Posts Tagged ‘Disease’
June 13th, 2010 | 
Author: What would you do if you had only two options and must choose one, a short life that was healthy from the beginning till the end or a long life that ended with many years of disease and its attendant sufferings, pain, surgeries, disability, immobility, bed sores and many others?
These are the two options available in a world where cure for incurable lifestyle diseases is sought after instead of prevention. In a world without preventive health education and motivation for lifestyle change to prevent diseases like cancer, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive lung disease, degenerative joint diseases and other diseases of civilization, the only people that would escape the above-mentioned sufferings are those that die early before disease strikes.
None of us would choose to die early or commit suicide for the sake of escaping disease or its attendant sufferings and neither would any of us want to end our long lives like many who worked so hard only to suffer heart, kidney and organ failures, paralysis from stroke and degenerative diseases affecting the spine, cancer and other preventable but incurable diseases.
If it turns out that I’m right, then it means nobody wants to die young and nobody wants to live a sadly- ending long life. For those of you that belong to this category, I’ve got good news for you: “You can remain young even in old age by slowing the ageing process and staying disease-free. In other words, even though you can’t reduce your calendar age, you can do something about your biological age such that you can have the anatomical, physiological and biochemical systems of a 30-year old in a 90-year old.
Did I hear you say impossible? Then you must not have seen the 90-year old woman climbing trees the other day on CNN because you needn’t be a mathematical genius like Einstein to figure out that her muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints could not be functionally older than yours when you were 30 provided you could climb trees then.
Experts now know that our health would benefit more from a slowing down of the ageing process by a new approach that teaches prevention instead of traditional medical approaches that passively address prevention and target individual disease. The people in developed nations who get the best curative management are increasingly experiencing more than one age-related disease and now, co-morbidity, the term used to describe the presence of more than one disease in an individual, has become a big health problem in these parts.
Recent advances in the study biological mechanisms responsible for ageing, which give rise to most diseases and other age-related health problems show that aging can be slowed down and disease can be prevented when we adopt healthy lifestyles as preached by medical professionals genuinely interested in prevention instead of cure. Embracing this new model of health promotion and disease prevention will not only guarantee a longer healthy lifespan but also a longer calendar lifespan and independence of invasive medical and surgical management. We must therefore be wise and embrace health promotion and disease prevention.
Here are a few rules you must follow to slow down aging and prevent disease:
Always seek preventive health knowledge from experts: By attending seminars and trainings organized by orthodox medical professionals like physiotherapists and doctors in preventive health, you will understand how your body works and you will acquire lifestyle change skills necessary to change your lifestyle from a disease-promoting to a disease-preventing lifestyle. Disease and its medical and surgical management make you age fast while a positive lifestyle change helps you slow down aging and prevent disease.
Do not lose your muscle strength: Muscle strength declines with age and the faster you lose muscle strength, the older you become. Strengthen all muscles in all parts of the body as advised by your physiotherapists and certified trainers. Note that exercise in the hands of people who don’t understand your anatomy and physiology is dangerous. Many orthopedic patients referred to me damaged their backs, necks and joints while exercising.
Do not lose your balance and co-ordination: Balance refers to your ability to remain stable especially when in the upright position. Coordination refers to your ability to use the right muscles at the right time and in the right sequence of steps that make up an activity and at the right intensity. The faster you lose them, the faster you age. When balance is lost, people begin to rely on walking sticks and frames and loss of coordination makes simple tasks like taking a spoon from a plate of food to the mouth impossible such that the individual has to be fed.
Do not lose your muscular endurance: Muscular endurance refers to the ability of a particular muscle group to perform repeated contractions or work over a period of time. The faster you lose your muscular endurance, the faster you age. The more your muscular endurance, the more your ability to work for prolonged periods before fatigue sets in.
Do not lose your cardiopulmonary endurance: This refers to the ability of your heart and lungs to supply your tissues with the amounts of blood and oxygen required in long periods of activity involving large muscle groups. These activities include, brisk walking, running, swimming, biking for long periods. The faster the rate at which the time you can safely spend on these activities diminishes, the faster you age. Your preventive health physiotherapist can safely help you increase the amount of time you can safely spend on these aerobic activities.
Do not lose your flexibility: flexibility refers to the ability to move your joints, knees, hips, ankles, elbows, shoulders, the joints in your neck and back and other joints in the body through an unrestricted, pain-free range of motion. This depends primarily on the ability of the muscles to lengthen and this depends on how often these muscles get stretched through the maximum possible range. Muscles that don’t get stretched regularly become permanently shortened and lose the ability to lengthen to allow full movement.
