Archive for the ‘Hormone Physician’ Category

Canadas decision to remove restrictions on the abortion pill did not impact its safety, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia say the study shows the drug remains a safe, effective option and signals to other countries that restrictions on the medication are unnecessary and burdensome.

Having access to medication that can be taken at home without a trip to the doctor or an abortion clinic, which are often harder to find in rural areas, became more crucial in a pandemic, said Dr. Sheila Dunn, a scientist and family physician at Womens College Hospital who co-authored the study published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The potential for this drug is you dont need an operating room, or surgical training to be able to deliver that care. You can deliver it from your office ... and your office could be in a small town, she said.

It has the potential to widen the number of providers. The change in the regulations really made a difference in whether or not providers would pick it up, she said.

Previously, the restrictions on the medication were onerous, she said.

Prior to November 2017, physicians were required to observe their patients taking the medication and in order to prescribe it, a doctor would need to be specially trained and registered with the manufacturer.

The abortion pill was approved in Canada in July 2015, while in 57 other countries like France and Britain, it had been available for decades. The U.S. approved the drug in 2000.

The drug provides an alternative to surgical abortions, and can be used up until 63 days into the pregnancy.

It works in two parts: first a patient takes mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone, which sustains a pregnancy. It stimulates the uterus to expel the pregnancy tissue, said Dunn. Then a second pill containing the hormone prostaglandin is taken one to two days later.

The process is similar to what would happen during a miscarriage, said Dunn.

The research showed that prescribing the drug without restrictions showed no increase in abortion-related health complications.

Researchers analyzed 315,000 abortions in Ontario between 2012 and 2020 and found no increase in health issues following the removal of the abortion pill restrictions.

Our study is a signal to other countries that restrictions are not necessary to ensure patient safety, Wendy Norman, the studys senior author and professor in UBCs department of family practice, said in a press release about the research.

The previous restrictions had no scientific justification and made it more difficult for people to access the care they needed, she said.

The uptake of the abortion pill was rapid following policy changes, the study says. When the medication became available without restrictions, within two years, 31.4 per cent of abortions in the country were provided using the drug.

The abortion rate also declined slightly after restrictions were removed, from 11.9 abortions per 1,000 female residents aged 15-49, to 11.3 indicating an increase in access does not mean an increase in abortions, said Dunn.

The abortion pill allows the experience of an abortion to be more private, and allows the patient to avoid the harassment many face around abortion clinics. Ontario launched protest-free buffer zones of 50 metres outside clinics and 150 metres outside abortion providers homes in 2017 for this reason.

Canada is the first country in the world to remove the restrictions, and its hoped other nations will follow suit, said Dunn.

It provides very good evidence that theres no rational reason for [restrictions] in terms of safety. Weve shown that really doesnt exist, she said.

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration removed a long-standing requirement that women had to pick up the medication in person.

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Remove restrictions on abortion pill didn't impact safety: Study | The Star - Toronto Star

William Culbert| Guest column

State Rep. John Ragan, 33rd District,is misguided in his efforts to usurp the authority of the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners in its efforts to protect Tennesseans from COVID-19. Despite his stated motivations, he has contradictory political views and legislative precedents.

The General Assembly may grant rule-making authority to the TBME, but the 71 medical boards that exist in every state and territory are established by the U.S. Constitution with a federal mandate to protect the public from the unprofessional, improper, unlawful, or incompetent practice of medicine … and gives authority to a medical board to enforce the acts provisions.

Ragans justification for his threat to have the Government Operations Committee disband the board is based on protecting the autonomy of physicians and their patients and the lack of regulatory specificity toward physicians that purvey misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19.

Rep. Ragan has advocated using taxpayer dollars to study the appropriateness of treating COVID-19 with drugs like a deworming medicine for horses with no anti-viral properties. This conflicts with the recommendation of major medical groups and disregards the significance of a highly effective anti-viral pill that has recently received approval for emergency use from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee.

In his House Bill 578 regarding gender identity, Ragan expressly undermines the autonomy of the physician, minor patient, and the responsible parent by requiring a second medical opinion from a different medical specialist with no specific training in endocrinology that is often expensive and difficult to obtain. Without meeting this requirement, the bill prohibits use of hormone therapy in these pre-pubertal patients despite medical assurances of its safety and reversibility.

Ragan says this legislation was drafted to protect Tennessees children, but he rejects Medicaid expansion, forgoing a million dollars a day in federal subsidies for direct health benefits for tens of thousands of the states children.

There are very few rules in medicine, but there are a lot of practice guidelines. They frequently have minor inconsistencies, and good physicians routinely operate within this penumbra. Unfortunately, the practices of some doctors are more motivated by social media, political news programs, or religious doctrine that do not represent good medicine.

Because what these physicians say matters, their opinions can be particularly dangerous, and medical boards may need to use broad regulatory terms like misinformation or disinformation to rein them in.

Even when regulators have known that physicians are addicted to drugs or alcohol or they over prescribe opioids, it has been difficult to stop them from practicing medicine. This is rapidly changing, but potentially more dangerous for patients are the doctors that knowingly reject the quality medical practice standards of their peers. They dont need more protection from politicians.

Physician William Culbert lives in Oak Ridge and has a practice in Clinton.

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Politician oversteps his authority with COVID-19 - Oak Ridger

The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC) recently spoke with Nicholas McAndrew, MD, MSCE, a medical oncologist and breast cancer specialist at UCLA Health and assistant clinical professor of Medicine at UCLA in the Division of Hematology/Oncology. AJMC asked McAndrew, about the arrival of CDK4/6 inhibitors in the treatment landscape.

AJMC: What is HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer?

McAndrew: HR-positive stands for hormone receptor positive, and HER2-negative means that the breast cancer is does not overexpress the HER2 protein; hormone receptor positive means positive for either the estrogen receptor or the progesterone receptor. HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer is the most common subtype of breast cancer. Hormone-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer represents about 60% to 80% of all cancer diagnoses, with HER2-positive breast cancer being about 20% and triple negative breast cancermeaning it's negative for estrogen, progesterone, and negative for HER2, representing about 10% of breast cancers.

AJMC: What are the goals of therapy in treating patients with this type of breast cancer?

McAndrew: The main goal of therapy for anybody with metastatic breast cancer, but in particular, hormone-positive HER2-negative breast cancer, is to control the progression of their cancer. Unfortunately, with metastatic breast cancer, once cancer cells have left the breast and have spread to distant organs in the body, or just in lymph nodes in the body not within the regional lymph node chain of the breast tissue, its no longer curable. Now, of course, the minority of patients develop thatmost patients who have been diagnosed with breast cancer are found at an early stage. But [some] patients either recur or present with de novo metastatic disease. And so, when a breast cancer is not curable, the main goal is to try and control the growth of the cancer in order to try and delay or avoid any kind of complications that could arise from where metastasis can develop. Also, that's in conjunction with helping maintain somebody's quality of life. So, the main goal of therapy is really to prolong someone's life, but also to prolong a good quality of life. And that takes into account trying to control the disease, but also especially for hormone-positive HER2 negative breast cancer, trying to give treatments that will achieve that goal with a minimum amount of toxicity. Thats really the most important part for hormone- positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.

AJMC: Could you give us a brief overview of the current treatment landscape for HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer?

McAndrew: In advanced or metastatic hormone-positive HER2 negative breast cancer, the broad overview is that because we're trying to help patients feel as well as possible for as long as possible, you want to start off with therapies that are going to be well-tolerated and maximally effective. And so, we prioritize giving hormone-based therapies or hormone-blocking therapies that are usually in conjunction with some kind of a molecular therapy. We do that first to try to extinguish those options, because oftentimes, those drugs can be tolerated for a longer period of time and have a better side effect profile. Then with chemotherapy, which is traditionally prior to the advent of all these amazing hormone-blocking therapieswe try to use those prior to having to give chemotherapy. In terms of a brief overview, we start off by trying to control the cancer with the less toxic hormone-blocking therapies before moving on to trying to control it with chemotherapy, which is oftentimes more toxic and less effective.

AJMC: How has the arrival of the CDK4/6 inhibitors change the treatment landscape?

McAndrew: It's really been game changing. They've been incredible drugs that have drastically improved survival in patients with metastatic breast cancereven in the first-line setting. In patients who have first-line metastatic disease, for hormone-positive HER2 negative breast cancer, traditionally, patients have initially been started on single-agent endocrine therapy. What Dr. [Richard] Finn and Dr. [Dennis] Slamon [had shown] in their labs is that it was hormone-positive HER2-negative breast cancer cell lines that seemed to be especially sensitive in a synergistic fashion with a different therapy to CDK4/6 inhibitors;1 [this] launched the first of many trials that showed that when we add these compounds to first-line and second-line endocrine therapy, it significantly improves progression-free survival, and importantly, with some CDK4/6 inhibitors, overall survival in both the first- and second-line settings. We have a couple studies now showing that that when ribociclib is added to a first-line endocrine therapy for both premenopausal patients and postmenopausal patients, it significantly improves overall survival.

AJMC: What are your preferred treatment regimens for treating patients with HR-positive HER2- negative advanced breast cancer?

McAndrew: I take certain things into consideration when I'm trying to select a treatment for patients. So, these drugs the CDK4/6 inhibitors do have different toxicities. For instance, abemaciclib (Verzenio) has more [gastrointestinal] GI toxicity and more diarrhea associated with it, but less neutropenia; it's given on a daily basis, rather than a 1 week on, 1 week off basis. Ribociclib (Kisquali) is has less GI toxicity and has more overlapping toxicity profile with palbociclib (Ibrance), with the exception that ribociclib additionally does carry the risk of QT prolongation. So, for patients whom I'm worried that they're not going to be able to reliably come in EKGs during the first 4 weeks of treatment, I sometimes consider not prescribing that one because I want to make sure they're safe and monitored on therapy.

And then with palbociclib, theres nothing of concern for QT prolongation; however, some of the overall survival data with palbociclib has not been positive. And so, I generally dont prefer that one when I'm considering between ribociclib and abemaciclib because the survival data in those drugs has been consistently positive. So, those are some of the factors that I take into account.

AJMC: In addition to concerns about patients coming in for an EKG, has the pandemic has the pandemic affected treatment choices? We know that cancer screenings dropped during the early months of the pandemicwas there any impact on the treatment of metastatic breast cancer?

McAndrew: In my practice it really hasn't impacted the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. I certainly think that many of the patients who were concerned about coming in for regular follow-ups in regular chemotherapyespecially for patients who were getting treatment for early-stage diseasein the end, I did see some patients concerned about coming in for their chemo and even in some rare cases, decide not to do chemotherapy. [This was] because of the concern for leaving the home during the pandemic, but that's a minority of patients. And I would say that most patients were able to come in; [with metastatic breast cancer] these patients are highly motivated to remain in close contact with their oncologist to continue to receive care. So, I actually haven't seen a major impact when it comes to the availability of treatment and the treatment decisions during the pandemic.

But certainly, one of the major things, especially early in the pandemic, in the early-stage setting was that patients who were diagnosed with low-risk hormone-positive or negative early-stage breast cancerback when the operating rooms were not running at full capacitywe were managing a lot of these patients with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy until they were able to book their surgery, usually months down the line. Typically, these patients will go right to surgery, but because of the institutional decision to try and preserve ventilators for the ICU, and to minimize the number of nonemergent surgeries and elective surgeries, a lot of patients were managed with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy until the operating rooms open back up at full capacity. And that was pretty successful. We didn't see any delay, or anyone's care be compromised from a cancer perspective, we didn't see any progressions, because of that decision. So that was good.

AJMC: Your earlier response about using CDK4/6 inhibitors in first-line treatment is consistent with responses we are hearing from oncologists who treat several types of cancersthat the trend in the first-line setting is to use the best drugs available. Is this true across the board with CDK4/6 inhibitors?

McAndrew: Yes, absolutely. Often, these drugs are very, very well-tolerated. And in many of these studies, patients would have gone on to receive a subsequent CDK4/6 inhibitor. And despite that potential source of confounding in the studies, we still see a maintained overall survival benefit when you start by giving them the CDK4/6 inhibitor plus the endocrine therapy. At this point, unless there are patient-specific comorbidities or tolerability [that] preclude the physician from being able to prescribe the CDK4/6 inhibitor, there's really not a reason not to start with the CDK4/6 inhibitor. Because when cancers become resistant to a line of therapy, it's not the same type of cancer, and we don't know whether delaying the addition of the CDK4/6 inhibitor until they progress on endocrine therapy is really the right thing to do. Because you're now dealing with a different type of cancer that was resistantthat has already become an acute resistance. So, if you capture the opportunity to try to control the disease when it's as endocrine-sensitive as possible, with the strongest tools possible, youre likely offering the patient the maximum amount of benefit.

AJMC: Is there's anything we haven't covered that you'd like to add?

McAndrew: The main focus at this point in terms of where the field is headed is trying to understand the mechanisms behind CDK4/6 resistance and trying to really tailor subsequent therapies to the different ways that patients may become resistant to these drugs. I think that that next-generation sequencing with both liquid biopsies and with solid tumor biopsies is going to be a huge part of where we see this field moving in the future. And hopefully, we'll be able to tailor subsequent lines of therapy specifically to patients mutations as they as they arise throughout the course of treatment, to stay one step ahead of the cancer.

Reference

Finn RS, Dering J, Conklin D, et al. PD 0332991, a selective cyclin D kinase 4/6 inhibitor, preferentially inhibits proliferation of luminal estrogen receptor-postive human breast cell lines in vitro. Breast Cancer Res. 2009;11(5):R77 doi: 10.1186/bcr2419.

