Some 58 percent of Americans never wear a helmet when riding a bicycle, 70 percent never wear hearing protection when using a gas lawn mower or leaf blower, and 27 percent never use sunscreen when they’re in the sun for a long time, according to a nationally representative poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.

The poll reveals what behaviors Americans do which they probably shouldn’t including: drive at least 10 mph over the speed limit on highways (25 percent often, 44 percent occasionally), talk on a cell phone (no hands-free device) while driving, (17 percent often, 36 occasionally) and leave items on the stairs at home (15 percent often, 22 percent occasionally).

The poll also reveals what behaviors Americans don’t do that they probably should including: read warnings that come with a prescription (9 percent never do), and unplug the toaster/toaster oven when not in use: (50 percent never do).

The results are revealing because those behaviors can cause real harm, according to safety experts at Consumer Reports and elsewhere. Ninety-two percent of bicyclists killed in 2007 reportedly weren’t wearing a helmet, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which notes that helmet use has been estimated to reduce risk of head injury by 85 percent.

The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 1 million new cases of basal and squamous cell cancers were expected to be diagnosed in 2008. And according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, prolonged exposure to noise at or above 85 decibels (emitted by many mowers) can cause gradual hearing loss.

Male and female poll respondents didn’t act much differently except when it came to wearing sunscreen (women did more often) and reading the info sheet for medicine (ditto). Behavior of younger respondents varied most when they were on the road. Respondents 18 to 34 years old were more likely than their elders to say they often use a cell phone when driving, roll through a stop sign, or drive at least 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.

The full report on how often Americans take risks is available in the February 2009 issue of Consumer Reports, on sale January 6 and online at www.ConsumerReports.org.

Source: Consumer Reports

If you’re an asthma sufferer, make sure the medical history at your doctor’s office includes your employment and recreation plans. A new screening tool developed by Tel Aviv University researchers may save you a trip to the emergency room later on.

It has long been suspected that physical exertion itself, as part of work or play, can trigger an asthma attack, but little medical evidence has been found for this conclusion ? until now. A study by Dr. Shlomo Moshe from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine gives doctors a new way of advising those who may be at risk.

Dr. Moshe’s research, reported in Occupational Medicine, will also help young asthmatic adults find safer and more suitable employment. It could also save lives.

Doctors should be aware of the risk level for asthma in young adult patients, Dr. Moshe says. “Using our recent research, we have developed a tool that gives both percentages and risks. If you had asthma in childhood, you can certainly develop it again. Family physicians need to know that certain jobs can be risky to their patients. If a patient wants to be a pro-football player, a baker, a carpenter, or a technician in an animal laboratory, his doctor needs to advise him accordingly.”

Dr. Moshe’s most recent research, which follows upon an earlier study, finds an indisputable connection between asthma and exercise. “When young adults start their first job, they should be aware of the pulmonary risks,” says Dr. Moshe, whose research covered nearly 800 young recruits to the Israel Defense Forces. “Exercise and sports like football do cause asthmatic attacks. Logically, that should be considered if someone wants to do a job which includes physical exertion, like being a guard, taking part in competitive sports, or working in a factory on heavy machinery.”

Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Adults with diabetes experience a slowdown in several types of mental processing, which appears early in the disease and persists into old age, according to new research. Given the sharp rise in new cases of diabetes, this finding means that more adults may soon be living with mild but lasting deficits in their thought processes.

Researchers at Canada’s University of Alberta analyzed a cross-section of adults with and without adult-onset Type 2 diabetes, all followed in the Victoria Longitudinal Study. At three-year intervals, this study tracks three independent samples of initially healthy older adults to assess biomedical, health, cognitive and neurocognitive aspects of aging. The Neuropsychology study involved 41 adults with diabetes and 424 adults in good health, between ages 53 and 90.

The research confirmed previous reports that diabetes impairs cognition and added two important findings. First, it teased out the specific domains hurt by diabetes. Second, it revealed that the performance gap was not worse in the older group. Thus, the reductions in executive function and processing speed seem to begin earlier in the disease.

Healthy adults performed significantly better than adults with diabetes on two of the five domains tested: executive functioning, with significant differences across four different tests, and speed, with significant differences or trends across five different tests. There were no significant differences on tests of episodic and semantic memory, verbal fluency, reaction time and perceptual speed.

