Women who live in heavy traffic areas such as the Northern Manhattan and South Bronx areas of New York City, could give birth to children with an increased risk of asthma due to what are called toxic PAH’s (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons).

The finding came from a study of the umbilical cord blood from New York City children, in which researchers found a change in a gene (called ACSL3) associated with prenatal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

Most commonly, PAHs are released into the air when fossil fuels, gasoline and garbage are burned, and as such perhaps the most common route of exposure to these chemicals is by breathing contaminated air. PAHs exist in cigarette smoke, wood smoke, vehicle exhaust, diesel exhaust and asphalt roads, as well as in the air of industrial coking, coal-tar and asphalt production facilities, along with trash-incinerating facilities.

Because of this, air in urban areas may have PAH levels 10 times higher than those in rural areas.

While exposure to PAHs has previously been linked to cancer, childhood asthma, cataracts, kidney and liver damage and other diseases, the new study found the chemicals result in epigenetic changes that may disrupt the normal functioning of genes by altering their expression.

Click here to read more.

As we enter the new year, we find medicine evolving and gradually shifting its focus to the principles that Integrative Medicine has taught us for years.

Forward thinking doctors are increasingly focusing on prevention of disease rather than just reactive treatment of disease. They realize that once damage has occurred in an organ, it is very hard to change the tissues back to healthy tissues.

Since heart attack and stroke are some of the most common causes of death in our country, we should pay special attention to measures that can prevent these diseases.

Of course, diet and lifestyle are two of the most important predictors for the development of both heart attacks and strokes.

Now a new study shows that the Coronary Artery Calcium screening test can play a very prominent role in helping determine an individual’s risk for heart attack. Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) screening is a tool that gives us a direct measure of calcium deposits (hard plaque) in the heart arteries which can subsequently lead to blockage of the arteries.

This is a noninvasive test that uses a CT scanner to take a picture of the heart. Calcium can be seen in the heart arteries and this can be quantitated. The more calcium in the arteries, the more likely for that person to have a heart attack.

In this new study, one of lead authors, Michael Silverman M.D. who is a fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, stated “We showed that by using only the traditional risk factors, we miss a significant percentage of individuals at high risk. We also may be over treating a large number of people who can safely avoid lifelong treatment.”

In the study, which was just published, the researchers looked at two different approaches to assessing an individual’s risk for heart attack. The first approach looked only at traditional risk factors, including cholesterol, blood pressure,current smoking and diabetes. The other group used the direct measurement of atherosclerosis(hardening of the arteries) as shown by the CAC score.

What the researchers found was that “15% of people believed to be at very low risk actually had high coronary artery calcium scores above 100 and were at relatively high risk of a cardiac event over the next seven years” according to Roger Blumenthal M.D. who is a co-author of the study.

Most importantly, he went on to say “On the other hand, 35% of study participants thought to be at very high risk of needing aggressive therapy with aspirin and statin medication actually had no coronary artery calcium and extremely low event rate over the next seven years. For them, we can emphasize lifestyle modifications.”

What this is saying is that significant numbers of people are given medication for the rest of their life including statin drugs when they really have no need for it whatsoever. To me it is very exciting that this study has been published and cardiologists will be reading it.

Furthermore, Khurram Nais M.D., one the senior authors of the study is quoted as saying “Our study shows that coronary artery calcium testing holds promise as a front-line assessment for people before they develop heart disease symptoms. In the meantime, we believe that doctors should consider offering a coronary artery calcium scan to their patients to markedly improve risk prediction if they are unsure whether they should be on lifelong statin and aspirin therapy.”

As a preventive medicine and lifestyle oriented physician, I am delighted to see this article and the comments made by the researchers themselves.

I truly hope that this will have an effect on physicians all over the country in not only finding heart disease in apparently low-risk individuals, but also in avoiding giving pharmaceutical drugs to patients, for the rest of their life, who do not need them.

At the present time, in Los Angeles, insurance will not cover a Coronary Artery Calcium scan, in most instances. In that case the patient must pay for the scan themselves, and that is a drawback for doing the test.

