Health Controversy: Should Teenage Girls Be Paid to NOT Get Pregnant?

The teen pregnancy rate is on the rise, and one advocacy group says that the answer is simple: Just pay teenage girls not to get pregnant. Could this really be a good idea?

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A program called College Bound Sisters, which is affiliated with the University of North Carolina, offers girls ages 12 to 18 $1 a day if they avoid getting sperminated (awful word, but it gets right to the point, doesn’t it?).

There are some ground rules, though: Program participants cannot have been pregnant before, they must be enrolled in school and be interested in attending college and have a sis who had a child before the age of 18, CNN reports. They also have to attend a once-a-week, 90-minute meeting where program advisers encourage them to abstain from sex or use birth control. If they comply, they get $7 a week, which is put into a college fund.

If a girl in the program gets pregnant? She loses her “savings” in the program. Bummer.

Will this program and others like it work? Maybe. But, my gut tells me that they’d have to pay some teens a lot more than $7 a week to get them to sign up. And while I can see the logic behind it, I keep coming back to this question: Does it feel wrong, somehow, to pay someone to do the right thing? Is this bribery, in a sense?

What do you think?

The Magic of Soy

It’s one thing to know the health benefits of soy. It’s another entirely to find tasty ways to include it in your everyday diet. The Cleveland Clinic, one of the top hospitals in America and a leader in coronary care, has some ideas.

Soy, which reduces cholesterol and promotes cardiac health, can be found in grocery stores in all kinds of permutations such as tofu, soybean curd, soy milk and cheese and soy burgers. Other products include tempeh, soy yogurt and butter, roasted soy nuts, soy flour and fresh or canned dry soybeans.

To take advantage of soy’s health benefits, start adding soy to your menu twice a week and build up to at least 25 grams per day. You can do this by adding tofu cubes to soups, stews and stir-fry recipes.

Try grilled soy burgers or hotdogs, and top them with a slice of soy cheese. Substitute frozen soy crumbles for ground beef in recipes and taco fillings, use canned soybeans in salads, soups and chili and add soymilk to cereal and recipes that call for milk. With so many choices, there’s only one thing’s for sure: there are a million delicious ways to get your daily soy!

The Uterus-Heart Connection

UPPSALA, SWEDEN, September 12 — New data shows that women who have hysterectomies after menopause have a four-times greater heart attack rate than those who keep their uteruses. A study led by Dr. Margareta Falkeborn, of the Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences/Geriatrics at Sweden’s University of Uppsala, found no increase in heart attack risk in premenopausal women who underwent hysterectomy unless both ovaries were removed as well.

Dr. Falkeborn’s study included 17,126 women who had undergone a hysterectomy and oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) from 1965 to 1983. The postmenopausal women generally required hysterectomy for fibroid tumors (non-cancerous growths).

Young women with normal estrogen levels suffer in many ways from the loss of estrogen after hysterectomy with oophorectomy. Not surprisingly, the loss of estrogen’s well-known protective effect increases heart attack rate. The study findings are all the more meaningful because postmenopausal women were not previously thought to benefit from the low level of estrogen their ovaries produce.

Dr. Falkeborn and colleagues, writing in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, speculate that there may be an association between fibroid tumors and heart attack.

The First Alzheimer’s Patient

In November 1901, German psychiatist Alois Alzheimer encountered a woman named Auguste Deter (Auguste D, as she came to be known) who had been brought to Alzheimer’s Frankfurt clinic by her husband.

According to the husband, the couple had been harmoniously married since 1873, but he had recently noticed a gradual decline in his wife that went beyond short- and long-term memory loss.  At the relatively young age of 51, she had become disturbingly absent-minded, making obvious mistakes in food preparation, neglecting her housework, stashing objects in nooks and crannies around their apartment, wandering aimlessly from room to room, and suffering from intense bouts of jealousy and paranoia.

As the months went by, thoughts of Auguste D. stayed with Dr. Alzheimer.  He recognized that Auguste D.’s case could prove to be of great scientific importance because of her young age.  At fifty-one, she was exhibiting the behavioral symptoms that one might expect to observe in a dementia patient in their seventh, eighth, or ninth decade.

