Healthspan Blog

Toned shoulders gives the appearance of a smaller waist.  Try these simple exercises to strengthen, tone, and define your shoulders.  Stand with your feet shoulder width apart.  Slightly bend your knees, tuck your pelvis under, and keep your back straight.  Hold 2-3 lb. weights in front of your upper thighs.  With straight arms bring them both up at the same time lifting them no higher than shoulder height (i.e., your arms should be parallel to the ground).  Do 15-20 reps.  With your stance in the same position as the first exercise, start with your arms at your sides.  At the same time lift both arms out to the side no higher than shoulder height.  Do 15-20 reps.  Work up to 2-3 sets of each exercise.

According to a latest report by Japanese researchers, doing exercise with breaks can burn higher amount of fat for us as compared to doing it continuously. Report says that we have much more chances of losing extra fat when we do exercise workouts with rest in between.

American College of Sports Medicine suggests modest exercise for 45 minutes to burn extra fat. But this study shows that we have better chances of losing fat if we keep some rest period between our exercise programs (From Medical News Today).

So far I believe in doing exercise for hours without any rest. But now I have a solid reason to have some rest between my exercises. Now I hope I will be able to concentrate more on doing exercise regularly and for longer hours with some rest period in between.

Did you know that you can tone your abs while you’re pregnant without doing harmful situps?  Try this simple pregnancy exercise to tone your tummy.

Standing lift your left leg and touch your heal with your right hand.  Repeat 15-20 reps then switch sides (i.e. left hand to right heal).  Work up to 3 sets on each leg.

Benefits: Tones your waist and inner thighs

GAITHERSBURG, Md., July 30 — A federal drug safety official recommended during an advisory committee hearing today that Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine made by GlaxoSmithKline, be withdrawn from the market because it increases heart risks.

Dr. David Graham noted in a written preview of his presentation that Avandia is no better at controlling blood sugar levels than similar diabetes medicines like Actos, made by Takeda. With a clear risk to the heart, and nothing to recommend it over other therapies, Avandia should be withdrawn, Dr. Graham argued in written remarks.

Dr. Graham is scheduled to speak to the committee later today. But it is not clear that the advisory committee, or indeed the Food and Drug Administration itself, will agree with Dr. Graham, a drug safety official at the F.D.A. who has a long history of arguing against the use or marketing of some widely-used drugs.

The committee may instead recommend that Avandia’s label include stronger warnings about its heart risks.

A committee vote is scheduled for later this afternoon.

The F.D.A. called the advisory committee meeting today after a study, published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine, called into question the safety of Avandia.

Since then, the controversy about Avandia has wounded GlaxoSmithKline and led to severe criticism of the F.D.A., which has known for a year that Avandia might increase the risks of heart attacks but waited until May to warn patients about a possible risk.

This delay has helped to push through legislation on Capitol Hill that would provide the F.D.A. with more authority and money to police the safety of marketed medicines. Both the House and Senate have passed F.D.A. reform bills but a conference committee has yet to come to agreement.

About a million patients in the United States took Avandia last year, and a similar number took Actos. Since May, Avandia’s sales have plunged.

Many patients who take Avandia, and their doctors, have been presented with conflicting advice about whether to switch to other drugs.

The controversy largely revolves around whether several highly complex statistical analyses of dozens of studies of Avandia have shown that the drug is too dangerous to use.

There are fierce disagreements about the answer to this question not only among academic experts but within the F.D.A. itself.

The heart attack risk comes on top of a problem with swelling that has long been known to occur in those taking both Avandia and Actos. The swelling is especially risky for patients suffering from heart failure.

GlaxoSmithKline argued forcefully before the committee that its drug is safe.

Dr. Murray Stewart, a GlaxoSmithKline vice president, said that in recent months the company has examined data from several large managed care companies in the United States that altogether included 1.35 million diabetes patients.

The company’s analyses, he said, showed that patients who took Avandia suffered no greater risk of heart attack or death from heart problems than those taking other diabetes medications, including Actos.

The hearing began today with a presentation by Dr. Robert Ratner of the MedStar Research Institute in Washington, about the epidemic of diabetes.

He noted that each day in the United States, there are 4,100 new cases and 810 deaths from diabetes. In addition, 230 patients suffer amputations, 120 suffer kidney failure, and 55 go blind because of the disease every day.

He said that while controlling blood sugar levels has proven health benefits in the short term, no study has proved that diabetes drugs extend lives.

“We’re not keeping people alive with our drug therapy because our drug therapy isn’t adequate,” he said. And he said that no diabetes medicine has conclusively proven that it helps protect the heart. He also noted that diabetes patients often fail to take their medicines properly, and doctors often fail to treat the disease aggressively enough.

“Why do we need new therapies for type two diabetes?” Dr. Ratner asked. “We have an epidemic of diabetes and its complication that will soon swamp our medical delivery system.”

Most diabetics die from heart disease, since diabetes has severe effects on the heart. If Avandia actually increases the risks of heart attacks, that “denotes a serious limitation” of the drug’s usefulness, an F.D.A. reviewer concluded in a report before the meeting.

Medical researchers have made a significant advance in understanding multiple sclerosis, a common neurological disease that causes symptoms ranging from muscle weakness to paralysis.

The disease is one in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the electrical insulation of nerve fibers. The cause is part genetic and part environmental, but researchers trying to identify the relevant genes have endured repeated frustration. Their approach has been to guess what genes might be involved and see if patients have abnormal versions.

This guesswork has produced more than 100 candidate genes in recent years, none of which could be confirmed except for long-known variants in the mechanism used by the immune system to recognize proteins that are foreign to the body.

In three articles published online yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine, three teams of researchers say they have identified, by separate routes, new genetic variants that contribute to the disease.

One team used a new, advanced gene-hunting method called Whole Genome Association, which has racked up a string of successes with major diseases in the last few months. The other teams used the candidate gene approach, but because all three teams identified the same gene, the researchers say they are confident they have opened a new window into the cause and possible treatment of multiple sclerosis.

The gene makes a substance called the interleukin-7 receptor, a protein that enables cells of the immune system to respond to a control agent. Researchers believe the receptor is part of a biochemical pathway involving many genes; defects in any of these genes may lead to the disease. It is now possible to explore the pathway, they say, in the hope of devising treatments to correct the disease-causing process.

The new research is the product of several large teams at universities in the United States and abroad who have coordinated their publications and pooled their data for analysis.

The leaders of the Whole Genome Association Study include David A. Hafler of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; Stephen L. Hauser of the University of California, San Francisco; and Jonathan L. Haines of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. The two candidate gene studies were headed by Dr. Haines and Jan Hillert of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Because the course of the disease is unpredictable, clinical trials are hard to conduct, said Dr. Kári Stefánsson, chief executive of Decode Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland. “But once you have an ironclad discovery, as I believe the interleukin-7 receptor is,” Dr. Stefánsson said, “then you have the motivation to endure the expense of a long clinical trial.”

The full list of principal investigators participating in the Whole Genome Association study is as follows: David A. Hafler of the Brigham and Women's Hospital; Eric S. Lander and John D. Rioux of the Broad Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stephen L. Hauser and Jorge R. Oksenberg of the University of California, San Francisco, Alastair Compston and Stephen Sawcer of the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine; Margaret A. Pericak-Vance of the University of Miami School of Medicine and Jonathan L. Haines of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.