Hopefully, with the publication of this article and subsequent articles, insurance companies will find it is much cheaper to do this preventive scan, rather than to treat someone for a heart attack. When that occurs, they will start covering this test as a screening test, much as they do for a cholesterol blood test now.

As an after note, I want to remind my patients and my readers, that we now have an even better test than the Coronary Artery Calcium Scan. It is called the CT Angiogram.

This test is similar to the CAC, except that iodine is injected in the vein of the patient while they are in the scanner. The iodine then allows us to see what is going on inside the arteries as well is on the wall of the arteries, where the calcium forms. Inside the arteries, there can be soft plaque which is missed by simply doing the CAC. Soft plaque can be particularly dangerous because it can break off, causing a clot in the artery which then leads to a heart attack.

In my own practice of medicine, for patients who can afford the difference in price between the CAC and the CT Angiogram, I always recommend the CT Angiogram. It gives much more information. It is theoretically possible that someone will have no calcium in the artery wall, but they can still have soft plaque inside the artery, and that is why I prefer the more advanced test.

If you are my patient, please feel free to talk to me about these new technology tests.

For all my readers, please talk to your physicians about this new information and ask them if the Coronary Artery Calcium scan is appropriate for you in evaluating your risk for heart attack. It could save your life. Or it could take you off a drug you do not need!

Coronary Artery Calcium Score

Summary Article

Original Article

Seeing your children grow up into young adults, and ultimately leave home to start families of their own, is one of the most bittersweet moments of parenthood. It’s what you’ve been preparing them for all these years, yet when it actually happens it can trigger intense emotions.

Empty Nest Syndrome refers to the feelings of depression, anxiety and grief that many parents and caregivers experience when their children go away to college, get married or move out on their own. While women are more likely to be affected than men, fathers too can experience mixed emotions when their kids leave home.

Researchers believe the transition may be particularly difficult for women because when their children leave home they are often juggling other major life changes, such as menopause or taking care of their elderly parents. Men, meanwhile, are less likely to view their children’s departure as a major life change, and as a result may find themselves unprepared emotionally.

Click here to read more.

 

Americans are willing to put up with a lot in order to achieve the “American Dream:” ever-increasing debt, long work hours, and hardly any time for family or pursuit of leisure activities, not to mention health-harming stress.

Yet, we plod along day in and day out in pursuit of the extravagant lifestyle we see on TV, or a facsimile thereof, despite its ability to erode our better judgment and squelch the deeper meaning of what life is really all about.

At the root of the problem, and some might say the cause of the housing market slump and credit collapse, is affluenza.

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Have you ever had a day when your stomach felt like a bottomless pit and that no matter how much you ate, you just didn’t feel full or satisfied? What if there were ways to fill your stomach so that you would feel full faster, yet end up consuming fewer calories overall? Would you try them?

Well, there’s good news. There are a number of healthy “tricks” you can use to feel full faster, meaning you’re less likely to overeat, take in too many calories and ultimately gain weight.

Click here to find out these healthy “tricks”.

In the mid-1960s about two out of every five adults smoked. Today it’s more like one in five. However, although smoking rates have been dropping for decades, they actually are on thhe rise according to a national survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

By now most people are well aware of the health hazards of cigarettes and other forms of tobacco. The CDC states:

“Tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. Each year, an estimated 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, and another 8.6 million have a serious illness caused by smoking.

For every person who dies from smoking, 20 more people suffer from at least one serious tobacco-related illness. Despite these risks, approximately 43.4 million U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. Smokeless tobacco, cigars, and pipes also have deadly consequences, including lung, larynx, esophageal, and oral cancers.”

The best way to prevent these illnesses, of course, is to quit smoking – a task the majority of smokers say they want to do. According to the American Heart Association:

“More than four in five smokers say they want to quit. And each year about 1.3 million smokers do quit. With good smoking cessation programs, 20 to 40 percent of participants are able to quit smoking and stay off cigarettes for at least one year.”

Click here to read more.

In this, the last post of the year, I reflect back over the changes in medicine this year.

The transition from modern medicine just looking at “drugs and bugs”, to the issues that we have been discussing in Integrative Medicine for decades, is overwhelmingly strong.

It seems that more and more articles in mainstream journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, andLancet, discuss issues that integrative medicine has been talking about for these so many years.

