Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:15:48 +0000 From: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Subject: One Dose of Swine Flu Vaccine is Effective Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories): 1. One Dose of Swine Flu Vaccine is Effective 2. Dates are Good for Your Heart 3. Barely Any Smoking Raises Lifetime Breast Cancer Risk 4. Sleep Helps Reduce Memory Errors 5. Mental Disorders May Be Twice as Common as Thought Sponsor Forever Young Getting old can be awful. Aches... pains... illness... constant bouncing from doctor to doctor. We all dread it. You can't stop the clock, but you can banish the miseries that sometimes come with it. Bulging belly Cholesterol-choked arteries Brain failure and fatigue Weakness and impotence Frozen joints or back pain Spotted, decrepit skin Tumors taking over your body Parkinson's tremors Menopausal miseries Fading, cloudy vision And all other indignities of aging! Read on... 1. One Dose of Swine Flu Vaccine is Effective Good news in the world's flu fight: One dose of the new swine flu vaccine looks strong enough to protect adults — and can spark protection within 10 days of the shot, Australian and U.S. researchers said Thursday. Australian shot maker CSL Ltd. published results of a study that found between 75 percent and 96 percent of vaccinated people should be protected with one dose — the same degree of effectiveness as the regular winter flu shot. That's remarkable considering scientists thought it would take two doses. U.S. data to be released Friday confirm those findings, and show the protection starts rapidly, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health told The Associated Press. This is quite good news, Fauci said. The dose question has an important ramification: It means people will have to line up for influenza vaccinations twice this year instead of three times — once for the regular winter flu shot and a second time to be inoculated against swine flu, what doctors call the 2009 H1N1 strain. Thursday's swine flu vaccine reports center on adults; studies in children aren't finished yet. But scientists had feared that people of all ages would need two shots about a month apart because the new H1N1 strain is so genetically different from normally circulating flu strains that most of the population has little if any immunity. Chinese manufacturers gave the first hint a week ago that one dose could be enough. But different manufacturers make different formulations of the vaccine, so more evidence was needed. Thus the CSL study, rushed out by the New England Journal of Medicine late Thursday, is welcome news. In a study of 240 adults, half younger than 50 and half over, one shot prompted the same kind of immune response indicating protection that is seen with regular flu vaccine. And a standard 15-microgram dose — not the double dose that also was tested — was enough. Copyright AP 2. Dates are Good for Your Heart Dates are very sweet but they don't raise blood sugar levels and do help protect against the clogging of arteries (atherosclerosis), according to new research at the Rambam Medical Center and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. According to a study by Technion Prof. Michael Aviram that will soon be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, dates offer a bonanza of health benefits. They improve cholesterol profiles and suppress the oxygenization of cholesterol, which causes fatty plaque to stick to the endothelium of the vessels in the heart and those leading to the brain. Aviram has long studied the benefits of specific fruits and vegetables on health and was the first to cite the pomegranate, red wine (grapes) and olive oil in suppressing the development of heart disease and stroke. There was a suspicion that dates are sugar bombs, said the Technion/Rambam researcher. But studies on healthy people found that eating 100 grams of dates a day for a month did not cause an increase in blood sugar but did significantly bring down levels of triglyceride fats in the blood. It also minimized oxygenization of cholesterol. He studied two date varieties - Halawi and Medjool - and found that Halawi dates were slightly better at protecting against atherosclerosis than the Medjool, though both are beneficial. Copyright Jerusalem Post 3. Barely Any Smoking Raises Lifetime Breast Cancer Risk Women taking the next puff of a cigarette might consider this: smoking 100 or more cigarettes may substantially increase their odds of developing breast cancer, researchers report. Previous studies _link_ed regular exercise, limiting alcohol intake, and avoiding postmenopausal obesity as life_style_ changes that can reduce women's odds of developing breast cancer, notes Dr. Ivana T. Croghan and colleagues in The Breast Journal. The current study provides new evidence that a woman smoker can reduce her risk of breast cancer by stopping smoking as soon as possible, Croghan commented to Reuters Health via email. Croghan's group compared smoking history and other breast cancer risk factors among 1,225 women who developed breast cancer and 6,872 who did not during the first year after their initial visit to the Mayo Clinic Breast Clinic. Surveys completed during this visit indicated just over 10 percent were current smokers, almost 9 percent were former smokers, and 81 percent had never smoked, Croghan, with the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Research Program in Rochester, Minnesota, and associates report. In addition to the _link_ with smoking, women who had used oral contraceptives for 11 years or longer had a whopping 200 percent increase in the odds of developing breast cancer. Women who used postmenopausal hormone therapy showed 81 percent increased odds, while aging raised the odds of developing breast cancer by 2 percent per year. On the flip side, Croghan and colleagues report that having a hysterectomy decreased women's odds by 35 percent. SOURCE: The Breast Journal, September/October 2009 Copyright Reuters 4. Sleep Helps Reduce Memory Errors Sleep may reduce mistakes in memory, according to a first-of-its-kind study