Latest news about Games And Recreation and Health and more

I have heard some good things lately about colpac products and I have decided to go out today and buy one. My family are all quite clumsy and we often seem to be having bangs, bumps and twists and even sprains and breaks. I sometimes think that we spend more time in hospital than we do at home. It is probably because we all are sporty and we tend to get a lot of sports injuries as well as falling down the stairs and tripping over things. We have quite a full medicine cabinet but do not have a gel pack and so I think that one of these will be good for us.

I am sure we will get a lot of use out of all of the products but I didn’t want to buy everything as the medicine cabinet is already bursting with things. I therefore have decided to just get a knee wrap as that tends to be the part that gets injured the most and then I can buy other ones if I need them later. It will also be a chance for us to try them out and find out whether we find that they work as well for us as for the person who recommended them.

I cannot decide what frames to go for when I select my new glasses. I like the eyeless frames but am not sure whether they will really work with my lenses because I have ones which change to dark glasses when it is sunny. I like the idea of getting some designer sunglasses but am not sure whether they look right when they have gone back to normal looking lenses. It is a job to find something which looks right for dark as well as normal lenses.

I think that I might ask the people in the shop as they are very good at helping to find a really good pair. They sorted me out with my current pair of Silhouette glasses which have lasted me for ages and work really well with all of my clothes, make up and look good when the lenses are dark as well as not. I am starting to wonder whether I should just keep them as they are so good, but they are beginning to look a little bit dated and I think that makes me look old, as I am not up with the latest trends and I certainly don’t want people thinking I am older than I actually am!

Health is wealth; poor health can lead to depression and other disorders. People should take of their healthy. When people become old their digestive system and other internal organs become weak, leading to digestive and intestine problems. In old age it becomes difficult for people to digest food rich in extra fats and complex carbohydrates. Gastroenterology is defined as study of gastrointestinal tract of the body. In order to treat abdomen and intestine problems and solve diseases of digestive organs like pancreas, stomach, liver, gall bladder, esophagus, liver and intestines gastroenterology is used.

Utah is located in western part of United States of America. People of Utah suffering from gastrointestinal diseases should visit gastroenterologist Utah. Good gastroenterologist will give right treatment to patient. Some of the common procedures used in Utah gastroenterology are GERD services, Endoscopy, abdominal surgery, cholecystectomy, laparoscopy, cholecystography, laparoscopy and liver transplantation. All these procedures are totally dependent on health of intestine and abdomen. If liver or other organs become victims to harmful bacteria, then doctors perform surgeries on patients.

In order to diagnose patient’s, tests like Endoscopy, colonoscopy, liver biopsy; EGD, Barium swallow, etc, are performed. If these tests turn positive and prove illness in patients, then doctors apply procedures as said above. Even though diagnosis is costly, people have to go for it so that their health won’t deteriorate further.

It made me smile the other day when my husband started looking at some hair loss products when we shopping in a pharmacy. He is receding just very slightly and is starting to worry. His father has a full head of hair and is not even that grey and so I think he has a chance of not losing it. The problem is that his mother was adopted so she has no idea about her background and whether her biological father lost his hair.

She has gone grey and it looks like my husband is going to go grey soon too. I suppose if he does follow her side of the family then there is no way of telling what might happen. His brother has thinning hair but he puts that down to the fact that he works with strong chemicals, but it could just be that he is naturally losing hair early. It is possible that he has tried a hair loss product or two so perhaps they should get together and see whether he found that anything particular worked for him

Hair loss is a condition where the rate of growth of the hair falls below the average level and the rate of hair fall crosses the threshold levels. Such a condition can arise out of any serious illness, or any long-term disease, or any kind of postoperative side effects. Hair loss can also occur due to improper care of your hair, especially when you use tight hair rollers, pull or comb your hair hard, or simply wearing pigtails. Recent times have seen advancements in the hair loss treatment methods. Many of the natural and herbal methods of treatment are being employed by the hair treatment experts, and which have yielded good results in less time.

