Medical bills can wreck credit, even when paid off

CHICAGO (AP) -- Mike and Laura Park thought their credit record was spotless. The Texas couple wanted to take advantage of low interest rates, so they put their house on the market and talked to a lender about a mortgage on a bigger home in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs.


Their credit report contained a shocker: A $200 medical bill had been sent to a collection agency. Although since paid, it still lowered their credit scores by about 100 points, and it means they'll have to pay a discount point to get the best interest rate. Cost to them: $2,500.


A growing number of Americans could encounter similar landmines when they refinance or take out a loan. The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that sponsors health care research, estimates that 22 million Americans were contacted by collection agencies for unpaid medical bills in 2005. That increased to 30 million Americans in 2010.


Surprisingly, even after the bills have been paid off, the record of the collection action can stay on a credit report for up to seven years, dragging down credit scores and driving up the cost of financing a home. An estimated 3.4 million Americans have paid-off medical debt lingering on their credit reports, according to the Access Project, a research group funded by health care foundations and advocates of tougher laws on medical debt collectors.

Vets prone to drug addiction get risky painkillers

CHICAGO (AP) -- Morphine and similar powerful painkillers are sometimes prescribed to recent war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress along with physical pain, and the consequences can be tragic, a government study suggests.


These vets are at high risk for drug and alcohol abuse, but they're two times more likely to get prescriptions for addictive painkillers than vets with only physical pain, according to the study, billed as the first national examination of the problem. Iraq and Afghanistan vets with PTSD who already had substance abuse problems were four times more likely to get these drugs than vets without mental health problems, according to the study.


Subsequent suicides, other self-inflicted injuries, and drug and alcohol overdoses were all more common in vets with PTSD who got these drugs. These consequences were rare but still troubling, the study authors said.


The results underscore the challenge of treating veterans with devastating physical injuries and haunting memories of the horrors of war. But the findings also suggest that physicians treating these veterans should offer less risky treatment, including therapies other than drugs, the study authors and other experts say.

Hand transplant patient speaks

When Emily Fennell walks into a store or the hair salon, people often ask, "What happened to your hand?" She gets a kick out of their reaction when she casually replies, "I had a hand transplant."

"They say, 'Can they really do that?' " she said, glancing down at the soft brace that covers her right forearm and wrist, slender fingers and neatly trimmed fingernails peeking from the bottom.

Most U.S. adults get vitamin boost

More than half of U.S. adults age 20 and older take vitamins or other dietary supplements, a new government study shows.

The percentage who took at least one dietary supplement increased to 53 percent in 2006, up from 42 percent in 1994.

Multivitamins/multiminerals are the most common: Almost 40 percent of people reported taking them in 2006.

“The majority of dietary supplement users report using them every day over the past 30 days,” said Jaime Gahche, nutritional researcher with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gannett News Service

Lansley’s health reform plans raise many questions

ANDREW LANSLEY, the UK Government’s Health Secretary’s future is not looking very healthy. He avoided the fate of Patricia Hewitt, one of his Labour predecessors, of being booed at the Royal College of Nursing’s Annual Conference. He wanted to avoid the disaster that befell Tony Blair at the WI Conference too! The problem is the NHS Reforms handing control of the bulk of the NHS budget in England to GP practice groups.

GPs are independent contractors paid by the NHS to do family doctoring. Paying them to buy hospital services is a big stretch. The problem lies with this wondrously vague term “commissioning”. What does it mean? Is it a form of competitive tendering for which hospital will do 500 cataract ops and 300 hip replacement ops cheaper than the next hospital, or does it mean planning the services for the improvement of the general health and well-being of the population living in the area?

We’ve been through all this in Wales with the Local Health Boards (LHBs). Some, like the Rhondda Cynon Taf LHB did a brilliant job, providing innovations in preventative healthcare.

Others like the Cardiff LHB got into awful difficulties with contracting competitively for out-of-hours care.