The old woman climbing the tree on CNN could because she never stopped flexing her hips to climb trees and so the muscles which allow flexion, the hamstrings did not get shortened. Many people half her age will hurt their hamstrings if they attempt to climb and so, even though younger in calendar age, their hamstrings are biologically older than hers. I’m not advising you to start climbing trees so I will not be responsible for any fractures or deaths through falls from trees. Your physiotherapist can design a programme that will help improve your flexibility.
There are many other determinants of aging and your preventive health physiotherapists and doctors will teach you to improve them and stay young and disease-free.
People who looked at this item also looked at…
Related items
Though many people have not even heard of Lupus, it is common – more common than some well-known diseases such as multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and leukemia. But because not much is known about the disease, treatment of lupus is made more difficult. What is lupus, exactly?
Diagnosis and treatment of lupus(http://www.mitamins.com/disease/Lupus.html) is made more complicated by the fact that currently, there is no one single test that can positively identify the disease. In fact, lupus is often mistaken for other diseases with some similar symptoms, such as multiple sclerosis or arthritis. In fact, lupus is an auto-immune disease in which the body essentially “turns” on itself. When this happens the body creates antibodies that attack the body rather than protect it.
Lupus(http://www.mitamins.com/disease/Lupus.html) sometimes only affects a single area of the body. Some of the most common areas to be affected are:
# Lungs: lupus can cause inflammation of the lungs’ lining, which can lead to pneumonia or pleuritis
# Kidneys: Inflammation of the kidneys can be caused by lupus, and this inflammation can lead to nephritis. The onset of nephritis is usually not accompanied by pain, so the lupus may not be detected.
# Heart: Chest pains, and subsequent hardening of the arteries, may be caused by lupus
# Blood: Anemia and inflamed blood vessels can result from lupus.
Lupus can often be identified by a rash on the body, most often on the face. Sunscreen can help to treat this rash. Some medications for other illnesses can trigger attacks, so this should be kept in mind in the treatment of lupus. Flu shots are recommended for lupus treatment, as they can prevent secondary infections which commonly occur in those with lupus. Other suspected triggers of lupus are dental fillings and hair dye, though there is no conclusive evidence of this. Because fear and anxiety may be triggers of lupus attacks, discontinuing use of certain products believed by patients to trigger attacks may be beneficial, even if these substances do not truly affect the body physiologically.
Natural Treatment of Lupus(http://www.mitamins.com/disease/Lupus.html)
A healthy diet containing necessary vitamins and nutrients, as well as regular exercise, are most effective in the prevention and treatment of lupus. Other kinds of meditative or calming activities, such as breathing exercises, can be effective in lupus treatment and can prevent skin flare-ups.
People who looked at this item also looked at…
Related items
If your family history includes coronary heart disease, you are wise to look at ways to reduce your risk for heart disease. Coronary heart disease although affected by genetic makeup, is also related to your lifestyle.
Think of the more common risk factors for coronary heart disease:
* Cigarette smoking – a lifestyle choice
* Elevated cholesterol – in part, a lifestyle choice
* High blood pressure – affected by life choices
* Obesity – resulting from lifestyle choices
* Prolonged periods of inactivity – a lifestyle choice
You probably know that changes to your lifestyle can readily reduce the risk for heart disease. Such changes do not require a physician’s help, although you will want to seek your physician’s advice. Nor do actions to reduce the risks of heart disease require participation in a program.
A report in the “American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine” for March/April 2007; 1(2): 79-90 called for practical steps doctors could take to help you change your lifestyle. That report states that most individuals who change lifestyle do it without any program, and gives these examples:
* “…more than 90% of individuals who have stopped smoking have done this without a formal smoking cessation program.”
* “The majority of individuals who lose weight also do this on their own.”
You can make lifestyle changes that will reduce heart disease risks.
Reduce Heart Disease Risks with These Steps
You can reduce the risk for heart disease by making a few changes in your current lifestyle.
1. Chocolate First
Can eating chocolate reduce the risk for heart disease? You have heard reports of it on television. You may have heard it discussed at the office. Is it true?
In 1996, University of California-Davis researcher Andrew Waterhouse found that chocolate contains phenols, chemicals that might reduce heart disease risks. Waterhouse wrote about his findings in the British medical journal Lancet, telling how he had used laboratory experiments to measure the amount of phenols in such products as baker’s chocolate, cocoa powder, and milk chocolate. He found that it took less than 2 ounces of milk chocolate to provide the same amount of phenols as a 5-ounce glass of red wine, which was already known for reducing heart disease risks. He reasoned that not only can eating chocolate reduce the risk for heart disease, but that more research would show that it actually does.
