Sneaky causes of sinus trouble

Sinus infections strike about 37 million people in the U.S. each year.

Teeny holes that connect your nasal passages to your sinuses (basically a collection of hollow, moist cavities that lurk beneath your nose, eyes, and cheeks) get blocked. Then gunk builds up in your sinuses, germs may grow, and you feel, well, hideous.

But the cause of the blockage is sometimes trickier to figure out. Here are 13 things that can cause an acute sinus infection (the most common type) and, in some cases, lead to a chronic sinus infection.

1. Viruses

Most sinus infections start with a cold. Colds are caused by a virus, which can make nasal tissue swell, blocking the holes that normally drain sinuses.

If your sinus infection is caused by a virus, antibiotics won’t help since these drugs kill only bacteria. Your symptoms will probably get better after about a week or so. A decongestant can help, but don’t use it for more than four or five days to avoid becoming dependent.

The best defenses against these sinus infections are the same things that protect against colds and the flu. In other words, get a flu shot, wash your hands, and don’t chill with the visibly ill.

2. Allergies

Because inflammation can block the nasal passages and prevent draining, allergies are often associated with sinus infections. In fact, studies have shown that people with sinus infections who have allergies tend to have more extensive sinusitis, says Dr. Sonia Bains, assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy, and Sleep Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina.

If you’re prone to allergies or hay fever, avoid things that trigger allergic reactions, such as dust mites, pet dander, mold, and cockroaches. Prescription or over-the-counter antihistamines and prescription nasal sprays can reduce chronic inflammation in the sinuses and nasal lining.

3. Bacteria

If a cold does not resolve in 10 to 15 days, bacteria may have joined the party.

Bacterial infections rarely jump-start sinus infections, but they are almost always the cause of complicating, secondary infections, says Dr. William J. Hueston, professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. In these cases, it's most likely Streptococcus pneumoniae or Haemophilus influenzae.

These bacteria lurk in healthy people; they’re waiting for the right circumstances to grow. Take a decongestant during a cold to avoid those circumstances. If you do develop bacterial sinusitis, you can treat it with antibiotics.

Belly fat link to heart attack

People who have a normal weight but have excess belly fat may have a higher risk of dying from heart disease than even obese individuals, researchers report.

In a new study, investigators found that normal-weight people who have what is called central obesity are at almost three times greater risk of dying from heart disease and two times greater risk of dying from any cause than those of normal weight with a normal waist-to-hip ratio.

"People with normal weight may be less likely to feel the need for lifestyle changes," explained lead researcher Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "But, central obesity isn't healthy even in those with normal weight."

There are several reasons why central obesity may raise the risk of death, Lopez-Jimenez said. It increases insulin resistance, and people with central obesity tend to have less fat in areas where fat might be protective, such as the hips and legs, he said. People with central obesity also tend to have less muscle mass.

For obese people, some of the risk is tempered by fat distribution, Lopez-Jiminez noted. Obese people tend to have fat in those places where it may be protective, and they tend to have more muscle mass, he explained.

For normal-weight people with central obesity, the only way to reduce the risk is to lose weight and build muscle mass, Lopez-Jimenez said, so that the weight is redistributed.

The findings were presented Monday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, Germany. Research presented at medical meetings should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

For the study, Lopez-Jimenez's team collected data on more than 12,000 men and women in the United States who took part in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

As part of the survey, participants had their weight, height, waist and hip size measured. In addition, the researchers matched data from the survey with the National Death Index.

Over 14 years of follow-up, more than 2,500 people died. Of those, more than 1,100 deaths were due to cardiovascular disease.

Lopez-Jimenez's group found the risk of dying from heart disease was 2.75 times higher, and the risk of dying from any causes was 2.08 times higher among those of normal weight with central obesity, compared with people of normal weight and normal waist-to-hip ratio.

To make sure their results would reflect body type, the researchers excluded anyone in the survey who had cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They also took into account age, sex, race, smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol.

Commenting on the study, Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained that "central obesity is the presence of excess fat in the abdomen. In this condition, the amount of fat deposited in the abdomen is out of proportion to total body fat."

Many studies have shown that central obesity is independently associated with the increased risk of cardiovascular events, Fonarow noted.



