The overlooked Diagnosis of Celiac Disease

This week in class we have been learning about the digestive system and what happens to it as we age and some of the conditions that can occur. One of the interesting articles that I found was about Celiac Disease and how difficult it can be to diagnose and how hard and long of process it can be to diagnose. Celiac disease is not only a disease that affects the elderly but can affect anyone at any age, and is a digestive disorder when damage is caused to the small intestine when gluten, which is a protein that is found in wheat is eaten. For people who have this disease they need to follow a strict gluten free diet, to avoid getting any serious heath complications or other diseases or disorders such as osteoporosis and lymphoma. For patients of this disorder it takes about ten years for a diagnosis to occur if one occurs at all. A study has shown that there are 3 million Americans who suffer from Celiac disease and about 95 percent of them are yet to know that that's the diagnosis. Some of the symptoms of Celiac disease include bloating, diarrhea and weight loss. For one patient her symptoms began in childhood but as she aged they only continued to worsen.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-celiac-ess.html

F.D.A backing Respiratory Distress Drug for Babies

In class this week we have been learning about the respiratory system and the different conditions that can happen in the respiratory system as we age. I find this topic to be interesting because my mother suffers from severe asthma, and other people in my family have suffered from respiratory diseases from asthma to COPD, so I have seen the effects that respiratory conditions can have when we age. I thought that this article was interesting because as a premature baby myself I have always wondered what kinds of drugs they were using and what kind of problems were being found with these medications. I found this article about the F.D.A approving this respiratory distress drug for babies to be interesting as well because it discusses how the drug surfaxin would be used to prevent respiratory distress disorder that could turn out to be potentially fatal in infants and premature babies. What this drug will do is coat the air sacs in the lungs to keep them open. Surfaxin will create the surfactant which many premature babies usually do not make themselves, which makes it difficult to breathe. The lab Discovery that has been working on this drug surfaxin has estimated that there are about 90 million premature babies who are treated with a surfactant every year in the United States. Even though this was not about the aging population but about babies I felt this was relevant because it spoke about the respiratory system and how distress to the system could be harmful and life threatening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/health/policy/fda-backs-surfaxin-respiratory-distress-drug-for-babies.html

How Alzheimer's is able to Spread in the brain

The last few weeks of class we have been learning about the nervous system as well as some of the conditions that go along with the nervous system as it goes through the aging process. One of the conditions that occurs is that of Alzheimer's disease. This disease is very interesting and is still having studies done it to see how it spreads through the brain, as well as causes, and possible treatments. One of the interesting articles that I came across was about how Alzheimer's spreads through the brain like a virus. The study that was performed was done on mice, and what the study showed was instead of the infection spreading like a bacteria would spread, it spread because of the break down of the tau proteins. This is interesting because these are also the proteins that are affected in Parkinson's. This study showed that they could put a halt in the disease if they were able to put a stop in cell to cell transmission and stop tau. If they were able to stop or at least slow this down they would be able to slow the cell death and how it moves across the brain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/health/research/alzheimers-spreads-like-a-virus-in-the-brain-studies-find.html?_r=1

Sugary Drinks and a link to Heart Disease

This week we have been learning about the circulatory system, so I found this article very interesting in relation to what we have been learning about the heart and about diseases of the heart. This article described how they tested a group of men ranging from the ages of 40 to 75 every four years to see what the risk of drinking beverages that were high in sugar had on the relation to heart disease and heart attacks. In this study the researchers controlled for factors such as family history, smoking, and exercise. The study showed that men who drank sweetened drinks were about 20 percent more likely to have heart attacks then those who do not. The study showed that there was a risk of about 19 percent of one daily serving of a sugar sweetened beverage that would increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/health/research/sugar-sweetened-drinks-linked-to-heart-disease.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=heart%20disease&st=cse

New Technology To Revolutionize Hearing Aids

There have been digital advances made that have caused great improvements to be made in the area of hearing aid use. The devices are now smaller and smarter or more technologically advanced then they have been in the past. There is research going on at many institutions including Arizona State and Cornell to work on the push to create the next big thing in the hearing aid world as well as to reduce the cost of the devices. This is being done just in time being that there are millions of baby boomers entering that age were hearing aids could become possibilities. Some of the new advances that are being made the hearing aids is that they are now able to amplify the voices for the listener and while muting out all other noises around them.When many people think of hearing aids they think of the huge things that grandma or grandpa would wear, but not any more. Now the devices are being made small enough that they are almost invisible, that will work better as well. One of the biggest challenges that are facing the hearing aid companies is the inability of the device to pick up which way the sound is coming from as well as the large expense for development.

http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2012/03/12/20120312science-digital-echnology-revolutionizing-hearing-aids.html

Parkinson's disease and a possible new way to prevent?

