Back awareness week

If you have a bad back, you don’t need an awareness week as unfortunately it is ever present in your consciousness. However, we now seem to have special days and weeks that are celebrated that I don’t remember from my dim and distant childhood – was there ever a Grandparent’s Day? This time I am reminding you that it is Back Care Awareness Week from 4 – 10 October 2008 and its theme and focus is ‘staying positive and believing that’you can do it’.

Given that 52% of the population now gets back pain – a 5% increase on last year – a positive attitude seems to be definitely called for. You now have full permission to stow the vacuum cleaner as the most common causes of bad backs apparently are spring cleaning and housework. As Quentin Crisp famously observed ‘There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.’ You may feel that’s a bit extreme but as a principle I could get excited about it.

More worrying is the fact that a recent study found that between 13% and 50% of teenagers have already had episodes of back pain and as many as two in every class of 15-18 year olds experience back pain on a recurrent or chronic basis. It’s apparently a combination of too much time in front of a computer, not enough physical activity and the increasing ‘couch potato’ syndrome. There are many options for the management and prevention of back pain and the earlier you seek help then the better it is. Back pain as well as physically causing immobilization, can cause many people to feel trapped by back pain. Even something simple like getting in or out of a car can become an enormous and painful challenge, so much so, that some people stop doing it and become housebound. This can lead to a downward spiral of pain, depression, lack of self-belief and negative feelings about your ability to lead a normal life. It is a ‘can do’ attitude that the back awareness week wants to promote to counter this.

Personally I am a big fan of chiropractic, particularly McTimoney which is less invasive and bone cracking than the more widely known osteopathic practices. There are plenty of events going on around the country, kicking off with a major exhibition at Olympia. If you would like to now more then visit the website at www.backpain.org.uk

Flame retardant clothing – Bad for children?

I wasn’t sure why this would be the case, but a warning put out on one of my natural news networks has confirmed that there are many hidden chemical dangers in even children’s clothing. I was reading about an 18-month old baby with sky-high levels of chemical flame retardants in her blood – two or three times the amount that’s known to cause major nerve damage in lab rats – and she had absorbed these chemicals through her skin. In the USA and the UK there are regulations in force relating to children’s nightwear and I am not suggesting you disregard them, but I do think it’s important to bear in mind the effect such chemicals have, particularly on infants and small children.

A recent study by the Environmental Working Group in the USA looked at 20 families and found that ALL the childen under school age had a level of chemical fire retardants in their blood that was an average of three times higher than their parents.

The chemicals in question are known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). Unlike the flame retardant antimony, which is generally the kind used to make clothing fire-resistant. Its found in every conceivable household item you can imagine: mattresses, TVs, computers, remote controls, and more.

Like antimony, PBDEs have been known to cause brain damage in animals, but now doctors are concerned that the possible effects on human children could range from hyperactivity to damage to hormone systems and reproductive organs.

Fortunately we are not so insistent on the high levels of fire retardant chemicals in clothing as they are in the USA, but it might be worth considering switching to natural, untreated, cotton garments and maintaining sensible fire precautions in the home – particularly if the child is sensitive to allergens or has a compromised immune system.

Aspartame – The sweet deception

I know I have mentioned aspartame before – probably too often – but I can’t emphasise strongly enough that sweeteners do you no favour, especially if you are trying to lose weight. Your body does not recognise a sweetener as sugar, and so you unconsciously seek it out in other ways. Many experts now believe that Aspartame is one of the most dangerous substances ever added to food, not only because it has been proven to make you fatter, but because of its links to serious health problems such as cancer and neurological diseases.

Why am I mentioning it now? Because many people just don’t think it’s true, or that I am a scaremongering killjoy (only on Halloween and never when it concerns your health!) Can I just point out that Aspartame has brought more complaints to the Food and Drug Agency in the USA than any other additive-ever. It’s responsible for a staggering 75% of the complaints they receive and from 10,000 consumer complaints, the FDA compiled a list of 92 symptoms, including death.

Now I think death is a pretty serious symptom – so if you are addicted to diet drinks and sweeteners, could you at least cut down and stop me worrying about you?

Safe cough medicine for children

In the USA there is a call for a ban of all cough medicines for children age 6 for two very good reasons. One, they don’t work well and two, the incidences of drug overdose for the children who use them are too high. A safe and effective home remedy is to go to the store cupboard and get out the honey as researchers at Penn State University recently found that giving children a spoonful of honey before bedtime was significantly better for quieting coughs, compared to a commercial cough suppressant containing dextromethorphan or no treatment at all. Honey soothes the throat by coating the area that is irritated and is a rich source of antioxidants and anti-microbial compounds that are very beneficial for healing.

Dosage:
Children ages 2 to 5 can have a half teaspoon; ages 6 to 12 can have a teaspoon; and ages 12 and over can have two teaspoons.