In 2003, Dirk Taubert, MD, PhD, and his colleagues at the University of Cologne, Germany published a further report on chocolate in the Aug. 27 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Dark chocolate, they found, lowers high blood pressure and reduces that risk associated with heart disease. They had done clinical research to show the effects in humans. Milk chocolate and white chocolate did not have this effect. Milk, whether blended into the chocolate or used to wash down the chocolate, diluted the effect.
Why dark chocolate? The answer is the phenols that Waterhouse discovered in chocolate back in 1996. Cocoa phenols are known to lower blood pressure.
In addition, phenols lower the risk of heart disease by keeping fat-like substances from oxidizing in the bloodstream and clogging the arteries.
So can eating chocolate reduce the risk for heart disease?
It can reduce some risks – if it is dark chocolate – the darker the better – and is not washed down with milk. European made chocolates appear to be better than American made, since they contain more cocoa phenols.
2. Smoking
Another lifestyle change that can reduce the risk of heart disease is to stop smoking. Those who say they can’t stop smoking have not been determined or committed enough. As quoted above from the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, ” more than 90% of individuals who have stopped smoking have done this without a formal smoking cessation program.”
If you are serious about reducing heart disease risks, stop smoking.
3. Obesity
Overweight sounds nicer than obesity, but whichever way you look at it in the mirror, it is a lifestyle change you can make to reduce heart disease risks. You don’t need to join one of the many programs advertised on television, or ask your doctor for prescription medication. You need to change your way of eating and get exercise.
4. Exercise
While the industrial age, followed by the information age, brought us many benefits, they also took away the benefits of farm work. A great number of us have developed a sedentary lifestyle that increases heart disease risks. To reverse that, and reduce the risks of heart disease, we need to follow a regular exercise program.
5. Cholesterol
Your genetic makeup may predispose you to higher levels of cholesterol. To reduce this risk of heart disease, you can change your diet to one of the many that reduce cholesterol intake.
Conclusion
There are other risks for heart disease, but these are examples of those that can be reduced by making simple changes in the way you live. Can they be eradicated without medication? Sometimes they can. Can they become less of a risk for heart disease without medication? Yes. It certainly is worth making the necessary changes.
CAUTION: The author is not a medical professional, and offers the information in this article for educational purposes only. Please discuss it with your health care provider before relying on it in any way.
People who looked at this item also looked at…
Related items
Posted in medication disease | 
Tags: Chocolate, Disease, Eating, Heart, Reduce, Risk | 
No Comments »
If you are a celiac, your miracle cure is under way – being trialed in Melbourne Australia from April 2009! It could conceivably desensitize people with celiac disease to the point that the villi in their small intestine are not damaged by the gluten protein. However with the need for extensive testing in this three phase trial, the vaccine may not be ready for release for several years.
Before we go into the details of such a cure it should be noted that this vaccine might not be a â??magic bullet’ that makes people permanently immune to the gluten protein, it might ‘only’ desensitize them. Also be aware that if you choose to undertake the â??therapy’ there are no guarantees of how you will react, and the only way to regularly check to see if you have been â??cured’ would be regular intestine biopsies. As it is known that some people take over two years to heal their intestines from gluten damage, how risky will this strategy be? It is expected that testing will be extensive so these questions may all sit under the â??devil’s advocate’ category, and all may be well.
An even more philosophical question is what effect covering up the cause of your disease will have on your body. Books have been written that suggest that it is the increased gluten potency in wheat and other gluten grains as well as increased use in manufactured foods that has led to an overdose of gluten. Our bodies then pass a â??tipping point’ where our genetic predisposition to CD turns into an active disease. If this is true, how wise would it be to continue ingesting unnaturally high levels of gluten, once â??cured’ just because we can? Sure it would make life simpler not following a gluten free diet, however maybe we should wait for gluten to be decreased at the source, the growing fields, before we return to a gluten filled diet.
Different types of celiac disease identified
With all these issues under consideration, I am sure that every celiac would still be interested in a â??cure’. A July 2007 article based on research conducted in Victoria, Australia, showed that “Celiac disease – is strongly associated with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) DQ2 and to a lesser extent with HLA DQ8.”
“HLA genes are part of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays a pivotal role in the immune system. HLA-DQ2 mediated celiac disease is common in people of European ancestry, with about 90 per cent of sufferers positive for DQ2. Another five per cent possess HLA DQ8. In China and East Asia, DQ2 genes are rare while DQ8 genes are as common as in Europe.”
