Therapist Unlimited Blog

A recent study has confirmed that doing yoga can offer treatment to those patients suffering from back-pain.
Based on the student made by the West Virginia University it was discovered that people with chronic low-back problems who do yoga also do better at overcoming pain and depression than people treated
conventionally for back pain.
According to the the three-year, $400,000 study, those group who did yoga postures showed lifted mood, less pain and
improved function compared with a control group who received standard medical therapy.
Kimberly Williams, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine revealed the yoga group had less pain, less functional disability and less depression compared with the control group.

Those who wish to find relief in their back-pain can try yoga as treatment.

Williams added the result were statistically significant and clinically important changes that must be maintained six months after the intervention.
She said 90 study subjects, who experienced mild to moderate functional disability, were randomly assigned to the yoga group or the group that received conventional medical therapy.
She added yoga participants took 90-minute classes twice a week for 24 weeks, doing postures targeted to relieve chronic low-back pain.
Williams said a follow up continued for six months after the end of classes or therapy.
Moreover, Williams said the classes were taught by certified Iyengar yoga instructors.
She said a popular form of yoga in the United States, Iyengar yoga emphasises postures that encourage strength, flexibility and balance.
It is said based on the latest statistics that in the United States, low-back pain represents the largest category of medical reimbursements, with $34 billion in direct medical costs reported annually.

Here is a piece of good news to all those patients suffering from heart failure.
A recent research has shown that a therapy called cardiac resynchronization can significantly delay the progression of heart failure.
Based on the research the treatment reduced the risk of serious heart failure events by 41 percent.
Dr. David Wilber, a co-author of the study and director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Loyola University Chicago
Stritch School of Medicine revealed the research has shown that for the first time, the onset of heart failure symptoms and hospitalization for heart failure can be delayed with pacing therapy.
According to researchers, a device implanted in the upper chest delivers electrical impulses that help synchronize contractions of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber.
Some 1,820 patients from 110 centers in the United States, Canada and Europe participated in the study.
The researchers revealed all patients in the trial had been diagnosed with early stage, mild heart failure (Class 1 and Class 2 on the New York Heart Association classification system).
The study’s principle investigator is Dr. Arthur Moss of the University of Rochester
Medical Center.
Patients were randomly assigned to two groups. A control group received an implanted defibrillator, and a second group received a defibrillator plus cardiac resychronization. (A defibrillator is a device that shocks the heart back to a normal rhythm if the patient experiences a life-threatening irregular heartbeat.)

Those persons suffering from heart failure can now use cardiac resynchronization as treatment for their medical condition.
 

Compared with the control group, the cardiac resychronization group had a significantly improved heart-pumping efficiency and a 41 percent lower risk of heart-failure events that required hospitalization or outpatient treatment with intravenous drugs.
Loyola heart failure patient Rosemary Jakubowski of Elmwood Park, Il. said that before she received cardiac resychronization, she had experienced significant fatigue.
Since receiving cardiac resychronization, Jakubowski has been taking kickboxing and swim aerobics classes, without fatigue.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved cardiac resychronization for patients with Class 3 (moderate) and Class 4 (severe) heart failure. Such patients experience marked limitations in physical activity or are unable to do any physical activity at all without discomfort.
Wilber said the study has shown that certain patients with early-stage, mild heart failure also can benefit from cardiac resychronization.

 

Researchers have recently discovered that exercise combined with a Mediterranean-style diet is linked with a lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
With their discovery, the researchers said the findings were strong enough to justify setting up controlled trials to investigate the link more robustly and see if there are any other factors that might have an affect on Alzheimer’s risk.
It is said that although previous studies have looked at links between diet or physical activity and risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), this is the first to look at their combined effect.
Lead researcher Dr. Nikos Scarmeas, associate professor of clinical neurology in the Department of Neurology, in the Sergievsky Center and in the Taub
Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at the Center explained Often times people who exercise also follow a healthy diet and vice versa.
Scarmeas added we wanted to tease out which of these two behaviors may be associated with lower risk for AD, or if the combination of the two is associated with decreased risk even further.
To get the information, Scarmeas and colleagues used data on 1,880 elderly residents of average age 77 who were part of a multi-ethnic community living in Northern Manhattan.
None of the participants had dementia at the start of the study.
In interviews that took place at the start of the study, the participants answered questions about their diet and level of physical activity.

