Eideard

Forty years ago, Americans could expect to live slightly longer than Europeans. This has since reversed: in spite of similar levels of economic development, Americans now live about a year-and-a-half less, on average, than their Western European counterparts, and also less than people in most other developed nations. How did Americans fall behind?

A study in the July 2011 issue of Social Science and Medicine is the first to calculate the fiscal consequences of the growing life expectancy gap over the next few decades. The study also pinpoints the crucial age at which U.S. life expectancy starts to deteriorate.

Specifically, researchers from the University of Southern California and colleagues at RAND Corp. and Harvard School of Public Health find that health in middle-age – around the age of 50 – is overwhelmingly the main contributor to disparities in life expectancy between Americans and Europeans.

In the first half of the last century, average life expectancy increased by saving more babies, explains author Dana Goldman…”But now it is reduction in mortality among the elderly, rather than the young, that propels increases in life expectancy…”

Accounting for levels of socioeconomic diversity in the United States and predicted future demographic estimates, the researchers found much of the life expectancy gap would disappear if the United States lowered prevalence of middle-aged obesity and obesity-related chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension to European levels…

Released in January 2011, Crimmins’ research looked at life expectancy over the last 25 years and found that smoking – and to a lesser extent obesity – were the two major reasons why U.S. life expectancy has fallen short of other high-income nations in the past.

Improving American health during middle age in the future to increase life expectancy would increase later-life pension benefits. But this expenditure would be offset by a significant decrease in health care costs – at least $17,791 per person, the researchers estimate.

Though the transition to better health initially raises expenditures, the researchers estimate that by 2050 health care savings from gradual middle-age health improvements could total more than $1.1 trillion…

Learning about good nutrition, exercise, changing your lifestyle is going to do you more good and cost society less than passing more legislation.

The follow-on question, of course, is will our bureaucrats ever have enough confidence to let go of the nanny state? Will we ever get it together enough to justify less “management”?

Second-hand tobacco smoke kills upwards of 600,000 people every year, nearly a third of them children, according to a global assessment in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The findings, released on Friday in the first ever global study, indicate that unlike “lifestyle” diseases, which stem largely from individual choice, the victims of passive smoking pay the ultimate price for the health-wrecking behaviour of others, especially family members.

Among non-smokers worldwide, 40 per cent of children, 35 per cent of women and 33 percent of men were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available across the 192 countries examined.

In addition to 5.1 million deaths caused by active smoking, the final death toll from tobacco for 2004 was more than 5.7 million people, the study concluded.

Nearly half of the passive-smoking deaths occurred in women, with the rest divided almost equally between children and men, according to the study.

RTFA.

Even posting an article like this means I have to crank up the software that removes comment spam. The tobacco industry is only matched by the gun industry when it comes to trying to squash dissent and criticism.

All that texting and social networking by teenagers could come back to byte them.

A new study by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine links poor health behaviors — including smoking, drinking and sexual activity — to hyper-texting and hyper-networking.

The study defines hyper-texting as sending more than 120 messages a day. Hyper-networking is spending more than three hours per school day on social network sites like Facebook, it said…

“The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers,” said Scott Frank, lead researcher on the study. “This should be a wake-up call for parents to not only help their children stay safe by not texting and driving, but by discouraging excessive use of the cell phone or social websites in general.”

“Startling” – my Aunt Hilda’s aspidistra!

The researchers say the results of the study are so striking that they are giving rise to a new health risk category for the age group.

The study is not the first time texting and social networking have come under fire. The activities have been blamed for accidents and promoting bad grammar skills…

Although, teachers complained about poor grammar before the internet too.

Cute tagline. And that’s all this article really is about. Let’s blame technology for screwed-up personalities.

That’s not genetic. That’s about where you hang out.

America continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance—obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and homicide—are not to blame, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

The study looked at health spending; behavioral risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. and 12 other nations — Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries.