When researchers divided participants into young-old and old-old, with age 70 as the cutoff, they found the same pattern of cognitive differences between young-old and old-old in the diabetes and control groups. Thus, the researchers concluded, the diabetes-linked cognitive deficits appear early and remain stable.

Source: American Psychological Association

A new study has found that among women who have never used menopausal hormone therapy, obese women are at an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer compared with women of normal weight. The research indicates that obesity may contribute to the development of ovarian cancer through a hormonal mechanism.

Ovarian cancer is the most fatal of gynecologic malignancies, and has a 5-year survival rate of only 37 percent. While studies have linked excess body weight to higher risks of certain cancers, little is known about the relationship between body mass index and ovarian cancer risk.

Researchers studied 94,525 U.S. women aged 50 to 71 years over a period of seven years. The researchers documented 303 ovarian cancer cases during this time and noted that among women who had never taken hormones after menopause, obesity was associated with an almost 80 percent higher risk of ovarian cancer. In contrast, no link between body weight and ovarian cancer was evident for women who had ever used menopausal hormone therapy.

According to researchers, these findings support the hypothesis that obesity may enhance ovarian cancer risk in part through its hormonal effects. Excess body mass in postmenopausal women leads to an increased production of estrogen, which in turn may stimulate the growth of ovarian cells and play a role in the development of ovarian cancer.

Among women with no family history of ovarian cancer, obesity and increased ovarian cancer risk were also linked in this study. However, women that did have a positive family history of ovarian cancer showed no association between body mass and ovarian cancer risk.

The study will be published in the February 15, 2009 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Brooke Burke was spotted over the holidays out with her hubby David Charvet and her children while sporting a Rockin’ Baby Pouch holding 9-month-old son Shaya.

It was last year that we reported on Brooke Burke’s own line of eco-friendly post-partum wraps called Tauts, which is designed to help women regain a tight belly after pregnancy.

Now the Dancing with the Stars champion is set to lead another fashion trend among new moms with the Rockin’ Baby Adjustable & Reversible Pouch.

Rockin’ Baby claims their pouches are “a perfect place to nestle your beautiful, and undoubtedly stylish, little one while you nurse, bond, nurture your baby, have hands free to care for other children or just simply and fashionably function.”

Shop Now for Rockin’ Baby Adjustable & Reversible Pouches

As news about the tragic death of Jett Travolta, the teenage son of famed actor John Travolta, begins to filter out, the focus is beginning to shift to the controversial religion the family belongs to and whether their Scientology beliefs could have contributed to his death.

Jett Travolta apparently died from injuries received when he suffered a seizure inside the bathroom where the family was vacationing in the Bahamas and hit his head on a bathtub.

The Travoltas have always maintained that Jett suffered from a rare disease known as Kawasaki disease, a condition usually found in Japanese children. However, autism experts contend the child suffered from autism, a condition that Scientologists do not believe exists. Scientologists believe that people suffering from disabilities such as autism are “degraded” and are capable of curing themselves by focusing more on church teachings.

An autism expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Post that anti-seizure medication could have controlled the attacks the son suffered, but that he may not have been on the medication due to the parents’ Scientology beliefs.

According to the article, the church would have discouraged the use of such anti-seizure medication. Experts that follow Scientology told the Post that very prominent Scientologists such as the Travoltas would have never consulted a doctor about treating their son for autism.

An autopsy is scheduled to be performed to determine the cause of death.

A slow, chronic starvation of the brain as we age appears to be one of the major triggers of a biochemical process that causes some forms of Alzheimer’s disease.

A new study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has found when the brain doesn’t get enough sugar glucose — as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain — a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer’s.

Robert Vassar, lead author, discovered a key brain protein is altered when the brain has a deficient supply of energy. The altered protein increases the production of an enzyme that, in turn, flips a switch to produce the sticky protein clumps. Vassar worked with human and mice brains in his research.

The study is published in the December 26 issue of the journal Neuron.

“This finding is significant because it suggests that improving blood flow to the brain might be an effective therapeutic approach to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s,” said Vassar, a professor of cell and molecular biology at the Feinberg School.

A simple preventive strategy people can follow to improve blood flow to the brain is getting exercise, reducing cholesterol and managing hypertension.