The English dilemma is whether to create hundreds of mini-quangos to plan healthcare or outsourcing everything to independent contractors with no responsibility to Parliament for the spending of vast sums of taxpayers’ money?

Read More http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/columnists/2011/04/16/lansley-s-health-reform-plans-raise-many-questions-91466-28530110/#ixzz1JfU2xU19

Progesterone reduces rate of early preterm birth in at risk women

NIH study finds progesterone benefits women with short cervix

A National Institutes of Health study has found that progesterone, a naturally occurring hormone, reduced the rate of preterm birth before the 33rd week of pregnancy by 45 percent among one category of at risk women.

The women in the study had a short cervix, which is known to increase the risk for preterm birth. The cervix is the part of the uterus that opens and shortens during labor. 

The study also found that infants born to women who had received progesterone were less likely to develop respiratory distress syndrome, a breathing complication occurring in preterm infants.

The study was published online in Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Infants born preterm are at high risk of early death and long term health and developmental problems. In 2005, there were 12.9 million preterm births worldwide (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20428351). In the United States, 12.8 percent of infants were born preterm in 2008 (http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/health.asp). Preterm infants are at increased risk for death in the first year of life, and breathing difficulties, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, blindness and deafness (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/Preterm_Labor_and_Birth.cfm).

The study was undertaken by physicians of the Perinatology Research Branch at NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) along with 44 medical centers around the world (including Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America). The study was a collaboration between the NIH and Columbia Laboratories, Inc., in Livingston, N.J.

The study found that a vaginal gel progesterone preparation could reduce the rate of early preterm birth in women at risk for early labor because of a short cervix. 

Estrogen Lowers Breast Cancer and Heart Attack Risk in Some

Ron Wurzer for The New York TimesAndrea LaCroix of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle
found that estrogen lowers breast cancer risk in some women.

In a finding that challenges the conventional wisdom about the risks of some hormones used in menopause, a major government study has found that years after using estrogen-only therapy, certain women had a markedly reduced risk of breast cancer and heart attack.

The research, part of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative study, is likely to surprise women and their doctors, who for years have heard frightening news about the risks of hormone therapy. But most of those fears are related to the use of a combination of two hormones, estrogen and progestin, which are prescribed to relieve hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and have been shown to increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

The new findings, reported Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, come from 10,739 women in the Women’s Health Initiative study who had previously had a hysterectomy, the surgical removal of the uterus. Nationwide, about one-third of women in their 50s have had a hysterectomy.

The Women’s Health Initiative was begun in 1991 by the National Institutes of Health as a sweeping investigation of hormone use and other health issues of postmenopausal women.

While most women in the hormone study were taking combination hormone therapy, women without a uterus took estrogen alone or a placebo for about six years and were followed for nearly 11 years. The estrogen-only group was not given progestin, which is prescribed only to protect the uterus from the harmful effects of estrogen. Although all the women in the estrogen study stopped using the treatment in 2004, the investigators have continued to monitor their health, as is typical in large clinical trials.

The most surprising new finding relates to breast cancer. The women with hysterectomies who used estrogen alone had a 23 percent lower risk for breast cancer compared with those who had taken a placebo. This is in stark contrast to the higher risk of breast cancer shown in the estrogen-progestin part of the trial.

“The decreased risk of breast cancer in this group is something we totally didn’t expect when we started the W.H.I. hormone therapy trials,” said Andrea Z. LaCroix, the study’s lead author and a professor of epidemiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “This study differentiates estrogen alone from estrogen and progestin in a very big way. I hope it gets across to women, because we are not reversing ourselves.”

Government appeals judge's health care ruling

The federal health care overhaul's core requirement to make virtually all citizens buy health insurance or face tax penalties is constitutional because Congress has the authority to regulate interstate business, the Justice Department said in its appeal of a ruling that struck down the Obama administration's signature legislation.

The government's 62-page motion filed Friday to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals argued that Congress had the power to enact the overhaul's minimum coverage requirements because it is a "rational means of regulating the way participants in the health care market pay for their services."

