Thursday, July 26, 2007

CAT CAN PREDICT DEATH 7-26-07

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.
Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill they probably don't know he's there, so patients aren't aware he's a harbinger of death. Most families are grateful for the advanced warning, although one wanted Oscar out of the room while a family member died. When Oscar is put outside, he paces and meows his displeasure.
No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.
If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.
Nursing home staffers aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying.

Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his "compassionate hospice care."

OBESITY IS CONTAGIOUS 7-26-07

The list of reasons a person might pack on too many pounds is already plenty long: genes, hormone disorders, a couch-potato lifestyle, love of cheeseburgers. Thanks to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, you can add another culprit to the list: friends.

Obesity spreads through social networks, according to the study, so if your friends put on weight, you’re more likely to put on the pounds, too. Your family members or spouse can also influence you; as they get heavier, you’re more likely to gain along with them. But, your friends—even if they don’t live anywhere near you—have the most sway. A close friend’s weight gain can even be downright dangerous.

“If your close friend becomes obese in a given time interval, there’s triple the risk that you will follow suit,” says Nicholas Christakis, a coauthor of the study, which was published Wednesday and a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School. “Before you know it you have an obesity epidemic, where we're all kind of gaining weight together, like a fashion spreading through society, rising in lockstep.”

The research—which Richard Suzman, director of the National Institute on Aging’s Behavioral and Social Research Program, calls “one of the most exciting studies in medical sociology that I have seen in decades”—focuses on 12,067 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a multidecade government health-research project. Each participant was asked to name a list of friends and family members when he or she joined the program in 1971. Then the participants and their friends and family were tracked over the years.

When one person in the study became obese, his siblings’ risk of also becoming obese jumped by 40 percent, while his spouse’s risk jumped by 37 percent. More strikingly, if that person had been named as a “friend” by another participant, the second participant’s risk of becoming obese shot up by 57 percent. If the friends were of the same gender, the risk was even higher, at 71 percent. (The study found a man’s weight gain would have no significant effect on his female friend’s weight, and vice versa, but the study did not have many male-female friendships to examine.) If the friends were particularly close—judged in the study by the fact that they both named each other on their lists of loved ones—the risk that one’s weight would follow the others’ increased by a whopping 171 percent.

Even people who’d never met each other were affecting each other in a six-degrees-of-separation way. If your friend’s friend’s friend, or your friend’s sibling’s friend, gains weight, “that will have a subtle effect on you over the course of two to four years,” says James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and the other coauthor of the study. “When we change our own lifestyle and become heavier or thinner, that has a ripple effect through the whole population.”

The study’s effects don’t just come down to the idea that thin people seek out other thin people as friends, while heavy people seek out other heavy people. In fact, what’s going on is much more interesting, according to the researchers: heavy and thin people are causing their friends to become more like them. The reason people have such a powerful effect on each other’s weight is hinted at by one of the study’s most intriguing findings, says Fowler: “Friends who are hundreds of miles away from you have as much of an effect as friends who are [geographically] close.”

Obesity, then, doesn’t spread among friends simply because they're hanging out together, “going out to eat at the same places or going to the bar or going to the park and running together,” he says. “It’s spreading through ideas about what appropriate behaviors are, or what an appropriate body image might be.” In other words, if you admire your friend and she happens to get heavier, you’ll be comfortable with the idea of getting heavier yourself. “If I see you gaining weight, and I respect you, and want to emulate you in other ways, that changes my ideas about what is an acceptable body size. I think, 'All my buddies are getting obese, so it's OK for me to be obese too',” says Christakis. “And even if you’re 1,000 miles away, or I only see you once a year, that’s enough to transmit the norm.”

The study suggests a new explanation for the obesity epidemic, says Matthew Gillman, director of the Obesity Prevention Program at Harvard Medical School. “Genes can certainly affect whether one individual is obese rather than the other, but they can’t really explain the obesity epidemic, because they haven’t really changed in the last 30 years,” he says. True, plenty of changes in American society have contributed to the epidemic: most obviously, an increase in fatty, carb-heavy processed foods and a decrease in built-in daily exercise. But social networks have changed, too. Compared to the years before the epidemic started, Americans also now have more ways to keep in contact with their loved ones, such as e-mail, instant-messaging and videoconferencing. The study suggests that the obesity norms could indeed be transmitted via those technologies; a friend 1,000 miles away can still send an e-mail bemoaning his recent weight gain.

There’s still a lot left to figure out about these new dynamics of obesity. One question the research brings up, but fails to completely answer, is where neighbors fit into the picture. They appear to have no influence: if your neighbor becomes obese, your risk of doing likewise doesn’t change. It’s unclear why neighbors aren’t playing a larger role, although Christakis notes that if you don’t particularly admire or even know your neighbors, you're not likely to base your ideas about body size on theirs.