This week in class we learned about Parkinson's and the different possible treatments, and symptoms that are present. The article that I found on foxnews.com is very interesting and describes the possibility of taking drugs to lower one's cholesterol could help to prevent Parkinson's disease. The study suggests that the use of the Cholesterol medications could help to prevent the development of Parkinson's especially in individuals under the age of sixty. The new study that showed that people who took the cholesterol lowering medications had a 26 percent chance of not developing Parkinson's over a 12 year time span. The risk was reduced by 69 percent for those individuals who were under the age of 60. The studies were not very conclusive. This is because there are other factors that could be causing the condition such as if a person is smoking, and people who were taking these certain kinds of cholesterol lowering medications could be taking other medications as well. It was said by one of the researchers that the cholesterol medications or the statins could help to lower the possibilities of Parkinson's because the statins would lower the inflammations that occur in the brain.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/03/13/cholesterol-drugs-may-help-ward-off-parkinsons/

Important to use muscles as they age

In this last week of class we have been learning about muscles, bones and cartilage and what happens to these areas as they age. One of the many interesting articles that I found was on muscles and was called More Than an Exercise in Vanity. This article was interesting because it talked about a man who had been lifting wights and working out since he was the age of 12 and now at the age of 60 and a Doctor of Cardiology and a marathon runner he was now a small man with not a muscle bulging on him. The article discusses how researchers talk about how the healthy muscles are the muscles that have been worked to the fullest extent and so they have enough strength to get through life especially as one ages and continues to get older. The article also discussed how muscles of the elderly population who don't use their muscles will atrophy and they will be unable to lift themselves up and brace themselves which leads to many of the falls that the elderly encounter. This article also discussed how the elderly population especially could gain muscles, by lifting weights and doing resistance training, as some of the ways of working out muscles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/health/13muscles.html?_r=1

Osteoporosis and Bone Density Testing

In class this last week we have been learning about bone and the different components of bone as well as the different diseases that occur in the bones and skeletal system especially as we age. One of these diseases are Osteoporosis. As we have learned Osteoporosis is when there is a low bone mass as well as a deterioration of the bone tissue, causing holes in the bone. These problems lead to things like being more fragile and the ability to fracture more and easier. The article that I read was very interesting because it described how it was not necessary for women who at the age of 65 test normal for bone mass to receive a bone density test with large spaces of time in between such as 15 years. This is because most women whose bones test in the normal range are having bone loss much more slowly. Another interesting fact from this article is that the drug Fosamax and others like it were being used to prevent broken bones and fractures in people with osteoporosis, but it has been found that these medications can not prevent the disease itself, so the use of the medication by women with osteoporosis forever is no longer wanted.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E1D61230F93AA25752C0A9649D8B63

Research Paused on Bird Flu

In the Article, Scientists to Pause Research on Deadly Strain of Bird Flu there are many things that relate to the topic that we have been learning about in class in the last week. This article related to the topic of Viruses and how easily and quick it is for them to spread. This article was very interesting because it talked about how doing work on the deadly flu virus had been stopped because of the fear of how contagious it might be and how easily it might spread, easily becoming a pandemic. At this point in time even though this strain of the flu is only seen in birds, spreading and killing the birds the fear of virus coming in contact with a human is what is causing the research to currently be paused. At an upcoming international meeting involving the World Health Organization a decision will be made on what to do next with this research, whether it is able to start up again and continue or has to be stopped completely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/science/scientists-to-pause-research-on-deadly-strain-of-bird-flu.html?scp=2&sq=dna%20viruses&st=cse

Approval of new Drug by the FDA for Skin Cancer

Hey Everyone! This week we learned about the different layers of skin and how we can get skin cancer so when I found this article about a new drug that the FDA had approved for advanced skin cancer I was interested. This article from the New York Times described the drug called Erivedge that is made by the Genentech drug company and was approved for patients with skin cancer of at least the basal cell which as we learned is the lowest layer of the epidermis. The positive thing about this form of skin cancer as we learned in class is that it is very easy to have removed most of the time and will very rarely spread to different parts of the body. In some cases the tumors can not simply be treated in the way of removal and small doses of radiation, so this new drug would come in handy in this situation. There was a clinical study performed were 96 patients were involved, 30 percent of the patients experienced a partial tumor shrinkage while on the new drug, while 43 percent of those in the trial study had a complete shrinkage of the tumors or a partial shrinkage of the tumors. After reviewing the results of the study, it looks as if the new FDA approved drug works well with this form of skin cancer.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/f-d-a-approves-drug-for-an-advanced-skin-cancer/?scp=2&sq=skin%20cancer%20&st=cse

How Exercise helps the body

The article I read this week was Exercise as Housecleaning for the Body. I found this article in the New York Times and thought that it was very interesting and relevant to what we have learned about in the last week or so of class. This is because it discussed a study that was performed using mice to show how a high sugar diet and lack of exercise can cause diseases, such as diabetes because of the lack of the ability for the cells to clean themselves out and undergo autophagy, and break down the proteins in the cells and create energy. Without being able to undergo this process the cells will die or malfunction and not be able to work correctly. An increase in autophagy was prompted by exercise and is important in receiving the gains that exercise is supposed to give. The study also shows how important it is to maintain an active lifestyle to keep healthy and to keep the processes of that cells have to undergo such as autophagy in normal functioning order.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/exercise-as-housecleaning-for-the-body/?scp=1&sq=cell%20aging%20&st=cse

Benifits of Antioxidants

The article, "Prevention: Coffee Lowers Risk of Prostate Cancer, Harvard Study Says; by Roni Caryn Rabin. This article was very interesting and talked about the importance of antioxidants in an individuals diet, especially in the aging males diet. It was very interesting that one of the main antioxiants that was said to be safe to drink was coffee and the large quantaties that could be consumed on a daily basis that would help to prevent Prostate Cancer as well as lowering the risks of Type II diabetes. This relates to what we have learned about this week because we learned about how eating and drinking antioxidants are good for the aging body, we also learned about diabetes and the types of changes that diabetes can have on a persons body especially as they age.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/health/research/24prevention.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=antioxidants&st=cse