Allergies-Understanding Causes and Risks

November 9, 2011 by
allergies, food allergies, environmental allergies, children, alternative medicine, natural medicine The incidence of allergic rhinitis seems to be increasing every year, among both infants and adults. Most doctors will simply treat the symptoms, but it’s important to look more closely at some of the underlying causes, and how you can prevent allergies from affecting your quality of life.

Benefits of pets, siblings, and farms

To look at this question, researchers questioned 8,486 adults, aged 20 to 40, from 13 countries, about their childhoods and their current respiratory health. After nine years, the study participants completed these questionnaires again and also were asked whether and when they developed nasal allergies or hay fever.

After taking into account other things that may affect allergies, including family history of allergies and whether their parents smoked, the researchers identified several childhood factors linked with later developing allergies:

  • Contact with children, either siblings or in daycare, decreased the risk of developing allergies.
  • The more siblings a person had, the lower his or her likelihood of developing rhinitis.
  • Sharing a bedroom with an older sibling was protective against developing allergies.
  • Having pets in the home or living on a farm as a child significantly decreased the likelihood of developing allergies.
  • Having a mother who smoked while they were in utero and when they were a child increased allergy risk.
  • Women had fewer allergies than men as kids, but more allergies as adults.

The balance between clean and not-so-clean

Some of these results may be surprising because they suggest that childhood exposure to more “dirt and germs” can keep allergies at bay. On the other hand, other studies suggest that for children growing up in urban environments, being exposed to urban pests such as cockroaches may increase allergy and asthma risk. Read on for tips on finding the right “balance of clean” to keep your family healthy.

  • If your child has been begging for a pet, don’t let the “dirt and germ factor” dissuade you. Of course, only consider adding a pet to your family if you know you can care for it properly, and pick one that fits your lifestyle. For example, cats tend to be lower maintenance than dogs.
  • Periodically taking your child out to a farm to see where our food comes from is a terrific learning experience, and it may just offer the added benefit of reducing your child’s risk of developing allergies.
  • Some parents of kids who have to share bedrooms feel they aren’t giving their kids the best of everything. But having siblings share a bedroom may be one of the best ways to allergy-proof your little ones.
I also recommend blood testing to identify potential environmental and food allergies, as this can also help to narrow down treatment options, making it more likely that you’ll experience longer term relief from hay fever symptoms.
Filed Under: Allergies, Environmental, Food Allergies, Immune Health Tagged With: , , , , ,

School Lunch Reform

November 2, 2011 by

This article discusses how corporations are willing to sell out the health of our kids for financial interests. “Food companies have spent more than 5.6 million so far lobbying against the proposed rules.” Really, food companies? I’m sure you can find other ways to make money without promoting obesity and illness-disgusting!

Filed Under: Diet and Nutrition, Pediatric Tagged With: ,

Vitamins and Death? Not So Fast . . .

October 25, 2011 by
A lot of hype and negative press has been surrounding the recent study that demonstrated the supposed risks of taking supplements.  This is a reprint of an editorial written by Alan Gaby, M.D. that exposes the faults of this study, and why it should be taken with a grain of salt!
An observational study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that women using multivitamins or certain other common vitamin and mineral supplements had higher mortality risk over 22 years. However, while it achieved widespread media coverage, it did not provide any convincing evidence that nutritional supplements are harmful. Researchers calculated the mortality rates were by manipulating the data, and nothing in the study contradicts decades of controlled research showing healthful benefits of these vitamins and minerals.

What the study said

In this study, 38,772 women from Iowa, whose average age was 62 years, filled out questionnaires three times over an 18-year period regarding dietary supplement use.

After a total of 22 years, researchers followed up and report that the risk of dying from any cause appeared to be 6% higher among women who took a multivitamin supplement than among women who did not take a multivitamin. Additional supplemention with vitamin B6, folic acid, iron, magnesium, zinc, and copper was also said to be associated with increased mortality rates.

Two factors should be taken into consideration while interpreting these results, the method used for calculating the results and the type of study.

Interpreting mortality risk methodology

The media coverage did not note a potentially serious problem with this study: that researchers looked at “adjusted” mortality rates rather than actual mortality rates in the population of women who took supplements, adjusting for a wide range of factors including caloric intake, cigarette smoking, body mass index, blood pressure, educational level, diabetes, use of hormone-replacement therapy, physical activity, and intake of fruits and vegetables.