The motion also warned other pieces of the overhaul, including a law that blocks insurers from denying coverage to people because of pre-existing conditions, would be "unworkable" without a minimum coverage provision.

Twenty-six states filed a lawsuit that said Congress had exceeded its authority by requiring that all citizens buy health insurance or face tax penalties. U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida agreed in a Jan. 31 ruling that said President Barack Obama's entire health care overhaul is unconstitutional. It is considered the most sweeping ruling against the health care law.

Autism fears, measles spike among Minn. Somalis

Health officials struggling to contain a measles outbreak that's hit hard in Minneapolis' large Somali community are running into resistance from parents who fear the vaccine could give their children autism.

Fourteen confirmed measles cases have been reported in Minnesota since February. Half have been in Somali children, six of whom were not vaccinated and one who was not old enough for shots. State officials have linked all but one of the cases to an unvaccinated Somali infant who returned from a trip to Kenya in February. The state had reported zero or one case of measles a year for most of the past decade.

Amid the outbreak, a now-discredited British researcher who claimed there was a link between vaccines and autism has been meeting with local Somalis. Some worry Andrew Wakefield is stoking vaccination fears, but organizers say the meetings were merely a chance for parents to ask him questions.

"Unfortunately a lot of the media thinks he's saying 'Don't get vaccinated.' That's far from the truth. He's basically encouraging people to get vaccinated but do your homework and know the risks," said Wayne Rohde, a co-founder of the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, which says parents should have other options for immunizing their children.

Measles has been all but eradicated in the United States, but accounts for about 200,000 annual deaths worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. None of those infected in Minnesota have died, though eight have required hospitalization.

The infections come as autism concerns have surged over an apparent rise in cases in Minnesota's Somali community, the largest in the U.S. Officials, though, haven't determined if that's really happening.

The Minnesota Department of Public Health found in 2009 that young Somali children in Minneapolis public schools were over-represented in autism programs, but cautioned that alone didn't prove a higher rate of autism. The CDC and National Institutes of Health are working with the advocacy group Autism Speaks on a more systematic study.

Safety warning issued over 'walking water balls'

The US government is warning people to stay out of giant, see-through inflatable spheres known as "water walking balls", because of the risk of suffocation or drowning.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) said that it "does not know of any safe way" to use the products, which are popular at amusement parks, resorts, malls and carnivals. They resemble hamster balls but are large enough for humans. People climb into the plastic, airtight balls and roll or try to walk on water in pools, lakes or rivers.

"We want to tell the public how dangerous these products are before someone is killed," said CSPC chairman, Inez Tenenbaum. "Our investigation into water walking balls will not stop with today's warning."

The commission is worried about too little oxygen in the balls, as well as the buildup of carbon dioxide. Another concern is the fact that the product has no emergency exit and can be opened only by a person outside of the ball – a serious problem if a person inside experiences distress.

The commission said it is aware of two incidents in which people were hurt. In the first, a five-year-old girl in Kingston, Massachusetts, passed out last year while inside a ball for a brief time. In the other, a young boy suffered a broken arm when the ball he was in fell out of a shallow above-ground pool onto hard ground.

F.D.A. Panel to Consider Warnings for Artificial Food Colorings

  WASHINGTON — After staunchly defending the safety of artificial food colorings, the federal government is for the first time publicly reassessing whether foods like Jell-O, Lucky Charms cereal and Minute Maid Lemonade should carry warnings that the bright artificial colorings in them worsen behavior problems like hyperactivity in some children.


The Food and Drug Administration concluded long ago that there was no definitive link between the colorings and behavior or health problems, and the agency is unlikely to change its mind any time soon. But on Wednesday and Thursday, the F.D.A. will ask a panel of experts to review the evidence and advise on possible policy changes, which could include warning labels on food.