Hair loss treatment method such as recapture is also quite popular. Recapture helps in restoring weak hair roots and follicles and it also helps in growth of healthy hair. Herbal hair loss product also plays crucial role in problems related to loss of hair. These awesome hair products are designed to help in reversing the hair loss in just few days. However, beware of those over the counter products, as they can simply aggravate your situation much more! Always go for a tested herbal hair loss product, and remain free of any potential side effects.

Herbal supplements are the natural extracts that are manufactured to give you the body and personality of your choice and dreams. The supplements are prepared from minerals, herbs, shrubs and other aquatic and marine resources. The best thing about these super green foods is that they build up your energy levels, give you strength, and make you more attractive and stalwart. Herbal supplements are just the natural way to keep you groovy all the time and you feel confident to strike in any kind of situation.

Natural hair loss treatment is the herbal way of treating your hair and eliminating baldness altogether. The natural treatment makes use of henna, amla, ritha etc. The paste is made and then applied on the scalp. Natural hair loss treatment method not only increases the speed of growing hair, but also starts the growth of lost hair in just matter of days. But, on the contrary, artificially synthesized medicines used for Quick weight loss are a complete catastrophe. Such medicines not only harm body tissues, but also make the whole body system completely ineffective. Quick weight loss methods advertised on over the counter sales have a widespread and devastating effect, and care should be taken to rely on slow and herbal ways to reduce the weight.

A new, potentially less expensive version of the female condom faces U.S. regulatory review this week when a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel weighs whether they adequately prevent pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The FC2 Female Condom, made by Female Health Co, is made with a synthetic rubber using a process similar to male condoms that the company says is less labor intensive and should reduce its current cost.

Male condoms, which come in a variety of brands and cost consumers between 50 cents and $2 a piece, are far more widely used than their female counterpart, which costs between $2.80 and $4.

Chicago-based Female Health is seeking FDA approval to market the new version. On Thursday, the agency will seek a recommendation from its panel of outside experts before later making its final decision.

“The whole idea is to increase access,” said Mary Ann Leeper, an adviser and former president of the company.

But FDA regulatory staff questioned whether the company should have conducted specific trials to show how well the FC2 prevents women from contracting diseases or becoming pregnant.

Female Health said it did not conduct such studies because FC2 uses a new material but is otherwise similar to the version already on the U.S. market, the FDA staff said in documents released on Tuesday ahead of the panel meeting.

The company “asserts that such studies are not necessary. This is an important review issue,” the staff wrote.

The company said it also looked at durability of the new material, a synthetic rubber called nitrile. The original condom uses polyurethane.

Both versions are comprised of a sheath with a closed ring on one end that is inserted near the cervix and an open ring on the outer end that stays outside the woman’s body.

Conducting another trial would have taken five more years and cost millions of dollars, Female Health’s Leeper said.

“The design is exactly the same, how you use it is exactly the same … we just don’t believe there is any more information required,” she said.

FDA approval could help boost sales in the United States, which make up just 10 percent of the female condom’s 34.7 million unit sales in 2008, according to Female Health Co.

“We haven’t been able to market the product,” Leeper said. But Female Health is seeking to partner with another company, perhaps a male condom manufacturer or a drugmaker invested in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) awareness, she said.

Most of its U.S. sales are to aid agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Leeper said needs FDA to approve FC2 before it can distribute it abroad.

The bulk of the condom’s use is in other countries, particularly in Africa where public health agencies provide it to help prevent the spread of the HIV virus.

The female version gives women their own option for protection and allows them to insert a condom before intercourse. Most other countries have already adopted the newer version, the company has said.

It also offers other advantages over the male condom, according to the company, including greater protection by covering part of a woman’s outer genitals.

Shares of Female Health Co. were up nearly 5 percent, or 13 cents, at $2.98 on the American Stock Exchange.

The results of a mammographic screening study suggest that some invasive breast cancers may spontaneously regress over time.

