A startling new study shows that lowering blood pressure more — with a target of 120 instead of 140 — can cut deaths by 25 percent.
A third of U.S. adults have high blood pressure so millions could be affected by the findings. But government-funded researchers who ran the study say it’s too soon for anyone to change what they are doing just yet.
Nonetheless, the results were so clear they stopped the main part of the study early to announce what they’d found.
As the U.S. heroin epidemic grows, so does the wait list for federally-funded rehab.
In Massachusetts, substance abusers have to wait weeks to get help. In Florida, it’s a month.
Wait times are as long as 18 months in Maine.
One Ohio woman couldn’t wait. That’s why she asked a judge to send her to jail so she could get clean. “There’s no help out there anymore,” Kayla Dempsey told c. “There’s a three-month waiting list for any rehab around here because of the heroin epidemic.”
Former President Jimmy Carter says he has melanoma that has spread to his liver and brain — but he’s fighting it with a drug so promising that its approval was fast-tracked last year.
Carter, 90, has already had his first infusion of the drug, known as Keytruda. It harnesses the immune system to fight melanoma that has spread through the body. Carter also told reporters he would undergo targeted radiation to his brain on Thursday afternoon.
“I’ll be prepared for anything that comes,” he said.
An entire class of diabetes drugs can cause severe and disabling joint pain, the Food and Drug Administration cautioned patients on Friday.
The drugs, which include Januvia, Onglyza, Tradjenta and Nesina, are all in the same class and work by making more insulin available to the body. Januvia was the first approved in the U.S. in 2006.
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning that the type 2 diabetes medicines sitagliptin, saxagliptin, linagliptin, and alogliptin may cause joint pain that can be severe and disabling,” the agency said in a statement that uses the generic names of the drugs.
Hold on to something,” Jim Tennant warned as he fired up his tractor. We lurched down a rutted dirt road past the old clapboard farmhouse where he grew up. Jim still calls it “the home place,” although its windows are now boarded up and the outhouse is crumbling into the field.
At 72, Jim is so slight that he nearly disappears into his baggy plaid shirt. But he drives his tractor like a dirt bike. We sped past the caved-in hog pen and skidded down a riverbank. The tractor tipped precariously toward the water, slamming into a fallen tree, but Jim just laughed.
When we had gone as far as the tractor could take us, Jim climbed off and squeezed through a barbed-wire fence. On the other side was a lush field teeming with crabapple and sycamore, and beyond that, the muddy trickle of water, known as Dry Run Creek, that has brought Jim’s family so much heartache. “This is what Dry Run looks like in the wet season,” Jim told me. “Summer grazing was in the hollow up there—before they destroyed everything, at least.”
.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Emotional video of a golden retriever comforting a patient just 24 hours before her dying day is warming hearts everywhere.
“I’m still not quite sure how it spread like wildfire, but I understand that it’s so touching to people,” said Tracy Calhoun, a registered nurse with Samaritan Evergreen Hospice in Albany, Oregon. “From across the world, the {social media] comments are amazing. Your stories make your life meaningful, so at the end of life, people want to share their stories — what their animals did when their loved ones were dying.
“That’s why I want to read all of them.”
New York Dog Lunges in Front of Bus, Saves Blind Owner’s Life
Dog Shows Up at Hospital Where Owner Is Battling Cancer
Police Dog Rescues Deputy After He’s Ambushed By 3 Men
.
Calhoun told ABC News that JJ, a four-year-old golden pup, began caring…
A woman who became known as the “Dust Lady” after being captured on camera in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on New York City has died after a battle with cancer, her brother confirmed to NBC News.
Marcy Borders, a 42-year-old from Bayonne, New Jersey, was pictured covered in dust after the World Trade Center was hit by two passenger jets. She was inside one of the Twin Towers at the time of the attack but managed to escape the building onto the street below.
She died in the hospital on Monday night at around 11:10 p.m. ET, according to her brother, Michael Borders.
.
Marcy Borders covered in dust as she takes refuge in an office building after one of the World Trade Center towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. Stan Honda / AFP
With second cancers on the rise, doctors and patients are forced to come up with new ways to handle that second, third or fourth diagnosis.
Nearly 1 in 5 new cases in the U.S. now involve someone who has had the disease before.
Judith Bernstein of suburban Philadelphia is an extreme example. She has had eight types over the last two decades, all treated successfully. This doesn’t mean her cancer came back — they are entirely new cancer that started on their own.
“There was a while when I was getting one cancer diagnosis after another,” including breast, lung, esophageal, and the latest – a rare tumor of her eyelids, she said. “At one point I thought I had cancer in my little finger.”
.
Judith Bernstein receives medicines intravenously ahead of chemotherapy at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Aug. 4…
Hearing a diagnosis of advanced melanoma, former President Jimmy Carter said he thought he had a few weeks to live, but was “surprisingly at ease” and that he trusted in the treatment prescribed by his doctors at Emory University.
The 39th president had learned in May that he had a “small mass” on his liver and decided to have the elective surgery to remove it on August 3. At that time the Carter Center, his nonprofit organization, released a statement saying “the prognosis is excellent for a full recovery.”
But by August 19, a Carter Center statement told a different story. Tests after the liver surgery revealed the cancer was melanoma. An MRI revealed there were four spots of melanoma on his brain. Doctors said the small spots were about 2 millimeters in size.
Federal regulators have uncovered new violations by the manufacturer of medical scopes recently linked to outbreaks of deadly “superbug” bacteria at U.S. hospitals.
Olympus Corp. failed to alert regulators to a cluster of 16 infections in patients who underwent procedures with the company’s scope in 2012, according to a warning letter posted online Monday by the Food and Drug Administration. Olympus did not report the problems to the FDA until 2015, when the company was already under scrutiny for a more recent series of outbreaks.
Medical device manufacturers are required to report serious device problems to the FDA within 30 days of learning about them. The infections reported to the company involved a bacterial strain called pseudomonas, which can cause pneumonia, severe sickness and death in hospital patients.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
New Study on Blood Pressure
.
Former President Jimmy Carter
Severe and disabling joint pain
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Stage 4 melanoma
.
James' World 2 