Doing regular exercise and eating Mediterranean-Style Diet is a good way to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

For physical activity, the participants were asked to say how much vigorous (eg jogging), moderate (eg hiking or cycling), and light (eg golfing or gardening) they had undertaken in the two weeks prior to the interview.
For diet, they were asked about their food and drink consumption over the previous 12 months. The questions covered nine food categories, the sum of which gave a single score for how close the diet was to a Mediterranean-style one.
A Mediterranean-style diet typically comprises a high intake of fish, vegetables, legumes (eg peas, lentils and beans), fruits, cereals and monounsaturated fatty acids, together with a relatively low intake of dairy foods, meats and saturated fats, and a moderate level of alcohol consumption.
After this, the participants underwent standardized neurological and neuropsychological tests about every 18 months from 1992 to 2006. The researchers then looked for patterns between diet, exercise and diagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s.
The results showed that:
    * A total of 282 incident cases of Alzheimer’s disease were diagnosed during a mean follow up of 5.4 years.
    * Compared with the participants who were least physically active, the most physically active had a 33 per cent reduction in risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
    * Compared with those who adhered the least, the participants who adhered the most to a Mediterranean-style diet had a 40 per cent reduction in risk.
    * Participants reporting the highest level of exercise and whose diet was closest to the Mediterranean-style showed a 60 percent reduction in risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to those who did not exercise and did not follow a Mediterranean-style diet.
Based on the result of their study, the researchers concluded that:
"In this study, both higher Mediterranean-type diet adherence and higher physical activity were independently associated with reduced risk for AD."
Scarmeas said it seemed that the more they did in terms of both diet and exercise, the lower their risk of develops Alzheimer’s.
But he also said that even a low level of physical activity seemed to have a protective effect.
Scarmeas said the study is important because:
"It shows that people may be able to alter their risk of developing Alzheimer’s by modifying their lifestyles through diet and exercise."
But he went on to caution that this was an observational, epidemiological study, and not a randomized controlled trial.
The data came from self reports, the participants were not randomly assigned to different diet and exercise groups, and there was not control group as there would be in a clinical trial.
"We know that some part of Alzheimer’s is related to genetic changes and as time goes on we discover more and more of these changes. But it is also possible that non-genetic changes, including lifestyle and behavior, may also be affecting our brain health and our risk of developing brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s, maybe in combination with our genetic predisposition," said Scarmeas.
"We need to understand and learn more about the exact biological mechanisms that may connect physical activity and diet with the biological changes of Alzheimer’s disease," he urged.
However, he also said that there are now lots of studies linking healthy diet and exercise with various health benefits and prevention of disease, and given that this study and several others also suggest these benefits could extent to brain health, it would not be unreasonable to emphasize to patients and healthy people that lifestyle, and not just genes, impact health, including brain health.

Plug as a potential cure for damaged knees are now being closely studied by a group of medical experts in the United States.
According to a medical report investigators from Hospital for Special Surgery have shown that a biodegradable scaffold or plug can be used to treat patients with damaged knee cartilage.
It is said that the study is unique in that it used serial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and newer quantitative T2 mapping to examine how the plug incorporated itself into the knee.
Dr. Asheesh Bedi, M.D., a fellow in sports medicine and shoulder surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery who participated in the research said the data has been encouraging to support further evaluation of this synthetic scaffold as a cartilage repair technique.
Bedi revealed the Trufit plug has been designed to have mechanical properties that are similar to cartilage and bone.
He said damage to so-called articular cartilage can occur in various ways, ranging from direct trauma in a motor vehicle accident to a noncontact, pivoting event on the soccer field.
The added articular cartilage lacks the intrinsic properties of healing.

If proven to be an effective cure, biodegradable scaffold or plug could bring joy to those patients suffering from damaged knees.