Studying health events to find patterns in a population (epidemiology) is a relatively inexact science, and it is quite possible that the assumptions upon which the researchers based their adjustments were not entirely correct. When they adjusted the data only for age and caloric intake, there was no statistically significant difference in mortality rate between supplement users and nonusers.

Observation only tells part of the story

The study was observational, meaning that while it might show a relationship between certain supplements and mortality, it does not provide evidence that one causes the other.

In observational studies, scientists correlate various lifestyle factors with health outcomes. Such studies help researchers develop hypotheses that can be investigated further, but the only type of study that can prove cause and effect is a randomized controlled trial, in which participants are randomly assigned to receive either a particular treatment or a placebo (an inert dummy pill) without knowing whether they are getting the treatment or not.

In the history of medical research, results of observational studies have sometimes eventually been contradicted by randomized controlled trials. In a famous example, numerous observational studies suggested that the use of hormone-replacement therapy by postmenopausal women prevents heart disease, but subsequent randomized controlled trials demonstrated that hormone-replacement therapy either has no effect or actually increases the risk of heart disease.

Should women stop taking supplements?

The new study does not negate previous research demonstrating that vitamins and minerals can have a wide range of health benefits. However, as with all substances that can affect your health, talk to your doctor about which dietary supplements are right for you.

(Arch Intern Med 2011;171:1625–33)

Filed Under: Diet and Nutrition Tagged With: ,

Small Intestinal Bowel Overgrowth and IBS

July 13, 2011 by
I’m posting a link here that explains in detail the symptoms of Small Intestinal Bowel Overgrowth (SIBO), and how it is often an underlying cause of IBS. In my clinic, I’ve diagnosed this several times, even after people have already consulted with their gastroenterologist, which indicates that SIBO is not “mainstream” enough for most doctors to pursue the appropriate testing. All that is required is a simple breath test-Once diagnosed, this condition is easily treatable, so talk to your doctor about performing the test if you’re experiencing recurring digestive symptoms, or have been diagnosed with IBS.

http://www.medicinenet.com/small_intestinal_bacterial_overgrowth/article.htm

Filed Under: Digestive Health, IBS Tagged With: , ,

Doctors and Drugs

June 15, 2011 by

U.S. doctors are too quick to reach for their prescription pads, according to a new report urging them to think more about side effects and non-drug alternatives.

“Instead of the latest and greatest, we want fewer and more time-tested drugs,” said Dr. Gordon Schiff, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a non-profit organization that studies ways to improve safe practices in healthcare.

“We are really trying to promote a different way of thinking about practicing,” added Schiff, whose report appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Nearly half of all Americans have used at least one prescription drug in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and experts say overprescribing is rampant.

By definition, that means people are being exposed to side effects, sometimes fatal, without the benefits that would justify those risks.

“Often what is really bothering them is not cured with a pill, but rather through exercise, physical therapy, or diet changes,” Schiff told Reuters Health.

Yet many doctors are quick to prescribe a drug, partly because they have limited time to deal with individual patients or because they and their patients have been bombarded with ads from the pharmaceutical industry.

As for prevention and non-drug alternatives, Schiff said, “there are no drug reps coming to my office pushing that.”

In an editorial in the same journal, researchers describe how opioid painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet have become increasingly common without good evidence that they help patients in the long run.

The evidence of harm, on the other hand, is clear, write Dr. Deborah Grady of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues.

In 2007 alone, for instance, there were nearly 11,500 deaths related to prescription opioids — “a number greater than that of the combination of deaths from heroin and cocaine,” according to the researchers.

Some four million prescriptions for long-acting opioids are written every year, with side effects ranging from addiction to constipation to sleepiness.

To counter some of this overprescribing, Schiff and colleagues urge doctors to think beyond drugs and to prescribe new ones much more cautiously.

When it first hits the market, new medicine has usually only been tested in a few thousand patients, often healthier and younger than the ones doctors see in their offices.

That leaves a lot of questions about safety, especially since patients often are taking several drugs at the same time. More than a third of people over 60 take five or more drugs, for instance, and the number of prescriptions continues to rise.

