Health Tip: Build Strong Bones

(HealthDay News) -- Osteoporosis is a condition in which bones become weak, brittle and may break easily.

The National Women's Health Information Center offers these suggestions to help prevent osteoporosis:

• Get plenty of calcium by eating or drinking dairy products, or by taking calcium supplements.
• Get enough vitamin D, through exposure to sunlight (use sunscreen), supplements or milk products.
• Eat a diet rich in vitamins and protein.
• Get enough weight-bearing exercise (where your body works against gravity). Examples include lifting weights or climbing stairs.
• Avoid smoking and excessive alcohol use.
• Take medication to specifically treat or help prevent bone loss.

A New Way to Calculate Your Disease Risk

By Dena Rifkin, MD

Here’s a sobering realization: No matter how well I take care of my patients, all of them—that’s right, all of them—are going to die someday. This pessimistic thought came to me this week as I was reviewing some of the recent cardiac-risk calculators.

These tools, many of which were based on a landmark observational research program in Framingham, Mass., allow physicians to estimate an individual’s risk of cardiac death over the next 10 years, or over a lifetime. Surprisingly few variables count in this calculation: age, gender, smoking history, blood pressure, presence of diabetes, and cholesterol level. Read More

Health Tip: Controlling Asthma

(HealthDay News) -- While some people are more likely to have asthma, the things that actually "trigger" attacks vary from person to person.

In general, there are things asthmatics can do to ward off attacks. The National Safety Council offers these suggestions:

• Avoid being around smokers. If someone must smoke indoors near a person who is asthmatic, it should only be allowed in a separately ventilated area.


• Keep humidity levels in the home low -- between 30 percent and 50 percent.


• Avoid using a humidifier. It one is necessary, change water daily to prevent microbe growth.


• When cooking, running a dishwasher or using the shower, keep windows open or use an exhaust fan.


• Have any combustion-powered appliances -- such furnaces, stoves or heaters -- checked every year, and change their filters regularly.


• Keep the house clean and free of dust, dirt and animal dander.

Newly Discovered Air Pollutants May Cause Lung Problems

(HealthDay News) -- Recently discovered so-called free radicals that are attached to small particles of air pollution could cause lung damage and perhaps even lung cancer, researchers report.

If confirmed through further research, the finding could help to explain why nonsmokers develop tobacco-related diseases like lung cancer, said lead researcher H. Barry Dellinger, the Patrick F. Taylor Chair of environmental chemistry at Louisiana State University.

It has been known for years that free radicals exist in the atmosphere, and these atoms, molecules and fragments of molecules can damage cells. It had been thought that these particles, which can be produced by combustion, exist for less than a second and then disappear.

"What I found out is that combustion-generated particles contain environmentally persistent free radicals," said Dellinger. "When the radicals are associated with particles, they can apparently exist indefinitely."

These free radicals are remarkably similar to the free radicals found in cigarette tar, Dellinger said. "The implication is you can have the same environmentally related diseases by exposure to airborne fine particles that you can get from cigarettes," he said.

Dellinger noted, however, that one would have to smoke about 300 cigarettes a day to be exposed to the same level of environmental free radicals found in moderately polluted air.

The findings were to be presented Monday at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, in Philadelphia.

The persistent free radicals (PFRs) discovered by Dellinger's team attach themselves to small particles of air pollution as they leave smokestacks, car exhaust pipes and household chimneys, and continue to exist as free radicals. Particles of air pollution containing metals, such as copper and iron, are more likely to remain in the atmosphere and can carry these PFRs great distances, Dellinger said.

As PFRs are inhaled, they're absorbed by the lungs and other tissues and cause cell damage that can lead to problems such as asthma, emphysema and lung cancer. However, there's still no direct evidence linking PFRs to any of these diseases, he said.

Dr. Neil Schachter, a professor of pulmonary medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, thinks it's premature to blame persistent free radicals for the adverse effects of air pollution.

"These airborne free radicals are of interest, but I am not sure we are at a point where our scalpel is sharp enough to dissect the individual components of air pollution that cause problems for people," he said.

It's possible that persistent free radicals are responsible for the respiratory damage caused by pollution, Schachter acknowledged. "There are studies that show that modifying free radicals can alter the course of disease," he said. "But the implications of this -- what it means to clinics, what it means to doctors, what it means to regulators -- I think we are a long way from pulling that together."

More information
For more on the health risks posed by air pollution, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Harassing Smokers, Part 2: This One Touched a Real Nerve

By Scott Mowbray

Last week, as we kicked off our new How to Quit Smoking section on Health.com, I asked this question: Is It OK to Harass the Smokers We Love? The response was overwhelming—from smokers, former smokers, nonsmokers, children of smokers, parents of smokers, educators, and hospital workers.

Now the word “harass” raised a lot of hackles (I intended it to). Sarcasm was a common response, as from reader MAS: “Sure, harass away! Next we’ll turn the kiddies loose on the oldies, fatties, drunks, and anyone else who might ultimately become burdensome to society.”

JF wrote: “The problem with allowing kids to harass the smokers they love is that it gives kids carte blanche to harass everyone who smokes—including strangers and parents’ acquaintances.”

Many smokers said that harassment simply makes them light up, out of annoyance or spite. As Jessica put it, “I was at a party and some random person put up a huge stink about me smoking (outside). She told me secondhand smoke kills and I told her I was counting on it.”

But some ex-smokers said campaigns by children or spouses had been decisive in their quitting.

Awareness of the effects of secondhand smoke (SHS) on children also leads some parents to quit. Good thing: A CDC summary released last week noted that although antismoking legislation covering public places has significantly reduced SHS exposure among adults, “a higher prevalence of SHS exposure was still evident in the groups aged 4-11 years and 12-19 years” from 1999 to 2004. Kids are among the most vulnerable, and many parents smoke where kids breathe.

Some users asked why smoking was singled out—why not obesity, drinking, and other well-known dangers? “So don’t throw stones, dwellers in glass houses,” said one. “Hello, Brave New World,” wrote MAS.

But some of the most thoughtful posts reflected a sense of love, concern, and propriety. Sue wrote of a smoking friend, age 50, whom she gently encourages: “Should we paper his computer with Post-it notes, stage an intervention, email him photos of diseased lungs, shame him into quitting? Our motives are pure, but those actions would surely damage our friendship. He is struggling with his addiction. He doesn’t need us to point out the obvious.”

And Stephen concluded: “I absolutely believe that as humans we have an obligation to the people around us. This includes telling them when they are harming themselves and others such as smoking and other destructive behaviors. I don’t know what works but I know that supportive talking is at least a start.”

Read my first smoking post, Is It OK to Harass the Smokers We Love?

Read 97 Reasons to Quit Smoking. (You can email it to a smoker.)

Read the latest science on quitting.

(PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)

Is It OK to Harass the Smokers We Love?

By Scott Mowbray

When I was 11 years old, I drew skulls and warnings on my mother’s cigarettes and then slipped the cigarettes back in the pack. If I was hoping to embarrass her, it worked: She offered them to guests at an afternoon party, and I heard the details. It wasn’t as hilarious as I had imagined, apparently. That was 1971.
Recently I asked a few friends and acquaintances if they had similar stories and received anecdotes dating all the way back to the start of the modern assault on tobacco. One friend’s father, who was a D.C. lawyer representing a tobacco company in the mid-’60s, fired the client after being pestered by a uniquely positioned pressure group: his offspring. Now 81, he emailed to say he recalls that “firing Lorillard as a client was written up…in an article in The Wall Street Journal, ‘Daddy, Why Do You Represent a Cigarette Company?’”
Read More