Original post:
McAndrew: No Reason Not to Start With CDK4/6 Inhibitors in Metastatic HR+ HER2-Negative Breast Cancer - AJMC.com Managed Markets Network

PALM BEACH, Fla., Dec. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- FinancialNewsMedia.com News Commentary - Breast cancer is cancer that develops in the breast tissue. Breast cancer signs include the formation of a lump in the breast and red patches on the skin. Obesity, lack of physical activity, excessive radiation exposure, and alcohol use are all risk factors for breast cancer. Breast cancer is more prevalent in developed countries than it is in developing countries. Post diagnosis, cancer therapy requires different procedures depending upon the form and severity of cancer. The cancer care market is increasing at a substantial pace due to the rise in the occurrence of cancer cases, growing knowledge among people about different stages, and availability of treatment of cancer. Breast cancer treatment relies on different factors, such as breast cancer origin, tumor size, and breast cancer phase, and cancer grade. Operations, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, targeted therapy, and bone-led therapy are some of the most popular approaches used in the management of breast cancer. A report from Facts and Factors states that the global breast cancer treatment market was registered at about USD 19.24 Billion in 2019 and is expected to generate revenues worth around USD 34.06 Billion by end of 2026, effectively growing at a CAGR of around 8.5% between 2020 and 2026. Active biotech and pharma companies in the markets this week include Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (NASDAQ: ONCY) (TSX: ONC), Intra-Cellular Therapies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITCI), Galera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: GRTX), Lineage Cell Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE: LCTX), Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD).

The report added: "The rising number of females diagnosed with breast cancer is a major driver of market development. Aside from this, the demand has grown due to the acceptance of unhealthy lifestyles, an increase in the women geriatric population, exposure to toxic radiation, and increased government initiatives. Since no absolute cure exists, there is room for the industry to develop globally. The global breast cancer treatment market is driven by America on a regional basis. The demand has grown as a result of changing lifestyles and the increased incidence of breast cancer in the United States. Europe is the market leader in breast cancer. The development of this market in America and Europe is due to technological advancements, increased life expectancy, and increased healthcare spending by people. The market is expected to expand at the fastest rate in the Asia Pacific."

Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (NASDAQ: ONCY) (TSX: ONC) BREAKING NEWS: Oncolytics Biotech Promotes Thomas C. Heineman, M.D., Ph.D., to Chief Medical Officer - Oncolytics Biotech ) today announced that Thomas (Tom) C. Heineman, M.D., Ph.D., has been promoted to the role of Chief Medical Officer (CMO). Dr. Heineman has over two decades of experience leading clinical development programs and previously served as Oncolytics' Global Head of Clinical Development and Operations.

"Tom's clinical expertise, deep understanding of oncology drug development, and impressive track record make him an ideal fit as our CMO," said Dr. Matt Coffey, President and Chief Executive Officer of Oncolytics Biotech Inc. "Since joining Oncolytics in August 2020, Tom has provided crucial insights that have enabled the efficient advancement of our lead breast cancer program and facilitated our pipeline's expansion into additional indications. Looking forward, Tom's strategic guidance will continue to be an invaluable asset as we move towards a registration study in metastatic breast cancer and advance our broader pipeline."

Dr. Heineman added, "The opportunity to serve as Oncolytics' CMO is exciting. Pelareorep's ability to recruit anti-cancer immune cells into tumors and promote an inflamed microenvironment positions it as a potential immunotherapeutic backbone that can enable the success of a wide range of immuno-oncology agents. We have demonstrated clinical proof-of-concept in several high unmet need indications and are now building on these results in ongoing trials. As CMO, I look forward to leading the clinical development of pelareorep through these and future trials, and to my continued work alongside my highly talented colleagues at Oncolytics."

Prior to joining Oncolytics, Dr. Heineman was Senior Vice President and Head of Clinical Development at Denovo Biopharma. Prior to his time at Denovo, he served as Vice President and Head of Clinical Development at both Genocea Biosciences and Halozyme Therapeutics. At Halozyme, Dr. Heineman was also Head of Translational Medicine and oversaw clinical trials in indications such as breast and pancreatic cancer. Dr. Heineman's experience further extends to big pharma and academia, as he previously worked as Senior Director, Global Clinical Research and Development at GlaxoSmithKline and as an Associate Professor at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

Dr. Heineman has co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He completed his fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and his internship and residency at the University of Maryland. Dr. Heineman earned his M.D. and Ph.D. in Virology at the University of Chicago. CONTINUED Read this full press release and more news for ONCY at: https://www.financialnewsmedia.com/news-oncy/

Other recent developments in the biotech industry of note include:

Intra-Cellular Therapies, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITCI), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) disorders, recently announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved CAPLYTA for the treatment of depressive episodes associated with bipolar I or II disorder in adults, as monotherapy and as adjunctive therapy with lithium or valproate.

"CAPLYTA is the only medication approved by the FDA to treat depressive disorders associated with bipolar I or bipolar II as both monotherapy and adjunctive therapy with lithium or valproate. CAPLYTA has shown a consistent favorable profile on weight, cardiometabolic parameters and extrapyramidal symptoms (movement disturbances). We are positioned to launch immediately and are excited to offer CAPLYTA to the millions of patients living with bipolar depression," said Dr. Sharon Mates, Chairman and CEO of Intra-Cellular Therapies. "We thank the patients, healthcare professionals and our Intra-Cellular team for all their contributions that led to this approval."

Lineage Cell Therapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: LCTX) recently announced that Lineage and its subsidiary, Cell Cure Neurosciences Ltd., have entered into an exclusive worldwide collaboration and license agreement with Rocheand Genetech, a member of the Roche Group (SIX: RO, ROG;OTCQX: RHHBY), for the development and commercialization of a retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cell therapy for the treatment of ocular disorders, including advanced dry age-related macular degeneration (dry AMD) with geographic atrophy (GA).

Genentech will assume responsibility for further clinical development and commercialization of Lineage's OpRegen program, which currently is being evaluated in a Phase 1/2a open-label, dose escalation clinical safety and efficacy study in patients with advanced dry AMD with GA. Under the terms of the collaboration agreement, Lineage will complete activities related to the ongoing clinical study, for which enrollment is complete, and perform certain manufacturing activities. Genentech will pay Lineage a $50 million upfront payment and Lineage is eligible to receive up to $620 million in additional development, approval and sales milestone payments, in addition to tiered double- digit royalties.

Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD) recently announced new data from the Phase 3 ASCENT study evaluating Trodelvy(sacituzumab govitecan-hziy) in relapsed or refractory metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) who received two or more prior systemic therapies, at least one of them for metastatic disease. In this subgroup analysis of Black patients, Trodelvy improved progression-free survival (PFS), with a 56% reduction in the risk of disease worsening or death (HR: 0.44; 95% CI: 0.24-0.80; P=0.008) and a median PFS of 5.4 months (n=28) versus 2.2 months with chemotherapy (n=34).

Trodelvy also extended median overall survival to 13.8 months versus 8.5 months with physician's choice of chemotherapy (HR: 0.64; 95% CI: 0.34-1.19; P=0.159). The results were presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) (Poster #P5-16-07).

Galera Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: GRTX) closed up over 28% on Monday on heavy trading volume of over 112 Million Shares and was up slightly in aftermarket trading. Galera Therapeutics recently announced that corrected results from its Phase 3 ROMAN trial of avasopasem for the treatment of RT-induced severe oral mucositis (SOM) in patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer (HNC) achieved statistical significance on the primary endpoint of reduction in the incidence of SOM. Avasopasem has been granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the reduction of SOM induced by RT.

DISCLAIMER: FN Media Group LLC (FNM), which owns and operates FinancialNewsMedia.com and MarketNewsUpdates.com, is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed FNM expects to be compensated forty nine hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press releases issued by Oncolytics Biotech Inc. by a non-affiliated third party. FNM HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE.

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The Global Breast Cancer Treatment Market Expected To Reach $34.06 Billion By End Of 2026 - PRNewswire

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27. Johnstone EB, Rosen MP, Neril R, et al. The polycystic ovary post-Rotterdam: a common, age-dependent finding in ovulatory women without metabolic significance. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2010;95(11):49654972.

28. Carmina E, Oberfield SE, Lobo RA. The diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome in adolescents. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2010;203(3):201.e1201.e5.

29. Legro RS, Brzyski RG, Diamond MP, et al.; NICHD Reproductive Medicine Network. Letrozole versus clomiphene for infertility in the polycystic ovary syndrome [published correction appears in N Engl J Med. 2014; 317(15):1465]. N Engl J Med. 2014;371(2):119129.

30. Costello M, Shrestha B, Eden J, Sjoblom P, Johnson N. Insulin-sensitising drugs versus the combined oral contraceptive pill for hirsutism, acne and risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and endometrial cancer in polycystic ovary syndrome. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007;(1):CD005552.

31. Bayer LL, Hillard PJ. Use of levonorgestrel intrauterine system for medical indications in adolescents. J Adolesc Health. 2013;52(4 suppl):S54S58.

32. van Zuuren EJ, Fedorowicz Z, Carter B, Pandis N. Interventions for hirsutism (excluding laser and photoepilation therapy alone). Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2015;(4):CD010334.

33. Somani N, Turvy D. Hirsutism: an evidence-based treatment update. Am J Clin Dermatol. 2014;15(3):247266.

34. Buzney E, Sheu J, Buzney C, Reynolds RV. Polycystic ovary syndrome: a review for dermatologists: Part II. Treatment. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2014;71(5):859.e1859.e15.

35. Richardson MR. Current perspectives in polycystic ovary syndrome. Am Fam Physician. 2003;68(4):697704.

36. Radosh L. Drug treatments for polycystic ovary syndrome. Am Fam Physician. 2009;79(8):671676.

37. Harrison CL, Lombard CB, Moran LJ, Teede HJ. Exercise therapy in polycystic ovary syndrome: a systematic review. Hum Reprod Update. 2011;17(2):171183.

38. Tang T, Lord JM, Norman RJ, Yasmin E, Balen AH. Insulin-sensitising drugs (metformin, rosiglitazone, pioglitazone, D-chiro-inositol) for women with polycystic ovary syndrome, oligo amenorrhoea and sub-fertility. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2012;(5):CD003053.

39. Romualdi D, De Cicco S, Tagliaferri V, Proto C, Lanzone A, Guido M. The metabolic status modulates the effect of metformin on the antimullerian hormone-androgens-insulin interplay in obese women with polycystic ovary syndrome. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011;96(5):E821E824.

40. Moghetti P, Castello R, Negri C, et al. Metformin effects on clinical features, endocrine and metabolic profiles, and insulin sensitivity in polycystic ovary syndrome: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled 6-month trial, followed by open, long-term clinical evaluation. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2000;85(1):139146.

41. Dumesic DA, Lobo RA. Cancer risk and PCOS. Steroids. 2013;78(8):782785.

42. Hunter MH, Sterrett JJ. Polycystic ovary syndrome: it's not just infertility. Am Fam Physician. 2000;62(5):10791088.

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Diagnosis and Treatment of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome ...

As the name implies, growth hormone deficiency results when the pituitary gland doesn't produce enough growth hormone to stimulate the body to grow. This can result in noticeably short stature in children.

Since growth takes place over many years, and since children grow at different rates, symptoms of growth hormone deficiency may be hard to identify. In addition to noticeably slow growth with normal body proportions, signs may include:

Growth hormone deficiency has no effect on a childs intelligence.

These symptoms may resemble other conditions, so be sure to always consult your child's physician for a diagnosis.

Growth rates vary considerably from child to child. But measured in height, average "normal" growth is often described as:

If your child is less than the third percentile in height for a child of his age, that can be a red flag for growth hormone deficiency.

Damage to the pituitary gland or hypothalamus may be the result of an abnormal formation that occurred before your child was born (congenital) or something that occurred during or after birth (acquired).

Congenital growth hormone deficiency can occur if there are mutations in genes for factors that are important in pituitary gland development, or in receptors and factors (including growth hormone) along the growth hormone pathway; to date, however, the cause of most of these cases is unknown.

Acquired causes of growth hormone deficiency include:

It's also important to remember that growth hormone deficiency is only one of many conditions that may affect your childs growth. Your childs short stature may be caused by other syndromes, and growth failure may be due to decreased nutritional intake, gastrointestinal disorders, diseases that have increased metabolic demand or hypothyroidism.

Some research suggests that there are additional complications from growth hormone deficiency, including:

You and your family are key players in your childs medical care. Its important that you share your observations and ideas with your childs health care provider and that you understand your providers recommendations.

If your child is experiencing symptoms of growth hormone deficiency and youve set up an appointment, you probably already have some ideas and questions on your mind. But at the appointment, it can be easy to forget the questions you wanted to ask. Its often helpful to jot them down ahead of time so that you can leave the appointment feeling like you have the information you need.

If your child is old enough, you may want to suggest that she write down what she wants to ask her health care provider, too.

Some of the questions you may want to ask include:

We view the diagnosis of growth hormone deficiency as an important first step to treatment and, ultimately, to your childs long-term health and continued growth. You can rest assured knowing your child is in capable hands.

Our compassionate staff includes physician specialists who are experienced in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of growth hormone deficiency. And we are uniquely qualified to determine the best course of care for your child. Our child-centric approach ensures that we care for your child as a child, not just another patient.

Because the chain of events involved in growth hormone deficiency is so complex, our researchers are investigating the different events that can cause a child to have short stature. Not all of these individual defects are well understood or easy to detect with a test, making this research vital to treatment strategies.

Our Division of Endocrinologyis one of the world's leading centers dedicated to caring for children and adolescents with acute and chronic endocrine and metabolic disorders. For children who suffer from growth problems, our dedicated team of doctors, nurses, and other caregivers offer hope for a healthier future.

Link:
Growth Hormone Deficiency | Boston Children's Hospital

Information on this web site is provided for informational purposes only. The information is a result of years of practice experience by the author. This information is not intended as a substitute for the advice provided by your physician or other healthcare professional or any information contained on or in any product label or packaging. Do not use the information on this web site for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing medication or other treatment. Always speak with your physician or other healthcare professional before taking any medication or nutritional, herbal or homeopathic supplement, or using any treatment for a health problem. If you have or suspect that you have a medical problem, contact your health care provider promptly. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking professional advice because of something you have read on this web site. Information provided on this web site and the use of any products or services purchased from our web site by you DOES NOT create a doctor-patient relationship between you and any of the physicians affiliated with our web site. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

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The mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing infection in most cancer patients, according to a nationwide study of veterans diagnosed with cancer in the past decade.

