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Picking the time of day to give birth may not be a choice very many women can make, but it could influence her chances of a smooth delivery, new research shows.
In a study of more than 700,000 births at all Dutch hospitals between 2000 and 2006, researchers found that the risks of newborn death and admission to the neonatal intensive care unit were higher with nighttime than daytime deliveries.
The findings, say the researchers, are in line with trends in other studies not only in obstetrics, but in hospital intensive care units as well.
Overall, the new study found, infants at smaller community hospitals who were born in the evening (between 6 p.m. and midnight) or overnight into early morning (between midnight and 8 a.m.) were 32 percent to 47 percent more likely to die than those born during the day.
Larger medical centers that would see more high-risk pregnancies — so-called tertiary centers – did not have as much of a difference between night and day. At these hospitals, only overnight births – as opposed to evening births — were linked to an increased risk of newborn death.
source www.reuters.com/article/
Eating dairy foods could help protect your heart, new research from Sweden suggests.
Dairy foods are a major source of saturated fat in the diet, which has been associated with heart disease. However, there’s some evidence that dairy foods could actually benefit heart health, for example by lowering blood pressure or reducing cholesterol levels, Dr. Eva Warensjo of Uppsala University and her colleagues note in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
To get a clearer sense of people’s intake of fat from dairy and heart disease risk, Warensjo and her team measured blood levels of two biomarkers of milk fat in 444 heart attack patients and 556 healthy controls. The substances, pentadecanoic acid and heptadecanoic acid, indicate how much dairy fat a person has been eating.
The researchers found that people with the highest levels of milk fat biomarkers, suggesting they consumed the most dairy fat, were actually at lower risk of heart attack; for women, the risk was reduced by 26 percent, while for men risk was 9 percent lower.
source www.reuters.com/news/health
The program aims to cut across the “silos” of health initiatives focused on one thing — AIDS, for example, or nutrition — and get broader initiatives into place.
“That is in addition to grants that we already make in vaccines, diarrhea, malaria,” Melinda Gates told reporters.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he would try to focus the Group of 20 meeting in Toronto later this month on the subject, adding the goal is to raise $15 billion.
“We may need an additional $45 billion by 2015,” Ban said.
Ban and Gates described a comprehensive approach through 2014 to help women deliver babies safely and plan healthy families with access to contraception, while incorporating current vaccination and nutrition programs.
“The women and children are always last in line for health issues,” Ban said. “It’s just morally unacceptable … This is a real human rights issue.”
source www.reuters.com/news/health
Sodickson, a radiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was going to Washington, D.C., to meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to find ways to protect patients from getting too much radiation from CT scans.
“The woman sitting next to me on the plane had a lump in her neck. It was thought to be cancer,” Sodickson said in an interview.
The woman’s doctor had ordered a CT scan to help determine if the lump was cancerous.
“She refused because she thought she would die of the CT scan,” Sodickson said.
A CT scan assembles cross-section images of the body into a vivid picture that gives doctors a much better look at a patient that conventional X-rays, often eliminating the need for exploratory surgery. But too much radiation exposure is believed to raise the risk of cancer and scientists are working to cut down the risk from a CT scan.
A CT scan of the chest exposes a patient to more than 100 times the radiation of an X-ray and an abdominal CT scan is roughly equivalent to 400 chest X-rays.
source www.reuters.com/news/health
European scientists have found a full range of markers in the blood of kidney transplant patients which could predict whether their new organ will be a success and whether they need large amounts of medication to help it.
The researchers said on Tuesday the finding may help doctors to give more personalized care to transplant patients and to modify the amount of powerful immunosuppressant drugs they have to take to prevent their bodies from rejecting a new kidney.
The scientists, led by Maria Hernandez-Fuentes at King’s College London, studied various groups of kidney transplant patients in Europe, including 11 patients who had stopped taking their drugs after the transplant but did not reject the donor organ since they appeared to have a natural “tolerance” for it.
They carried out detailed tests of blood samples and found differences in the immune systems particular to these patients.
“We hope that now we can start to look at screening other patients to see if they also have similar markers in their blood,” said Rachel Hilton, a renal consultant at Guy’s Hospital in London and co-author of the study.
source www.reuters.com/news/health
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