Why, you might ask, should we spend more time thinking about the link between diabetes and erectile dysfunction? Well, the answer comes in three stages. Whether you prefer to read and believe the World Health Organization’s alarming reports showing the spread of obesity, or you prefer to believe the evidence of your own eyes as you walk (sorry, drive) down Main Street every day, there are more overweight people than ever before. Every aspect of our lives is changing because of this increase in physical size, not the least being the dramatic rise in the incidence of type II diabetes. Medical science long ago identified the cause and effect. People who are overweight have a significantly higher risk of late-onset diabetes than thin people. Finally, even though men are reluctant to talk about their sexual difficulties, the research fairly consistently shows about three-quarters of all diabetic men suffer some degree of erectile dysfunction. Sadly, if the diabetes is not positively controlled, the damage to the nerve endings does reach the point when the dysfunction tips over into permanent impotence. Unlike muscles and soft tissue, nerves cannot and do not heal themselves.
As some encouragement, there’s continuing research at the Case Western Reserve University. The team is using proteomics. This looks at how proteins relate to the genetic information processed through and controlling our bodies. Recently, they have been studying the way in which proteins work in the penis. This is relevant in two ways. Firstly in the action of the smooth muscles in the arteries to dilate and contract, and secondly in the corpus cavernosum which expands when the extra blood flows into the penis. Their findings show the number of proteins and their activity levels changes depending on whether the male is diabetic and the length of time the diabetes has been active. The most important of these proteins delivers collagen where it’s required. This is important to build strength. Of similar importance are the proteins that transport the hormones and those that help maintain the cells in a healthy condition. Although this has been an animal study using rats, there are a high number of proteins associated with cell death in the penis of a diabetic rat. more…
In the midst of all the debate about environmental issues, we are too often distracted by the hot button climate change. Yet controlling carbon emissions is only one of many different concerns about how we live our lives and the impact our lifestyles have on our environment. If we are to hand over a habitable planet to our children, we have to start thinking about every aspect of the systems currently in use and how we might make them safer. One of the less obvious questions is how we dispose of our unwanted drugs. There are a number of quite different issues. One day, you open the bathroom cabinet and find unexpected rows of half-empty bottles and packs of pills, all of which have passed their use-by dates. For a moment, you pause and wonder whether you should do something. Then your eye catches the toothbrush and life goes on for another month or so.
Why worry?
Well, the statistics are interesting. In some parts of the country, more people accidentally poison themselves, become hooked on addictive drugs or die of drug overdoses than die in traffic accidents. That should give you pause for thought. The number of deaths from traffic accidents is already an epidemic but, when you collect the statistics from emergency departments around the country, one of the largest groups of people admitted for treatment is suffering drug-related problems. Children are common admissions. Instead of having lockable cabinets, parents store drugs in places easily accessible by children and family members, friends and neighbors with addiction problems. Children are often tempted by brightly colored pills, thinking them candy. Adults can raid your stash of unwanted drugs to feed their addiction. But how should you dispose of these pills?
The temptation is to flush them away. Except this dumps a cocktail of drugs into the sewers that drain into our rivers and seas. Downstream, the water is drawn out by another city or town but the water purification plants cannot remove all these chemicals. The result is that the downstream population consumes a dilute mixture of your drugs. Fish and animals you might eat also drink the water, treated and untreated, so there’s a big circle of life with drugs recycling through the food chain. more…
There is a wonderful idiom, several times used as the title to a movie and offering the comparative warning, “It shouldn’t happen to a dog.” It refers to some proposed act or omission that is so unpleasant to humans, it should not even be wished on a dog (being a mere animal, it might be expected to bear most things, but not this). Human culture has grown up with animals a part of our lives. Whether as pets, living as one of the family in our own homes, or as working beasts, we value them for “who” they are and what they can do for us. This means treating them in much the same way as humans. If they get sick, we give them our medications. Sometimes, they retaliate by acting as incubators to encourage viruses to mutate and, as with “swine” or “bird” flu, return the favor by passing us infections to which we have no resistance. But, in general, we worry about them. Even the animals we propose to eat are stuffed full of antibiotics to keep them fit and healthy. So, keeping this real, there are many protections we have put in place for our animals. The most carefully monitored rules affect horses. These powerful animals have become a key part of the gambling industry, running in races for our excitement and jumping fences for our admiration.