“If people start early enough, maybe they can dodge the bullet,” Vassar said. For people who already have symptoms, vasodilators, which increase blood flow, may help the delivery of oxygen and glucose to the brain, he added.

Indulgence in a high-fat diet can not only lead to overweight because of excessive calorie intake, but also can affect the balance of circadian rhythms – everyone’s 24-hour biological clock, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have shown.

The biological clock regulates the expression and/or activity of enzymes and hormones involved in metabolism, and disturbance of the clock can lead to such phenomena as hormone imbalance, obesity, psychological and sleep disorders and cancer.

While light is the strongest factor affecting the circadian clock, Dr. Oren Froy and his colleagues of the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition at the Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment in Rehovot, have demonstrated in their experiments with laboratory mice that there is a cause-and-effect relation between diet and biological clock imbalance.

The researchers fed mice either a low-fat or a high-fat diet, followed by a fasting day, then measured components of the adiponectin metabolic pathway at various levels of activity. In mice on the low-fat diet, the adiponectin signaling pathway components exhibited normal circadian rhythmicity. Fasting resulted in a phase advance. The high-fat diet resulted in a phase delay. Fasting raised and the high-fat diet reduced adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) levels. This protein is involved in fatty acid metabolism, which could be disrupted by the lower levels.

The researchers suggest that this high-fat diet could contribute to obesity, not only through its high caloric content, but also by disrupting the phases and daily rhythm of clock genes. They contend also that high fat-induced changes in the clock and the adiponectin signaling pathway may help explain the disruption of other clock-controlled systems associated with metabolic disorders, such as blood pressure levels and the sleep/wake cycle.

Contact with nature has long been suspected to increase positive feelings, reduce stress, and provide distraction from the pain associated with recovery from surgery. Now, research has confirmed the beneficial effects of plants and flowers for patients recovering from abdominal surgery.

A recent study by Seong-Hyun Park and Richard H. Mattson, researchers from the Department of Horticulture, Recreation and Forestry at Kansas State University, provides strong evidence that contact with plants is directly beneficial to a hospital patient’s health.

Studies show that when patients have great stress associated with surgery, they typically experience more severe pain and a slower recovery period. Some of these problems are treated with drugs that can have side effects ranging from vomiting and headaches to drug dependency or even fatality.

The study, published in the October 2008 issue of HortTechnology, was conducted on 90 patients recovering from an appendectomy. Patients were randomly assigned to hospital rooms with or without plants during their postoperative recovery periods. Patients with plants in their rooms had significantly fewer intakes of pain medication, more positive physiological responses (lower blood pressure and heart rate), less pain, anxiety, and fatigue, and better overall positive and higher satisfaction with their recovery rooms than their counterparts in the control group without plants in their rooms.

The study suggests that potted plants offer the most benefit, as opposed to cut flowers, because of their longevity. Nursing staff reported that as patients recovered, they began to show interaction with the plants, including watering, pruning, and moving them for a better view or light.

This nonpharmacological approach to recovery is good news for patients, doctors, and insurers alike in terms of cost effectiveness and medical benefits. The study provides strong evidence that contact with plants is directly beneficial to patients’ health, providing meaningful therapeutic contact for patients recovering from painful surgery.

Moderate drinkers often have lower risks of Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive loss, according to researchers who reviewed 44 studies.

In more than half of the studies, published since the 1990s, moderate drinkers of wine, beer and liquor had lower dementia risks than nondrinkers and appear to receive certain health benefits. In only a few studies were there increased risks.

“Alcohol is a two-edged sword,” said Michael Collins, Ph.D., a professor and neuroscientist at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and lead author of the refereed report in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “Too much is bad. But a little might actually be helpful.”

Moderate alcohol consumption generally is defined as 1 drink or less per day for women and 1-2 drinks or less per day for men.

Long-term alcohol abuse can cause memory loss and impair cognitive function. It’s unknown why moderate alcohol use appears to have the opposite effect. One theory is that the well-known cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption also can reduce the risk of mini strokes that cause dementia.

Collins and another Loyola professor, neuroscientist Edward Neafsey, Ph.D., suggest a second possible explanation. Small amounts of alcohol might, in effect, make brain cells more fit. Alcohol in moderate levels stresses cells and thus toughens them up to cope with major stresses down the road that could cause dementia.