"In this new study, men and women in the normal body mass index category, but with increased waist-hip ratio had the highest cardiovascular mortality risk, even higher than those classified as obese by body mass index. This increased cardiovascular risk remained evident after risk factor adjustment," he added.

While the study reported an association between belly fat in normal-weight people and risk of death from heart disease, it did not prove that a cause-and-effect relationship exists.

Tips for making healthy lunches fun for your kids

As another school year begins, so does the chore of keeping your kids interested in their school lunch, while trying to keep it healthy.

Catherine McCord, of Weelicious.com said that thinking out of the lunch box can make all the difference.

Adding color, shape and texture, could change a boring meal into one that your kids will brag about, she added.

Picking foods that are bright in color like strawberries, bananas and mangos can brighten up your child’s lunchbox. And think locally.

Cutting up your child’s food into fun shapes can also help. And handing your child a boring square of a sandwich will not get them to eat it any faster.

Texture can also a difference. Adding foods that have some crunch will be more interesting for your child to eat.

McCord also suggested making lunch an interactive experience. Cutting up fruits and veggies and then adding something to dunk them in like peanut butter, hummus or ranch dip keep kids active during lunchtime – and if you’re pressed for time – low-fat salad dressing makes a great dip.

If your kids are stuck in the cold cut-sandwich rut, try changing it up. They can still get protein from other foods.


Finally, get your kids involved. The more decisions your child makes about what goes into his or her lunch box, the more knowledgeable they will be about healthy foods.

Why pregnancy really lasts 9 months

Human babies are born helpless and needy, a fact that anthropologists have long explained by pointing to the size of the female pelvis. If babies were born with bigger brains, the theory goes, they'd get stuck in the birth canal. Instead, they stop gestating before they grow too large, resulting in completely dependent newborns.

But the story may not be so simple, new research finds. A study published Monday, Aug. 27, argues that it's not the size of mom's pelvis that determines when baby is born, but her metabolism.

"There is not a unique pelvic constraint on gestation length and baby size," study researcher Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island, told LiveScience. "There is a certain capacity a mother has metabolically, and once that capacity is reached, the baby is born."

Baby heads and pelvic width

Human babies are born underdeveloped compared with other primates: Our brains are less than 30 percent their adult size at birth, compared with around 40 percent for chimpanzees, our closest living ape relative. In fact, it would take a gestation length of 18 to 21 months instead of nine months for human babies' brains to reach that level of development, according to zoologist Adolf Portmann's book "A Zoologist Looks at Humankind" (Columbia University Press, 1990).

The problem of fitting baby's head through mom's pelvis is known as the "obstetrical dilemma." Anthropologists have theorized that evolution has made a trade-off between big baby brains and the narrow pelvises needed for bipedal walking, resulting in babies born earlier than the ideal.

But Dunsworth's math suggests a different interpretation. In fact, she said, when you take body size into account, humans aren’t cutting gestation short at all. After controlling for body size, human pregnancies are second in length only to orangutans' and 37 days longer, not shorter, than gorilla and chimpanzee pregnancies, Dunsworth and her colleagues report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We're actually gestating longer than you would predict," Dunsworth said.

Human mothers also invest a lot of energy in their babies in the womb. The researchers found that human baby brains are 47 percent larger than baby gorilla brains, the primate with the next-largest infants. Human newborns are also twice the size of gorilla newborns. Even when controlling for maternal body size, human babies are larger than expected. In other words, humans aren't growing our babies smaller than average; we're super-sizing them. [Procreation Station: 11 Odd Animal Pregnancies]

Hips and energy

Next, Dunsworth and her colleagues turned to the other side of the dilemma: Mom's hips. Again, they found little evidence to back up the assumptions of the obstetrical dilemma. Women's wider hips are not less energy-efficient than men's narrower pelvises, the researchers calculated.

"Within the normal range of variation in women and men, walking and running are not compromised by a wider pelvis," Dunsworth said.

What's more, to get human brains up to the chimpanzee level of 40 percent of adult size, the pelvis would only have to widen about 1.18 inches (3 centimeters), well within the normal range of variation of humans today, the researchers found. This extra space wouldn't add any extra energy burden, they wrote.

