Month: November 2013

Dietitians for Professional Integrity released “The Food Ties That Bind,” a report that details the messaging Big Food shared with dietitians at 2013 Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo.

By Bill Berkrot and Ransdell Pierson DALLAS (Reuters) – Amgen Inc's experimental heart medicine from a closely watched new class of drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors lowered "bad" LDL cholesterol 52 percent after one year with no major increase in serious adverse side effects compared with standard drugs, such as statins, according to data from a study. The clinical trial of the drug, evolocumab, marks the first data looking at 52 weeks of use for the new class of injectable biotech medicines seen as potentially the biggest advance in the field of cholesterol therapy in many years. Several companies are developing the drugs, which work by blocking a protein that prevents the liver from removing LDL cholesterol from blood. In addition to Amgen, Pfizer Inc and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc in partnership with Sanofi are in advanced stages of testing PCSK9 inhibitors.

It can be challenging to create rich and meaningful family conversations about gratitude. Last Thanksgiving season, I took a different approach by coming up with gratitude questions to help enliven our sharing.

Signs of approaching “sudden” cardiac arrest, an electrical malfunction that stops the heart, usually appear at least a month ahead of time, according to a study of middle-age men in Portland, Oregon. “We’re looking at how to identify the Tim Russerts and Jim Gandolfinis – middle aged men in their 50s who drop dead and we don’t have enough information why,” said Sumeet Chugh, senior author of the study and associate director for genomic cardiology at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles. Some 360,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur each year in the United States, largely involving middle-aged men, with only 9.5 percent surviving, according to the American Heart Association. But Chugh’s study set out to determine whether signs and symptoms occurred as much as a month before sudden cardiac arrests.

Honor your instincts. Gut feelings. Women’s intuition. Whatever you want to call it, give yourself the freedom to say, “I don’t know why this doesn’t feel right, but it doesn’t so I’m not going to do it. Sorry. Sayonara.”

President Barack Obama's HealthCare.gov site is riddled with security flaws that put user data of millions of people at risk and it should be shut down until fixed, several technology experts warned lawmakers on Tuesday. The testimony at a congressional hearing could increase concerns among many Americans about Obama's healthcare overhaul, popularly known as Obamacare. Opinion polls show the botched rollout of the online marketplace for health insurance policies has hurt the popularity of the effort. The website collects personal data such as names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and other information that criminals could use for a variety of scams.

By Michael Schletter for Life By DailyBurn If you've been workingout for eight plus weeks and haven't started to reap the benefitsyet, there's a good chance that one or more of these silentsetbacks has found its way into your fitness regimen. By beingaware of bad habits and the effect they have, you can work toeliminate them from your regimen and hopefully watch your progressstart to soar again. Here are some of the most common culprits tolook out for. More from Life by DailyBurn: 7 No-Crunch Exercisesfor Six-Pack Abs How to Get Fit

An experimental drug to treat Morquio A Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes skeletal malformation and a variety of related lung, eye, ear and heart problems, should be approved, an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded on Tuesday. The 21-member panel voted overwhelmingly in favor of approval, saying the benefits of the drug, Vimizim, which is made by BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc, outweigh its risks. The FDA is not obliged to follow the recommendations of its advisory panels but typically does so. Morquio A Syndrome is characterized by a deficiency of an enzyme known as N-acetylgalactosamine-6-sulfatase, which causes excessive storage in the body of long chains of sugars known as glycosaminoglycans.

NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed landmark legislation Tuesday banning the sale of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21, making New York the first large city or state in the country to prohibit sales to young adults.