The medical expert explained if left untreated, these injuries can increase loads placed on the remaining intact cartilage and increase the risk of progression to degenerative arthritis.
Bedi said one way to treat patients with symptomatic chondral lesions is an OATS procedure, in which cartilage is transferred from one portion of the knee to treat another.
To make the procedure for beneficial to the patient, he and his team made the study to examine whether they could use a biodegradable plug, the Trufit CB plug, to fill the donor site.
He revealed the goal was to monitor how the plug incorporated itself into the knee and to evaluate the quality of the repair cartilage.
According to medical facts, the Trufit plug has two layers.
The top layer has properties similar to cartilage and the lower layer has properties similar to bone.
The bilayered structure has mechanical properties that approximately match the adjacent cartilage and bone.
Surgeons inserted the plug in the knees of 26 patients with donor lesions from OATS procedures and followed up with imaging studies (with MRI and T2-mapping) at various intervals for a period of 39 months.
Bedi said so far the result of their study is encouraging since the plug demonstrated a predictable process of maturation on imaging studies that paralleled the biology of their incorporation.,
He added with increasing postoperative duration, the repair tissue demonstrated encouraging properties with T2-values that resembled native articular cartilage.
Furthermore, Bedi and his team believe that there is a role for scaffold-based cartilage repair strategies in the treatment of symptomatic cartilage lesions.
Bedi and the other researchers hope thy can successfully treat these cartilage problems over the long term, thus restoring normal knee function and slowing the progression of knee arthritis.

Here is a piece of good news to those persons suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
A recent study has shown that a group of chemicals found in many fruits and vegetables, as well as tea, cocoa and red wine could protect the brain from Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating, progressive disorder affecting an estimated 15-20 million people worldwide.
Over the past four decades, through worldwide research efforts, it is now known that in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease there are abnormal cellular processes which lead to neurodegeneration and dementia. Understanding these disease processes at the molecular level will allow the development of pharmacological agents to block these processes, and lead the way for effective therapies in Alzheimer’s disease.
Central to the development of Alzheimer’s disease is toxic beta-amyloid peptide, a substance that is normally produced in the brain but, in this disease, is deposited abnormally as amyloid plaques.
Dr. Robert Williams, a Biochemist working at Kings College London revealed that while much more research needs to be done, there is mounting evidence that certain flavonoids chemicals found in plants and food derived from plants - might provide therapeutic benefit for Alzheimer’s sufferers.
Williams told the media in a recent interview that there have been some intriguing epidemiological studies that the consumption of flavonoid-rich vegetables, fruit juices and red wine delays the onset of the disease.
He said these reports, while not as powerful as controlled, randomized clinical trials, have encouraged a number of research groups, including our own, to investigate the biology of flavonoids in more detail.
The medical expert revealed a lack of good research and clinical trial data meant this field of research had suffered from a lack of scientific credibility, not helped by early positive health claims for flavonoids that cannot access the brain or are broken down too rapidly by the body to be of any benefit.
The medical expert added skepticism also persists because flavonoids are known antioxidants and yet clinical trials with other antioxidants, such as vitamin E, showed no reported benefit on either symptoms or disease progression in dementia.
Williams said a new concept is emerging that suggests flavonoids do not act simply as antioxidants but exert their biological effects through other mechanisms.

To all those persons suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease it is time to consume tea, cocoa and red wine since they contain flavonoid which could treat your sickness.

He said a small number of recent studies carried out in models of Alzheimer’s disease have found that oral administration of green tea flavonoids or grape flavonoids reduces brain pathology and, in some cases, improves cognition. Dr Williams and colleagues have focused their own cellular studies on a flavonoid called epicatechin, which is abundant in a number of foodstuffs, including cocoa.
Furthermore, Williams said he and his team found that epicatechin protects brain cells from damage but through a mechanism unrelated to its antioxidant activity and shown in laboratory tests that it can also reduce some aspects of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
Williams said their findings is very interesting because epicatechin and its breakdown products are measurable in the bloodstream of humans for a number of hours after ingestion and it is one of the relatively few flavonoids known to access the brain suggesting it has the potential to be bioactive in humans.
He said flavonoids can protect brain cells against the toxic actions of beta-amyloid.
He adds: "Although our findings support the general concept that dietary intake of flavonoid-rich foods or supplements could impact on the development and progression of dementia, they are clearly insufficient to make any sort of nutritional recommendations at this stage.
Williams said the challenge now is to identify the single flavonoid or combination of flavonoids that exert the most positive effects and to define the mechanisms of action and optimal quantity required before embarking on clinical trials to treat their effectiveness in dementia.

According to a recent study, patient suffering from alcohol-related liver disease could find effective cure from their medical condition through abstinence. Yes, you heard it right abstinence, based on the research conducted it was discovered that abstinence from alcohol is an integral factor in long-term prognosis, even with relatively severe alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver.

Dr. Nick Sheron, the lead researcher of the study and senior lecturer at the University of Southampton and consultant herpetologist at Southampton General Hospital explained his team decided to conduct the research to discover the impact of pathological severity of cirrhosis on the survival in patients with alcohol-related cirrhosis. Sheron said with the use of up-to-date mortality data from the National Health Service Strategic Tracing Service they determine that drinking status was the most important factor in determining long-term survival in alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver.He said the research team also discovered that the degree of cirrhosis on biopsy had less impact on survival.