But Dr. Lisa Schwartz and her husband Dr. Steven Woloshin, both of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, told Reuters Health it’s difficult for doctors to get unbiased information about new drugs.

“We need to be making this information much more easily accessible to doctors,” said Schwartz, an expert in risk communication. “There are billions of dollars being spent on new drugs with unproven benefits.”

Schwartz and Woloshin said one way to do this would be to have the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration, which approves new drugs, send out simple summaries about the medications.

They also emphasized that overprescribing, while real, goes hand in hand with underprescribing of drugs to high-risk patients.

“We have both problems in this country,” Schwartz told Reuters Health.

According to Schiff, patients also have a role to play.

“Patients need to ask critical and skeptical questions, too,” he said. “They really should learn about the side effects of the drugs they are taking and be on the lookout for them.”

Schiff’s “Principles of Conservative
Prescribing” study was funded by government grants supporting consumer healthcare education and healthcare quality research.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/lwuNm0 Archives of Internal Medicine, June 13, 2011.

Filed Under: Prescription Drugs Tagged With: , ,

Work Causes Heart Disease

April 6, 2011 by

People who regularly work long hours may be significantly increasing their risk of developing heart disease, the world’s biggest killer, British scientists said Monday.

Researchers said a long-term study showed that working more than 11 hours a day increased the risk of heart disease by 67 percent, compared with working a standard 7 to 8 hours a day.

They said the findings suggest that information on working hours — used alongside other factors like blood pressure, diabetes and smoking habits — could help doctors work out a patient’s risk of heart disease.

However, they also said it was not yet clear whether long working hours themselves contribute to heart disease risk, or whether they act as a “marker” of other factors that can harm heart health — like unhealthy eating habits, a lack of exercise or depression.

The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, followed nearly 7,100 British workers for 11 years.

“Working long days is associated with a remarkable increase in risk of heart disease,” said Mika Kivimaki of Britain’s University College London, who led the research. He said it may be a “wake-up call for people who overwork themselves.”

Cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes are the world’s largest killers, claiming around 17.1 million lives a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Billions of dollars are spent every year on medical devices and drugs to treat them.

The findings of this study support previous research showing a link between working hours and heart disease.

For this study, men and women who worked full time and had no heart disease were selected, giving 7,095 participants.

The researchers collected data on heart risk factors like age, blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes and also asked participants how many hours they worked — including work during the day and work brought home — on an average weekday.

During the 11-year study, 192 participants had heart attacks. Those who worked 11 hours or more a day were 67 percent more likely to have a heart attack than those with fewer hours.

Of course, heart disease is a multi-factorial issue, but those working more than 11 hours per day need to take even further precautions to lower their heart disease risk. Talk to your naturopathic doctor about laboratory studies that can help to identify numerous cardiovascular risk factors, so the proper steps can be taken to help prevent heart disease and stroke in the future. 

Filed Under: Anxiety, Heart Disease Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Elderberry and Infections

March 24, 2011 by

As many of my patients are already well aware, I often rely upon Elderberry extract, especially in the treatment of influenza and other viral infections. This recent study demonstrates evidence as to why this treatment is effective.

In a study designed to examine the effects of a standardized extract of black elderberry (Sambucus nigra L.) on 3 Gram-positive bacteria and one Gram-negative bacteria responsible for upper respiratory tract infections, as well as two different strains of influenza virus, the extract was found to possess antimicrobial activity against both Gram-positive bacteria of Streptococcus pyogenes and group C and G Streptococci, the Gram-negative bacteria Branhamella catarrhalis, and human pathogenic influenza viruses. The results of this study suggest that elderberry extract such as the one used in this study may be an effective tool for helping to combat various types of upper respiratory tract infections.


Reference: “Inhibitory activity of a standardized elderberry liquid extract against clinically-relevant human respiratory bacterial pathogens and influenza A and B viruses,” Krawitz C, Mraheil MA, et al, BMC Complement Altern Med, 2011 Feb 25; 11-16. (Address: Institute for Medical Microbiology, Justus-Liebig-University, Frankfurter Strasse 107, 35392 Giessen, Germany. E-mail: Stephan.Pleschka@mikro.bio.uni-giessen.de ).

