Custom-made insoles may ease certain foot pain
Custom-fit insoles may help ease foot pain caused by high arches, rheumatoid arthritis and certain other conditions, a research review suggests.
Australian researchers found that in 11 clinical trials, custom-designed orthotic devices for the shoes helped ease certain forms of foot pain. One study, for instance, showed that within 3 months, the shoe inserts improved pain in adults with abnormally high arches.
Another study, of 209 adults younger than 60, found that custom orthoses eased pain from bunions—though they did not appear to be as effective as surgery in the long run.
UK watchdog urges doctors to cut antibiotics
British doctors should slash the number of times they prescribe antibiotics for respiratory tract infections because the drugs rarely help, the country’s drug cost watchdog said on Wednesday.
This means doctors in the state’s health system should not prescribe antibiotics for most cases of sore throats, colds, bronchitis or other types of respiratory infections, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE, said.
They should also delay writing such prescriptions and reassure people the drugs are not needed immediately and would make little difference because most respiratory infections are viral, the new guidelines said.
EU says safe to eat during Games, despite concerns
Europeans travelling to the Beijing Olympics have nothing to fear from Chinese food, despite an upsurge in food safety warnings in the Asian powerhouse, the European Union’s health chief said on Wednesday.
“There is no need for Europeans to take any extra or special measures, other than the ones they would normally take when travelling to a country outside the European Union,” EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou told Reuters.
“There are problems, but there is no major danger from eating food during the Olympics.”
Government to release revised U.S. HIV estimates
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday it will soon release long-awaited revised estimates of how many Americans become infected with the AIDS virus every year.
Activists have been saying the numbers are sharply higher and have been urging the CDC to release the numbers.
In June, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he believed the numbers had risen from 40,000 to 50,000 a year, although the CDC denied he had seen the new estimates.
School failure harder on girls than boys: US study
Academic failure appears to trouble teen-age girls more deeply than boys, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said adolescent girls who are expelled, suspended or drop out of high school before they graduate are more likely to have a serious bout of depression by age 21 than boys with similar experiences.
“For girls there are broader implications of school failure,” said Carolyn McCarty, a University of Washington researcher whose study appears in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Depression linked with first stroke in elderly
The results of a study in the current issue of the journal Stroke suggest that there is an association between depression and an increased risk of having a first stroke in elderly patients.
“It has long been noted that depression is common after stroke and that depression is associated with increased mortality in patients with stroke,” Dr. Ingmar Skoog, of Sahlgrenska University Hospital/Molndal, Sweden, and colleagues write. During the last decade, they add, published reports have suggested that depression may actually contribute to stroke risk.
The current study involved 401 stroke-free 85-year-olds who were participants in the Longitudinal Gerontological and Geriatric Population Studies in Goteborg. At study entry 72 were demented and 329 were dementia-free. The subjects were followed for 3 years and information was obtained from the Swedish Hospital Discharge Register, death certificates, self-reports, and key informants.
Prizes don’t help smokers kick the habit long-term
Contests that offer smokers cash and other incentives to quit don’t produce better long-term results than smoking cessation efforts that don’t reward people for kicking the habit, a new analysis of existing research demonstrates.
“While competitions may be an attractive and high-profile way of encouraging smokers to make a quit attempt, our evidence found that they don’t improve the long-term success rate,” Dr. Kate Cahill of the University of Oxford told Reuters Health in an email interview. “Many people relapse once the competition is over and the prizes stop coming.”
In the U.S., such contests are typically offered in the workplace, while the highest-profile initiatives outside the U.S. are the international “Quit & Win” contests, run every 2 years in more than 80 countries, Cahill explained.
Day care babies gain more weight: study
Infants cared for by someone other than mom or dad are more apt to be exposed to “unfavorable” feeding practices and to gain more weight during their first year of life, a new study shows, which could contribute to childhood weight problems.
“Parents may want to have enough communication with child care providers about when, what and how to feed their babies during their stay in day care, which is important to avoid potential risk of overfeeding or underfeeding at home,” Dr. Juhee Kim of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Reuters Health.
Kim and co-investigator Dr. Karen E. Peterson of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, analyzed data on child care arrangements, feeding practices, and weight gain collected for 8,150 infants who were 9 months old. More than half of these children received regular child care from someone other than a parent.