So why are babies born after nine months of gestation and not some other point? Dunsworth and her colleagues found that metabolism may hold the answer. By six months of pregnancy, women expend twice their usual energy keeping basic metabolic processes going, a burden that only gets greater as the fetus gets larger. The typical maximum metabolic rate humans can sustain is between 2 times and 2.5 times average (with some exceptions such as professional cyclists). That means the female body may simply not be able to cycle through enough energy to keep a pregnancy going more than nine months. [8 Weird Changes That Happen During Pregnancy]

A new story

The findings complicate the "fairly simple" story of baby brain size being set by mom's pelvic size, said John Fleagle, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York.

"This is the most thorough and thoughtful consideration of this issue that anyone's ever done," Fleagle, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience.

The findings basically switch around the assumption that the demands of walking and running on mom's pelvis determine baby's head size and suggest that instead, mom's metabolism sets the pregnancy length and baby size and the pelvis adapts to fit, Fleagle said. It's also possible that before the invention of agriculture, humans didn't have the energy to grow babies quite so big, meaning labor and delivery may not have been as much trouble tens of thousands of years ago as they are today.

Pelvic and head size still play a role in the birth process, noted Wenda Trevathan, a biological anthropologist at New Mexico State University who studies childbirth and was not involved in the research. Shoulder size and shape may also influence how babies emerge from the birth canal, all meaning that unlike other animals, humans are better off when they have assistance at birth.

Ultimately, Fleagle said, it may be a mistake to think of helpless babies as an evolutionary negative. Being born before the brain is set allows human offspring to learn from experience.

"The helpless baby is a baby that grows up in an environment that it has to deal with," he said.

Is Coffee Bad Or Good For Your Health? Two Experts Debate

Coffee has been linked to reduce in  risk of skin and prostate cancers. It might also lower depression risk in women. It could help in protecting  from Type 2 diabetes. It might stave off Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And it really tastes good.

Over the past few years, a body of scientific evidence has built up pointing to the many health benefits of coffee. No wonder more than 50 percent of Americans enjoy a daily java fix. But before you grab a celebratory cup of joe (or seven), consider this: Coffee is also an addictive stimulant that could come with enough side effects to give some experts the jitters. We sensed a serious debate, er, brewing.
Give your views by giving comments........

Mother-To-Daughter Uterus Transplants Conducted By Swedish Doctors

Two Swedish women are hoping to get pregnant after undergoing what doctors are calling the world's first mother-to-daughter uterus transplants.

The University of Gothenburg said two Swedish women, both in their 30s, had received wombs from their mothers in surgery carried out at a hospital in the west of the country over the weekend. The identity of the women was not disclosed. "More than 10 surgeons, who had trained together on the procedure for several years, took part in the complicated surgery," said the team leader, Mats Brännström, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the university.

One of the women had her uterus removed many years ago because of cervical cancer, while the other had been born without womb, the university said in a statement. "Both patients who received new uterus are doing fine but are tired after surgery. The donating mothers are up and walking and will be discharged from the hospital within a few days." The university said it estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 women of childbearing age in Sweden alone were unable to bear children because they lacked a uterus.

The medical team said the quality of the uterus was controlled by the ovaries and the hormones feeding into it and, in theory, a transplanted, post-menopausal uterus could carry a baby. One of the two recipients, identified only by the name Anna, said she realised some people would criticise the operation on ethical grounds, but that for her it simply meant restoring a bodily function that cancer had taken from her. "It feels huge to be able to experience this," she said in comments posted on the website of the Sahlgrenska hospital, where the operations were carried out without complications.

She said there were still no guarantees she and her boyfriend would be able to conceive, but she added: "We have received a wonderful opportunity, and if it works out it will be a lovely bonus." ............... CBS/AP) Surgeons in Sweden say they have performed the world's first mother-to-daughter uterus transplants "without complications." Doctors from the University of Gothenburg on Tuesday said two women in their 30s received wombs from their mothers in surgical procedures on Sept. 15 and 16.