But the researchers found that some vaccinated patients, including those who had received therapies that suppressed their immune systems within the six months before vaccination, were less protected than their peers from COVID-19 infection for the duration of the study.

We know that, in general, cancer patients with COVID-19 have poor outcomes, said postdoctoral scholar Julie Tsu-Yu Wu, MD, PhD. Our goal was to identify those patients who might benefit from additional interventions like a vaccine booster shot or who should be candidates after exposure for prophylactic interventions like oral antivirals or monoclonal antibody treatments. But the main finding of our study is that COVID-19 vaccination is an effective way to prevent infection in most cancer patients.

Wu shares lead authorship of the study, which will be published Dec. 2 in JAMA Oncology, with Jennifer La, PhD, a principal data scientist at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System. Senior authors of the study are Albert Lin, MD, staff physician at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System; Nikhil Munshi, MD, staff physician at VA Boston and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Nathanael Fillmore, PhD, associate director of the Cooperative Studies Program Informatics Center at VA Boston and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

This study highlights the strengths of the national VA health care system, Fillmore said. Access to high-quality data from veterans across the country was crucial for enabling the studys rigorous trial emulation approach.

Many cancer patients infected with COVID-19 have poor outcomes, with an estimated mortality rate of 13% to 33%. But because cancer patients were excluded from early vaccine trials, it hasnt been clear whether or to what extent the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines protect people with cancer.

The researchers studied the medical records of more than 180,000 VA patients who received systemic, or whole-body, treatments, including chemotherapy or hormone therapy, between August 2010 and May 2021. The patients median age was 73.7, and 94% were men. Of these, about 113,000 were vaccinated with one of the two mRNA-based vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna between Dec. 15, 2020, and May 4, 2021. (People who had been previously diagnosed with COVID-19 were excluded from the study, as were those who received the adenovirus-based vaccine produced by Johnson & Johnson.)

For each day of the study period, the researchers matched a patient who had been vaccinated with a peer of similar medical history and demographic background who had not been vaccinated, comparing the rates of COVID-19 infection in each pair.

To calculate vaccine effectiveness, the researchers compared the number of COVID-19 diagnoses in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. If 10 of 100 unvaccinated people became infected versus 1 of 100 vaccinated people, the vaccine prevented 9 of 10 possible infections, and the vaccine effectiveness would be 90%.

The researchers found that, overall, the vaccines were about 58% effective at preventing infection starting at two weeks after the second dose. But the vaccines were about 85% effective in people whose last cancer treatment had concluded six or more months before their first dose. The vaccines were about 63% effective among people whose cancer treatments concluded three to six months before their first dose, and 54% among people whose treatments concluded within three months of their first dose. (The two vaccines were similarly effective.)

Systemic cancer treatments include chemotherapy, which can suppress the immune system, and hormone therapy, which is less likely to do so. Among people whose cancer treatments concluded less than three months before their first dose, the vaccine was about 57% effective in those who had received chemotherapy; it was about 76% effective in people who had received hormone treatment. (The vaccines were found to be substantially less effective in a small subset of patients with certain kinds of blood cancers, which can suppress the immune system.)

This is the first study in people with cancer that looked at a clinically significant outcome documented infection rather than surrogate markers like the levels of antibody production, Wu said. We found that, although the vaccines tended to be less effective in some subgroups of people, there is no reason to avoid vaccination.

Summer Han, PhD, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and of biomedical informatics at Stanford, is a co-author of the study.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants P01-155258-07 and P50-100707), the Veterans Affairs Office of Research and Development, the Department of Defense and a Stanford Cancer Institute Innovation Award.

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COVID-19 vaccine effective in people with cancer, study finds - Stanford Medical Center Report

The benefits of fasting

Has a friend turned down a dinner invitation because they are fasting? Or maybe you have turned down invitations once or twice as well? Fasting has become mainstream because of its reported health benefits, and it is true. There are, however, still some beliefs about fasting that needs to be corrected. Is fasting for everyone? Is it really the solution to better health? Will I feel tired if I fast? Lets find out.

Fasting increases the human growth hormone that is responsible for the bodys metabolism and promotes insulin sensitivity that lessens the risk of diabetes, obesity, and more.

Fasting means holding back from eating or drinking for a period of time. It goes way back and began as part of religious practices to show faith and devotion, whether as penance or sacrifice. Early philosophers and healers used fasting for healing and therapy, as it was observed that the body has a way to heal itself in times of stress, illness, or pain. Later on, scientists studied fasting that yielded favorable results. Apparently, fasting increases the human growth hormone that is responsible for the bodys metabolism and promotes insulin sensitivity that lessens the risk of diabetes, obesity, and more.

According to the book The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-day, and Extended Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore, insulin levels rise whenever we eat and it functions in two ways: Either by turning food into energy or storing the excess energy. But when the body fasts, insulin levels drop and use stored energy. When insulin levels are kept low, it will help the body become more insulin sensitive, lowering the risk of serious diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, among others.

But what do other people think about fasting? Unlike what others may believe, fasting does not cause electrolyte imbalance, nor does it make you feel lethargic. In the book, Dr. Fung and Jimmy Moore mention that electrolytes, such as sodium, magnesium, chloride, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, may decrease its levels, but not below normal limits. Taking a multivitamin may also help. Moreover, those who fast do not feel lethargicthey might even say otherwise. As also mentioned in the book, this is because adrenaline is used to release glycogen, which may explain the reason, instead of feeling tired, those who fast feel energized. But Dr. Fung and Moore also reiterate that fasting is not the only solution to better health. It should be supplemented with whole, unprocessed foodthis means no to junk food, no to sugar, and no to refined grains.

While fasting has its benefits, it is still not for everyone. This is why it is important to consult with your physician before even trying. (For those who have an eating disorder, pregnant, or who have a medical condition, fasting is not recommended.) Also, if you are on the clear to try fasting, start with small time intervals. Most important, take care of your body with nourishing, healthy food. It may be difficult to let go of your favorite sweets and snacks, so you must try harder to reduce your intake of them. Instead, eat more fruits, greens, and healthy fats. Lastly, supplement this with other healthy habits like getting quality sleep, exercising, and practicing a healthy lifestyle.

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Is fasting the way to better health? - Manila Bulletin

Testosterone is the crucial hormone produced in men, critical for a mans performance in life. It influences gaining weight, sexual drive, muscle mass, capacity, and various other mechanisms.

As a man, you should know that testosterone is a naturally occurring hormone in the human body. The hormone is commonly synonymous with manhood, and it is nearly difficult to exaggerate its numerous effects on the body.

It affects everything from our physical image to our curiosity and interest in sex. Men with elevated testosterone levels also exhibit many of the traditional masculine characteristics emphasized by our society. Men with higher levels of testosterone benefit from regular exercise, and men with healthy testosterone levels can also have increased motivation and sociability.

A mans testosterone levels lower as they get older. The testosterone levels drop by more than half, particularly between the age of thirty and fifty. Few males have genetically low testosterone levels due to their diet, lifestyle, and workout routines.

There is some exciting news for men with reduced testosterone levels. You can increase testosterone output without ever using steroids. There are plenty more testosterone-enhancing supplements available now. All of these testosterone booster supplements include organic ingredients to help the body produce more testosterone.

The testosterone enhancing industry is anticipated to have one of the fastest-rising sectors of the testosterone supplement market by 2021. This checklist is a conclusive rating of a few of the finest testosterone supplements available on the market.

Besides that, testosterone-based supplements are considered legal all over the globe. Most of them include multi-vitamins, nutrients, medicinal plants, and shrubs that are FDA-approved as universally accepted as safe (GRAS). Several of them are validated by academic research and have evidence that shows they can naturally improve testosterone levels.

With the rising number of testosterone supplements, it can be pretty challenging to choose the right one for you. And to help you out with the same, we will give you a top 11 list of testosterone supplements you can purchase for yourself.

This issue describes the meteoric rise in demand for testosterone booster supplements. Well give you a detailed overview of the best testosterone boosters we have included in our list. We favor testosterone-boosting supplements that use clinically validated ingredients in adequate quantities. So, testosterone booster supplements with unknown or minimally beneficial ingredients were jumped over.

We reached out to the respective companies, interviewed them, reviewed the supplement contents, spoke to experts, and then later made a small list of the best supplements you can lay your hands on.

To find the best testosterone-boosting supplements, we searched the internet for the best testosterone supplements, spoke to them, and gathered additional information to develop this list.

Here is the list of the best testosterone supplements that you buy in 2021

Testogen is among the few testosterone supplements on this list that are endorsed by a celebrity. Will Pounder, a professional MMA fighter, says that Testogen has significantly improved his life. To safely boost testosterone levels, this supplement employs healthy and natural ingredients.

This supplement is an excellent option to maximize the free testosterone levels in your body that helps you retain energy levels throughout the day and in bed. Boosting testosterone production is just a matter of time as you start consuming the Testogen testosterone booster.

Testogens creators also say that their solution boosts energy, productivity, muscle development, libido, and weight loss, among several other things. They claim that all these optimum benefits make the supplement one of the best testosterone booster supplements in the market.

Testogen Price: $59.99

The Prime Male asks you to use the red pill and use their naturally prepared supplement to improve your testosterone levels. The blend of ingredients in the Prime Male promises to help you gain muscle mass, lose extra fat/weight, improve your cardiovascular health, and even condition your mind and enhance your mindset, among several other things.

This testosterone booster supplement maintains the levels of luteinizing hormone in your body to increase testosterone production. Alongside, the Prime Male is an exceptional testosterone booster to keep your physical and mental energy high.

On top of that, visible muscle growth and impeccable athletic performance are other mentionable benefits offered by this outstanding testosterone booster.

As per their official site, Prime Male states that it can improve a mans testosterone levels within 12 days with the help of the natural ingredients in it, rendering it among the more effective testosterone supplements on our list. Additionally, Prime Male is also endorsed by none other than Dolph Lundgren.

Prime Male Price: $69

TestoPrime is a testosterone-boosting supplement that focuses on helping with protein synthesis, which we do not find with the rest of the testosterone boosters. This premium supplement comes in the list of the best testosterone booster supplements automatically due to its testosterone-boosting capabilities.

TestoPrime, like many other testosterone boosters, promises to improve physical and mental vitality, burn excess weight, develop lean muscle, and promote the bodys natural testosterone output.

If your sexual performance is impacted adversely due to low T levels and you want to increase testosterone production, TestoPrime is the best testosterone booster you can get within your budget.

Most importantly, the brand reputation of TestoPrime says it all about its efficiency in offering health benefits and promoting athletic performance. This supplement can be regarded as a one-shot solution for everyone, from general users to athletes.

TestoPrime Price: $59.99

Testo Lab Pro T Booster is a testosterone booster that appears to improve testosterone securely and naturally. The recipe maintains safeguards and enhances the testosterone levels in your blood. TestoLab Pro seems to be more potent than other natural testosterone boosters on this list because it targets free testosterone.

Apart from other things, the supplement promises to boost masculine vitality, vigor, and potency. It may help muscle-building, stamina, stress tolerance, trust, sexual desire, bone mass, and even sperm count.

If youre concerned about the side effects of T-supplements, this supplement is the perfect choice for you. The natural ingredients of this supplement wont let you face any side effects at all.

Testo Lab Pro T-Booster Price: $69.99

Hunter Test is a dietary supplement marketed as a high-quality testosterone booster. It has the most visually appealing branding on this list.

The stylish, canister-style kit includes a supplement that promises to improve your life by improving strength and fitness, offering unstoppable inspiration, and promoting emotional stability and trust, among other things.

Hunter Test has become one of the only supplements that appear to directly reverse testosterone decline. giving you the ability to reinvigorate your masculinity.

A Muscle Mass Amplifier matrix, an Energy Amplification framework, and a Performance Power mix are all essential elements in Hunter Test. Hunter Tests creators characterize their replacement as a complete testosterone booster.

Hunter Test Price: $75

TestoFuel is a testosterone booster sold to men who wish to lose body fat and gain lean body mass. The supplement promises to naturally boost testosterone levels by providing your body with the missing link in testosterone development. You will reap the rewards of an anabolic reinforcement complex by consuming the supplement regularly.

Vitamin D, oyster extract, and D-aspartic acid are key ingredients in TestoFuel. This supplement is endorsed by a celebrity, Robby The Black Prince Robinson (Mr. Olympia).

While D-aspartic acid is commonly found in natural testosterone boosters, a few supplements contain oyster extract, despite research indicating that oyster extract can aid in sex drive, vigor, and testosterone development.

TestoFuel Price: $65

Testo 911 is a testosterone supplement manufactured by PhytAge Labs that incorporates fenugreek seed and other validated testosterone enhancers to promote lean muscle mass, testosterone development, and other benefits at any age.

Testo 911 contains various additives, including magnesium, zinc, Rhodiola Rosea, DIM, and others. Testo 911 can promote testosterone production while promoting stress response and immune response, two aspects tied to testosterone in a roundabout way.

This supplement has magical benefits in improving your mental wellbeing and cognitive health. If youre dealing with ongoing and recurring anxiety and depression, Testo 911 is the best option for you to improve your mental state. The product manifests a sense of confidence and wellbeing that helps you reinforce your energy levels.

According to PhytAge Labs, these products work together to achieve weight loss targets. Testo 911 allows you to have plenty of time to put the approach to the test to see how it works for you.

Testo 911 Price: $69.95

TestRX seems to be among the best testosterone booster supplements you see next to the petrol pump. But dont be fooled by the labeling. TestRX uses ingredients that are similar to those used in many other testosterone boosters on the list. It is also promoted online with related advantages.

The creators of TestRX believe that their solution will improve mens strength, endurance, lean muscle, fat loss, and sexual desire, among other things. You will allegedly gain pounds of lean muscle at any given age by consuming this testosterone booster.