As with most sports, the fear is that horses dosed with stimulants and other drugs might run faster and/or jump higher. Think Barry Bonds and the debate about the use of steroids in Major League Baseball for an understanding of the passion in the world of racing and equestrian sports. At the top of the sport, the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) carried out detailed research in the early part of this century and concluded it was unsafe to allow horses to compete if they were relying on painkillers. In 2004, the Federation moved toward a zero-tolerance policy. This was approved by the Veterinary Committee and representatives of the different national bodies. The risk of seriously injuring the horses was too great and this protective care was strongly endorsed by horse-lovers around the world. Horses should only be used when they are completely fit. It’s therefore somewhat surprising to see the FEI change the policy to allow the use of a range of painkillers. Indeed, the decision has provoked outrage. more…
One of the ways in which the government attracts our attention is by having a series of steps to move from “no reason to panic” to “run for your life!” The classic example of this is the Homeland Security’s “Advisory System”. This moves from a Low Green, through a Guarded Blue, an Elevated Yellow, a High Orange to a Severe Red. For those of you who have lost interest, we are currently at yellow when we walk around the streets of our cities, but orange the moment we take to the air. The same thing recently happened with swine flu that was rapidly renamed the H1N1 flu to avoid the sale of pork dropping through the floor. The World Health Organization ratchets up the warning through eight phases, taking us from, “It’s mainly just the birds and animals dying”, to “Now humans are dying too” through “It’s a pandemic” to two phases where we gradually get back to business as usual. In case you were sleeping, we are currently still at the pandemic level of alert even though not many are dying. Actually, when you think about it, this sounds a bit hard-hearted but, in a regular flue season, thousands die. We have apparently been lucky the H1N1 outbreak proved mild.
Putting this another way, it was the intention of the DHS to worry us. If we are vigilant, we may identify unusual behavior in those around us and help prevent a terrorist attack. Equally, the WHO wanted us to take the threat of the flu seriously and protect ourselves by wearing a mask, washing our hands frequently, and so on. People only modify their behavior if you give them a reason to change. To that extent, some worry or anxiety about terrorism or the flu is entirely rational. But it can become irrational where, if the news headline is that ten people have just died of flu in Indonesia, you break out in a sweat, your heart races, your stomach churns and your bowels threaten to open. This is not in any way to suggest we should not be sad if people die in foreign countries. But to showing an overreaction suggests generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The latest research estimate is that about 5% of the US population suffers GAD. Except there will be a range of behavior from background worry to disordered anxiety, and where people fit into the range is likely to change from day to day and their diagnosis will depend on when a doctor sees them. more…
When people start speaking about insomnia there’s usually a lot of confusion involved. Some people think that it’s a very serious health condition that threatens the patient with no sleep for weeks, months and years. Others think that only by using strong prescription drugs and going to the doctor on a regular basis will help overcome this condition. But if you save yourself from the common beliefs and start operating with pure facts, it’s much easier to understand what insomnia really is and how it can be treated. Here are seven facts you have to know about the most common sleep disorder that affects millions of people in US alone each year:
1. Insomnia is not a uniform sleep disorder. In fact, it has different gradations and specialists classify three most common types of insomnia: transient, short-term and chronic insomnia. Each type of insomnia has different duration and periodical characteristics that make it easier for the doctors to classify and treat these sleep disorders.
2. Insomnia effects go far beyond the simple lack of sleep and poor concentration abilities the next day. Things like bad mood, irritability, impaired coordination, drowsiness, memory problems, loss of focus, low stress threshold, loss of appetite, depression and hallucinations are just a part of the whole list of problems you can experience while not getting enough sleep for a long period of time.
3. There’s a wide range of conditions and factors that can be the actual cause for insomnia: jet lag, stress, work shift changes, depression, bad sleeping space, use of medications, substance abuse, health conditions, overexhaustion, poor diet, improper food or activity schedule, and much more. more…
Whenever you go online, there are headlines everywhere. Some attract our attention and we click through to find out more. Others strike no chord and our lack of knowledge continues. Looking back over the last ten years, it’s become impossible to avoid learning about the risks associated with obesity. Everyone makes the link between this condition and an “epidemic” – a word referring to diseases and disorders. The majority accept that eating a healthy diet and exercising on a regular basis is the way to protect our health. Unfortunately, fewer people make the link between lack of sleep and the same list of diseases affecting the overweight. We tend to rate sleep disorders low on the scale of dangers. If we have a bad night’s sleep, it’s difficult the next day. No-one relates loss of sleep to diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
Why worry? Because, thanks to the stresses and pressures of modern life, the majority of us are sleeping less than we did two generations ago. We used to sleep an average of nine hours a night. Now the average has dropped to seven-and-a-half. In part, this is due to longer commutes and more time spent at work. When you finally get home, there’s the family and things to do. You want to catch the latest episodes of your must-watch television series, chat with friends online. There are so many distractions to keep us from going to bed. And then, even if we lie down, we may still be thinking about the last exciting pass through the social networking site, electronic games, the latest music, the argument with your partner for not spending more time with him or her, [insert whatever you find keeps you awake].
