Vets with traumatic stress can kick smoking habit
Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder have a high rate of smoking and a poor rate of quitting, but new research shows that adding smoking-cessation therapy to their routine mental health care may help.
This “integrated” care, researchers found, was more successful in helping vets kick the smoking habit than the traditional approach of sending them to a specialized smoking-cessation clinic.
Shock wave therapy helps some stroke sufferers
After a Stroke, some patients develop muscle spasm in their hand and wrist. A small study now indicates that the condition can be relieved with focused shock wave therapy, and the benefits may persist for at least 12 weeks after treatment.
Shock wave therapy is commonly used to break up kidney stones, and it has also proven useful in the treatment of various bone and tendon diseases, but there’s not much known about its use for abnormal muscle tension, or “hypertonia,” Italian researchers note.
China experts say bird flu bigger threat than SARS
Bird flu now poses a bigger and more worrying threat to people than SARS, medical experts in southern China, the region where severe acute respiratory syndrome first surfaced, said on Friday.
The main reason, they said, was that humans had learned how to effectively control the spread of SARS, but had not done the same for bird flu, which can be spread by wild birds.
Cholera kills hundreds as rain pounds West Africa
Cholera outbreaks triggered partly by heavy rains battering West Africa have killed hundreds of people in the past few months, prompting appeals for medicine to help thousands of sufferers, U.N. officials said on Friday.
The disease has struck as far afield as tiny Guinea-Bissau, where the government has banned sales of water in markets to combat the waterborne disease, to giant Congo, where 16 people travelling in a military convoy died of the infection.
Heart ailment seems under-recognized in women
Italian investigators report, that compared to men, women with a hereditary heart condition called Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy are substantially more likely to be diagnosed later in life and with more severe symptoms.
This occurs despite the fact that Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy “should theoretically be present in males and females equally,” said Dr. Iacopo Olivotto, because it is a genetic disease with an inheritance pattern that requires only one parent to have the condition.