TestRX is distinguished using the ZMA formula, which combines magnesium aspartate, vitamin B6, and zinc. This mixture tested for its impact on testosterone indicate that ZMA can boost testosterone by up to 30%.

TestRX Price: $69.99

This natural testosterone booster was made by an actual doctor, Dr. Ryan Shelton, who also happens to be the chief medical officer at the manufacturing company Zenith Labs.

This formula promises to encourage better testosterone levels, aid in self-confidence and stamina, support appetite and sex drive, and offer other benefits valuable to men of all ages.

The most surprising fact about Barbarian XL is that it takes the levels of luteinizing hormone higher in your body in order to boost the essential hormone, testosterone. By the side, the testosterone-boosting supplement does a phenomenal job by helping you decrease body fat and promoting muscle growth.

Backed by only natural ingredients, this supplement enhances your sexual capabilities, helping you last longer in bed as well. You sense a refreshed and revitalized feeling all over your body as you start consuming this amazing supplement.

Barbarian XL Price: $49

CrazyBulk promises that their Testo-Max solution will help you recapture your prime by naturally increasing your testosterone levels. You will boost muscle development, stamina, and agility while restoring boundless vitality just by taking four pills of Testo-Max every day.

Testo-Max uses the same validated ingredients as the other supplements on this list to produce these results. If youre a bodybuilder and muscle growth is your primary concern, theres nothing better than Testo-Max for you.

Bodybuilders often tend to take anabolic steroids like Sustanon to get gigantic muscles with super endurance. Such steroids come with certain side effects that Testo-Max wont cause. Therefore, this is the supplement in the market at present to help you reach your bodybuilding goals while stimulating natural testosterone production and hormone production.

CrazyBulk Testo-Max Price: $59.99

JayLab Pro T20 is sold as a 30-second natural testosterone booster. By consuming the supplement regularly, you will allegedly set back the years on your sexual prowess by 20 years.

The supplement helps to increase libido (via ingredients such as Cordyceps Sinensis and Rhodiola Rosea), enhance blood flow (via components such as Avena sativa and L-norvaline), and boost testosterone (using Tribulus Terrestris and Tongkat Ali).

The natural ingredients of this product promote weight loss while increasing free testosterone levels in your body.

The specific components in JayLab Pro T20 can act in novel ways to help testosterone from various perspectives. Both orders also have free eBooks with additional details on testosterone boosters. And, at $37.95 (plus free delivery to the United States), JayLab Pro T20 is one of the most affordable products on our list of recommended natural testosterone boosters for 2021.

JayLab Pro T20 Price: $37.95

It is difficult to rate testosterone supplements since all the T-level boosters improve testosterone by utilizing organic ingredients. Most supplements contain related ingredients (for example, vitamin D, zinc, D-aspartic acid, Tribulus Terrestris, and Tongkat Ali).

We have used the following rating criteria to distinguish between excellent and poor testosterone enhancing supplements:

Numerous testosterone boosters provide the appropriate testosterone-enhancing ingredients but at the incorrect dosages. Dosage of ingredients is essential. Specific drug doses were reviewed to guarantee that each approved supplement included scientifically proven dosages of all active compounds.

There are both safe and risky methods for increasing testosterone. Top-quality, scientifically-backed ingredients that are beneficial in several trials are used in successful T-boosting supplements.

Some testosterone booster brands are shady. They hide stimulants like caffeine into their formulas, tricking you into thinking the supplement is working. Other companies are reputable, multimillion-dollar supplement companies with a medical advisory board. We considered transparency and reputation in our rankings.

Some testosterone-booster supplement manufacturers are untrustworthy. They conceal stimulants such as caffeine in their formulations, fooling you into believing the supplement is efficient. Other businesses are well-known, billion-dollar supplement businesses with a clinical advisory board. In our ratings, we took clarity and credibility into account.

Be cautious of testosterone boosters who promise to double or triple the testosterone levels, as even anabolic steroids have difficulty doing that. The majority of studies indicate that the components in testosterone boosters will raise testosterone by 10% to 40%. Numerous males would not benefit from using a natural testosterone booster.

If your testosterone levels are still high, a product is unlikely to boost them higher. We admired testosterone-boosting supplements that promoted truthful benefits.

Testosterone-boosting supplements are one of the priciest supplements on the market currently. Some vitamins are $80 for a months worth of supply. If you want to spend $30 or $100 for each months supply of a testosterone enhancement, the products mentioned above offer decent value for the money.

Testosterone-booster supplements are mainly sold to males who would like to regain their sexual desire, increase stamina, lose weight, or gain muscle mass.

Testosterone levels decline with age. Your testosterone levels decrease as you grow old. Some refer to it as male menopause. You may not always feel as strong, enthusiastic, or powerful as you once did.

Testosterone levels have often declined with age. Its a normal part of the aging process. However, the average man currently has reduced testosterone levels than at any other time in history. Testosterone levels have steadily declined over the years.

A few men take action as their testosterone levels fall. Such examples of men who use testosterone boosters are:

Testosterone boosters are accepted among many different types of men. If youre trying to lose weight, develop muscle mass, or just become more energetic, testosterone supplements offer to give you the vitality you havent felt since you were young.

Interestingly, several ingredients in the best testosterone boosters have scientific support for their claimed benefits. The best testosterone booster is nothing but a combination of science-backed ingredients.

If youre in search of the best testosterone booster for attaining effective testosterone-boosting benefits, you need to know about the ingredients first.

Zinc, D-aspartic acid, and other popular testosterone-boosting ingredients have been shown in studies to improve testosterone that is supposed to be present in the best testosterone booster. These ingredients are reported to take up testosterone levels naturally and enhance sperm quality in men.

Many herbal testosterone boosters, such as Tribulus Terrestris, Tongkat Ali, and others, are supported by empirical evidence and they have evident benefits in boosting testosterone levels. Indigenous peoples have used several of these extracts for decades until they were used in western testosterone enhancement supplements.

D-aspartic acid (DAA) is a typical component in male sexual wellbeing and testosterone products. DAA, as per research, can improve testosterone. DAA functions by increasing the bodys levels of luteinizing hormone, as discussed in this report. Luteinizing hormone instructs the testicles to generate more testosterone.

DAA may be able to kickstart your bodys capacity to generate testosterone due to this effect.

Researchers discovered that DAA could dramatically improve testosterone in animals and humans in less than 12 days in this 2009 report. Comparably, men who took DAA supplements had better testosterone production following 90 days, according to this report.

Men began the analysis with low sperm output. Men saw an improvement in their sperm count, from 8.2 million to a staggering 16.5 million after consuming a DAA supplementation for 90 days.

Not that all studies have indeed been favorable to DAA. In this analysis, DAA was shown to be no more potent than a placebo at increasing testosterone.

And while taking DAA at elevated doses of 3,000mg or 6,000mg over a prolonged period, certain men do not experience a rise in testosterone. DAA seems to be effective on some men, but not on all.

Vitamin D is essential for mens sexual health and testosterone development. According to research, D vitamin deficient men have low testosterone, which leads to insufficient sperm production and other problems. Researchers evaluated the theory in this sample by dividing men over the age of 65 into two categories.

One party received 3,300 IU of vitamin D each day, and the other got a placebo. The males who consumed vitamin D increased their testosterone levels by 20%. Few men augment their testosterone with the D vitamin, whereas others spend a lot of time outdoors.

Zinc is yet another crucial mineral for the production of testosterone. Zinc deficiency is related to reduced testosterone levels and male sexual health.

Multiple studies have found that males who do not get sufficient zinc every day have low testosterone levels than men who get adequate zinc. As a consequence, nearly every testosterone supplement on the market incorporates zinc.

Boron is not very well known, but its also necessary for testosterone production. In this research, men were given either a 6mg boron or a placebo.

After 60 days, researchers discovered that males in the boron group had 29.5% higher testosterone levels than the males present in the placebo group. Boron is essential for a variety of facets of male health, particularly testosterone development.

Tribulus Terrestris is a primary ingredient in testosterone enhancement supplements. Some research has related Tribulus Terrestris to significant testosterone benefits, although others were less convincing.

Researchers discovered that Tribulus Terrestris supplements raised testosterone by 16% after 90 days in this trial. Men have shown fewer erectile dysfunction symptoms.

Fenugreek is just as common as Tribulus Terrestris for increasing testosterone levels. In this report, researchers instructed men to take 500mg of fenugreek a day while engaging in resistance exercise.

After the study, subjects in the fenugreek community had slightly higher levels of testosterone. In addition, as compared to the other group, the subjects had more significant weight loss and intensity. The research was conducted on males in their twenties who have higher levels of testosterone than older men.

Ashwagandha is being used in an increasing number of testosterone supplements. For millennia, ashwagandha was used as an adaptogen that ensures it makes the body react to high-stress levels. However, a growing number of researchers have linked ashwagandha to testosterone.

Researchers found that after 90 days of taking 5,000mg of ashwagandha every day, males had 22% higher testosterone than others.

Subjects also had better sperm production, as demonstrated by 14 percent of the subjects spouses becoming pregnant during the 90-day study cycle. Ashwagandha can also give you peace of mind by bringing down the cortisol levels (that destroy testosterone) and making it easier to perform in bed.

On the whole, testosterone boosters improve testosterone in a variety of forms. Some people make use of minerals and vitamins. Others make use of medicinal extracts, fruit extracts, or unknown components.

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Best Testosterone Boosters: Top Pills to Boost Low T Levels Safely - Journal of the San Juan Islands

SAD is a type of mood disorder, and its symptoms often include feeling sluggish or tired, having trouble sleeping, and experiencing difficulty concentrating during certain seasons. Most commonly these symptoms appear in the winter, but SAD can also occur in the summer months.

Bindiya Gandhi, M.D., previously told mindbodygreen that these lights "work wonderfully by resetting and improving your overall circadian rhythm" during a time when your body may struggle to do so naturally due to lighting fluctuations."Light therapy is not new, and doctors have long been recommending this therapy for many different ailments," she adds.

Sun lamps are also used to help ease morning blues, depression, lethargy, insomnia, and confusion. According to Lizz Kinyua, M.D., a physician with a focus on mental health, these symptoms tend to occur during winter and autumn months because when it is dark for the majority of the day, our hormones can go a little haywire.

Sun lamps, Kinyua explains, "provide light just as bright as the sun to promote serotonin production and reduce melatonin production. When used continuously and in combination with other medications, they can be incredibly useful."

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As per the reports from World Health Organization, approximately 2 billion adults today are overweight, and out of those, nearly 650 million are obese with BMI greater than 30 kg/m. The worldwide prevalence of obesity is increasing day by day, and it is estimated that obesity and being overweight kill more individuals than being underweight.

We all know that the best ways of controlling weight are a balanced diet and exercise, but is it easy to lose weight? Most people struggle to lose pounds despite following a healthy diet and daily workouts.

Although diet and exercise are the two natural and effective ways to lose weight, one other solution is dietary supplements. These nutritional supplements tackle the root cause of obesity, increase metabolism and help burn stubborn fats.

With hundreds of dietary supplements available in the market, it is a challenge to select the best one. Resveratone is one effective supplement to lose weight.

Resveratone is a 100% safe, natural dietary supplement that targets the root cause of obesity and stress in the body. Resveratone is created to control the bodys primary stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol is natures in-built alarm system in our body; when the body is under stress, the cortisol is released in a more significant amount.

The hormone turns on flight and flight mode, slowing your metabolism and regular bodily functions. During stress, cortisol slows calorie burning, promotes fat storage, increases the loss of muscle mass, and affects appetite.

Resveratone, on the other hand, reduces hunger cravings, prevents overeating, improves sleep quality, burns unwanted belly fat, boosts metabolism, and increases energy levels, so you feel great while losing weight.

The background of Resveratone is surprising. You wont believe it, but the primary person responsible for Resveratone is a 57-year-old construction worker Bill Maddox. He was an overweight person, experienced joint problems, high blood pressure, fatigue, and type 2 diabetes mellitus due to the former situation.

He tried everything to lose weight, and the doctors lost hope for his life. At this time, he met Dr. Megumi Namikaze, and things started to improve for him. Bill discovered a plants healing property, which led him to lose weight and formulate an effective formula, Resveratone.

The duo realized that the leading cause of weight problems is not related to diet; instead, it is linked to stress. Under stressful conditions, the body releases cortisol which decreases metabolism and promotes fat storage.

Now, the function of Resveratone is clear-cut it acts on the stress hormone of our body.

Multiple ingredients inside this effective supplement work synergistically to achieve weight loss. Some of the primary elements are:

The main ingredient in the Resveratone supplement is Resveratrol. It is extracted from a plant known as Japanese Knotweed. It has antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties. Some of the known effects of Resveratrol include:

Another main ingredient found in Resveratone is Alpha Lipoic Acid. It helps soothe inflammation, reduce blood pressure, improve liver function and increase energy by ATP production within cells. It is a vital component as it allows the breakdown of carbohydrates for fueling cells, tissues, and organs of the body.

In a study, participants consuming alpha-lipoic acid lost around 1.52 pounds weight within 14 weeks compared to the placebo group.

ALSO READ:Exipure: Only Buy Exipure After Reading This Honest Review!

Berberine found in Resveratone formula is extracted from a group of shrubs known as Berberis. It activates the metabolic master switch of the body named as AMP-activated protein kinase enzyme.

In addition to metabolic function regulation, it reduces blood sugar levels, sugar production in the liver, and insulin resistance, promoting weight loss.

In a study, researchers gave 500 mg of berberine to obese individuals thrice a day. After 12 weeks, they found an average weight loss of five pounds along with a 3.6% body fat reduction.

Some other essential ingredients added in Resveratone supplement are:

Resveratone is a safe formula manufactured in the USA. It is made with natural plant extracts in an FDA-registered facility, which means it follows good manufacturing practices and stringent regulations. Also, the company claims that its supplement is free from allergens.

However, if you suffer from any medical condition or taking any supplement, ask your physician before consuming Resveratone.