Fifteen-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. have fallen relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years. Forty-five year old U.S. white women fared the worst—by 2005 their 15-year survival rates were lower than that of all the other countries. Moreover, the survival rates of this group in 2005 had not even surpassed the 1975 15-year survival rates for Swiss, Swedish, Dutch or Japanese women. The U.S. ranking for 15-year life expectancy for 45-year-old men also declined, falling from 3rd in 1975 to 12th in 2005.

When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries. In terms of obesity, researchers found that, while people in the U.S. are more likely to be obese, this was also the case in 1975, when the U.S. was not so far behind in life expectancy.

In fact, even as the comparison countries pulled ahead of the U.S. in terms of survival, the percentage of obese men and women actually grew faster in most of those countries between 1975 and 2005. Finally, examining homicide and traffic fatalities, the researchers found that they have accounted for a stable share of U.S. deaths over time, and would not account for the significant change in 15-year life expectancy the study identified.

The researchers say that the failure of the U.S. to make greater gains in survival rates with its greater spending on health care may be attributable to flaws in the overall health care system. Specifically, they point to the role of unregulated fee-for-service payments and our reliance on specialty care as possible drivers of high spending without commensurate gains in life expectancy.

“This study provides stark evidence that the U.S. health care system has been failing Americans for years,” said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis. “It is unacceptable that the U.S. obtains so much less than should be expected from its unusually high spending on health care relative to other countries.”

Hear, hear. Although I’m in comparatively good health for my age, etc. – actuarial tables still have me rolling along behind the hopes established for my kin up on PEI – 40 years ago!

I see no proof either for snow or beer accounting for the difference.

This way – no, that way – no, this way – no, that way

Indonesia’s highest Islamic authority has followed up a series of contentious edicts with a new one barring Muslims from watching television gossip shows or having sex-change operations.

The authority, the Indonesian Ulema Council, said gossip shows about the intimate details of people’s private lives — a popular genre on Indonesian television — were immoral and threatened society. Gossip shows are allowed only if they “uphold the law, warn the public and help people,” the council said.

While the council’s edicts are usually ignored, they can be cited by religious hard-liners to justify vigilante-style crackdowns on “un-Islamic” activities. It has recently issued a steady stream of edicts including bans on interfaith marriages, smoking and yoga.

They recently had to correct a truly embarrassing edict on praying in the appropriate direction – when they learned they had Muslims praying in the direction of Kenya, not Mecca.

Newborns of non-smoking moms exposed to secondhand smoke during pregnancy have genetic mutations that may affect long-term health, according to a…study published online in The Open Pediatric Medicine Journal. The abnormalities, which were indistinguishable from those found in newborns of mothers who were active smokers, may affect survival, birth weight and lifelong susceptibility to diseases like cancer.

The study confirms previous research in which study author Stephen G. Grant, Ph.D., associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, discovered evidence of abnormalities in the HPRT gene located on the X chromosome in cord blood from newborns of non-smokers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke.

In the current study [.pdf], Dr. Grant confirmed smoke-induced mutation in another gene…that is representative of oncogenes – genes that transform normal cells into cancer cells and cause solid tumors. The GPA mutation was the same level and type in newborns of mothers who were active smokers and of non-smoking mothers exposed to tobacco smoke. Likewise, the mutations were discernable in newborns of women who had stopped smoking during their pregnancies, but who did not actively avoid secondhand smoke.

“These findings back up our previous conclusion that passive, or secondary, smoke causes permanent genetic damage in newborns that is very similar to the damage caused by active smoking,” said Dr. Grant. “By using a different assay, we were able to pick up a completely distinct yet equally important type of genetic mutation that is likely to persist throughout a child’s lifetime. Pregnant women should not only stop smoking, but be aware of their exposure to tobacco smoke from other family members, work and social situations.”

Sometimes I wonder how folks of my generation ever made it beyond wars, foolish habits, our self-destructive culture.