These findings “provide new insight on what is arguably the major harm associated with mammographic screening, namely, the detection and treatment of cancers that would otherwise regress,” Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, from the Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, White River Junction, Vermont, and colleagues state.

The study, which is published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, involved 119,472 women, from 50 to 64 years of age, who underwent three rounds of mammography screening from 1996 to 2001 as part of the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Program. The cancer rates in this group were compared with those in 109,784 control women who would have been screened had the program been in place in 1992.

Women in the control group were invited to undergo a one-time screen at the conclusion of their observation period, the authors explain.

As anticipated, the 4-year cumulative incidence of invasive breast cancer in the screened group was higher than in the control group before screening: 1268 vs. 810 cases per 100,000 population.

However, even after the one-time screen in the control group, the 6-year cumulative incidence of breast cancer in the screened group was still higher: 1909 vs. 1564 cases per 100,000 population.

“Because the cumulative incidence among controls never reached that of the screened group, it appears that some breast cancers detected by repeated mammographic screening would not persist to be detectable by a single mammogram at the end of 6 years,” Welch and colleagues conclude.

“If the ’spontaneous remission’ hypothesis is credible, it should cause a major reevaluation in the approach to breast cancer research and treatment,” Dr. Robert M. Kaplan, from University of California, Los Angeles, and Dr. Franz Porzsolt, from the University of Ulm, Germany, write in a related editorial. “Certainly it is worthy of further evaluation. But, finding better data to assess the hypothesis will be difficult.”

* Avastin meets goal in breast cancer clinical trial

* Study shows Avastin can be added to common chemotherapies

* Roche stock up 4.1 percent

ZURICH (Reuters) - Roche Holding AG, the world’s largest maker of cancer drugs, said on Monday that Avastin met its primary endpoint in a Phase III breast cancer trial.

Roche said Avastin, which it markets with Genentech Inc, increased the time breast cancer patients live without the disease worsening and the study confirmed that Avastin can be combined effectively with commonly used chemotherapies.

Avastin was tested in combination with either taxane-based, anthracycline-based or Xeloda (capecitabine) chemotherapies. The results will be submitted for presentation at a future medical meeting, the company said.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said the data provided another confirmation of Avastin’s role in breast cancer, and would give doctors a wider choice of background therapies for use with the drug.

Avastin was first developed for bowel cancer but its use in breast cancer is expected to be a key driver of sales in future.

“We expect the stock to trade up on this news, as Street expectations for Avastin penetration in MBC (metastatic breast cancer) increase,” they wrote in a research note.

“However, given the still-unresolved Genentech minority take-out, we anticipate near-term Roche upside to be limited.”

Roche is seeking to buy the 44 percent of Genentech it does not already own for $43.7 billion. But Genentech’s share price has fallen well below the $89 offer price as concerns mount about Roche’s funding of the bid, given the credit crisis.

Roche stock was up 4.1 percent at 156.60 Swiss francs by 0850 GMT, outperforming a 2.3 percent rise in the European drugs sector.

As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America’s fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.

“It doesn’t come up,” said David Felinton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morning. “We’ve got a lot of economic challenges here in Huntington. That’s usually the focus.”

Huntington’s economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city’s financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

Nearly half the adults in Huntington’s five-county metropolitan area are obese — an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.

Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. It’s even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have).

It’s a sad situation, and a potential harbinger of what will happen to other U.S. communities, said Ken Thorpe, an Emory University health policy professor who is working with West Virginia officials on health reform legislation.

“They may be at the very top, but obesity and diabetes trends are very similar” in many other communities, particularly in the South, Thorpe said.

The Huntington area’s health problems, cited in a U.S. health report, are a terrible distinction for the city, but the locals barely talk about it. Many don’t even know how poorly the city ranks.

Culture and history are at least part of the problem, health officials say.

This city on the Ohio River is surrounded by Appalachia’s thinly populated hills. It has long been a blue-collar, white-skinned community — overwhelmingly people of English, Irish and German ancestry.