Each bottle of Resveratone contains 60 capsules that are sufficient for one month. The company recommends consuming two capsules of this supplement daily for at least three months to experience the benefits. So for long-term use, the company offers discounts on multiple bottle purchases.

Remember Resveratone is only available for purchase from the official website. It is not available to purchase from any retail store or other websites.

Also, the company offers a 60-day hassle-free money-back guarantee so, if you are dissatisfied with the results, return it for a full refund. Customer service is available for further information via:

Overall, Resveratone is an effective and safe supplement made from natural ingredients for weight loss. This supplement was created by a 57-year-old construction worker Bill Maddox with the help of Dr. Megumi Namikaze.

The main ingredient of this formula is Resveratrol, extracted from a plant named Japanese Knotweed.

Research also proves the efficiency of all the ingredients added in this formula to boost metabolism, reduce hunger, decrease blood sugar levels, affect cortisol levels, and burn stubborn fats. According to the company, 291,000 people have already experienced excellent results, but you can get a refund if the resveratone supplement does not work for you.

Order Resveratone now from the official website!

RELATED:Best Protein Powder: Ranking the Top Protein Supplements

Affiliate Disclosure:

The links contained in this product review may result in a small commission if you opt to purchase the product recommended at no additional cost to you. This goes towards supporting our research and editorial team and please know we only recommend high quality products.

Disclaimer:

Please understand that any advice or guidelines revealed here are not even remotely a substitute for sound medical advice from a licensed healthcare provider. Make sure to consult with a professional physician before making any purchasing decision if you use medications or have concerns following the review details shared above. Individual results may vary as the statements made regarding these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The efficacy of these products has not been confirmed by FDA-approved research. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

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Resveratone: Effective Resveratrol Ingredients or Supplement Scam? - Federal Way Mirror

Being severely overweight has never been so dangerous. During the COVID-19 epidemic, Americans who are obese, without any other risk factors, were hospitalized at three times the rate of those who weren't, by some estimates. When combined with other diet-related health conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, obesity raises the risk of hospitalization sixfold and the risk of death twelvefold.

Those numbers have raised the stakes in the nation's epidemic of diet-related disease and added to the growing alarm of politicians and nutrition experts, some of whom are starting to call upon regulators to rein in food companies. They're pushing measures similar to those used to curb the influence of tobacco companies in the 1990s, such as limiting the marketing of certain kinds of food to children and actively discouraging the consumption of key ingredientschief among them, sugar.

At issue is the explosive growth in a broad class of food products that are not merely processed in the conventional sense to lengthen shelf life, but are also often modified to maximize flavor, visual appeal, texture, odor and the speed with which they are digested. These foods are made by deconstructing natural food into its chemical constituents, modifying them and recombining them into new forms that bear little resemblance to anything found in nature. So radically are they altered that nutrition scientists have given them a new name: ultra-processed.

Ultra-processed foods are often designed to directly target the vulnerabilities of the human brainin particular, to exploit the way the brain processes pleasurable sensations. They often deliver a signal to the brain's reward centers so quick and potent, some neuroscientists believe, that many people find it as addictive as opioids or nicotine.

Lab-made creations such as chips, hot dogs, enriched bagels and American cheese have been a staple of the American diet since the 1980s. In recent years, however, the varieties of these foods have multiplied on store shelves and in fast-food restaurants. In 2017 and 2018, they accounted for 57 percent of the calories consumed by the average Americanup from 54 percent in 2001 and 2002, according to one study.

"We've gotten really good at stripping out and refining and processing sugars and fats into these really potent vehicles, and they've gotten cheaper to make," says Ashley Gearhardt, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies food and addiction. "Then we combine them into totally novel food products that are so much more rewarding than anything our brains ever evolved to handle. That's why so many of us can't stop eating them."

The implications are worrisome. Half of American adults now have diabetes or pre-diabetes, three quarters of adults are overweight and about 100 million, or 42 percent, are obese, by the standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Among children between 2 and 5 years old, one in 10 are already obese. Among teens, that number is one in five.

Our food, in other words, is literally killing us. Food companies have tricked our brains into making us complicit, and our elected officials are complicit, too. What's needed is a better understanding of exactly how processed foods make us sick and a public reckoning with Big Food's role in the nation's health crisis. So far, policymakers have shown little appetite for scrutinizing the tactics of the powerful food lobby, but the pressure to curb consumption of ultra-processed foods is growing.

The nation's food crisis seems to be playing out in ways eerily reminiscent of the early days of tobacco smoking more than half a century ago, before regulators caught up with Big Tobacco. (It's no coincidence that many tobacco companies later acquired food companies.) This time, it's Big Food peddling harmful and possibly addictive products.

"We have now the accumulated evidence, particularly in the last five years, that people who eat more ultra-processed foods have higher risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, depression, cancer, renal and liver diseases," says Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "The studies have been overwhelming. There've been hundreds and hundreds of them. There's no doubt that this is not a good thing. It is a problem."

A few years ago, Kevin Hall set out to debunk the theory, espoused by a growing number of nutritionists, that Americans were getting fatter and sicker because of the complex industrial and chemical processing that food companies were using to make their products appealing. Hall believed the explanation had more to do with Americans simply eating too many calories, fats and sugars. The notion that extra processing might be causing the problem struck him as "ridiculous."

To prove it, Hall, who runs a research laboratory that studies the regulation of metabolism and body weight at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), ran a controlled experiment that he thought would show beyond a doubt that processing wasn't as important as nutrients. He paid 20 volunteers $5,000 apiece to move into an NIH facility in Bethesda, Maryland, for one month. He divided the volunteers into two groups. One ate mainly healthy food derived from simple ingredients with minimal processing, such as Greek yogurt, beef tender roast and shrimp scampi with spaghetti. The other group ate Honey Nut Cheerios, Chef Boyardee beef ravioli, Eggo pancakes and other processed foodsthe kind most overweight people in America eat.

Hall and his colleagues did their best to ensure that the only significant difference between the two groups was in how much processed food they consumed. Each group ate diets that were nutritionally identical in every way Hall and his team could think of, containing the same amounts of sugar, salt, fat, fiber, macronutrients, carbohydrates and calories. Both groups of volunteers were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. After they finished a meal, their leftovers were carried down a couple floors and delivered to a team of nutritionists in a laboratory, who precisely weighed and characterized everything left on the plate.

Hall, it turns out, had it all wrongprocessing, in fact, made all the difference. The subjects in Hall's study who subsisted on Cheerios and Chef Boyardee gained one pound per week on average and consumed in excess of 500 calories a day more than the group with the healthier diet. What's more, when they later switched to a natural diet, they dropped the extra weight. The conclusion: whatever food company chemists are doing to food, it makes people fatter.

The results opened up a new avenue of inquiry for Hall and his colleagues. What was it about the ultra-processed food that prompted this overindulgence and weight gain? The question is a matter of intense speculation and debate in the world of nutrition sciencea debate that can only be solved with more research. What's clear, however, is that the ultra-processed foods favored by a vast proportion of Americans are causing harm.

Humans have been modifying food since hunter-gathers discovered fire and figured out how to barbeque stone-age animals. Ten thousand years ago, ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians learned how to smoke, salt and dry their food to preserve it. In the 19th century, pasteurization and canning techniques vastly expanded the capacity for long-term storage and transport of food.

Processed food, as we know it today, arrived in the first half of the 20th century. That's when food engineers figured out how to use modified potato starch to form pork, ham, sugar, water and sodium nitrate into a pliable gelatinous blob that would fit into a rectangular tin emblazoned with the word "Spam." Two World Wars, the Space Race and increasing consumer demand for fast meals with a long shelf life that could support the lifestyle of the expanding middle class financed the scientific efforts necessary to give us spray drying, evaporation, freeze-drying and a sophisticated understanding of how to make a decent tasting cupcake you can put on a shelf and still eat two years later. By the early 2000s, Americans were getting more than half of their calories from chicken nuggets, artificially sweetened canned food, potato chips and other man-made concoctions.

Nutritionists didn't create a language to describe this trend until 2009. That year, Carlos A. Monteiro, a lanky, curly-haired professor of nutrition at the University of Sao Paulo, introduced the "NOVA Food Classification system," a novel grouping of foods based not on their nutritional content but according to the extent and purpose of the physical, biological and chemical processes applied to them after they were separated from nature.

He coined the term "ultra-processed," (as opposed to "minimally processed" or simply "processed") to refer to "industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (such as flavor enhancers, colors and food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable). Monteira excluded foods that had been exposed to simple processes like drying, fermentation, pasteurization or other processes that might subtract part of the food (frozen vegetables, dried pasta or eggs). He also carved out exceptions for products manufactured by industry with the use of salt, sugar, oil or other substances added to natural or minimally processed foods to preserve or to make them more palatable, but that could still be recognized as versions of the original foodsusually foods that had just two or three ingredients (such as beef jerky, or freshly made bread).

Ultra-processed food, by contrast, was meant to include Frankenstein-like creations that were often made up of added sugar, salt, fat and starches extracted from natural occurring foods and then blended with artificial colors, flavors and stabilizers to hold it all together. Soft drinks, hot dogs, cold cuts, packaged cookies and salty snacks like pretzel rods all qualified, as did many frozen dinners and canned entrees.

"They are not food," Monteiro says. "They are formulations. They contain chemical compounds that do not belong to foodthat should not belong to foods."

Many researchers dismiss Monteiro's classification system as overly broad. The category of "ultra-processed foods," after all, encompasses a wide variety of different products with endlessly varied nutritional profiles. It lumps Twinkies, Doritos and diet soda together with protein-rich entrees like Perdue Chicken tenders, which are made from the rib meat of an actual chicken and then combined with dextrose, sugar, guar gum, yellow corn flour and other ingredients, and Hormel Beef and bean chili, made from actual beef, beans and crushed tomatoes and combined with less than 2 percent modified cornstarch, soy flour and caramel color.

Nonetheless, by defining a new category that represents levels of processing, he gave public health experts and epidemiologists the language to discuss how industrial chemists had changed foodand how to measure their inventions against a wide array of health problems. The strength of those associations soon began to generate attention.

Although scientists haven't figured out how ultra-processed foods cause people to gain weightwhich of the thousands of chemicals, additives, nutrients actually lead to worse health outcomesthe market forces that have guided food manufacturers are clear enough. Between 1980 and 2000, the period in which obesity and metabolic diseases began to rocket upwards, the number of calories available for purchase in the U.S. food supply increased 20 percent, from about 3,200 per person per day to 4,000, which dramatically increased competition for the limited attention and stomach capacity of the American consumer.

Nestle, the author of many books on the politics of food policy, suggests that federal farm subsidies that ensured surplus crops, such as corn, made it to market, along with the widespread adoption of cheap additives in the 1970s like high fructose corn syrup, were among the factors that drove this overproduction. Meanwhile in the 1980s, activist stockholders stepped up pressure on food companies to grow their quarterly growth profits to keep the stock prices rising. All of this fueled a high-stakes arms race in the food industry between competing product development and marketing teams.

"If you're trying to sell your food product and make a profit in an environment in which there's twice as many calories as anybody needs," says Nestle, "you either have to get people to buy yours instead of somebody else's or to get everybody to eat more in general."

To sell more, food companies made their products ubiquitous. They sold them in bookstores and libraries. They set up in clothing stores, drugstores and gas stations. They offered up bigger portions and created more cartoon characters to sell cereal, using tactics pioneered and perfected by Big Tobacco, which by then had begun to diversify from cigarettes into food. They also called in scientists, who helped devise ingenious marketing techniques and scientific innovations to sell more food.

Michael Moss devotes a chapter of his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat to the exploits of Howard Moskowitz, an industry star who pioneered the use of advanced mathematics and computational science to "optimize" food products so that they created the most powerful cravings. Over the years, Moskowitz reengineered a wide array of products, ranging from General Mills breakfast cereals to Prego Spaghetti sauce, by testing out modifications in color, smell, packaging, taste and texture on human guinea pigs, and then feeding the data into a sophisticated mathematical model that "maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create, so that I can just dial up the product," Moskowitz explained to Moss.

The most important weapon in Big Food's arsenal turns out to be sugar. Moskowitz coined the term "bliss point" to describe the "perfect amount" of the sweetness in a product to maximize consumption. By focusing on the bliss point, Moss argues, food companies have changed the American palate in ways that predispose us to overeating the bad stuff (potato chips and ice cream) and pushing the good stuff (broccoli and asparagus) to the side. Recent studies, he says, show that 66 percent of the food in grocery stores now contain added sweeteners.

"These companies have learned how to find and exploit our basic instincts that attract us to food," says Moss, whose latest book, Hooked, examines the addictiveness of the food. "The problem isn't that these companies have engineered the perfect amount of sweetness for things like soda, cookies or ice cream. It's that they've marched around the grocery store, adding sugar to stuff that didn't used to be sweet, like bread and yogurts and spaghetti sauce. This has created this expectancy that everything should be sweet."

Fructose, one of the most commonly used sweeteners, is now present in many foods at concentrations unheard of in nature, according Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist affiliated with UC San Francisco and author of Metabolical, about the dangers of processed food. In recent years, studies have shown that fructose destroys or inactivates several key enzymes needed for the healthy functioning of mitochondria, the power plants in human cells that convert simple sugars into ATP, the form of energy we use to carry out the functions of the human body and brain.

This disruption in energy conversion causes a backlog of unprocessed glucose to circulate in the bloodstream. Sensing the excess glucose, the pancreas floods the system with the hormone insulin, which tells the body to remove the glucose from the bloodstream and store it as fat. Some of this fat tends to build up on the liver, which the body relies upon to filter, process and balance the blood leaving the stomach. The liver becomes sick and the problem worsens. Starved of the energy our mitochondria would normally provide, we eat more.

"It shouldn't be surprising that kids are getting type-two diabetes and fatty-liver disease that used to be the diseases of alcohol," he says. "We now know that fructose is a mitochondrial toxin, which turns into fat in the liver and is metabolized by the liver in ways virtually identical to how alcohol is metabolized."