led by a cognitive neuroscientist at Michigan State University. The findings, which appear in the September issue of the journal Learning & Memory, have practical implications for everyone from students flubbing multiple choice tests to senior citizens confusing their medications, said Kimberly Fenn, principal investigator and MSU assistant professor of psychology. “It’s easy to muddle things in your mind,” Fenn said. “This research suggests that after sleep you’re better able to tease apart the incorrect aspect of that memory.” Fenn and colleagues from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis studied the presence of false memory in groups of college students. While previous research has shown that sleep improves memory, this study is the first to address errors in memory, she said. Study participants were exposed to lists of words and then, 12 hours later, exposed to individual words and asked to identify which words they had seen or heard in the earlier session. One group of students was trained in the morning (10 a.m.) and tested after the course of a normal sleepless day (10 p.m.), while another group was trained at night and tested 12 hours later in the morning, after at least six hours of sleep. Three experiments were conducted, using different stimuli. In each, the students who had slept had fewer problems with false memory – choosing fewer incorrect words. How does sleep help? The answer isn’t known, Fenn said, but she suspects it may be due to sleep strengthening the source of the memory. The source, or context in which the information is acquired, is a vital element of the memory process. Or perhaps the people who didn’t sleep during the study were simply bombarded with information over the course of the day, affecting their memory ability, Fenn said. Further research is warranted, she said, adding that she plans to study different population groups, particularly the elderly. “We know older individuals generally have worse memory performance than younger individuals. We also know from other research that elderly individuals tend to be more prone to false memories,” Fenn said. “Given the work we’ve done it’s possible that sleep may actually help them to reject this false information. And potentially this could help to improve their quality of life in some way.” 5. Mental Disorders May Be Twice as Common as Thought The prevalence of anxiety, depression and substance dependency may be twice as high as the mental health community has been led to believe. It depends on how one goes about measuring. Duke University psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi and colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand used a long-term tracking study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 32 to reach the conclusion that people vastly underreport the amount of mental illness they've suffered when asked to recall their history years after the fact. But such self-reporting from memory is the basis of much of what we know about the prevalence of anxiety, depression, alcohol dependence and marijuana dependence. Longitudinal studies like the Dunedin Study in New Zealand that track people over time are rare and expensive, Moffitt said. If you start with a group of children and follow them their whole lives, sooner or later almost everybody will experience one of these disorders, said Moffitt, the Knut Schmitt-Nielsen professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. The Great Smoky Mountains Study, a similar effort _base_d at Duke, has tracked 1,400 American children from age 9-13 into their late 20s and found similar patterns, said Jane Costello, a professor medical psychology at Duke who runs the study. I think we've got to get used to the idea that mental illness is actually very common, Costello said. People are growing up impaired, untreated and not functioning to their full capacity because we've ignored it. The best retrospective studies, the US National Comorbidity Surveys (NCS) and the New Zealand Mental Health Survey, have found the incidence of depression from ages 18 to 32 at a rate of about 18 percent. But they have been roundly criticized by some for their rates being too high. The latest analysis from the Dunedin Study found 41 percent of that age range had experienced clinically significant depression. Similarly, the survey studies have reported a 6 to 17 percent lifetime rate of alcohol dependence between ages 18-32, versus nearly 32 percent in the Dunedin Study. Guidelines published by the American Psychiatric Association that set the bar for defining what is and isn't a treatable illness are currently being revised by a rewriting of the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But given the findings of these longitudinal studies, the stringency of the diagnostic criteria might need to be reconsidered, said Moffitt, who is on the committee writing the new DSM-Vstandards. Researchers might begin to ask why so many people experience a disorder at least once during their lifetimes and what this means for the way we define mental health, deliver services and count the economic burdens of mental illness, Moffitt said. On the one hand, it could be argued that the diagnostic standards have been set too low if so many people can be considered mentally ill. On the other hand, perhaps these findings argue for more and better mental health care because the disorders are more common than anyone had realized. Editor's Notes: Getting old can be awful — banish the miseries that sometimes come with it. This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this Newsmax e-mail because you subscribed to it or someone forwarded it to you. To opt out, see the _link_s below. TO ADVERTISE For information on advertising, please contact Newsmax Advertising Sales via e-mail. TO SUBSCRIBE If this e-mail has been forwarded to you and would like a sub_script_ion, please sign up here. Remove your e-mail address from our list or modify your profile. We respect your right to privacy. View our policy. This e-mail was sent by: Newsmax.com 4152 W. 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