No matter what people tell you, the ability to work well on less than five hours sleep a night is very rare. Indeed, the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that people sleeping less than seven hours release stress hormones and this increases the risk of heart disease. The National Cancer Institute proves a link between less sleep and cancer. Ten years ago, a study published in Lancet showed men deprived of sleep with glucose and lipid levels close to those associated with diabetes. People who sleep an average of five hours are 73% more likely to become obese. At present, the research shows no consistent pattern of cause and effect. When someone is diagnosed with heart disease is that caused by the stress, or was the stress only the trigger for lack of sleep which caused the disease? There is a real need for research into the role sleep plays in our lives. more…
It’s never a happy thought, but we are all getting older. Those of us boomers are into our sixties now with the rest of the pack starting to catch up. This is the time when things really start going wrong with our bodies. Most of us have been lucky up to now. But despite the best efforts of medical science, there’s no pill to slow down the years. Worse, the most likely first symptom of age is going to be erectile dysfunction. All those high cholesterol meals we crammed away will come back to bite us as layers of platelets build up on the walls of our blood vessels. Some call this arteriosclerosis, others artherosclerosis. Whichever name, the result is the same. The muscles in the walls of the arteries needed to dilate start to fail. Without the dilation, there can be no erection. It’s an unhappy thought, but loss of sexual power can be the first symptom of a lifestyle with too much fat and too little exercise. When someone invents a time machine, we can go back and give ourselves good advice. Until then, we have to make the best of our golden years.
Curiously, the world is growing old with us. When we were young and living through the fifties, the television was a novelty. Replacing the radio and its world of advertiser-sponsored programs came the future with moving images and all the new ads. They were simple sales pitches, very naive by modern standards. But they got the message across. And what were those messages? Well, for the most part, housewives were told what food to put on our plates, what drinks to offer us. Then came the things to make the household run smoothly and the latest model vehicle to get us from A to B. In between were sometimes disturbing news reports which grew worse as we came into the sixties and the Russians took over Cuba as a missile base on our doorstep. In some senses, it’s actually more relaxing to have the modern coverage of world events. For the most part, our media have forgotten the need to tell us what’s happening outside our shores. It’s more important to package our local politics as the news and give us the messages most important to those controlling the content. The ads have changed as well. The networks have decided the silver-haired crowd has the buying power. We boomers hold what’s left of the purse strings. So we need to know about the adhesive to keep our dentures in place, heat wraps to keep the arthritis pain under control and the latest pills to keep Alzheimer’s away. Oh, and the pills to keep our sex lives going. more…
One of the things supposed to make America the best place in the world to live is its free market economy. If you listen to the propaganda, you believe you can buy anything you want in the US and, for the most part, the power of competition forces all traders and service providers to keep their prices low. Supposedly, if you don’t like the price or the quality of what’s on offer from one supplier, you can take your business elsewhere. This is all great in theory, but it breaks down when you get on to the subject of intellectual property rights. Now you can’t download music from anyone except iTunes and the roof falls on your head if you start up a business selling sodas and call it Pepsi. The idea of copyright or trademarks is simple. If you wrote the music and the lyrics, you own the rights and everyone has to pay to listen to them. Equally, anyone who brands a business gets a monopoly on the use of the name. No other business can copy your name and pass off its products as the brand. The predatory way in which all this works is most obvious in the patent market where anyone with a new idea can get a monopoly to exploit it. If anyone else tries to copy it, courts are quick to issue an injunction and damages follow. You can’t have failed to see news of the big cases between the technology companies, arguing who has the rights to mobile phones and hand-held devices.