Sugar isn't even the worst problem in the American diet. More damaging still is the consumption of processed grains, used in corn flakes, white bread and many other products. These grains are stripped of their outer shell, known as the "bran," and their inner germ, which contains fiber, fatty acids and nutrients, leaving only the carbohydrates. The human body digests these liberated carbohydrates much faster than when they're locked inside the grains.

"Instead of sitting in the stomach and gradually being broken down into glucose, it begins to break down as soon as it gets to your mouth and is almost fully digested by the time it has moved through the stomach, and all absorbed by the time it gets to your small bowel," says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the nutrition department at Tufts University.

This rapid digestion starves the gut bacteria, which we rely on for healthy functioning of the digestive system, leading to increased gut permeability that in turn may allow bacteria and toxins to enter the bloodstream and cause widespread inflammation, a factor in a wide variety of diseases such as celiac disease, diabetes, asthma, Alzheimer's and cancer.

It also floods the bloodstream with glucose, causing insulin levels to spike. This high "glycemic load," a measure of how quickly blood sugar rises, can have long-term consequences for the way the body processes food, leading to a long-term dysregulation of the hormonal systems. These hormones tell the body to store more fat at the expense of providing calories to keep things running. The body, starved of energy, craves foodmeaning we are forever hungry, even when we overeat.

"Having seen thousands of patients with obesity, I think people can show a lot of discipline around food choice and selection if they experience benefits," says David Ludwig, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. "I think what we have trouble with consistently is resisting extreme hunger."

Some researchers suggest the change in our diet may also be changing our brains, rewiring them with aberrant patterns that lead to compulsive eating, and possibly even addiction.

Nora Volkow, a neuroscientist who is now Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the NIH, was one of the first to begin researching food addiction in 1980s. She was struck by similarities between the compulsive behaviors and experiences reported by drug addicts and alcoholics and those reported by obese patients who claimed to be unable to control their eating. In recent years, she says, evidence has emerged from her lab and others linking the pathological brain activation patterns seen in drug addicts to those seen in many obese research subjects and compulsive overeaters.

"When I first started to speak about it, there was a complete and absolute rejection, almost anger, from people who insisted it was an endocrinological disease, not a disease of addiction," she says. "But that's an artificial distinction. If you look at it from the outside, what is the difference between nicotine and an ultra-processed food if both have been designed optimally to generate that compulsive responsea response that manipulates the dopaminergic system in a way that you don't find in natural foods?"

Nicole Avena began studying whether or not sugar could actually meet the scientific criteria for other addictive substances in the early 2000s after hearing from recovering drug addicts that they found it more difficult to quit sugar than heroin. Avena, an associate professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found that sugar, in both animals and humans, led to binging, withdrawal and cravingall components of addiction typically seen in drugs of abuse. She also saw neurochemical and neuroimaging changes in the brain virtually identical to those found in drug addicts. Sugar, when combined with other ingredients present in ultra-processed food, was more addictive still. In rats, sugar was found to be as addictive as cocaine.

"Our brains just aren't designed to be able to process these different types of ingredients in the quantities that we're being exposed to," says Avena.

Ultra-processed foods have something else in common with nicotine: Some of the biggest producers of processed foods were, from the 1980s to the end of the 2000s, known as Big Tobacco. In 1985, RJ Reynolds acquired Nabisco for $4.9 billion, and Phillip Morris acquired General Foods in a $5.75 billion deal that was then the largest takeover in U.S. history outside of the oil industry. Phillip Morris added Kraft to its portfolio in 1988 and rebranded itself as Altria in 2003. (RJR flipped Nabisco to Phillip Morris in 2000, which in turn spun off Kraft from its international tobacco business in 2007.)

UM's Gearhardt has been studying the events that led up the groundbreaking 1988 Surgeon General's report that deemed nicotine addictive, and the benchmarks used to do so, despite a concerted effort by one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation to prevent it.

One of the most important factors producing an addiction is the speed with which a drug hits the body and lights up the reward centers of the brain. By the time Big Tobacco began acquiring food companies, they had decades of experience studying and optimizing the speed with which their products delivered nicotine to the brain. They continued to harness that science in their food products.

"Many of these ultra-processed foods are almost pre-chewed for us," she says. "They melt in your mouth immediately. There's no protein, there's no water, there's no fiber slowing them down. It's going to hit your taste buds and light up your reward and motivation centers of the brain immediately. Then there's a secondary hit of dopamine when it gets absorbed into the body."

The threat is so grave that policymakers have recently shown glimmers of a newfound willingness to take on the food industry. A report by the General Accounting Office in August, commissioned by members of Congress on the powerful House appropriations committee to review diet-related chronic health conditions and federal efforts to address them, painted a grim picture.

More than 30 percent of young people aged 17 to 24 no longer qualify for U.S. military service because of their weight. Diet-related ailments such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes soaked up 54 percent of the U.S. government's $383.6 billion in health care spending, which includes Medicare and Medicaid, in 2018. They accounted for about one-quarter of the nation's total $1.5 trillion in health care spending in 2018 and were associated with 1,487,411 deathsmore than half of deaths from all causes.

Recently policymakers on both sides of the aisle called for a White House conference along the lines of the 1969 conference on food, nutrition and health. That meeting, called by then-President Richard Nixon to address the hunger crisis, resulted in the creation of the special supplemental nutrition program for Woman, Infants and children (SNAP) and the school lunch program, among other things.

"Now we face a second food crisis," said Senator Cory Booker, who chaired a farm subcommittee earlier this month that focused on the GAO report. "Despite being the wealthiest nation in the world, we have created a food system that relentlessly encourages the overeating of empty calories that are literally making us sick and causing us to spend an ever-increasing amount of taxpayer dollarsliterally, trillions of dollars a yearon health care costs to treat diet related diseases."

Nobody is under any illusions that solutions will come easy. In recent years, public health officials have launched major campaigns to deal with what many consider to be the lowest hanging fruit: regulations to reduce soda consumption through taxes and limitations on how federal and state food assistance can be spent, among other measures. The food industry, which has poured tens of millions of dollars into lobbying, campaign contributions and influencing public opinion, has fought back ferociously.

In California, where four cities have passed soda taxes, the beverage industry spent $7 million promoting a 2018 ballot initiative that would have made it harder for cities to raise taxes of any kind. The industry dropped the initiative after lawmakers agreed to implement a 12-year moratorium on local taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks. The word "ultra-processed foods" appears in U.S. dietary guidelines only in the references, says NYU's Nestle, because if it appeared more prominently "the food industry would go berserk." She notes that in 2015, when a scientific committee recommended changing guidelines to encourage Americans to eat less meat for reasons of "health and sustainability," industry lobbyists convinced Congress to insert language into a spending bill ordering the Department of Agriculture to change it.

"We could put restrictions on portion size, put restrictions on advertising and marketing, change federal subsidy policies to subsidize healthier foods and make them more available," Nestle says. "There's a whole lot of things we could do. But you can't do anything without taking on the food industry. And nobody wants to do that because they're very powerfuleverybody eats and loves their products. Anytime anybody talks about taking on the food industry, all of a sudden we have charges of 'nanny statism.'"

(In response to a request for an interview, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Brands Association, which represents companies that manufacture food, beverages, household and personal care products, suggested Newsweek reach out to the SNAC International, formerly the Snack Food Association, which did not respond to inquiries.)

Congress has been slow to address the obesity crisis. Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, has been among those advocating for the passage of a bipartisan bill that would require Medicare to cover medications, behavioral therapy, dietician visits and other approved therapies to treat obesity. The bill has been introduced in both the House and Senate every year since 2013, but Congress has not passed it.

It will take time, research and public pressure to change minds in Washington, advocates say. For now, the best hope for a solution is to catalyze a groundswell of consumer demand for products that are healthier. Many food companies have recognized that diet-friendly, healthy choices are in demand and can move products. Which brings us back to the science.

To change minds, scientistsand the food industry itselfwill need a better understanding of precisely what it is about the nation's diet that is feeding the public health crisis. "We need to better understand what the mechanisms are that are driving the deleterious effects of ultra-processed food so we can target policies and potential reformulations to improve the health of the nation."

"We need a national nutrition moonshot," says Tufts Mozaffarian. "We're drowning under an epidemic of diet-related disease."

Hall, for one, plans to run another comparison study to make sure people aren't simply eating more because the food tastes better. This time he'll make sure the processed and unprocessed dishes both taste equally delicious, as judged by independent tasters. The results will hopefully bring us another step closer to understanding and, eventually, action.

Original post:
Americans Are Addicted to 'Ultra-Processed' Foods, and It's Killing Us - Newsweek

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Republicans in the Ohio House are trying, again, to limit thehealth care transgender children can access regardless of parental consent.

House Bill 454 would outlawthe use ofpuberty blockers, hormonesandgender reassignment surgery for childrenunder the age of 18. If approved, doctors who broke the law could face professional discipline andcivil lawsuits. Teachers would also be required to tell parents about a"minor's perception thathis or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex."

Twenty-five of Ohio's 64 House Republicans signed upto sponsor the bill, which is nicknamedthe Save Adolescents from Experimentation or SAFE Act.

Supporters say the law would protect parents and children from being "bullied" into treatments that can be irreversible. Opponents saybanning treatment for one specific groupisunconstitutional, grossly disrespectful and a serious threat to the health ofOhio's most vulnerable children.

Only a handful of medical providers in the Buckeye State providegender-affirming medical care to minors, such as puberty blockers, hormones and surgery.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohiodoesn'tprescribe hormones toanyone under 18.

Most family doctors won't either, said Liam Gallagher, the program director for an LGBTQ youth nonprofit called Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Transgender kids who want to transition get referred to specialized programs at a handful of major hospitals.

One of those is theTHRIVE programat Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus whereDr.ScottLeibowitz serves as its medical director of behavioral health.

"We work with parents and families on all ends of the belief spectrum ...," Leibowitz said. "Ethical and morally responsible care respects families of different cultures, different races anddifferent religious viewpoints."

He rejected the idea that anyone at THRIVE would pressure parents into medicating their children.

"Any type of treatment decision that would have potentially irreversible effects, that is something that is not ever rushed," Leibowitz said.

That can mean waiting on hormones until the child's 18th birthday.

Gallagher, who began his own transition at 21, said he's observed that most Ohio doctors want both parents to agree before they prescribe medication.Group sessions at the youth center where he workscan feel like"an echo chamber where we talk about the frustration of having to wait."

"The waitingfelt like years for me even though it was just months," Gallagher said.

For a lot of the teenagerswho frequentKaleidoscope,gender-affirming care doesn't go beyond choosing clothing, haircuts and pronouns that fit them.

When it comes to surgery something HB 454 calls gravely concerning Liebowitz was more circumspect, saying it dependedon the "emotional maturity of a young person."

Data on how many minors undergo this kind of surgery is scarce, but the standards of care written by theWorld Professional Association for Transgender Healthrecommend frank discussions about thelifelong impacts onfertility.

The standards state that for most minors "genital surgery should not be carried out untilpatients reach the legal age of majority to give consent for medical procedures in a given country."

The larger issue for Leibowitz is that the fear of surgery is being used as a cudgel to beat back against all forms of medical intervention.

"Its about raising fear for unknowing people who think the medical community is out to harm patients,"Leibowitz said.

That's howJames Lewis, a Columbus-area parent,felt when his then-12-year-old daughter started questioning her sexuality and gender identity.

"She explored having girlfriends and boyfriends," Lewis said. "It wasnt a moral issue for us."

Then, she asked to cut her hair and wear more masculine clothing. That wasn't a problem either until she refused to wear shorts to soccer practice and Lewis discovered his daughter had been cutting herself. Diagnoses of depression, anxiety and gender dysphoria soon followed.

She started asking abouttransition, but Lewis wasn't comfortable with the idea when she had so many other mental health diagnoses.

"I dontthink weshould allow children to make adult choices," Lewis said.

His daughter eventually concludedthat her feelings better aligned with body dysmorphia, a preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in appearance,and she's since recovered. She's in college, and Lewis is optimistic about her future.

The USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau spoke with Lewis' daughter, and she confirmed this story. She is not being named due to a request for privacy.

Lewis said the biggest issue he had withthe medical community during those years was the way he they pushed hormones and other gender-affirming therapies.

He was warned that his decisions might cause her to take her own life.

About85% of transgender adolescents reported seriously considering suicide, according to a 2019 study published in the American Academy of Pediatrics. Family acceptance can reduce those risks.

But it felt to Lewis like the practitioners he spoke with couldn't or wouldn'taccept that some children might be confused or claim to be something they're not.

"I think the human experience,as much as we want to make it simple, I think thats doing injustice to everyone," Lewis said. "With this bill, I think the intent is to prevent being too hasty."

Opponents of HB 454 strongly disagree.

"Banning ethically appropriate and life-saving treatment options universally for all youth, on the grounds that they are not indicated for some youth, takes shared decision-making away from the family and doctor and places it entirely into the hands of Ohio politicians," Leibowitz said.

At the heart of the debate overHB 454 is this question about whether children like Lewis' daughter are the exception or the rule.

Supporters of the bill claimthat almost all children who experience gender dysphoria will "desist" or grow out of it by adulthood.

"The standard of care for gender dysphoria should be watchful waiting, which doesnt mean we do nothing," said Dr.Andre Van Mol, a family physician who works with a conservative advocacy group called the American College of Pediatricians. "We protect gender dysphoric children from making permanent, life-altering mistakes."

These studies, including those referenced in the Ohio bill, are considered problematic because they often don't distinguish between children who are transgender and those who are non-conforming. The latter refers to children who don't fit the stereotypes associated with their gender.

"Those young children were never declaring they were transgender in the first place," Leibowitz said."They were gender diverse."

A2013 studyfrom theUniversity Medical Center in Amsterdamfollowed127 adolescents who had been referred to a clinic for gender dysphoria. Researchers claimed 63% grew out of their dysphoria by adulthood, but38 of the kids were considered "sub-threshold" for a diagnosis in the first place.

