Dr. Howard Smith Reports

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/pIvjASoILKg A German study reveals an association between seasonal allergies and anxiety as well as a link between year-round or perennial allergies with depression.   Psychologists at the University of Augsburg studied more than 1700 middle-aged persons with a variety of allergies including environmental, food, and drug hypersensitivities.   The researchers point out t...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/BZa4b6iu7Xs Calling addictive substance abuse a disease negatively impacts the addicts’ efforts to get sober.   This is the conclusion of a study from the University of North Carolina just published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology . The researchers studied 214 men and women with substance abuse problems.   One group received growth mindset messaging and...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/UFtArWv0Arw Premature infants who listen to music enjoy enhanced neural development.   Swiss neuroscientists at the University of Geneva report the positive effects of specially composed and performed music on developing neural networks of premies. The musical selections varied with time of day and were designed to lend an auditory structure to the infant’s first days o...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/RghCkNItbYQ Obesity in the teen years increases the chances of heart weakening and heart failure in middle age by a factor of eight.   But wait, that’s not the worst news.   Even mildly overweight adolescent guys risk heart disease in their 40s and 50s. These conclusions come from a study of nearly 1.7 million Swedish military recruits who were weighed at age 18 as they...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/sG9x8bkrmOg Marijuana is legal throughout Canada, and a study just presented to the Canadian Neuroscience Meeting shows that teens regularly using it suffer impairment of their memory, decision-making, and impulsivity-control skills. Neuroscientists at The University of   Montreal studied over 3800 teens entering high school and followed them during the subsequent 4 yea...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/dAJdcux1xZI Women who use assisted reproduction techniques including in-vitro fertilization and intracystoplasmic sperm injection are 5 times more likely to suffer pregnancy-associated heart failure.   This conclusion comes from a study at Germany’s Hannover Medical School presented last week to the European Society of Cardiology. This pregnancy-associated heart failure...