The incidence of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in women has risen during the period of 1995 to 2007, according to a newly published study by researchers from the Mayo Clinic. This rise in RA follows a 4-decade period of decline and study authors speculate environmental factors such as cigarette smoking, vitamin D deficiency, and lower dose synthetic estrogens in oral contraceptives may be the source of the increase…

Between 1 and 2 million Americans suffer the effects of RA, a chronic inflammatory disease that targets joints and which contributes to work-related disability, increased morbidity, and shortened survival. Up to one-half of all RA patients become unable to work within 10-20 years of follow-up and those with the disease have a 60% to 70% higher mortality risk than those in the general population. Furthermore, studies show that RA treatments alone account for $9 billion in excess health care costs with direct and indirect costs expected to exceed $39 billion annually…

“We observed a modest increase of RA incidence in women during the study period, which followed a sharp decline in incidence during the previous 4 decades,” said Dr. Sherine Gabriel. Results show that RA incidence in women increased by 2.5% per year from 1995 to 2007, while a decrease of 0.5% was noted for men. Researchers did not find a disproportionate increase in RA incidence in any particular age group over the study period.

Prior studies have clearly demonstrated that cigarette smoking is associated with a greater risk for RA development in both sexes. While smoking rates in the U.S. are declining, the rate is significantly slower in women than men, which researchers believe may, in part, explain the modest increase of RA incidence in women. Researchers also note that lower doses of estrogens found in modern oral contraceptives offer less protection against RA development then at the previously higher doses found in older medications, which they suspect may contribute to the increased RA incidence among women. Furthermore, several studies have shown vitamin D deficiency to be associated with RA development and coupled with evidence that this deficiency, particularly in women, has risen over the past decades the Mayo team considered it a possible contributor to the upward trend in RA.

Dr. Gabriel concluded, “Reasons for the increase in incidence we found are unknown, but environmental factors likely play a role and should be further explored.”

There is ever-increasing evidence that we’re killing ourselves slowly with all the crap we accept as part of an urban industrial environment. It has to cease. We have to win back a healthier lifestyle.

A Qatari diplomat who was questioned by federal investigators after an in-flight disturbance has been released and will not face charges, officials said.

Mohammed Al-Madadi has “been given clearance to travel back to Washington,” said Alison Bradley, a spokeswoman for the Brown Lloyd James public relations firm, which represents the Qatari Embassy. A federal law enforcement official told CNN Al-Madadi will not face charges…

The passenger was in a lavatory for a long time and may have been smoking, a U.S. official told CNN. He also may have made an “unfortunate comment” referring to a shoe bomb when questioned on the plane, the official said.

Fran Townsend, a homeland security official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told CNN that the person involved was a Qatari diplomat and that her sources said the incident may have been a misunderstanding. She said law enforcement officials examined the man’s shoes and were satisfied there were no explosives.

Dealing with an uptight air marshal in the middle of a flight – and making a smart-ass joke about how “I couldn’t get my shoe to ignite” is not the brightest decision – even with a diplomatic passport.

“Hmmm… too tame.”

A marijuana bust along the U.S.-Mexico border revealed 30 pounds of the drug stuffed into framed pictures of Jesus Christ, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said Wednesday.

“This is not the first time we have seen smugglers attempt to use religious figures and articles of faith to further their criminal enterprise,” said William Molaski, port director of the agency’s office in El Paso, Texas, in a statement.

“What some might find offensive or sacrilegious has unfortunately become a standard operating procedure for drug smugglers. This would include using religious symbols, children and senior citizens in their attempts to defeat the CBP inspection process.”

There’s a pun involving holy rollers in here somewhere.

While lower intelligence scores — as reflected by low results on written or oral tests of IQ — have been associated with a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, no study has so far compared the relative strength of this association with other established risk factors such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure.

Now, a large study funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council, which set out to gauge the relative importance of IQ alongside other risk factors, has found that lower intelligence scores were associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and total mortality at a greater level of magnitude than found with any other risk factor except smoking…

When the data were applied to a statistical model to quantify the associations of nine risk factors with cardiovascular mortality, results showed that the most important was cigarette smoking, followed by low IQ. Similar results were apparent when the health outcome was total mortality.

I wonder if inclusion of firearms worship could determine the eventual date of the Darwinian disappearance of the Republican Party?