Major medical groups like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatricsstrongly support medically necessary transition-related care for minor patients.

Supporters said it's betterto look at long-term studies like the one psychologistKristina Olson is running out of the University of Washington. Her research aims to develop criteria for determining whichgender-diverse children go on to transition.

Our study suggests that its not random, Olson told The Atlantic in 2019. We cant say this kid will be trans and this one wont be, but its not that we have no idea.

Another theory written into HB 454 is that the onset of gender dysphoria can be rapid or sudden and therefore potentially the result of outside influences like peer groups and social media. That's what Lewis believes happened to his daughter.

But Gallagher, ofKaleidoscope Youth Center, says that's not true. When he came out to his parents at 21, it might have looked sudden, but he'd been thinking about it for years and preparing to start testosterone for months.

"For the person we are coming out to, they are seeing the tip of the iceberg," he said.

TransOhio Chair James Knapp started his transition at a time when doctors required people to live openly as the opposite gender for at least oneyear before getting hormones.

"Trans kids who are trying to access gender-affirming care have to jump through so many hoops," Knapp said. "You have to have two physicians sign off before you can start talking about hormone blockers."

The hurdles aren't all medical, either.

"Look," Gallagher said, "As much as I love my identity, and I love my experience, I am going to be honest: No one wants to be trans. It is really difficult."

Trans people especially transgender women of color face higher rates of unemployment, homelessness and violent crime.

"It wasn't like I read a book that talked about being a magician and suddenly I was a magician," Gallagher said. "This is something I have always felt."

If passed, Ohio would be the second state to ban medical interventions for transgender youth.At least 15statesintroduced similar legislation, but only Arkansas passed a law. A federal judgeblockedits implementation soon after.

Ohio lawmakers introduced a similar bill last General Assembly but itdidn't get a hearing.

Still, opponents of the proposal concedethat Ohio's legislature seems to grow a little more conservative each year. In addition to HB 454, Republicansintroduced abill to ban transgender girls from participating in women's sports, and they inserted language into the state budgetthat lets doctors refuse care on religious grounds.

"We had the gay panic of the 1950s through the 1980s. Now it's thetrans panic," Gallagher said. "It has just shifted. Instead of being worried about 'thehomosexual' in the classroom,we're afraid ofthe scary trans person in the bathroom."

Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.

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Ohio Republicans want to ban treatments for transgender youth but what would that mean? - The Columbus Dispatch

When it comes to staying at the top of your lifting game, a few factors matter as much as a high-quality recovery plan between training sessions. Some athletes prefer foam rolling, while others swear by low-intensity jogs on their off days. For others, its all about embracing the cold specifically, cold water immersion (CWI).

Ice baths, a more casual term for CWI, have risen in popularity in recent years. Fitness guru Wim Hof who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in the wintertime in his underwear and is a staunch supporter of cold exposure and celebrities such as Joe Rogan routinely riff on the benefits of sitting still in an ice water-filled tub. High-level strength and power athletes use ice baths to enhance recovery from high-intensity competitions and training sessions. Although the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, there are some conflicting findings that suggest CWI may or may not be an effective recovery alternative for weightlifters, powerlifters, and other athletes.

Editors note: The content on BarBend is meant to be informative in nature, but it shouldnt take the place of advice and/or supervision from a medical professional. The opinions and articles on this site are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. Speak with your physician if you have any concerns.

Here are the cold-hard facts and findings on CWI, the potential benefits, and possible detrimental long-term effects on muscle recovery and adaptation as we currently know them.

Disclaimer: Exposure to extreme cold can affect people with cardiovascular conditions. You should check in with your doctor before experimenting with cold exposure of any kind, and especially so if you have a cardiovascular condition.

According to a 2017 study, CWI can reduce inflammation and muscle soreness after intensive bouts of training. (1) The study had 15 participants immerse themselves in water that was 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 minutes after their workouts. A control group rested in ambient (room temperature) air.

Researchers found that CWI was effective at reducing the inflammatory marker neopterin two hours after participants mixed martial arts training sessions. In other words, 15 minutes in cold water may help you reduce muscle soreness after training rather than just chilling in room temperature air.

Cold water immersion can also help athletes feel like theyre recovering better. A 2017 study found that MMA competitors who dunked in cold water after working out reported being less sore than those who didnt. (1) A 2018 study also employed 15 minutes of cold water immersion (15 degrees Celsius, or 50 degrees Fahrenheit) for participants after a mixed martial arts competition. (2)

Participants who sat up to their torsos in cold water baths actually performed less well on various fitness assessments soon after immersion (sprinting, for example). But athletes consistently reported feeling better sleeping harder, being less stressed, and reporting less fatigue after CWI. In other words, if you enjoy slipping into a freezing bath, itll probably help you. If you dont, theres probably no need to force yourself.

Need to recover quickly between bouts of intensive cardio? A 2010 study had 41 elite, cis male athletes perform 20 minutes sessions of exhaustive, all-out effort, intermittent exercise. (3) These high-intensity cardio bouts were followed by 15 minutes of recovery.

Participants who used cold water immersion during those 15 minutes recovered faster than those who didnt. So, if youre looking to perform multiple bouts of all-out effort, 10 degree Celsius cold water immersion in between sessions can help you come back all the stronger.

For athletes engaging in high-intensity training, a 2010 study found that cold water immersion might boost acute recovery. (3) That is perhaps especially true if the way youre training is high impact.

MMA fighters in particular seem to benefit in the short-term by CWI, reporting feeling less sore and being less inflamed after sessions and simulated competitions. (1)(2) If youre feeling tossed around after a particularly intense deadlift or squat session, then it may do you some good to dunk yourself into some chilly water.

Especially when youre training in the heat, cold water immersion after your sessions may be able to help ease your cardiac stress from exercise. A 2019 study found that CWI may not reduce your physiological stress levels or otherwise improve hormonal recovery. (4) But after 45 minutes of cycling in a hot environment, the study did find that CWI helped reduce participants heart rate faster than passive recovery.

A study published in 2014 explored the idea of people strengthening their immune system response through a combination of meditation, breathing techniques, and cold exposure. After participants of the study were exposed to a bacterial infection, it was found that the group that implemented the techniques mentioned above experienced fewer symptoms.

The researchers note that they think the deep breathing was more influential. However, deep breathing often goes hand-in-hand with colder exposure, and they do think cold exposure can help build a stronger immune system over time. (5)

Ice baths may not be for everyone and, frankly, they can be uncomfortable, especially to the uninitiated. But if theyre all the rage with folks at your CrossFit box, its understandable to wonder if theyre for you. Ultimately, it depends on your training goals and your preferences.

If your training involves getting punched or otherwise slammed around quite a lot, CWI might be able to give you relief. Martial artists who train for their sport at high impact or who are looking to recover immediately after a competition might choose to brave some icy waters.

Training at high intensities can create a whole lot of soreness not to mention mental fatigue. Cold water immersion might be just what you need to soothe your immediate muscle aches and recover for your next session.

Regardless of your sport or training methods, you can benefit from cold water immersion if you love the cold. If you think itll make you feel better, its likely that it will. Thats why the studies discussed above have found that perceived recovery after CWI is high, even if your hormone levels stay the same.

If it sounds like ice baths might be a good addition to your recovery routine, youll have to be strategic about how to integrate them into your program. As with pretty much anything in training, start with your goals and make sure youre switching up your routine gradually.

A 2020 study found that cold water immersion may actually be bad for hypertrophy in the long run. (6) Muscle biopsies after sustained immersion in cold water found that the cold exposure reduced the levels of proteins that you need to build up muscles after training sessions. Bear this in mind when considering integrating ice baths into your program. If hypertrophy is your goal, you might want to avoid CWI.

But if your goal is to recover quicker between intense sessions or experience less muscle soreness after a high-impact training, you may decide to move forward.

Most of the studies discussed in this article above had athletes immerse themselves in cold water (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, or 10 degrees Celsius) for 15 minutes. If that sounds like a walk in the proverbial park, thats great. On the other hand, if the idea of even 15 seconds in cold water makes you shiver, remember to build up your tolerance.

Just as you gradually increase your load during training, youll have to gradually settle into an effective ice bath routine. If 15 minutes wont do, start with 30 seconds or a couple of minutes and add time each week until youre at a level youre comfortable with.

According to a 2021 study, a periodized approach to recovery can help athletes benefit most from CWI. (7) Just as you dont train the same exact way all year, you dont need to recover the same way all year. Base your CWI approach on what youre doing with your training, this study suggests.

Are you going through a particularly high-intensity or high-impact training block? Are you recovering from a competition? CWI might be great for you. If youre in a hypertrophy block, though, you might want to hold back on the cold water. Periodize your CWI in the same way you periodize your training if you want to maximize benefits.

If CWI immersion is detrimental to hypertrophy goals and potential long-term training success, how come so many athletes swear by it? What gives? It seems that its a matter of perspective.

If youre assessing the effectiveness of CWI, you need to ask how youre measuring effectiveness. If your goal is for it to help you feel better, and it does, then awesome. If your goal is to build more muscle or receive tangible improvements in performance, you may want to stick to more tried-and-true recovery methods.

Featured Image: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock

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6 Ice Bath Benefits That May Convince You to Take the Plunge - BarBend

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y., Nov. 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- United Rheumatology, the pre-eminent rheumatology care management organization known for empowering rheumatologists to advance the standard of care, recently announced findings that suggest Repository Corticotropin Injection (RCI) Acthar Gel significantly improves clinical outcomes and decreases the need for concomitant medications for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The study, published in Open Access Rheumatology: Research and Reviews, evaluated real-world treatment patterns and outcomes from an electronic medical records database for patients with rheumatoid arthritis treated with RCI and provided valuable insights into the use of this treatment and management of these difficult-to-treat patients during routine clinical practice. The link to this article can be found here.

Electronic medical records data was obtained from the United Rheumatology-Normal Integrated Community Evidence (UR-NICE) repositoryfor patients who used RCI to treat RA. RCI is a naturally sourced mixture of adrenocorticotropic hormone analogs and other pituitary peptides that exerts anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties via melanocortin receptors. It is approved as a short-term adjunctive therapy for RA and is typically used in patients with refractory RA.

"This study is an excellent example of the importance of the UR-NICE data repository to the understanding of the performance of a pharmaceutical in the real-world ecosystem of Clinical Rheumatology," said Executive Vice President and Chief Value Medical Officer of United Rheumatology, Dr. Andrew Concoff."The deidentified and aggregated data from United Rheumatology member practices across the country creates the opportunity to gain novel insights as to the performance of medications in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The clinical phenotype of the patients that have typically been treated with RCI is better understood by the analysis of UR-NICE data in this study."

Patients with severe RA activity, at initiation of RCI therapy, showed a significant reduction of swollen and tender joints, pain, and the need for additional medications such as anti-inflammatory drugs, opioids, and disease-modifying antirheumatic medication. Dr. Concoff added, "For clinicians, this study is a reminder that routine and consistent capture of a measure of disease activity as part of a treat-to-target strategy is vital to clearly identify whether a given patient is adequately treated on their current regimen."

A total of 66 independent rheumatology practices in United Rheumatology's physician network and 114 patients participated in the study.

About United Rheumatology: United Rheumatology represents over 660 community-based rheumatologists in 39 states. It does not own or operate rheumatology practices; the practices are all independent. A comprehensive portfolio of physician, patient, and health plan payer offerings, driven by the largest rheumatology electronic medical records clinical database in the US, supports an unparalleled platform for jointly developed coordinated care solutions.

Contact:Corrie Fisher Email:[emailprotected]

SOURCE United Rheumatology

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Options for Those who Suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis as New Research Reflects the Benefit of Repository Corticotropin Injection (RCI) to Real-World...

SLEEP is vital for all of us and if you're struggling to get the snooze you need then it can be difficult.

While keeping regular sleeping hours and have a good sleep environment is key, eating right can also help.

1

Physician in psychiatry and sleep medicine, Alex Dimitru said seven to eight hours of sleep per night is ideal for most people.

He explained: "We should aim to be realistic, and ideally create a "window" of time for sleep of eight or nine hours - with the realisation that despite our efforts, we all end up sleeping a little less than we planned.

Alex, who is working with mattress brand OTTY said in order to try and restore your sleep deficit, simple tweaks in your diet can help.

"Adding minerals like potassium, magnesium, calcium, and iron onto your plate can help promote the production of melatonin, the hormone responsible for sleep regulation.

"Research shows that some specific foods contain sleep-promoting properties that will encourage you to drift off more easily and quickly."

Here are the 10 foods that could help you drift off into a peaceful slumber.

Melatonin is key to sleep and cherries contain plenty of this.

Alex said that these are great to snack on in front of the TV and that you could also mix them with other sources of melatonin such as nuts and oats.

He added: "When eaten regularly for breakfast or as a post-workout snack, they can help in regulating your sleep cycle."

If you're a chocoholic then it's best to stick to the dark variety to help you drift off to sleep.

"Dark chocolate contains serotonin, which relaxes your body and mind, and promotes a general feeling of happiness", Alex said.

Almonds contain tryptophan and magnesium, which both help to naturally reduce muscle and nerve function while also steadying your heart rhythm, Alex said.

If you don't fancy chomping down on nuts, then he said that almond butter will also have the same effect.

"Spread it on crackers, a banana, or a piece of toast when your late night cravings hit. Be careful not to go overboard though, and keep your dollop to under a tablespoon so you're not feeling too full before attempting to rest", he added.

Alex said that if almonds aren't for you then you could try walnuts, as they contain a few compounds that help promote better sleep at night, such as melatonin, serotonin and magnesium.

"Walnuts are fantastic when chopped up and added to a fresh salad, as a topping on cereal or yogurt, or by themselves as a crunchy alternative to crisps or more unhealthy nuts", he said.

Alex said that if you're waking up in the middle of the night then it might be because you're still hungry.

He suggested adding homous to your meal as it is a great source of tryptophan, which the body uses to help make melatonin and serotonin.

"Melatonin helps regulate the sleep-wake cycle, and serotonin is thought to help regulate appetite, sleep, mood, and pain", he added.