It may be helpful to follow the honey with a warm – not milky – drink such as decaffeinated tea. The type of honey makes a difference – go for a tested honey such as manuka, it’s more expensive, but it is more effective.

Adult snorers – It starts in childhood

If you have ever dug your partner in the ribs, or tried every brand of ear plugs on the market, it may help to know that really they can’t prevent it. Actually, it may not help at all, but a new study has shown that adult snoring may be rooted in early snorers .

This is based on a study of more than 15,000 adults ages 25 to 54 in Northern Europe, specifically in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Estonia. They were asked questions about their early life environment, childhood history and adult medical problems. The result was that they concluded that there are several factors in early childhood that are associated with adult snoring.

So what are the risk factors so you can identify if your child is going to disturb someone’s sleep in later life? First clue was that adult snorers were more likely to have been hospitalized for a respiratory infection before they were two, had recurrent ear infections such as glue ear or inflammation or have large tonsils that can compromise the upper airways. On the environment front, the child was more likely to have grown up in a large family, or to have been brought up as a baby in a household with a dog.

Karl Franklin, M.D., Ph.D., who carried out the research, speculated that these factors may enhance inflammatory processes and thereby alter upper airway anatomy early in life, causing an increased susceptibility for adult snoring.

Typically the habitual snorers in the study (defined as more than 3 times a week) were more likely to be male, overweight and had a higher prevalence of asthma and chronic bronchitis and were smokers. You may not be able to do anything about their childhood, but those other factors also contribute so tackling the weight, smoking and asthma certainly couldn’t hurt and might help to reduce the frequency and volume. Sadly there is no real cure for snoring, but a good website for general information on what causes it, and what can help, can be found at www.britishsnoring.co.uk

Zap that verruca

In and out of swimming pools or public showers? An unfortunateside effect can be the development of a verruca, and if you don’t want to wear jelly shoes – or it’s too late – then you might be interested in a new product to treat the problem.

The ingredient most favoured for treating a verruca is salicylic acid, but so far this is not been available in an over the counter product that you can pop into the chemist and buy for yourself. The next most favoured method is to freeze it, also used for warts, and one enterprising company has introduced a product called Bazuka Sub-Zero which allows the user to see when the foam applicator is frozen and direct the treatment quickly and accurately on to the wart or verruca.

Why is this a breakthrough?
Because some freezing treatment formats are hard to target directly at the verruca and wart and can cause damage to the surrounding nerve endings as the freezing treatment hits other skin areas. This is backed up by research taken from the data of doctors and chiropodists, who expressed this concern and said they had seen patients where damage, especially to nerve endings, had occurred.

It’s just one application, and it freezes the wart or verruca to the core. After 10 days or so, the treated wart or verruca will fall off revealing new skin that has formed. Apparently it is easy to use, allowing the user to actually see when the applicator is clearly frozen and ready to apply.

If you want to find it, apparently it is available from pharmacies, Superdrug and Morrisons supermarkets and costs £12.95.

Mobile phones and children

There has been plenty of media coverage about the over use of mobile phones, particularly in adults, and the potential health hazards. It is the radiation emissions from the phones that could place users at risk of brain conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, and they have also been linked to cellular DNA damage, and children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable. Nor does the phone have to be switched on to cause a problem: even on standby mobile phones (and cordless phones) create a magnetic field.

It was in 2005 that research by the Irish Doctors Environmental Association (IDEA) first claimed to have found the first proof of health problems caused by mobile phones. They estimated that up to five per cent of the population could be suffering headaches, mood swings and hearing problems caused by radiation from handsets. At that time too, experts advising the Government warned that children under eight should not be given mobile phones because of the potential health risks. Now news is in from Canada where the Toronto department of public health has announced that children under the age of eight should not use a mobile, or cell, phone only in an emergency and young teenagers should restrict their use to just 10 minutes a day. Loren Vanderlinden, a health department supervisor and author of the report, has said that new studies are starting to suggest that long-term mobile phone usage may increase the risk of brain tumours, and this goes much further than the more tentative position of the UK health officials a few years ago when they also warned parents not to let children use a mobile.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

It may be hard, if not impossible to wean a teenager from their mobile phone or to restrict the time they are on it. However, there are some options for reducing the radiation that can help anyone who has prolonged use of a mobile. First it might be helpful to know what are the symptoms of over use:

** “Hot ear” effect / feel your brain is heated up
** Headache Fatigue / tiredness
** Nausea
** General discomfort
** Blurred vision

One of the ways to counteract the radiation is to have a device attached to the phone to affect how cells “receive / react” to wave radiations and usually this is done through some form of magnet. There is a website that offers Biophone and Bioguard – a unique technology that they claim is scientifically proven and works with a number of phones including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, and others – so if you want to know more visit them at www.biofona.co.uk and browse through the site.

