intrigued by the question of perception. To develop a program to help kids lose weight and be healthier, she first had to know how obese children felt about themselves.

What she found was surprising. Talking with nearly 150 children and their parents, the Nemours Children's Clinic researcher discovered that kids and parents both underestimated how serious the children's weight problems were. That reflected a larger trend: As waistlines in America grow, perception of what's normal also expands. "These are significantly overweight kids," Lochrie says. But "they often don't perceive themselves as overweight, and their parents don’t either."


The perception gap first showed up in the study's recruiting process. Lochrie was looking for high-risk cases, not kids who needed to lose a few pounds. To make sure she got enough volunteers, she decided to include children in the top 15 percent of their age group in terms of body mass index, or BMI, a way of evaluating the body's weight relative to its height. But when she signed up the participants, it turned out that almost all of the kids referred by schools and family doctors were at the extreme end of the spectrum: The BMIs of most of the study participants were in the 97th percentile. In other words, it took a lot before children's weight made the alarm bells start to ring in school health centers and doctor's offices.

The skewed perception reached all the way into Lochrie's lab. The seasoned nurse