Woman hopes to have child using womb donated by own mother. "We are not going to call it a complete success until this results in children," added Michael Olausson, one of the Swedish surgeons, to The Associated Press. "That's the best proof." Brannstom said in a video released by the hospital that he first got the idea for such a transplant in 1998 after he removed the uterus of a young woman with cancer. The woman then suggested to him, "Why don't you transplant the uterus from my mother to me," he said, and he began researching the project the following year.

After successfully transplanting a uterus into a mouse, the doctors realized they were onto something. For the next 13 years, they'd test the transplants on larger animals, eventually in non-human primates like baboons. The procedure is performed by removing the uterus from the donor through an incision in the abdomen. After detached, it is placed on a bed of ice while the blood vessels attached to the the uterus are flushed with preservation solution. The process of lifting the organ into the recipient and waiting for the blood vessels to function again takes between 20 and 40 minutes. Once pumping blood properly, the uterus is then attached to the woman's vagina. Olausson said in theory, there could be a lower risk of organ rejection when the donor is a family member but he said a more important factor was the "emotional connection" between mother and daughter.

 Also, it makes it easier to "know that the transplanted organ works," he said, adding that it doesn't matter if the donor is past menopause. The Swedish women, who were not identified, won't receive any fertility treatment for a year while doctors monitor how they respond to the anti-rejection drugs needed to stop their own immune systems from attacking the donated wombs, he said. If they are considered to be stable after that, doctors will continue the in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, they started before the surgery. IVF uses eggs from the women's own ovaries to create embryos. After a maximum of two pregnancies, the wombs will be removed again so the women can stop taking anti-rejection drugs, Olausson said.

 Such drugs can have side effects such as high blood pressure, swelling, diabetes and may also raise the risk of some cancers. Fertility experts hailed the Swedish transplants as a significant step, but stressed it remains to be seen whether they will result in successful pregnancies. "There's no doubt this will be a pioneering step if it's been successful," said Scott Nelson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who was not involved with the transplants. "At present, the only option for these women is to have a surrogacy, i.e. having their embryos implanted into another woman." Nelson said that in terms of risks to the pregnancy, the greatest concerns are the placenta not developing normally, the baby not growing properly or being born prematurely. "Pre-term birth is a major risk, i.e. a small baby being born, that's what you'd mainly be worried about," he said.

Nelson also said the chances of pregnancy may be lower than normal with a donated womb because it would not contain all the blood vessels it originally had, possibly compromising a baby's development. James Grifo, an infertility expert at New York University, questioned how the fetus would be affected by the immune-suppressing drugs that prevent organ rejection. "Some people will always be willing to take the risk, but there are issues that need to be addressed before you expose a fetus to these medicines," he said. Grifo and colleagues at NYU abandoned a uterus transplant program "because some issues seemed insurmountable." "The group of patients that would need this is so small we decided to focus our efforts elsewhere," he said. "We started in rats but once we got to humans, it became very clear the rejection drug was going to be the issue and we didn't know how to safely deal with that issue."

 In Sweden, Olausson said anti-rejection drugs have not proved harmful to fetuses when the mother has undergone other organ transplants. Also, tests on mice, rats and pigs with transplanted wombs didn't show any adverse effects of such drugs, he said.

Turkish doctors last year said they performed the first successful uterus transplant, giving a womb from a deceased donor to a young woman. Olausson said that woman was doing fine, but he wasn't sure whether she had started undergoing fertility treatment yet. In 2000, doctors in Saudi Arabia transplanted a uterus from a live donor, but it had to be removed three months later because of a blood clot.

BPA Linked With Kids' Obesity

According to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Kids and teens with higher levels of the notorious plastics chemical bisphenol A (known simply as BPA) in their urine may also be more likely to be obese.

The FDA recently banned BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups after concerns were raised about potential side effects on the “brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children,” according to the FDA website.

Still, the organization has stood by the overall safety of the chemical; in March the FDA denied the Natural Resources Defense Council’s petition to ban BPA outright.

Now a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association is adding more fuel to the flames.  The paper shows an association between BPA levels in children’s urine and obesity prevalence. BPA is known to disrupt your body’s metabolic mechanisms, according to the study authors, which could affect your body’s ability to control its weight.