Ginseng safe for children?

Previously ginseng has been highly recommended as an immune system tonic, but mainly suitable for men and post menopausal women. The Red Army famously uses ginseng to help with stamina and endurance, but some new research seems to indicate that it can also be used safely for short term use when treating children with cold and flu symptoms.

Sunita Vohra, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Alberta tested an over-the-counter ginseng supplement and found it was well tolerated in children without any serious adverse effects if used just for treating common cold symptoms. As this is a self-limiting illness the supplementwas only given for a short period and presumably helped by stimulating the child’s own natural immune defences to be more effective in combating the cold.

The effects of supplements on children has not much been studied – nor indeed as I have previously reported have the effects of drugs such as statins which are currently being prescribed to them. As it is estimated that 41% to 45% of children in Canada and the United States use natural health products, then it seems about time a comprehensive study was done. George Rylance, a paediatrician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, who helps to produce the British National Formulary for Children, said that dosages must be tailored for each child, calculated by weight and age.

The standard adult dose of a ginseng supplement for treating a cold is three times daily at 600 mg on day one, 400 mg on day two, and 200 mg on day three. The dosage was adjusted for children according to weight and their standard dose 26 mg/kg per day on day one, 17 mg/kg/day on day two, and 9 mg/kg/day on day three. Children weighing more than 45 kg were given the standard adult dose. They received a liquid form of ginseng which they were given in orange juice – not sure if they added in any benefit from the vitamin C or not.

The result on safety over a short term was conclusive, it was fine, and there was some indication that the ginseng was effective in reducing the duration of the symptoms of the cold. The maker of the ginseng product used in the study, CV Technologies, plans to start a larger randomized efficacy trial in children within the next year, as it seems to be an effective treatment for upper respiratory tract infection.

Pets and pregnancy – A warning

A new study shows that pregnant women who use flea and tick shampoos on pets may double the risk of autism in their children. This preliminary finding comes from the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment study (CHARGE) – a case-control study from the University of California Davis, in the US.

The results are part of an ongoing research project which is following 2,000 children – some with autism, some with developmental delay, and some with typical development – and compares individual genetic patterns with exposure to medications, chemicals, food products, and other environmental factors.

It is believed that it is pyrethrins, commonly used chemicals in insecticides, that may play a role in triggering autism in certain children. Pyrethrins are extracted from Chrysanthemum flowers and are regarded as low in toxicity and there are commercial pyrethrum formulas that are considered safe to use in food preparation areas where flies and other insects can be found. One other product where Pyrethrins are widely used is in lice-control shampoos for humans and pets.

As I mentioned earlier, this is only a preliminary study but it would be a sensible precaution for pregnant women to avoid contact with lice-control shampoos. Let someone else shampoo the dog, or look for shampoos that treat lice naturally with ingredients such as tea tree oil, and not pyrethrins.

Oh really?!

Sometimes I really despair about the people who hand out research grants – then again sometimes I wish they would just give me the money because in a 30 second phone call I could give them the same conclusions for a lot less money – and so could you. This week’s prize goes to Aryeh D. Stein, M.P.H., Ph.D., of Emory University, Atlanta who has discovered that the if a baby is well fed for the first few years of life, they will be smarter as they grow up. No really? His study was based on children from poor and disadvantaged Guatemalan villages and he discovered that when said children were given a proper diet with sufficient protein and adequate nutrition they were able to think better – on average it related to the equivalent of 1.6 years of schooling, Having an inadequate diet has an effect on virtually every function of the body and certainly impacts the ability to think clearly – hunger can do that to you as you would have imagined the researchers could have guessed at for themselves. What really annoyed and upset me however was they based their trial on the children being provided twice daily with either fresco, a sugar-sweetened drink that provided 330 kcal/L but no fat or protein, or the dietary supplement atole — a traditional hot drink made with vegetable protein, dry skimmed milk, and sugar — that provided 6.4 g/100 mL protein and 900 kcal/L.

How do you justify giving deprived kids a sugar loaded drink with no benefit to them just to test a theory that anyone with half a brain could have predicted the results of? The supplemented kids who got atole showed improved growth and less stunting at age three years as well as better cognitive ability. Great, but what about the rest? This is research for its own sake and how it was justified is a mystery to me but presumably it made sense to the people who paid for it; namely the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Thrasher Fund and the Nestle Foundation. The latter was set up to provide initiates and supports research in human nutrition with public health relevance in low – and lower middle-income countries, and presumably to sell more of their products from coffee to baby milk – wonder if they also make fresco?

The researchers did not report any conflicts of interest.

Primary source: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine

Source reference: Stein AD, et al “Nutritional supplementation in early childhood, schooling, and intellectual functioning in adulthood: a prospective study in Guatemala” Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2008; 162: 612-618.

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