The hearings signal that the growing list of studies suggesting a link between artificial colorings and behavioral changes in children has at least gotten regulators’ attention — and, for consumer advocates, that in itself is a victory.


In a concluding report, staff scientists from the F.D.A. wrote that while typical children might be unaffected by the dyes, those with behavioral disorders might have their conditions “exacerbated by exposure to a number of substances in food, including, but not limited to, synthetic color additives.”


Renee Shutters, a mother of two from Jamestown, N.Y., said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that two years ago, her son Trenton, then 5, was having serious behavioral problems at school until she eliminated artificial food colorings from his diet. “I know for sure I found the root cause of this one because you can turn it on and off like a switch,” Ms. Shutters said.


But Dr. Lawrence Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in Walnut Creek, Calif., said evidence that diet plays a significant role in most childhood behavioral disorders was minimal to nonexistent. “These are urban legends that won’t die,” Dr. Diller said.


There is no debate about the safety of natural food colorings, and manufacturers have long defended the safety of artificial ones as well. In a statement, the Grocery Manufacturers Association said, “All of the major safety bodies globally have reviewed the available science and have determined that there is no demonstrable link between artificial food colors and hyperactivity among children.”

Prostate screening has no benefit

Prostate cancer screening does not save lives, according to a 20-year study, published in the British Medical Journal.

One in four newly diagnosed cancers in UK men is prostate cancer.

Last year, the body which regulates screening in the UK advised against routine screening.

The UK National Screening Committee said this study provided further evidence that the harms outweigh the benefits.

Prostate cancer kills 10,000 people in the UK every year.

While there is no screening programme, men over 50 may still request a test.

Screening

This latest study was carried out in Norrkoping in Sweden. It followed 9,026 men who were in their 50s or 60s in 1987.

Continue reading the main story

Nearly 1,500 men were randomly chosen to be screened every three years between 1987 and 1996. The first two tests were performed by digital rectal examination and then by prostate specific antigen testing.

The report concludes: "After 20 years of follow-up, the rate of death from prostate cancer did not differ significantly between men in the screening group and those in the control group."

The favoured method of screening is the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test.

Global Spread: More People Think 'Fat People Are Lazy'

Thin may be the American ideal, but that view appears to have gone global, a new study finds.

Negative attitudes toward fat people have taken root in several other cultures around the world, even in countries where chubbiness was once considered attractive, anthropologists at Arizona State University report.

Why that's so isn't entirely clear, but some experts suggest it might be the unintended byproduct of global efforts to curb obesity. Health campaigns about the risks of being overweight may be seen as criticizing and casting blame on individuals — you eat too much and don't exercise enough! — rather than on environmental and social factors, leading people to adopt the same perspective.

For their study, published in the journal Current Anthropology, the ASU researchers asked people to answer true or false to a variety of statements, each with a varying degree of fat stigma: "Fat people are lazy" or "Some people are fated to be obese" or "A big woman is a beautiful woman."

They got responses from 700 people in 10 countries or regions, including American Samoa, Argentina, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, two sites in Arizona and London.

What Are The Effects Of Radiation On Humans? What Is Radiation Poisoning?

 Contrasting media reports abound regarding the dangers occurring at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan. The reports have triggered uncertainty, concern and even panic among members of the general public in Japan and around the world.

Workers in Japan have been bravely battling to save the facility from a disastrous meltdown, exposing their bodies to potentially dangerous and lethal doses of radiation. In this text, we attempt to explain what impact radiation may have on the human body.

Radiation takes place when the atomic nucleus of an unstable atom decays and starts releasing ionizing particles, known as ionizing radiation. When these particles come into contact with organic material, such as human tissue, they will damage them if levels are high enough, causing burns and cancer. Ionizing radiation can be fatal for humans.

REM (roentgen equivalent in man) - this is a unit we use to measure radiation dosage. We use this measurement to determine what levels of radiation are safe or dangerous for human tissue. It is the product of the absorbed dose in rads and a weighting factor (W_R), which accounts for how effective the radiation is in causing biological damage.