The dilemma for Alzheimer and his colleagues was the same as it is today: Did Auguste D. (and others like her) have a specific disease separate from normal aging? Or were their brains simply moving quicker along the continuum of aging and experiencing the symptoms of senility a bit more rapidly than others?  This quandary puzzled Dr. Alzheimer for years to come.

In 1906, Auguste D. passed away.  Dr. Alzheimer performed an autopsy, finding a high volume of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the tissue of her brain.  In November of that year, Dr. Alzheimer delivered a now famous lecture to the Assembly of Southwest German Psychologists in Tübingen.  Alzheimer stood before nearly ninety of his colleagues in this lecture theatre and reported on the case of Auguste D, interspersing his lecture with wonderfully-drawn slides of the plaques and tangles found in and on Auguste D’s brain in post mortem investigation.

The Benefits of Post-Menopausal Exercise

Postmenopausal women respond much like younger women to regular, vigorous exercise, U.S. researchers found.

Study leader and exercise physiologist George Brooks of the University of California at Berkeley said despite changes in hormones and changes in body composition, postmenopausal women can make significant changes in their cardiovascular fitness without going on extreme diets.

The study involved 10 healthy but sedentary women, averaging 55 years of age, who participated in endurance training on an exercise bike for one hour, five days a week, at 65 percent of maximum lung capacity.

The study, published in the journal Metabolism — Clinical and Experimental, found participants increased their body’s capacity to consume and use oxygen by an average of 16 percent and dropped their resting heart rates by an average of four beats per minute.

Brooks said that after the age of 30, people lose the capacity to consume and use oxygen at about 1 percent per year, but women in the study had the cardiovascular and metabolic capabilities of women 16 years younger.

Pubic Lice

The facts on crabs

Pubic lice, also called crab lice or crabs, are parasitic insects which typically infest the hair surrounding human genitalia. Crab lice can, however, also thrive in other areas of the body with hair, including the armpits and eyelashes. Humans and gorillas are the only species known to host crabs.

Transmission and Symptoms of Crabs

Genital crabs are transmitted through close interpersonal contact. Because they prefer to inhabit pubic zones in humans, sexual intercourse is the most common method of transmission. However, pubic lice can also spread through shared beds, shared towels and shared clothing.

The primary symptom of STD crabs is a persistent, burning itchy feeling in the genital region. Many people who contract genital crabs say the itching is worse at night. If the crab lice spread to other hair-covered parts of the body, so too will the itching.

Pubic Lice Treatment Recommendations

The primary treatment for pubic lice is to apply a prescription cream rinse to the affected area. Your doctor will prescribe a pyrethrin-based compound of the necessary strength. Pyrethrins are extremely effective insecticides.

The treatment agent your doctor prescribes should be applied to the affected area and left to sit for a specified period of time, usually 10 to 15 minutes. Then, rinse the areas clean and repeat as often as directed.

Some people shave the hair off the affected areas, or groom it carefully using a fine comb. This can be done to remove dead crab lice and nits, though it is not a necessary step in most treatment regimens.

The Latest on Obesity

Two out of five men and almost a third of women around the world are now overweight, a major population study has shown. Almost a quarter of men and 27 percent of women are fat enough to be considered obese, according to the findings. Doctors assessed 168,159 people aged 18 to 80 in 63 countries across five continents. A tape measure was used to record the waist circumference of all those taking part. Relative weight and height were also measured to provide Body Mass Index (BMI) figures.

Lead author Dr. Beverly Balkau, from French state-run medical research institute Inserm, in Villejuif, said, “This is the largest study to assess the frequency of adiposity (body fat) in the clinic, providing a snapshot of patients worldwide.

“The study results show that excess body weight is pandemic, with one half to two-thirds of the overall study population being overweight or obese.

“Central adiposity adds significantly to the risk of developing heart disease and particularly of developing diabetes.”

The findings were published by the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

More than half the study population — 56 percent of men and 71 percent of women – had over-wide waistlines measuring 37 inches and 31.5 inches respectively.