Out of the public eye, the drug manufacturers protect their monopolies. They rely on local patents to keep the competition out of the US market and a lot of propaganda to slime the online pharmacies as unsafe places to buy your must-have drugs. Of course, they are more worried about the cheaper prices charged by the online pharmacies taking their business away rather than public safety. But the message comes out continuously and strong. Wherever possible, the manufacturers avoid court cases. This can be bad publicity. The common strategy is to pay foreign manufacturers not to make generic copies. But, every now and again, the foreign company will not play ball, i.e. it asks for too much money. So now we see Pfizer taking an Israeli company to court. This is Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd and it’s one of the larger generic manufacturers. In 2004, it applied to the FDA for a licence to make and sell as generic version of viagra. The FDA has indicated its willingness to grant the licence, but has yet to actually do so. If it does, the licensed generic version will eat into Pfizer’s profits. Hence, the action seeking an injunction to prevent Teva from launching the generic. more…
There’s new research from the University of California that states the problems surrounding older people and their sleep, while offering few solutions. This is a somewhat sad trend when it comes to research affecting the aging members of our society. When people are younger and more energetic, they will contribute to the growth and development of the American way of life. Equally important is their personal earning capacity. To maintain their quality of life, they will often pay the medical profession well. Those who are older have less to contribute and, while some do have money, there’s less that can be done to improve the quality of life when bodies have aged. Although Sarah Palin was exaggerating the threat of “death panels” to drum up opposition to reform, we have a comparable effect already in the rationing of research into the health problems of the old, and in the poor quality of healthcare services in the geriatric sector. People do have shorter lives in the US than in many other countries around the world.
According to the research, about half the seniors in the US complain of difficulty in sleeping. It’s suggested that lack of sleep increases the risk of illness and early death. The question, therefore, is why seniors do find sleep more difficult. The answers are not directly related to age as such, but to the facts that older people are more prone to diseases and disorders, use more medications which have insomnia as a side effect, and find their circadian rhythms disrupted. Unfortunately, the research also finds the healthcare service is not sympathetic to these problems and fails to properly diagnose sleep disorders or give the appropriate treatment (including simply adjusting the dosages in medications probably contributing to the sleep disorder). At present, there’s no financial incentive for hospitals and clinics to divert resources to treat these problems. Although seniors can use their own savings to go to professional sleep laboratories for overnight assessment with a polysomnogram, the necessary follow-up treatments through counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy is often neglected because it’s not considered cost-effective. Necessary dentistry or, where appropriate, surgery is a one-off cost and preferred where appropriate. But, for the most part, seniors are left to fend for themselves. more…
For some, there are threats everywhere. They fear the world is dangerous and, unless they stay in a constant state of vigilance, their lives will be at risk. In a small number of cases, this gets out of control and tips into paranoia and mental disorder. For the majority, it”s an exaggerated caution because they do not understand how modern technology works. They see how dangerous electricity can be and so are cautious when using powered equipment, particularly when that involves the use of “radiation”. Now there”s a word to get the conspiracy theorists into action. Yet, from a scientific point of view, you cannot escape the fact that television and computer screens give off electromagnetic radiation (EMR), handphones rely on microwave broadcasts, and then there”s light. In coherent form as a laser, it can potentially blind people. As it shines from the sun, we can see our way and, with appropriate protection from ultraviolet, live healthy lives.
The white light we “see” is in fact made up of all the colors blended together. Each color has a property of its own and you may have seen increasing publicity given to light as a treatment for skin problems like acne. When it”s projected from a TV or computer screen, you get both the EMR and light in the visible spectrum, often with a slightly bluish tinge. For the treatment of skin problems, blue and red are used. For the treatment of sleep disorders, blue and green are being used in a series of clinical trials. It”s perhaps slightly ironic, but those who felt an effect from television and computer screens were probably right, except that the effect seems to be beneficial if you want to change your sleeping times.
We know when to sleep because our internal clock is set to match the local daily cycle. If we move to different time zones so that morning is now night, this confuses us and we find it difficult to match local time for sleep. As a trial, a number of people were cut off from the world in rooms without windows or clocks. There was no way for them to tell how much time was passing. The research team kept them awake for fifty hours and then allowed sleep for eight. When awake, half were exposed to blue light, the other to green. All the participants were carefully monitored and it was found that both colors could reset the internal clocks. The only difference between the two groups was that dim blue and bright green lights were less effective. The relevant neurotransmitters and hormones responded more precisely to bright blue and dim green. more…
