INSAF

Home monitoring makes sense if you have high blood pressure. Your blood pressure changes from hour to hour, sometimes even minute to minute. It jumps around so much that you are more likely to get a good sense of your blood pressure if you check it at home rather than in the doctor's office. Just a few of the things that can influence your blood pressure: standing up from a chair watching an exciting show on television eating a meal listening to soothing music stress the time of day In fact, the American Heart Association (AHA), American Society of Hypertension, and Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association urge people with high blood pressure, or at high risk for developing it, to become blood pressure do-it-yourselfers. There are many good reasons to follow their advice. Taking your blood pressure at home allows you to: •   Find your real blood pressure. The measurement your doctor or nurse takes is just a single frame from an...

“ Stand up straight.” That’s timeless advice we’ve probably all heard at one time or another. It’s worth heeding. Good posture is important to balance. By standing up straight, you center your weight over your feet. Good posture also helps you maintain correct form while exercising, which results in fewer injuries and greater gains. Good balance has many payoffs. If you love tennis, golf, running, dancing, skiing, or any number of other sports or activities, working on balance strengthens your abilities. Not an athlete? Just walking across the floor or down the block requires good balance. So does rising from a chair, going up and down stairs, toting packages, and even turning to look behind you. Poor posture isn’t necessarily a bad habit. Physical reasons for poor posture include: • I nflexible muscles that decrease range of motion (how far a joint can move in any direction). For example, overly tight, shortened hip muscles tug your upper body forward ...

By Dr. PJ Prakash High intake of salt results in high body weight because salt makes our body retain water. United States Salt Intake and Risk of High Blood Pressure Common salt found in the food is composed of two minerals – sodium and chloride. These minerals also help maintain the electrolyte balance in the blood vessels that maintains the blood pressure. While there are no adverse effects of high chloride content reported, high levels of sodium have been related with an imbalance of electrolyte activity resulting in a high blood pressure. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is an important risk factor for both heart attack and stroke. Salt Intake and Weight Management High intake of salt results in high body weight because salt makes our body retain water. On the other hand, low salt intake may result in weight loss as it causes our body to expel water. Water takes away excess sodium through the kidneys. So a...

Approximately 15 million people in the U. S. have food allergies, including 1 in 13 children. The most common food allergies−peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish−affect 90 percent of all food-allergic reactions in the United States. Testing can help to determine if one is allergic to a certain food or if the symptoms are caused by something else. A family history of food hypersensitivities may increase the likelihood of having the susceptibility, and should be discussed with a physician or allergist before testing. When one’s immune system attacks a food protein mistaking it as a threat, it is called an allergic reaction. The food protein attacked by the body is referred to as an allergen. Frequent symptoms of allergic reactions include itching or swelling in the mouth, vomiting, hives, abdominal pain, and tightening of the throat or trouble breathing. A more serious type of reaction is anaphylaxis, a dangerous and potentially fatal reaction to an allergen...

Medications make a difference — generally a positive one — in the lives of many people. Insulin keeps blood sugar under control, cholesterol-lowering drugs can reduce the chances of having a heart attack, and thyroid medication can restore a normal hormone level. These are but a few examples. At the same time, all drugs carry side effects, and can interact with other medications. For many medications, one or more side effects affect balance. And that can increase your chances of taking a fall. How? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, common problems include vision changes, dizziness or lightheadedness, drowsiness, and impaired alertness or judgment. Some medications may damage the inner ear, spurring temporary or permanent balance disorders. How do I know if this is a problem for me? Some of the commonly prescribed medications that can affect balance include: •  antidepressants •  anti-anxiety drugs ...

          Gene therapy: not just for mice. Bradbury J Genetic traits like a bulbous nose or balding give some people reasons to moan about what they inherited from their parents. But more serious genetic flaws can cause debilitating disease. Now, Italian researchers have come up with a way of treating one such inherited disease and reversing another using a promising new method of gene therapy. The idea behind gene therapy is to replace a faulty gene with a shiny new version that works properly. Modified versions of viruses, which have been sculpted by millions of years of evolution, perfectly penetrate human cells. They act as couriers delivering DNA payloads to defective cells and ensure it is stably inherited. This deceptively simple idea, though, has been challenging to achieve in practice. The first commercial gene therapy product, Glybera , only received regulatory approva...