Filed Under: Immune Health Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

PCOS Patients Benefit From Exercise and Acupuncture

February 24, 2011 by

Acupuncture and physical exercise improve hormone levels and menstrual bleeding pattern in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), reveals research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. 

PCOS is a common disorder that affects up to 10% of all women of child-bearing age. Women with PCOS frequently have irregular ovulation and menstruation, with many small immature egg follicles in the ovaries. This causes the ovaries to produce more testosterone which, in turn, leads to troublesome hair growth and acne. Obesity, insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease are also widespread among these patients. 

In the current study, published in the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism, a group of women with PCOS were given acupuncture where the needles were stimulated both manually and with a weak electric current at a low frequency that was, to some extent, similar to muscular work. A second group was instructed to exercise at least three times a week, while a third group acted as controls. All were given information on the importance of regular exercise and a healthy diet. 

“The study shows that both acupuncture and exercise reduce high levels of testosterone and lead to more regular menstruation,” says docent associate professor Elisabet Stener-Victorin, who is responsible for the study. “Of the two treatments, the acupuncture proved more effective.” 

Although PCOS is a common disorder, researchers do not know exactly what causes it. “However, we’ve recently demonstrated that women with PCOS have a highly active sympathetic nervous system, the part that isn’t controlled by our will, and that both acupuncture and regular exercise reduced levels of activity in this system compared with the control group, which could be an explanation for the results.” 

In my experience, women I’ve seen with PCOS respond extraordinarily well to nutritional, botanical, and dietary interventions. Plus, conventional medical treatments tend to be very “piecemeal”, treating each component of PCOS as individual symptoms, rather than addressing the body as a whole. As this study confirms, exercise and acupuncture are other treatments that can be implemented to successfully reverse PCOS.  
Filed Under: Acupuncture, Diet and Nutrition, Women's Health Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Pesticides and Brain Development

February 16, 2011 by

Toddlers whose mothers breathed more of a chemical often present in insecticides during pregnancy had slower brain development, according to a study from New York City.

On average, women breathing the highest amounts of piperonyl butoxide, or PBO, had babies who scored 3.9 points lower on a mental development test at age three (85 points and above is considered normal).

These changes are about the same as those seen in kids with low-level lead exposure, according to Megan Horton, a researcher at Columbia University who worked on the study.

“It means that these kids might not do as well in school” later on, said Horton, whose findings appear in the journal Pediatrics.

Baby brains are extra vulnerable to toxic chemicals, because they are not fully formed.

“If you alter the blueprint, there may be lasting long-term consequences,” Horton explained.

She and her colleagues analyzed air samples from a few hundred pregnant women’s environments to track the levels of PBO and another chemical called permethrin. The two compounds are commonly found in bug sprays for indoor use.

Permethrin wasn’t tied to the toddlers’ mental skills. But among the 42 women who breathed the highest levels of PBO — around 4 parts per trillion — nearly half had a baby with a lower-than-normal mental development score.

“For these toxic chemicals, there’s probably no such thing as a safe level during pregnancy,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, who heads the Children’s Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and was not involved in the new study.

He suggested that pregnant women who have an insect problem should make sure more bugs can’t get in through measures such as caulking cracks in walls, and that all food is cleaned up.

“Instead of spraying,” he said, “use little baits like roach motels because it’s contained.”

To me, this has been obvious all along, but in light of this information, I would disagree with using even “contained” pesticides, as there is still an exposure risk. Pregnant or not, this is further proof that pesticides promote serious neurological complications, and should be avoided at all costs. If you absolutely must use pesticides, make sure you wear gloves, a ventilator, and other protective gear to limit your exposure as much as possible. If you have been exposed to pesticides in the past, there are tests that can be performed to assess the levels in your system. Treatments can then be implemented to help your body excrete these harmful toxins. 

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/gZSdEU Pediatrics, online February 7, 2011.

Filed Under: Cancer, Environmental, Pediatric Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Diet Soda and Heart Disease

February 10, 2011 by

As many of my patients know, I often discourage the use of diet sodas and other sources of artificial sweeteners. The reasons for this are numerous, but here is yet another suggestion that diet soft drinks may not be the best choice: 

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/lat-heb-dietsodastrokeheartattack20110209,0,4324389.story
Filed Under: Diet and Nutrition, Heart Disease Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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