Survey reveals drug and alcohol abuse in British teens
According to a government survey in the UK almost half of all youngsters between the age of 10 and 15 say they have consumed alcohol. This survey on the lifestyles and concerns of children has revealed startling drug and alcohol abuse problems.
The online ‘TellUs2’ survey for watchdog Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) interviewed 111,000 children and teenagers and found that 14 per cent of children in the 12-15 age group said they had experimented with drugs such as cannabis.
Fewer soldiers losing limbs after battlefield injury
In previous wars, battlefield surgeons often had to take the limb of a soldier with a bleeding leg or arm wound in order to save his life, but now with advances in vascular surgery, lives can often be saved without sacrificing a limb, a new study indicates.
“The purpose of our study was to show that with the proper resuscitation strategy, you have the option of saving the limb,” lead researcher Dr. Charles J. Fox, from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, told Reuters Health.
Hypnosis may calm kids’ irritable bowels
Gut-directed hypnotherapy is “highly effective” for children with long-standing abdominal pain or irritable bowel syndrome (known as IBS), researchers have found.
“We advocate that hypnotherapy become the treatment of choice in children with persisting complaints of either functional abdominal pain or IBS in whom first-line therapies such as education and dietary advice have failed,” Dr. Arine M. Vlieger of St. Antonius Hospital, Nieuwegein, and colleagues conclude in a report in the journal Gastroenterology.
Few overweight people trim down after heart attack
Overweight people lose virtually no weight after suffering a heart attack, according to the first study to evaluate factors associated with post-heart attack weight changes.
“On average less than a half of a percent change in body weight occurred, and that’s really small,” Dr. John A. Spertus of the Mid America Heart Institute of Saint Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health. People need to lose at least 5 percent of their body weight to significantly improve their heart health, he added.