Gut Microbiota

One of the biggest new areas of research are the friendly bacteria in our intestinal tract. This is called the “Gut Microbiota”.

A recent article in Medscape (You will need to register to read it) is entitled The Shifting Microbial Landscape. The article points out, as I’ve mentioned to my patients and readers for many years, that the human DNA contains only approximately 23,000 genes. Experts could not figure out why so few genes could carry out the biological diversity that we see among human beings. It seemed our genome should have a million genes or more to allow for this.

More and more research is now showing that part of what determines how our body functions, as well as our individual traits, is probably not coming just from our own genes but the also genes of trillions of microorganisms that reside on and in our body.

It is estimated that the genomes of the bacteria and viruses inside the human intestinal tract alone encode for 3.3 million genes. “They serve as a buffer and interpreter of our environment. We are chimeric organisms”, says Jayne Danska, an immunologist at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute in Ontario Canada.

New research is showing that “transplanting”fecal material from a healthy individual to a patient with inflammatory bowel disease, can often “cure” their bowel problems. There is a lot of research on this now as it is encouraged by the FDA

I encourage all my readers to take a very powerful, preferably physician-quality, probiotic every day, such as the one I recommend at my Healthy Living Shop.

Environmental Medicine

Another major trend among conventional medicine which follows those of us who have been practicing environmental medicine for many years is the realization that the chemicals in our environment can have profound effects on human health.

In this article, the European Union says that pesticides may harm human brains. And in Europe they are setting new, much stricter safety standards for a category of pesticide called the neonicotiniod family of chemicals.

Another recently published article shows the effect of Mercury levels on adult human cognition.I discussed this in a previous issue of my newsletter.

This article from the prestigious Annals of Oncology, talks about the emerging epidemic of environmental cancers in developing countries

And I am delighted that my friend Marissa Weiss, M.D., has added an entire section to breastcancer.org on the subject of “Think Pink, Live Green. As you know from my writings in the past year, which will continue in the new year, environmental toxicity is a huge contributor to the epidemic of breast cancer that we have in our country and in the world now.

In summary what used to be called “Alternative” is no longer that at all. Orthodox medicine has laid claim to many of the teachings of Integrative Medicine over the past decades, and proceeding with research that moves our science forward.

This can only serve to spread our knowledge and inform all the people of our country, on healthy lifestyles and healthy habits to bring good health to our country and the world.

Roasted turkey with homemade stuffing, maple-glazed ham, cheesy potato casseroles, pumpkin pie and other calorie-laden desserts made from scratch represent a sense of comfort and with that comes the temptation to eat in excess. The holiday feasting and indulging starts on Thanksgiving and continues on through New Year’s Day, a time when resolutions are made — and most center on getting back in shape.

Along with looking forward to spending time with family and loved ones over the holidays comes an equal share of stress and anxiety that often set off triggers that cause us to overeat.

Some people may be able to stop after a slice of mom’s homemade apple pie, but for others who suffer from binge eating disorders, a condition in which people cannot control the amount of food they eat, the one piece of pie sets off a chain reaction of needing more sweets to fulfill the craving, rendering them unable to stop eating.

“That pie often opens the floodgates to cravings, and many of us have spent holiday season after holiday season telling ourselves to have just one little treat,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Denise Lamothe, a leading expert on emotional eating and resident psychologist for Bach Original Flower Remedies.“Instead we binge our way through, not only the holiday season, but also well beyond the New Year.”

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Stress is as much a part of American culture as a cheeseburger and fries … and it can be just as risky to your health. Even if you aren’t facing any major troubles, just going about your daily routine — getting the kids ready for school, driving to the office, trying to hook up phone service, etc. – can expose you to loads of it.

At the least, stress is a nuisance and just plain doesn’t feel good. It can manifest in a number of different ways. You may:

• Feel distracted or anxious
• Worry excessively
• Feel nervous
• Be tired or irritable
• Gain weight

That’s right — just being stressed out can cause you to gain weight, according to the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation. “Under stress, people conserve more fat, and we think that may be what’s going on here,” says psychologist and study co-author Tené Lewis of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Click here to read more.