Heavy drinkers suffering from alcohol-related liver disease should stop or abstain from their habit if they wish to find effective cure in their medical condition.
 

Furthermore, Sheron revealed they found out that abstinence from alcohol at one month after diagnosis of cirrhosis was the more important factor determining survival with a seven-year survival of 72 per cent for the abstinent patients against 44 per cent for the patients continuing to drink.

The medical expert hoped people around the world who are suffering from alcohol-related liver disease should now abstain from drinking if they wish to get cure of their life threatening medical condition.

Those people inflicted with allergies and asthma could soon find cure in folic acid.

People suffering from allergies and asthma could soon find cure in Folic acid.
This was revealed in a recent study made by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center who found out that Folic Acid or vitamin B9, may help treat allergic reactions, allergy symptoms, and even asthma.
Based on internet data, folate occurs naturally in food while folic acid is the synthetic form of this vitamin. Sources include cereals, baked goods, leafy vegetables, asparagus, fruits, legumes, yeast, mushrooms and organ meat (such as beef liver or kidneys).
According to the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers carefully examined medical data from 8,083 patients’ ages 2-85 who participated in the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
During the research, serum folate levels and total IgE levels were measured. IgE, or immunoglobulin E, is a class of antibodies that mediates allergic reactions, asthma and respiratory symptoms.
The study has shown that higher levels of folate were linked to lower IgE levels; fewer reported allergies, less wheezing and a lower likelihood of developing asthma.
Furthermore, the researchers found out that people with the lowest folate levels (less than eight nanograms per milliliter of blood) had a 40 percent increased risk of wheezing, 30 percent increased risk of having elevated IgE levels, 31 percent increased risk of allergic symptoms and a 16 percent higher risk of asthma compared to those with the highest levels of folate (above 18 nanograms per milliliter of blood).
Despite the encouraging result on the healing power of folic acid, researchers has yet to formally recommend it to patients since it still need further study before it can be officially be recommended to the public as cure to the said medical conditions.
 

A recent medical study has shown that a drug used to cure alcohol and drug addiction could be an effective treatment to the compulsive behaviour of kleptomaniacs.
In the study conducted by the University Of Minnesota Department Of Psychiatry, it was discovered that the drug Naltrexone (mean dose of 117mg/day) could effectively curb the urge to steal of those persons suffering from Kleptomania.
Jon Grant, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., a University of Minnesota associate professor of psychiatry and principal investigator of the study revealed they base their evaluation on  25 men and women ages 17-75, who spent an average of at least one hour a week stealing.
Grant explained although the said drug is not a total cure for kleptomania it is still good news to all that if combined with individual therapy it can affectively bring solution to this type of sickness.
Those patients suffering both from will certainly be happy with this report since Naltrexone offers effective and cheap treatment for their medical condition.

Alcoholism and drug addiction medicine Naltrexone is also an affective treatment for Kleptomania.

A recent study conducted by medical researchers has shown that alt is an effective cure to people suffering from depression.
The research conducted by the University of Iowa (UI) has shown that salt can make people happy and be in a better mood.
Kim Johnson, a psychologist of UI and member of the research team made the discovery that salt is an effective cure for depression based on the experiment they conducted on rats.
Johnson said in the research they conducted they found out that salt is a natural mood-elevating substance, which makes in an ideal medicine for people suffering from depression.
She said same mood enhancing result is seen among humans who take substantial amount of salt.

Studies has shown that salt is an effective means to cure depression.
 

The psychologist said due to the benefit it offers to humans’ salt intake per person worldwide is 10 grams a day, which is greater than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended intake by about 4 grams, and may exceed what the body actually needs by more than 8 grams.
Based on research the high demand for salt could be traced back 2000 BC when it was first discovered that salt is an affective food preservative.
Roman soldiers were paid in salt; the word salary is derived from the Latin for salt.
Today, salt is still part of human diet due to its taste and cheap price.
Studies have shown that the high levels of salt are contained in everything from pancakes to pasta these days.
According to the latest statistics, 77 percent of our salt intake comes from processed and restaurant foods, like frozen dinners and fast food.
This particular report will sure bring smiles to those suffering from depression since salt is inexpensive and easy to find.