Shooting shows gaps in mental health safety net
Mental health professionals complain their hands are tied in two ways when they try to help people like Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui—a lack of funding for mental health services in general and laws that make it tough to treat people against their will.
They say the 23-year-old student’s shooting rampage sheds new light on flaws in the U.S. mental health system.
Low blood pressure in elderly linked to mortality
Aggressive treatment of high blood pressure (hypertension) in patients who are 80 years or older is associated with lower five-year survival rates than their counterparts with blood pressure levels at or higher than treatment target levels, researchers report.
Physicians should therefore “use caution in their approach to blood pressure-lowering in this age group,” they advise in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.
Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds
A fruity cocktail may not only be fun to drink but may count as health food, U.S. and Thai researchers said on Thursday.
Adding ethanol—the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits—boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.
Early heart attacks often treated aggressively
Patients who come to the emergency department with symptoms suggestive of an impending or “evolving” heart attack are often treated as aggressively as if they had a confirmed one.
The finding comes from the international SYNERGY trial published in a recent release by the European Heart Journal.
High selenium levels linked to diabetes risk
Contrary to researchers’ expectations, high blood levels of selenium are positively associated with diabetes in adults, according to findings published in the medical journal Diabetes Care.
The results of some animal studies have suggested that oxidative stress reduces insulin secretion and increases insulin resistance, Dr. Joachim Bleys and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, point out. They therefore hypothesized that because selenium has antioxidant properties, high levels of selenium in the body may prevent diabetes.
Jefferson researchers want to learn if heart defect ‘at heart’ of some migraines
Researchers of the heart and headaches at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital are combining efforts to determine if a common heart defect may be the cause of some forms of migraine headaches.
Investigators from the Jefferson Heart Institute and the Jefferson Headache Center are enrolling participants in a blinded study to determine if closing a Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO), a small hole or flap that can allow blood to flow between the right and left sides of the heart, can stop migraines. In newborns, the PFO closes at or shortly after birth, but in 20 percent of adults the gap remains open to some degree.