Expanding waistlines resulted in a significant increase in heart disease and diabetes rates, said Dr. Balkau.

For men, every extra 5.5 inches around the waist corresponded to a 35 percent higher frequency of heart disease, she said.

For women, an increase of about six inches around the waist equated to a 40 percent greater rate of heart disease.

Follow Through on Medications

It makes sense that if we only had to take medication once a day, we’d be more likely to follow through and take all that is prescribed. A survey by the pharmaceutical company Schwarz Pharma finds it’s true, citing the eight out of 10 Americans who said in their response to the survey that they might be more likely to remember to take their medication if they only had to take it once a day at bedtime.

The “Pulse Beat” survey of 1,017 men and women finds 63 percent have skipped taking prescription drugs during the day because they forgot or were too busy. Dr. Klaus Veitinger, company president, says finding ways to increase patient compliance is “a key issue in treating chronic conditions such as hypertension.”

The survey says 28 percent already make taking medication a bedtime ritual, sort of like preparing their clothes for the next day. Women are more likely than men to skip a dose during the day and 44 percent of the study participants over age 65 already take medication at bedtime.

Part of Schwarz Pharma‘s reason for the study is its recent introduction of Verelan, or verapamil HCL in the generic. The hypertension drug is taken at bedtime and has an extended-release formula that allows for the maximum concentration of the drug during the early morning hours when blood pressure is known to rise and the risk of heart attack is greater.

The Science of Pain

U.S. scientists say they’ve determined how the human body differentiates various kinds of pain, overturning what has been conventional wisdom.

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California-San Francisco say they’ve shown how different sensory neurons — called nociceptors — respond to different kinds of pain stimuli.

“Conventional wisdom was that nociceptive neurons in the skin can’t tell the difference between heat and mechanical pain, like a pin prick,” Caltech Professor David Anderson said. “The idea was that the skin is a dumb sensor of anything unpleasant, and higher brain areas disentangle one pain modality from another … “

But that theory, Anderson said, didn’t explain control of pain-avoidance behavior.

Anderson and UCSF Professor Allan Basbaum created a genetically engineered mouse in which pain-sensing neurons can be selectively destroyed. They discovered when a certain population of nociceptor neurons was killed, the mice stopped responding to being poked, but still responded to heat. Conversely, when the researchers destroyed a different population of neurons, the mice stopped responding to heat, but their sense of poke remained.

“This tells us the fibers that mediate the response to being poked are neither necessary nor sufficient for a behavioral response to heat,” Anderson said, “And vice versa for the fibers that mediate the response to heat.”

Menopause Diet

Healthy foods for women with menopause

A healthy diet is important in all stages of life. It’s even more important during menopause to keep the body healthy as it adjusts to major changes. Because menopause is associated with weight gain as well as increased risk for some diseases like heart disease and osteoporosis, it’s especially important to choose a diet that minimizes those risks. Here are some menopause diet tips:

Eat a wide variety of nutritious foods and limit junk foods like sweets and chips. This doesn’t mean you can never indulge in a treat; it just means picking them carefully and enjoying them in small amounts.

Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Choose sweet fruits as a snack instead of cake or candy. Fresh is usually best, but buy whatever you will eat. Dried fruits are convenient, but watch portion sizes as they tend to be calorie dense. Frozen vegetables are quick-frozen at their peak freshness, so they are also a convenient option.

Get plenty of fiber. Choose whole grain breads and cereals instead of highly processed white breads or sugary cereals. Fresh fruits and vegetables are also a good source of fiber.

Continue to get enough iron. You’re no longer losing iron with your periods, but iron is still important to good health. Lean red meat, eggs and leafy green vegetables are rich in iron. Nuts and enriched grains are also good sources, but be careful as these are also high in fat.

Increase calcium intake. Eat plenty of dairy products and other calcium-rich foods like broccoli and legumes. If you don’t eat much dairy, consider a calcium supplement along with vitamin D (vitamin D helps the body absorb the calcium). Getting enough calcium is important to preserve bone density.