For decades, Huntington thrived with the coal mines to its south, as barges, trucks and trains loaded with the black fuel continually chugged into and past the city. There were plenty of manufacturing jobs in the chemical industry and in glassworks, steel and locomotive parts. Nearly 90,000 people lived in the city in 1950.

The traditional diet was heavy with fried foods, salt, gravy, sauces, and fattier meats — dense with calories burnt off through manual labor. Obesity was not a worry then. Workplace injuries were.

But as the coal industry modernized and the economy changed, manufacturing jobs left. The city’s population is now fewer than 50,000, and chronic diseases — many of them connected to obesity — seem much more common.

Shari Wiley is a nurse at St. Mary’s Regional Heart Institute in Huntington. She runs a program that identifies heavy school children and tries to teach them better eating and exercise habits. The effort began because of an alarming trend.

“A lot of the patients we were seeing were getting heart attacks in their 30s. They were requiring open heart surgery in their 30s. And we were concerned because it used to be you wouldn’t see heart patients come in until they were in their 50s,” Wiley said.

The Huntington area is essentially tied with a few other metro areas for proportion of people who don’t exercise (31 percent), have heart disease (22 percent) and diabetes (13 percent). The smoking rate is pretty high, too, although not the worst.

However, the region is a clear-cut leader in dental problems, with nearly half the people age 65 and older saying they have lost all their natural teeth. And no other metro area comes close to Huntington’s adult obesity rate, according to the report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on data from 2006.

Perhaps fittingly, hospitals are now Huntington’s largest employers. Another is Marshall University, home of the “Thundering Herd” football team depicted in the 2006 film “We Are Marshall” which dominates local sports conversations.

The river runs along the edge of town, but it’s not a focal point. Marshall and one of the city’s remaining factories sit to the east with several blocks of hotels and office buildings farther west. A new complex called Pullman Square — which includes a movie theater and a Starbucks — is trying to become a retail and dining center and illustrates a transition to a service economy.

The area’s unemployment rate was about 5 percent in September, actually a bit better than the 6.1 percent national average that month. But often the jobs are not high-paying. Many workers lack health insurance, and corporate wellness programs — common at large national companies — are rare.

Poverty hovers, with the area rate at 19 percent, much higher than the national average. In the hilly coal fields to the South, people still live in houses or trailers with drooping, battered roofs. They stare hard at any stranger in a new car. In Huntington and its outskirts, many people think of exercise and healthy eating as luxuries.

The economy needs to pick up “so people can afford to get healthy,” said Ronnie Adkins, 67, a retired policeman, as he sat one recent morning on the smoking porch of the Jolly Pirate Donuts shop on U.S. 60.

Doughnut shops don’t help either, of course. But breakfast pastry shops aren’t the most common outlets for fatty food. Pizza joints are. They are seemingly on every block in some parts of the city. The online Yellow Pages lists more pizza places (nearly 200) for the Huntington area than the entire state of West Virginia has gyms and health clubs (149).

Hot dog places also abound, with the city hosting an annual hot dog festival every summer. “I’ve never seen so many places that are hot dog oriented. I guess it’s a cultural thing. Appalachian,” said Mayor Felinton, who grew up in Maryland and moved to Huntington to attend Marshall University and stayed put.

Fast food has become a staple, with many residents convinced they can’t afford to buy healthier foods, said Keri Kennedy, manager of the state health department’s Office of Healthy Lifestyles.

Kennedy said she had just seen a commercial that presented “The KFC $10 Challenge.” The fried-chicken chain placed a family in a grocery store and challenged them to put together a dinner for $10 or less that was comparable to KFC’s seven-piece, $9.99 value meal.

“This is what we’re up against,” said Kennedy, noting it’s an extremely persuasive ad for a low-income family that is accustomed to fried foods. “I don’t know what you do to counter that.”