Examination Surveys between 2003 and 2008. Overall, 17.8 percent of the study participants were obese, while 34.1 percent were overweight. The researchers also divided up their urinary BPA levels into four levels, ranging from the lowest levels to the highest. A little more than 10 percent of study participants in the level with the lowest urinary BPA levels had a BMI indicative of obesity, compared with more than 22 percent of those with the highest urinary BPA levels.

 "We note the recent FDA ban of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups, yet our findings raise questions about exposure to BPA in consumer products used by older children," the researchers wrote in the study. "Last year, the FDA declined to ban BPA in aluminum cans and other food packaging, announcing 'reasonable steps to reduce human exposure to BPA in the human food supply' and noting that it will continue to consider evidence on the safety of the chemical. Carefully conducted longitudinal studies that assess the associations identified here will yield evidence many years in the future."
 A study just last month appearing in the journal PLoS ONE linked higher urinary levels of BPA with a condition called coronary artery stenosis, or narrowed arteries. That research, conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge and University of Exeter, included 591 people. That same Cambridge-Exeter team also showed in a Circulation study that high BPA may be linked with an increased risk of heart disease, Reuters reported. ................ NEW YORK –
 The BPA chemical used in food packaging might be linked to childhood obesity, a new study suggests, but the researchers say their findings don't prove it's the cause. While most people have traces of the plastics chemical in their bodies, the study found that children with the highest levels in their urine were twice as likely to be obese as those with the lowest.There are other factors that could explain the results, and many reasons why children gain too much weight, the researchers said. "Clearly unhealthy diet and poor physical activity are the leading factors contributing to obesity in the United States, especially in children," said lead author Dr. Leonardo Trasande of New York University.

But the study does hint that causes of childhood obesity may be more complicated, he added. He said it is the first national research to tie a chemical from the environment to childhood obesity, and seems to echo what some studies have seen in adults. One puzzling result: Significant differences were detected only in white children. For black and Hispanic kids, obesity rates were similar for those with the lowest levels of BPA as those with the largest amount. The researchers couldn't explain that finding.

The study was released Tuesday and is in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. BPA, or bisphenol A, has been used since the 1960s and become so widespread that it's found in virtually all Americans. Government health officials have deemed low levels of it to be safe, but haven't been able to decide what amount of BPA — if any — would be a health concern. BPA is used to make hard plastics for food and beverage containers and many consumer goods and for metal can linings.

Environmental groups have worried it interferes with children's development. Makers of baby bottles and sippy cups stopped using it, and this year the FDA made announcement  it could no longer be used in those baby products. Some experimental studies on animals have found that BPA can aid obesity by disrupting metabolism and helping to make fat cells larger. And studies have suggested a possible tie between urinary BPA levels and obesity-related illnesses in adults, including diabetes and heart disease.

In the new study, Trasande and his colleagues used information from an annual federal health survey, which includes weighing and measuring participants and taking blood and urine samples. Their study involved more than 2,800 children ages 6 through 19, who took the survey in the years 2003 through 2008. They compared BPA levels in their urine to their weight, and divided them into four groups based on BPA amounts. The key finding: About 22 percent of the children with highest levels of BPA were obese, compared to just 10 percent of kids with the lowest levels. Was the reverse true? Did the heaviest kids have more BPA in their urine, and the thinnest kids less?

Yes, Trasande said. But he did not include those numbers in his study, and declined to provide them. The study raised more questions than it answered: —The body excretes the chemical in a matter of hours. It's possible that the study is simply indicating that heavier kids are more likely to have recently consumed something from a BPA container. —Only one urine sample was taken from each child, and the youngest children in the study were 6.

What isn't known is how much BPA they were exposed to when they were infants — the time in life when the chemical theoretically could have had the greatest effect in triggering weight gain. All this means is that the study raises some interesting questions, but at this point it's impossible to say BPA causes childhood obesity, said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a federal agency involved in research on BPA. "It's a hypothesis that needs further exploration," she said.

 The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, called the study speculative and noted lab animal studies that found no evidence that BPA causes obesity. "Attempts to link our national obesity problem to minute exposures to chemicals found in common, everyday products are a distraction from the real efforts under way to address this important national health issue," the organization said in a statement.