Here is another reason to develop interventions for 18-24 year olds…

Original Article

(source: National Institute of Health)

Overweight girls who lose weight before they reach adulthood greatly reduced their risk for developing type 2 diabetes, according to researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Harvard University, who analyzed 16 years of data on nearly 110,000 women.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease. It is marked by high blood sugar levels and difficulties in the body’s production or use of insulin. Being overweight, exercising infrequently and having a family history of diabetes are known to contribute to the risk of developing the disease.

Dr. Gary Foster is a professor of  medicine and public health at Temple University. In this short audio interview, he shares current issues with obesity and practical solutions to how we, as a nation, can tackle the obesity pandemic.

Realistic Solutions to Obesity: Interview with Dr. Gary Foster

(source: The Obesity Society)

By: Ali Al-Rajhi

My notes from the interview

Is obesity more of lifestyle or medical problem?

Dr. Foster that obesity is more of a medical problem: but what is the source?

• Look at biological and environmental factors…genes haven’t changed much, but people’s environment has changed significantly.

Black Females have the highest rate…we don’t know why but Dr. Foster’s guess is that it may be linked to the environmental they live in, cultural lifestyle, and their socio-economic status.

What can be done to tackle the issue of obesity? Overall message is to “eat less and move more,” and current interventions are focusing on the following approaches:

• Level 1: Behavioral modification; Level 2: pharmaco-therapy; Level 3: Bariatric Surgery
• People must think through the whole process differently – instead of working on the “reinforcement” side, work more on the “antecedent” side (e.g., what are the early triggers that make one overeat or stay sedentary?).
• Think of caloric intake as you do when balancing your finances: Understand how much energy goes into body and how much is burned (energy in and energy out).
• Change your relationship with food and don’t focus on losing pounds (e.g. don’t diet, just eat healthier)
• Change kids preferences at an early age…even pre-uteri as research has shown (e.g., talk to mom about what she eats).

What about diet plans? Generally not effective, but every diet works to some extent if it gets you to eat healthier or eat less then what you did before.

Diabetes is the most costly from a health care point-a-view and closely tied to obesity…both a medical and economic problem

To influence children to eat healthier just change environment at home with healthier selections and don’t point fingers as teens might resist…show by action and not words. Same can be said about school environment (e.g., change what is offered in the cafeteria and vending machines)

What about folks that are biological pre-deposed to be overweight?

• These people might make changes but will quit because they feel defeated if they don’t see changes.
• The solution: Think of it as an endless life-long marathon and just make small changes in your diet (e.g., think of ways to eliminate unhealthy calories like replacing whole milk with fat-free milk).

Where can the public get good information?

• The NIH has practical outlines and patient handouts that are ethnically diverse. Just type in “obesity” into the search.

What do you get when you combine Magic The Gathering and Infection Control? Yes, you guessed it…Healing Blade!

Original Post

(source: Wall-Street Journal Blog)

In the real world, it’s microbes vs. antibiotics. In the Healing Blade card game, it’s the Lords of Pestilence vs. the Apothecary Healers.

Two doctors have created the game, similar to Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh (with a dash of Dungeons & Dragons, for those old enough to remember), to teach med students about infectious disease, American Medical News reports.

The game pits the antibiotic Healers against various bugs, depicted as monsters with germ-appropriate characteristics. Water- and food-borne Campylobacter jejuni, for example, appears as a rather unfriendly looking mermaid. The monster representing the notorious Clostridium difficile, seen in the picture above, has the microbe’s toxic spores protruding from its back. And Enterococcus faecalis is depicted as a devil with a fist of fire, appropriate given the bacterium’s characterization as a “fiery colonic demon.” (Ouch.)

Arun Mathews, one of the game’s creators (the other is Francis Kong), tells American Medical News he hit upon a card game as a way to represent the complexities of matching antibiotics to illnesses. Players pick a side, then pit diseases and their symptoms and resistances against antibiotics — which can actually “turn into adversaries when real-world events such as resistance comes into play.”

Mathews, a hospitalist, and Kong, a health IT consultant, are the founders of Nerdcore Learning, the company that produced the game.

About This Talk

(source: TED)

Armed with bracing logic, wit and her “public-health nerd” glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today’s political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations — from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia — demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive measures that could stall the spread of this devastating disease.

About Elizabeth Pisani

An alumna of various government health agencies, Elizabeth Pisani is now an assumption-busting independent researcher and analyst, polling transgendered sex workers, drug addicts and others to illuminate the surprising (and often ignored) demographics that belie traditional studies.

Pisani is fearlessly outspoken on the global failure to understand and manage the realities of AIDS, decrying the tangled roles that money, votes, and media play in the public health landscape. She shows how politics and “morality” have hogtied funding, and advocates for putting dollars where they can actually make a difference. As the Globe and Mail wrote: “Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient.”

Ever wonder where you can tap into a large data base of Public Health information? Well look no further then CDC Wonder.

CDC Wonder

(source: CDC)

CDC Wonder is an easy-to-use, menu-driven system that makes the information resources of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) available to public health professionals and the public at large. It provides access to a wide array of public health information.

CDC WONDER furthers CDC’s mission of health promotion and disease prevention by speeding and simplifying access to public health information for state and local health departments, the Public Health Service, and the academic public health community. CDC WONDER is valuable in public health research, decision making, priority setting, program evaluation, and resource allocation.

CDC WONDER, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is an integrated information and communication system for public health. Its purposes are:

• To promote information-driven decision making by placing timely, useful facts in the hands of public health practitioners and researchers, and

• To provide the general public with access to specific and detailed information from CDC.

With CDC WONDER you can:

• Access statistical research data published by CDC, as well as reference materials, reports and guidelines on health-related topics;
• Query numeric data sets on CDC’s computers, via “fill-in-the blank” web pages. Public-use data sets about mortality (deaths), cancer incidence, HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, vaccinations, natality (births), census data and many other topics are available for query, and the requested data are readily summarized and analyzed, with dynamically calculated statistics, charts and maps.

The data is ready for use in desktop applications such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, or statistical and geographic analysis packages. File formats available include plain text (ASCII), web pages (HTML), and spreadsheet files (Tab Separated Values). All of these facilities are menu-driven, and require no special computer expertise.