Lack of exercise is another concern. During a warm and sunny autumn week in Huntington — the kind of weather that would bring out small armies of joggers in some cities — it was unusual to see a runner or bicyclist. The exercise that does occur is mostly confined to a local YMCA, at campus recreation facilities at Marshall, or at Ritter Park in a tony neighborhood south of downtown.

Some attribute the problem to crumbling sidewalks in the city and a lack of walkways along busy rural roads. Others blame it on lack of motivation, as well as a cultural attitude that never included exercise for health.

There’s a connection between education and lack of exercise, too, said Dr. Thomas Dannals, a Huntington family physician.

“The undereducated don’t know the value of it. They don’t have the drive for it. There’s a reason you’re successful, you’ve got drive. The same is true for exercise,” said Dannals.

Dannals has been trying to change cultural attitudes. The local newspaper has called him “an exercise evangelist” for founding the city’s triathlon, marathon and other projects designed to make exercise popular and fun. He’s also spearheading a riverfront exercise trail project, called the Paul Ambrose Trail for Health (PATH).

Ambrose was a Huntington physician who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, jet that crashed into the Pentagon. Just before he died, he had been working on a U.S. Surgeon General report on obesity, and was on the plane that morning to attend an adolescent obesity conference in Los Angeles.

But the PATH project, first proposed more than a year ago, has yet to win the necessary funding. The lack of support is not surprising: Dannals can’t even get a company to sponsor the Huntington marathon.

Local politicians tend to be equally tepid about improving health, said Dr. Harry Tweel, director of the Cabell-Huntington Health Department.

Smoking — a common sin in West Virginia — has been hard to control, Tweel said. When the health department tried to restrict smoking in local bars and restaurants, a group of local businesses fought it all the way to the state Supreme Court. (The restrictions were upheld in 2003.) Even hospitals have fought smoking restrictions in the past, Tweel said.

Other communities have taken more ambitious steps to control the amount of fat in local restaurant food. In July, the Los Angeles City Council placed a moratorium on new fast food restaurants in an impoverished area of the city with above-average rates of obesity. In 2006, New York City became the first U.S. city to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant foods. Other cities are considering similar measures.

Forget it, Tweel said. Not in Huntington.

“You’re mentioning areas (of the country) that are well beyond this local region in accepting that kind of change,” said Tweel.

“People here have an attitude of ‘You’re not going to tell me what I can eat.’ The cultural attitude is ‘My parents ate that and my grandparents ate that,’” he said.

Mayor Felinton echoed Tweel. Felinton had stomach surgery last year to help him lose weight and has been walking to work about three days a week. He has shed nearly 80 pounds and became sort of a local poster boy for weight loss. But in the midst of a re-election campaign last month, he said he had no plans to plunge into a fight over fat in restaurants.

“We want as much business as we can have here,” said Felinton, who lost his recent re-election bid and leaves office in January. “As many restaurants as you have, it kind of enhances the livability. Maybe not the health.”

To be fair, most people in Huntington don’t seem to be aware of how poorly their city looks in national health statistics.

The latest numbers came from the CDC report, released in August, but little-publicized. It was based on survey data from 2006, comparing about 150 metropolitan areas. The Huntington area includes five counties — two in West Virginia, two in Kentucky and one in Ohio.

Of the 40 Huntington-area residents interviewed for this story, many had heard something about West Virginia being one of the unhealthiest states. But only one — Tweel — knew about the latest report showing how bad Huntington compared with other metro areas.

Some doctors, on hearing the statistics, noted the Huntington area is not in such bad shape by West Virginia standards. A recent state study found that health problems are significantly worse in the more rural coal counties to the south. But those places didn’t show up in the CDC report, because they were too small.

Still, Huntington is an unusually obese place, said Dr. John Walden, chairman of the family and community health department at Marshall University’s medical school.

Walden is a third generation physician in the area, but he’s also traveled extensively around the world. He says it’s always a little jolting coming home and realizing how obese his hometown is compared to the rest of the world.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a place where I’ve seen so many overweight people,” he said.