So it appears that this preliminary research has been able to isolate two main versions of celiac disease. However the molecular workings of the immune response in the two antigens appear to be very different. The researchers discovered that T-cells in people with DQ8-associated celiac disease reacted quite differently to the small proteins in gluten than the T-cells in people with the DQ2 form of the disease.
“At the moment a gluten-free diet is the only treatment for celiac disease but nearly half the people on the diet still have damage to their small intestine. Consequently other therapies, including a vaccine and three different drugs, are in various stages of development. The research team believes celiac disease might be the first example of an immune disease where treatments are customized according to the genetic make-up of the patient.”
The celiac vaccine discovery
The discovery that lead to the creation of the vaccine was that the one critical part of wheat gluten protein that was toxic was the common genetic version (HLA DQ2) of celiac disease. “As much as the identity of the toxic component of gluten was important, it was the way in which it was found that has proven to be even more important. By eating gluten in wheat, rye, or barley for three days (even a single meal will suffice in some people), immune cells (T cells) that damage the small intestine are mobilized into blood for a few short days. The T cells in blood can be monitored and analyzed to define what part of gluten they recognize. The parts of gluten recognized by the vast majority of T cells involved in celiac disease can be condensed to a few “short” fragments of gluten that remain after its digestion in the gut. These gluten fragments can be synthesized using fairly standard chemistry and are the basis for the celiac vaccine.”
The Celiac Vaccine Trials
The original research began at Oxford England in 1997. The work continued in Australia in 2002 and by April 2009 Bob Anderson from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical research (Melbourne, Australia) will commence the first world trials of a celiac vaccine that could reduce or eradicate the need for being gluten free. In fact Bob Anderson calls the vaccine a “next-generation desensitization therapy” that has been successful in mice and is soon to be tested on celiacs.
“The vaccine will be tested on 40 volunteers with celiac disease over 11 months to establish that it does not harm them. In a subsequent phase 2 trial, which is designed to find out if the treatment is effective, volunteers will receive the treatment and then be challenged with foods containing gluten. Their immune response and intestines will then be examined to see if a tolerance to gluten has developed. The therapy involves repeatedly injecting solutions of gluten at increasing concentrations. The aim is to desensitize the subjects slowly, in a similar way to hay fever and dust allergy desensitization treatments.”
Testing process
“For a new drug to be accepted for use in people in Australia, Europe, or North America it must have progressed successfully from Phase 1 (safety) studies usually involving up to about 30 volunteers, to Phase 2 (efficacy) studies to show that “it works” in people with the medical condition of interest (typically about 200 volunteers in several locations around the world), and to Phase 3 (similar to Phase 2 but involving several thousand volunteers in many sites around the world).”
The celiac vaccine future
Due to difficulties in funding, Bob Anderson (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute) co-founded a commercial company called Nexpep to develop the vaccine. Nucleus Network, Centre for Clinical Studies (CCS) in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, will be conducting the Phase 1 clinical trial.
The difficulty he has faced, besides the technical issues, is the low diagnosis level of celiac disease and the mass of associated symptoms has made a vaccine cure unattractive to traditional pharmaceutical companies. These companies always prefer well defined markets to accurately forecast payback periods for their R&D and marketing expenses.
The facts are that for this vaccine to prove financially viable, The US will need to approve the drug and doctors and celiacs will need to accept the treatment. One report estimates that only 600,000 people are diagnosed with celiac disease (out of the 5 million with celiac disease in North America and Europe). Â
Compounded to the funding challenges is that previously, globally, there have only been three “randomized, controlled” studies of the gluten free diet – one in children and two in adults – the largest with 57 participants.”
The assessment of the vaccine treatment will require repeated endoscopy and collection of small intestine biopsies which are expensive and un-enjoyable for volunteers. However a recent trial in Italy has shown that biopsies are still the only â??almost’ guaranteed method of assessing gluten damage. The study findings showed that “two years after adopting a gluten free diet, about half those people diagnosed with celiac disease continued to have villous atrophy as severe as when they were first diagnosed. Only about one in five of those with severe intestinal damage (villous atrophy) on a gluten free diet had raised (abnormal) blood levels of transglutaminase antibody, meaning that standard blood tests to monitor disease activity were relatively ineffective.”
So while the development of this vaccine is an important step in potentially eradicating celiac disease, philosophical questions still remain as issues for the long term efficacy of the vaccines. As an Australian first, this research is applauded by the gluten free community. We wish the researchers and medical staff all of the best in demystifying this illusive disease.
Article references are available on the gluten free pages website.Â