In a nutshell, dementia is a symptom, and AD is the cause of the symptom. When someone is told they have dementia, it means that they have significant memory problems as well as other cognitive difficulties, and that these problems are severe enough to get in the way of daily living..... Too often, patients and their family members are told by their doctors that the patient has been diagnosed with “a little bit of dementia.” They leave the doctor’s visit with a feeling of relief that at least they don’t have Alzheimer’s disease (AD). There is great confusion about the difference between “dementia” and “Alzheimer's disease.” The confusion is felt on the part of patients, family members, the media, and even healthcare providers. This article provides information to reduce the confusion by defining and describing these two common and often poorly understood terms. What is the difference between Alzheimer's disease and dementia? “Dementia” is a term th...

By MySahana The best way to take care of someone else is to take care of yourself first. United States South Asian culture is a collectivistic culture, meaning that individual needs and wants are pushed aside for the benefit of the whole group. Generally, people who are raised in a collectivistic culture are taught that it is best to sacrifice oneself if that means the group as a whole will be happier. Overall, it is emphasized that others are often more important than yourself. This is exhibited in day to day life where hosts will take less food so that their guests will have enough, a friend my not suggest a different time for lunch to avoid inconveniencing her friend or a husband who bites his tongue about a legitimate complaint so as to avoid an argument. South Asian children who internalize these values learn to be more flexible as adults. They also are often better at compromising with others when there is a source ...

The world looks very different at 3 a.m. when you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling or the clock. “How will I make it through tomorrow without any sleep?” you worry. If you regularly can’t get to sleep — or stay asleep — and it’s affecting you during the day, then you may have insomnia.  Prescription or over-the-counter sleep aids can help you drift off, but these drugs also have side effects. These include morning drowsiness, which can make activities like driving or using machinery dangerous, and an increased risk for falling. There are other ways to get a good night’s sleep than medications. Try simple lifestyle changes, recommends Dr. Hadine Joffe, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Two good ones to start with include avoiding caffeine and sticking to a regular sleep schedule. If these steps don’t help, it’s worth a call to your doctor to see if a medical condition — such as thyroid problems, anemia, sleep apnea, menopausal...

The easiest way to lower blood pressure is by popping a pill. It takes just a few seconds and you are finished. But pills cost money and often have side effects. Fully relaxing your body and your mind for a few minutes a day could lower your systolic blood pressure (the top number of a blood pressure reading) by 10 points or more—at no cost, and with no side effects. Researchers with the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital compared a stress management technique called the relaxation response with education about lifestyle changes such as sodium reduction, weight loss, and exercise. They found: Blood pressure decreased more in the relaxation response group 32% of the volunteers in that group were able to eliminate one blood pressure medication and still keep their blood pressure under control, compared with 14% of the lifestyle group. The relaxation response, developed by Harvard's Dr. Herber...

Discharge from the hospital is a critical transition point in your loved one’s care especially if she has multiple comorbidities. While a number of factors can contribute to a senior's readmission to a hospital after being transitioned home, there are six common conditions that are the most prevalent causes: Arthritis Congestive Heart Failure Diabetes Myocardial Infarction (Heart Attack) Pneumonia Comorbidity Arthritis Arthritis is a chronic disease, which is characterized by more than 100 conditions that primarily affect a body's joints. Some of the most common forms are osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia and gout. The chances of getting arthritis, especially osteoarthritis, which is caused by the deterioration of a joint's cartilage, increases with age, making it likely that a senior may suffer from the disease's effects. Some with osteoarthritis have knee or hip replacement surgery to help relieve the pain in ...

Recently, Joel Stein of Time wrote an article about "why Millennials will save us all." Stein states "I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof. Here's the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to ... National Institutes of Health ..." Stein goes on to say "[m]illennials consist, depending on whom you ask, of people born from 1980 to 2000. To put it more simply for them, since they grew up not having to do a lot of math in their heads, thanks to computers, the group is made up mostly of teens and 20-somethings. At 80 million strong, they are the biggest age grouping in America...

(Article written by Dr.Ronesh Sinha) My father was an extremely busy critical care physician in a small California town. Yet despite his schedule, every Thursday morning he made me join him in 20 to 30 minutes of meditation. As a hot-blooded teenager, sitting still for half an hour seemed unbearable. Now that I’m a doctor with two young kids and a mortgage, I can see why he needed those moments of tranquility. I’m convinced that the vast majority of problems I see in my patients are strongly connected to stress in some way. In my mind, and probably in yours, the word meditation conjured images of levitating yogis, Tibetan monks, or those artsy folks from college we just couldn’t relate to. I never fully believed in it until I delved into the science in an effort to help myself and all the patients who walked into the clinic complaining about stress. I found an increasing number of studies done with a functional MRI scanner (fMRI) that show meditation helps the part of your brain...