A sudden, short dose of up to 50 rem will probably cause no problems, except for some blood changes. From 50 to 200 rem there may be illness, but fatalities are highly unlikely. A dose of between 200 and 1,000 will most likely cause serious illness - the nearer the 1,000 it is, the poorer the outlook for the human will be. Any dose over 1,000 will typically cause death.

When an atomic bomb explodes, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII, people receive two doses of radiation: one during the explosion, and another from fallout. Fallout refers to the radioactive particles that float in the air after an explosion; they rise and then gradually descend to the ground. A dose of 100 rems will have probably cause some initial signs of radiation sickness, such as loss of white blood cells, nausea, vomiting, and headache. With a 300 rem dose you may lose hair temporarily - your nerve cells and those that line the digestive tract will be damaged. As the dose rises and more white blood cells are lost, the human's immune system becomes seriously weakened - their ability to fight off infections is considerably reduced.

Exposure to radiation makes our bodies produce fewer blood clotting agents, called blood platelets, increasing our risk of internal bleeding. Any cut on the skin will take much longer to stop bleeding.

Experts say that approximately 50% of humans exposed to 450 rems will die, and 800 rems will kill virtually anyone. Death is inevitable and will occur from between two days to a couple of weeks.

NHS Supply Chain Welcomes National Audit Office Report On Managing High Value Capital Equipment, UK

Today's National Audit Office (NAO) report on NHS trusts planning, procurement and use of expensive medical equipment - such as Computed Tomography or Cat-Scan (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners - has been welcomed by NHS Supply Chain.

The report, Managing High Value Capital Equipment in the NHS in England, states that value for money is not being achieved across all trusts because of their failure to collaborate but that savings can be achieved by grouping together requirements for new machines.

"The NAO report acknowledged that 75% of the NHS Trusts are utilising NHS Supply Chain framework's and are enjoying lower acquisition costs and equipment cost savings. Naturally trusts get the benefit of NHS Supply Chain's national pricing and we are already providing services to support a number of the recommendations in the Report," explained Andy Brown, NHS Supply Chain's Managing Director Diagnostics.

Last November NHS Supply Chain was awarded a prestigious healthcare procurement award by the Health Service Journal (HSJ) for innovative methods that save NHS trusts time and money when acquiring medical equipment, including bulk purchasing which releases significant savings and has the potential to make a major contribution to QIPP targets over the next three years.

Teens who use Facebook, social media may suffer from new condition called 'Facebook depression'

Teens who frequently use Facebook have more to worry about than lost homework time.

A new condition dubbed "Facebook depression" may affect teenagers who spend a significant amount of time on the social-networking site, researchers warned in the latest issue of Pediatrics Journal.

The problem, researchers found, was that the popular website's constant feed of status, picture and message updates gave users a skewed view of reality, which could make vulnerable kids feel like they aren't good enough.

Facebook, according to the study, can create a false reality because people normally post the best sides of themselves, or at least not the full story.

Romantic Breakups Cause Real Pain

Rejection quite literally hurts — the experience and the memory of getting dumped by a loved one trigger brain regions linked with physical sensations of pain, scientists find.

Around the world, people for centuries have used the same language — words like "hurt" and "pain" — to describe mental suffering as well as physical suffering, leading researchers to wonder if the sensations weren't activating the same parts of the brain.

Speculatively, it makes sense that getting your heart broken could feel like something literally breaking. During the course of human evolution, rejection from a group could leave one extraordinarily vulnerable, researcher Edward Smith, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York, told LiveScience, "so that might be why this link evolved between rejection and pain, to make us want to avoid rejection."

Past research had not found much to suggest rejection triggered pain areas in the brain. However, those studies had attempted to elicit feelings of rejection in test subjects by telling them they had been excluded from a computer game, for instance, or that anonymous feedback suggested a stranger did not like them — examples that might trigger only tepid feelings of rejection. "We wanted something bigger," Smith said.

