Whipple’s disease
Whipple’s disease is a rare bacterial infection that most often affects your gastrointestinal system. Whipple’s disease interferes with normal digestion, impairing the breakdown of foods such as fats and carbohydrates and hampering your body’s ability to absorb nutrients.
In addition to affecting your intestinal tract, Whipple’s disease can infect other organs, including your brain, heart, joints and eyes.
Without proper treatment, Whipple’s disease can be serious or fatal. But no matter which part of your body Whipple’s disease affects, a course of antibiotics can provide successful treatment.
Many common signs and symptoms of Whipple’s disease involve your gastrointestinal system and include:
- Diarrhea
- Abdominal cramping and pain, which tends to worsen after meals in some cases
- Weight loss, associated with the malabsorption of nutrients
Other frequent signs and symptoms associated with Whipple’s disease include:
- Inflamed joints, particularly your ankles, knees and wrists
- Fatigue
- Weakness
- Anemia
Teens and Women on the Pill Risk Breast Cancer
Women who use the birth control pill, especially if they start under age 18, run a high risk of getting breast cancer, a major study says.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / PRURGENT
Oral contraceptive use has been closely linked to a certain deadly type of breast cancer, a leading cancer journal stated recently, and the results may prove to challenge the breast cancer research community.
A study concerning the deadly “triple negative” breast cancer, involving more than 1200 women aged 20 – 45, found a “distinct etiology,” or cause and effect, for women who used oral contraception for longer than a year, and an even stronger correlation for women who began using it before the age of 18.
The study was published in the April 2009 Cancer, Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention over a five-year period. The study’s main author, Jessica Dolle, and other researchers at the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, found that oral contraceptive use for a year or more “was associated with a 2.7-fold increased risk for triple-negative breast cancer.” Triple negative breast cancer is a subtype of cancer associated with a high mortality and has little hope for a cure. Read more
Cholesterol lowering with niacin definition
Cholesterol lowering with niacin: Niacin or nicotinic acid, one of the water-soluble B vitamins, improves all lipoproteins when given in doses well above the vitamin requirement. Nicotinic acid lowers the total cholesterol, “bad” LDL-cholesterol, and triglyceride levels, while raising the “good” HDL-cholesterol level. There are two types of nicotinic acid: immediate release and timed release. Most experts recommend starting with the immediate-release form; discuss with your doctor which type is best for you. Nicotinic acid is inexpensive and widely accessible to patients without a prescription but must not be used for cholesterol lowering without the monitoring of a physician because of the potential side effects. (Nicotinamide, another form of the vitamin niacin, does not lower cholesterol levels and should not be used in the place of nicotinic acid.) Read more