Vidcast: https://youtu.be/BHsfjlX86Mg Health News You Should Use, the latest medical discoveries and commonsense advice that you can use in a practical way to keep yourself and your family healthy.   Here are this weeks stories : Management of Asthma Changing Button Battery Dangers TELL ME WHY: Coffee is Good For Your Gut Bowel Cancer Rising In Over-fed Young Adults Measles Will Become Epidemic Un...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/K5dWdmkXykI Pharmaceutical companies are the corporations that most of us love to hate for their unabashed greed in raising drug prices to astronomical levels.   Here’s one drug company that deserves sustained applause rather than scorn for its generosity.   The story is told by good news network.org . Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company based in Foster City, C...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/g5bWW3_0-7g Women over 30 with an interest in motherhood constantly have an eye on that ticking biological clock.   The latest study from Rutgers University suggests that men also need to pay attention to old Father Time if they want to produce healthy offspring. The study reviewed nearly half a century of research on fertility and healthy reproduction.   Men 45 years o...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/HYkk6YqL5iU Death due to congestive heart failure has been on the rise over the past 7 years, and the group most affected is surprisingly those under 65.   A new study from Northwestern University cardiologists looks at CDC epidemiologic data for nearly 48 million Americans from 35 to 84 years of age. The study shows that the trend toward declining death rates from hear...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/-UtbUESmvgM Orthorexia nervosa is medical jargon for an obsession with healthy eating.   Psychologists from Toronto’s York University explain the drivers and dangers of this condition in a review article just published in the journal Appetite . Orthorexia nervosa tends to develop in those individuals with a history of eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive personalities...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/qkRJ7UIEFVM The myth that falling asleep to the TV is good for children is now dispelled by a study from the University of ‘Massachusetts-Amherst.   Developmental specialists and neuroscientists there studied some 470 preschoolers and their parents using electronic sleep monitoring and questionnaires for behavioral assessment. Thirty-four percent of the kids had TVs in...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/R6j4W6aPTgc Kids with teeth that protrude are at significant risk for a lifetime of dental problems.   An Australian study of more than 50,000 children and adolescents was just published in the journal Dental Traumatology . The data reveals that children under the age of six with teeth that protrude more than 3 millimeters are more than 3 times more likely to sustain se...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/G3--3Vsow-c The ready availability of marijuana had both positive and negative impacts on the use of hospital services in the state of Colorado.   Cardiologists and epidemiologists at UC-San Francisco studied some hospital records from Colorado comparing utilization before and after pot legalization.   On the positive side, there were fewer hospitalizations for chronic...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/RQhzQKE1s0M Inflammatory bowel disease is best treated by simultaneously applying therapies that focus both on the gut and the brain.   A study from Sweden’s University of Gothenberg just published in journal Gastroenterology emphasizes the need a comprehensive, holistic approach to the disease. The researchers studied 400 patients with IBD and matched controls using qu...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/UoXTh9OtlzA Electronically monitoring a child’s day-to-day breathing patterns and their responses to medicine improves asthma management.   Pediatricians at the University of Utah developed a smartphone app they call eAsthmaTracker and tested it with more than 300 children receiving care at 11 clinics statewide. The app tracks a child’s respiratory symptoms and peak flo...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/RVam3gGQvYI Broccoli and its cruciferous vegetable cousins can inactivate a gene that cancers use to overwhelm our immune systems and our bodies.   This latest finding comes from Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center’s Cancer Research Institute. We know that eating broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collard greens, Brussel sprouts, and kale seems to reduce the ris...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/frbow4n-VoM This is a wake up call for the US, Britain, Ireland, Italy, and Australia that comes from Italy’s Bocconi University and Bruno Kessler Foundation.   Researchers there crunched the numbers using a computer model and simulated the characteristics of measles immunity between 2018 and 2050 in these countries as well as in South Korea and Singapore. The study pro...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/V6FqGGLJLo8 While the incidence of bowel cancer dropped in middle-aged adults 50+ over the decade ending in 2014, colon and rectal cancer is on the rise for younger adults.   This result is now reported in the journal The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology , and it is derived from a tabulation of cancer registry data from the westernized countries Australia, New Zeala...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/wvab4Bj4SIc We’ve known for years that coffee can be good for your digestion as it helps keep you regular,   reduces risk of gallstones, and keeps your liver humming along.   A new study from the University of Texas at Galveston explores that reasons for this conclusion.   Their studies were carried out in a rat model. These investigators found that, when exposed to cof...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/n-VPKjhnrRU If a child swallows a button battery that has passed into the stomach, a study to be presented to the Digestive Disease Week annual meeting concludes that the ingested object must be removed quickly to prevent damage to the gastrointestinal tract linings.   Current recommendations suggest wait and see to allow the battery to pass through the gastrointestinal...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/ZIK07yBWRcA A study just published online by the New England Journal of Medicine is challenging the way we manage asthma.   For decades, inhalation of the short-acting bronchodilator albuterol, sold as Proventil and Ventolin, has been the recommended treatment for attacks with the addition of an inhaled steroid for maintenance of easy breathing. A collaborative group fr...

Vidcast: https://youtu.be/MtNakRwjYu0 Health News You Should Use, the latest medical discoveries and commonsense advice that you can use in a practical way to keep yourself and your family healthy.   Here are this weeks stories and a selections of news from the past several weeks: Prophylactic Antibiotic Dose Improves Instrumented Vaginal Deliveries   How Much Coffee Is Too Much Sunscreens Won’t L...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/9DzvBHZ9CzU The author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda,” Roald Dahl, wrote in 1988 about his experience when his daughter developed measles.   "Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one...

Vidcast:   https://youtu.be/CU2WZFt3CZ8 A planned ultrasound at 36 weeks will detect undiagnosed breech presentations in time to allow intervention and prevention of dangerous fetal distress and emergency c-sections.   This recommendation springs from a study by public health specialists at Britain’s University of Cambridge. The investigators screened nearly 3900 women during their first pregnanci...