Smith and his colleagues put out fliers in Manhattan and online ads on Facebook and Craigslist looking for people who had been through an unwanted breakup of a romance in the last six months. As the brains of the 40 volunteers were scanned through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), half the time they looked at photos of their ex, and half the time they looked at photos of a friend. During both situations, participants were asked to focus on experiences they shared with the people in the pictures.

Medtronic Protecta Implantable Cardiac Devices Win US Clearance

Medtronic has received FDA approval for its Protecta line of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy-defibrillators (CRT-Ds).

The new family of implantable defibrillators features SmartShock™ Technology, which includes six new Medtronic-exclusive algorithms that recognize life-threatening arrhythmias and deliver therapeutic shocks only when appropriate, therefore enhancing patient quality of life. Findings from the Virtual ICD study, based on a statistical model, shows that 98 percent of patients with SmartShock Technology will be free of inappropriate shocks one year after implant and 92 percent will be free of inappropriate shocks five years after implant.

• Wavelet + PR Logic, SVT discrimination in the VF zone, and Confirmation + in Protecta devices are designed to detect non-lethal arrhythmias and deliver lifesaving shock therapy only when necessary.

• T-wave Discrimination and Lead Noise Discrimination distinguish oversensing from deadly arrhythmias and withhold shock therapy when appropriate.

• Lead Integrity Alert, first released in 2008, provides advanced warning of potential lead fractures so the patient can seek medical attention, and reduces the risk of receiving an inappropriate shock.

All Protecta XT devices have OptiVol® 2.0 Fluid Status Monitoring, a new update on the Medtronic-exclusive feature that measures changes in fluid build-up in heart failure patients to identify patients at risk of worsening heart failure. Medtronic implantable defibrillators have Conexus® Wireless Telemetry that allows patients to transmit device data to a physician’s clinic from virtually anywhere via the industry’s largest remote monitoring system, the Medtronic CareLink® Network. CareLink serves more than 4,000 clinics and 500,000 patients in 30 countries.

New drug developed to fight skin cancer melanoma

A new drug named Yervoy has been developed in the U.S. to prolong the lives of people with the skin cancer melanoma, according to media reports Monday.

Developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, Yervoy is in a new class of drugs designed to fight cancer by removing molecular brakes that prevent immune system cells from destroying tumors.

Approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Yervoy is hailed by experts as the first drug in the melanoma field that could extend survival in a meaningful way.

The effect of the drug was shown in a randomized clinical trial involved metastatic melanoma patients who had already failed to benefit from treatment with another drug.

After treated with Yervoy, they were found to live a median of about 10 months, 3.6 months longer than a control group who received an ineffective treatment. More than 20 percent of the people with Yervoy treatment lived at least two years, and some of them even longer.

According to Bristol's announcement Monday, Yervoy also improves the survival of previously untreated patients with metastatic melanoma.

A complete course of the treatment consists of four infusions given over three months and costs 120,000 U.S. dollars.

Drug researchers noted Yervoy is not specific for any type of tumor, that it might conceivably be effective for many types.

However, Yervoy's function of loosening the restraints on the immune system may lead to dangerous side effects such as colitis, diarrhea, hepatitis, endocrine dysfunction and skin problems. Its negative effects have already been discovered in 12.9 percent of the patients who participated in the clinical trial.

New site lets employers put health care out to bid

Self-insured businesses looking to cut out the middleman when it comes to health care might want to check out Open Health Market, an online system designed to connect them directly with medical providers eager to compete for more patients.

The website, created by a New Hampshire lawyer and several other partners, works something like a confidential matchmaking service: employers submit requests for proposals on various medical services and procedures. Health care providers then submit competing bids. The site's creators don't get involved in structuring any deals; they just get the two sides together.

Nearly 60 percent of insured workers in the United States are covered by employer-funded plans. Lawyer Don Crandlemire says those companies represent an enormous, untapped power to change a health care system that rewards volume over value.