The study also brings up several other questions: Why are same-sex friendships and relationships so much more influential over weight than male-female friendships are? Where does the ripple effect stop? Does the same dynamic apply to other behavior-related health problems, such as drinking, smoking and risky sexual behavior? It may be some time before researchers fully know the answers.

It’s not too early, however, for public-health officials to start thinking about the study’s implications. Over the last 25 years, obesity in the United States has doubled; 66 percent of Americans are overweight and 32 percent are on the next level, classified as obese, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And measures to combat the problem aren’t bringing those numbers down. “We see no evidence that the obesity epidemic has peaked,” says Christakis. And it’s possible the epidemic won’t peak until weight-loss groups and health advocates start taking social ties into account. But in a way, that's good news, says Fowler: “The flip side of this is that thinness is contagious, too." If you really want to lose weight, he adds, maybe you should encourage some of your buddies to trim down as well.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

MOVING SOON? 7-25-07

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So, before you get to carried away, make sure you check out the Relocation.com website for professional guidance on how to make that big move a easy transition.

Good luck to all!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

FREE ONLINE DATING 7-24-07

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DIET SODA / HEART RISKS 7-24-07

Study: Diet Soda Linked to Heart Risks

BOSTON (AP) -- People who drank one or more diet sodas each day developed the same risks for heart disease as those who downed sugary regular soda, a large but inconclusive study found. The results surprised the researchers who expected to see a difference between regular and diet soda drinkers.
It could be, they suggest, that even no-calorie sweet drinks increase the craving for more sweets, and that people who indulge in sodas probably have less healthy diets overall.
The study's senior author, Dr. Vasan Ramachandran, emphasized the findings don't show diet sodas are a cause of increased heart disease risks. But he said they show a surprising link that must be studied.
"It's intriguing and it begs an explanation by people who are qualified to do studies to understand this better," said Vasan, of Boston University School of Medicine.
However, a nutrition expert dismissed the study's findings on diet soda drinkers.
"There's too much contradictory evidence that shows that diet beverages are healthier for you in terms of losing weight that I would not put any credence to the result on the diet (drinks)," said Barry Popkin, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who has called for cigarette-style surgeon general warnings about the negative health effects of soda.
Susan Neely, president of the American Beverage Association, said the notion that diet drinks are associated with bulging waistlines defies common sense.
"How can something with zero calories that's 99 percent water with a little flavoring in it ... cause weight gain?" she said.
The research comes from a massive, multi-generational heart study following residents of Framingham, Mass., a town about 25 miles west of Boston. The new study of 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women was published Monday online in the journal Circulation.
The researchers found those who drank one or more sodas a day - diet or regular - had an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, compared to those who drank sodas infrequently. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that increase the risk for heart disease including large waistlines and higher levels of blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides.
At the start of the study, those who reported drinking one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent increased prevalence of metabolic syndrome compared to those who drank less soda.
Of participants who initially showed no signs of metabolic syndrome, those who drank one or more sodas a day were at 44 percent higher risk of developing it four years later, they reported.
Researchers expected the results to differ when regular soda and diet soda drinkers were compared, and were surprised when they did not, Vasan said.
But Popkin said that result isn't that surprising. He said much of the market for diet sodas are people who have unhealthy lifestyles and know they need to lose weight - with the other portion being thin people who want to stay that way. That means many people drinking diet sodas have unhealthy habits that could lead to increased heart disease risks, whether they drink diet soda or not.
In studies in which some users were randomly given diet sodas and others were given regular soda, diet soda drinkers lost weight and regular soda drinkers gained weight, Popkin said.
In a statement, the American Heart Association said it supports dietary patterns that include low-calorie beverages.
"Diet soda can be a good option to replace caloric beverages that do not contain important vitamins and minerals," the association said, adding further study is needed before any association between diet soda and heart risk factors would lead to public recommendations.
Vasan also said poor overall health habits may be one reason diet soda drinkers did not show lower heart disease risks in the Framingham study, but there hasn't been enough research to say for sure.
Another possible reason is a controversial theory called "dietary compensation," which holds that if someone drinks a large amount of liquids at a meal, they aren't satisfied and will tend to eat more at the next meal, Vasan said.
Other theories, Vasan said, are that people who drink a large amount of sweetened drinks are prone to develop a taste for sweeter foods, or that the substance that gives soda its caramel color promotes resistance to insulin, which is needed to process calories.
Without a more definitive explanation, Vasan offers only this advice to diet soda drinkers: "Consume in moderation and stayed tuned for more research."

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

ONLINE DATING? 7-11-07

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Good luck to all!

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

HOTEL RESERVATIONS

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Hope everyone has a fun and safe summer season.