Throughout the day we consume lots of drinks from tea to booze and many people don't drink enough water throughout the day.

Alex said: "As well as compromising your overall energy levels, dehydration could also be impacting your ability to not only fall asleep, but remain asleep.

"Choosing watery fruits like watermelon can make up for any deficits. A simple 2-cup serving is half water, which will hydrate you before bed and eliminate post-dinner hunger pains due to its fibre and volume.

"Other fruits with high water content include pears, oranges and apples."

Chamomile tea has been proven to help ease the symptoms of insomnia as the herb contains a flavonoid compound that is known to harbour sleep inducing properties, so once your taste buds become accustomed to the unique taste, a cup a night before bed could do wonders for your rest, Alex said.

Pistachios contain protein, magnesium, and vitamin B6, all of which contribute to better sleep.

Alex said: "Hold back on them though, and don't exceed a 1-ounce portion.

"If you eat too much it can reverse the effect and keep you awake due to a high calorie intake!"

Porridge is a breakfast staple for many, but Alex said making a small bowl in the evening could help promote a better night's sleep.

"A bowl for breakfast may be your usual go to, but making yourself a small bowl oatmeal in the evening could help promote a better night's sleep.

"The grains in oatmeal trigger insulin production, which raises your blood sugar naturally and makes you feel sleepy.#

"Oats are also rich in melatonin, which relaxes the body and helps you fall asleep", he explained.

Bananas are packed with potassium and magnesium that are known to relax the muscles, Alex said.

"They also contain the amino acid L-tryptophan, which gets converted to 5-HTP in the brain. The 5-HTP is converted to serotonin, a relaxing neurotransmitter.

"As youre probably already aware, when it's getting close to bedtime, its important you're steering clear of heavy fried foods, alcohol, caffeine (like coffee, tea, and energy drinks), and any heartburn-inducing foods, such as tomato sauce or orange juice.

"These can have the exact opposite effect and keep you tossing and turning for longer."

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The 10 foods that can help you drift off to sleep... - The Sun

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Nutrition crucial in managing diabetes, no matter the type - The Herald Journal

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results ofoperations should be read in conjunction with our unaudited condensed financialstatements and related notes included in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q andthe audited financial statements and notes thereto as of and for the year endedDecember 31, 2020 and the related Management's Discussion and Analysis ofFinancial Condition and Results of Operations, both of which are contained inour Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, filed withthe Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2021. Past operating resultsare not necessarily indicative of results that may occur in future periods.

Company Overview

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded, or FFPE. In March 2020 we also released a RUOBRAF Target SelectorTM validated for both ctDNA and FFPE.

Our revenue generating efforts are focused in three areas:

providing laboratory services to medical oncologists, neuro-oncologists,

and other physicians or healthcare providers treating patients with cancer

providing laboratory services using both our CTC and ctDNA and ctRNA

assays in order to help pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies run

licensing our proprietary technology and selling our distributed products,

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Assays, Products and Services

Our current assays and clinical trial services include:

CTC and ctDNA and ctRNA Testing. Our current assays and our other planned

cancer diagnostic assays are based on our Target-Selector technologies.

After completing testing, we or our partners provide our customers with an

easy to understand report that describes the results of the analyses

performed, which is designed to help medical oncologists, neuro-oncologists,

surgical oncologists, urologists, pulmonologists, pathologists and other

physicians make better decisions about the treatment of their patients.

Clinical Trial Services. We plan to utilize our clinical laboratory and

translational research capabilities to provide clinical trial and research

services to pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies and clinical

research organizations to improve the efficiency and economic viability of

their clinical studies. Our clinical studies and translational research

services could leverage our knowledge of CTCs and ctDNA and ctRNA and our

ability to develop and implement new cytogenetic, immunocytochemical and

molecular diagnostic assays. Our current assays can, and our other planned

cancer diagnostic assays and biomarker assays are anticipated to be able to,

help optimize clinical trial patient selection and/or monitor cancer drivers

during the course of treatment or disease progression. Demonstration of

clinical utility of our assays would more easily enable these tests to be

adopted in standard clinical practice, helping physicians select the most

appropriate therapy for their patients.

RT-PCR COVID-19 Testing. We are currently performing RT-PCR testing for

COVID-19 and have received more than 640,000 samples for processing to

date. We believe that our RT-PCR COVID-19 testing will be an important aspect

of our business until the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.

In May 2020, we announced the availability of a Target-Selector molecular assayRUO kit for the detection of BRAF mutations in ctDNA and FFPE samples.

Pharmaceutical, Research and Health Economic Collaborations

In February 2021, we announced establishing a research collaboration withProtean BioDiagnostics, Inc. to research the ability of our Target Selectormolecular assay to determine EGFR status in non-small lung cancer (NSCLC)patients.

Provider Agreements

In July 2019, we announced that we entered into a Laboratory Services ProviderAgreement with Beacon Laboratory Benefit Solutions, Inc., a nationallyrecognized premier provider of laboratory benefit management technologysolutions to health and managed care companies in the United States.

In June 2020, we announced that we entered into a managed care provideragreement with Medical Cost Containment Professional LLC (MCCP), to processout-of-network claims for Biocept's Target SelectorTM liquid biopsy testing.MCCP is a reference-based pricing insurance network that includes more than150,000 providers nationwide.

Patents and Technology

Our success depends on an intellectual property portfolio that supports ourfuture revenue streams and erects barriers to our competitors. We aremaintaining and building our patent portfolio through filing new patentapplications, prosecuting existing applications, and licensing and acquiring newpatents and patent applications.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

In January 2021, we signed an agreement with the Foundation for CaliforniaCommunity Colleges to make COVID-19 testing available to the 116 Californiacommunity colleges and their more than 2.1 million students. Through theFoundation's CollegeBuys program, our PCR-based COVID-19 test is now availablefor community colleges to purchase for students, faculty and staff.

In June 2021, we announced a collaboration with CLEARED4, a market leader inpandemic health and safety solutions, to develop a system for tracking andmanaging COVID-19 testing requirements and test results for our customers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Results of Operations

Three Months Ended September 30, 2020 and 2021

The following table sets forth certain information concerning our results ofoperations for the periods shown (dollars in thousands):

expenses

operations

taxes

delivered

Costs and Expenses

Income Tax Expense

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Results of Operations

Nine Months Ended September 30, 2020 and 2021

The following table sets forth certain information concerning our results ofoperations for the periods shown (dollars in thousands):

Income Tax Expense

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liquidity and Capital Resources

Cash Flows

Our net cash flow from operating, investing and financing activities for theperiods below were as follows (dollars in thousands):

Liquidity, Capital Resources and Expenditure Requirements

the costs of developing our anticipated internal sales and marketing

capabilities;

the scope, progress and results of our research and development programs,

including clinical utility studies;

the scope, progress, results, costs, timing and outcomes of the clinical

utility studies for our diagnostic assays;

our ability to manage the costs for manufacturing our microfluidic channels;

the costs of maintaining, expanding and protecting our intellectual

property portfolio, including potential litigation costs and liabilities;

our ability to obtain adequate reimbursement from governmental and other

third-party payers for our assays and services;

the costs of additional general and administrative personnel, including

accounting and finance, legal and human resources, as a result of becoming

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Off-Balance Sheet Arrangements

We have not engaged in any off-balance sheet arrangements as defined inItem 303(a)(4) of Regulation S-K.

Critical Accounting Policies and Significant Judgments and Estimates

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BIOCEPT INC - 10-Q - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations - Insurance News Net

Songs in the Key of Life: Belt It Out for Good Health

By Sara Butler

>We've all done it: Belted out a tune along with the radio in our car or while we're sudsing up in the shower. It doesn't matter if you can carry a tune or not, people simply love to sing.

The good news for all you budding songbirds out there is that singing can actually be good for you, both physically and mentally. So, get those pipes ready and learn about why you should be singing for your life!

There's quite a bit of research out there to support the benefits to your body and mind when you sing. In fact, whether you sing alone or in groups you reap many benefits, including the following.

Stress relief - You can literally sing your stress away. Studies have found that the level of the stress hormone cortisol is lower in people after singing. Participants in studies also report feeling more relaxed after singing. As long as the conditions you're singing under don't make you feel anxious, it's really good for your stress levels!

Gives a boost to immunity - There is some evidence that singing can also be good for your immune system. Studies have found that singing, when compared with merely listening to music, boosts levels of antibodies in your system that help to fight off infection. Simply listening to music didn't have the same effect.

Increased lung function - It makes sense that all that deep breathing associated with singing and the use of muscles that support your respiratory system would help to increase your lung function! Studies have found that the breathing techniques often associated with singing benefit people who have conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Singing won't cure lung conditions, but it can help. Plus, deep breathing helps to increase the amount of oxygen in your blood which leads to improved mood.

Social connection - When you sing with other people, then you build relationships with them -- and that's good for everyone. Studies have found that people who sang in groups together felt more connected to one another and bonded, likely due to the oxytocin that's released when you do an activity together. Oxytocin, in case you forgot, is also known as the love hormone that helps to bond people together and create feelings of inclusion.

Might help with snoring - If you or someone you love snores, then it may be time to take up singing. Studies have found that those who sing regularly snore less than the general population. While more research needs to be done, it's an interesting hypothesis to try out for yourself!

Higher threshold for pain - If you're a chronic pain sufferer, then you may want to start singing. That's because the endorphins released during singing can help to change how your body perceives pain, making it more manageable.

If you are intrigued and now want to work more singing into your day, there are some practical ways to do it! You can:

The next time your favorite song comes on, sing it loud and proud. In no time at all, you'll be walking on sunshine.

The information, including but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material contained on this page are for informational purposes only. The purpose of this post is to promote broad consumer understanding and knowledge of various health topics, including but not limited to the benefits of chiropractic care, exercise and nutrition. It is not intended to provide or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your chiropractor, physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking a new health care regimen, and never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this page.

Disclaimer

The Joint Corp. published this content on 19 November 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 19 November 2021 00:12:05 UTC.

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Songs in the Key of Life: Belt It Out for Good Health - marketscreener.com

Julie Fisher, MD: Hello, and welcome to Cure Expert Connections on HER2-positive breast cancer. I'm Dr Julie Fisher and I'm a medical breast oncologist at the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'd like to welcome one of my patients, Jocelyn Muller, who's here today to share the story of her journey with HER2-positive breast cancer. Welcome, Jocelyn. We're going to spend the next 60 minutes walking you through her diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up from each of our perspectives and our continued communication throughout the process.

Let me just go ahead and open with a brief overview of HER2-positive amplified breast cancer. This is referring to the human epidermal growth factor 2 receptor. This is a protein that is expressed on the surface of all breast cancer cells. It is overexpressed or present in excess in roughly 15% of cases of breast cancer. This is diagnosed via biopsy, so if a patient presents with an abnormal finding on her routine mammogram or if she's able to palpate an area of abnormality and is then referred for a biopsy, that's the next thing that happens. That is typically done these days in our radiology departments. They numb the skin, place a hollow bore needle in the tumor itself, and obtain some tissue. Our colleagues in pathology then look at the tissue under the microscope and can ascertain if it is indeed breast cancer. Anytime someone is diagnosed with an invasive breast cancer, the pathologists first test for the presence of the estrogen and progesterone receptors. They also assess this HER2/neu protein to determine: is this one of the cases that is overexpressed and has excess protein? Or is this indeed a case where there is the standard amount of HER2/neu protein? Again, the roughly 15% of cases that overexpress HER2/neu are referred to as HER2/neu-amplified or HER2/neu-positive; this is very relevant for the physician team taking care of the patient with HER2-amplified breast cancer because it has significant implications for both prognosis and treatment. We know that HER2-positive breast cancer has the potential to behave more aggressively, and it has a higher risk of returning post-treatment. Historically, that was something that we could only lament, but thankfully that changed dramatically in the early part of the 2000s with the advent of drugs that specifically target that HER2/neu protein. I tell my patients, "We use those drugs in conjunction with chemotherapy." I think of those specially target drugs, such as snipers, and they're going to specifically home-in on that overexpressed HER2/neu protein. That has again dramatically changed the landscape of how we treat HER2-amplified breast cancer. It's changed this from a disease that we previously thought was very high risk, into something that we have wonderful tools for treating. Again, these account for about 15% of breast cancers. Most HER2-amplified breast cancers will be hormone receptor-positive, meaning sensitive to either estrogen, progesterone, or both. The minority of those cases will be insensitive to those hormones but overexpress the HER2/neu protein. That has an effect on subsequent treatment recommendations as well. How do we test for this? There are 2 main ways that our pathology colleagues assess HER2/neu positivity. One is a simple stain: it's a test referred to as immunohistochemistry. Another scientific method for determining HER2/neu status is what we call FISH, which stands for fluorescence in situ hybridization. Either of those 2 tests can garner a HER2-positive breast cancer diagnosis.

Transcript edited for clarity.

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An Overview of HER2-positive Breast Cancer - Curetoday.com

Lanita Bennett is a local breast cancer survivor. Photo by Stephen Gross/The Anniston Star

Lanita Price Bennett believes in doing everything she can to prevent bad health issues.

I have taken every vaccine available; you name it Ive taken it, explained Bennett. Ive gotten my yearly mammogram for 40 years.

In 2020, her yearly mammogram was scheduled for May 10, but it had to be rescheduled to later that June.

In early July, the doctor said Bennett needed a repeat mammogram and a sonogram because something had shown up. She got a biopsy in mid-July and went back to get the results in late July.

My husband, Stan, and I would regularly deliver meals for Meals on Wheels, and we thought wed go in that morning for the appointment and head on to our route, Bennett said.

The doctor told Bennett she had a very aggressive triple-negative invasive ductal carcinoma. With the surge of COVID-19 at the time, her doctor was not certain how long surgery would be an option, but he did have an opening at 6 a.m. the next morning. Bennett decided to get her surgery then.

Because of COVID restrictions, my husband couldnt come in with me. He has been by my side for 41 years, so him not being allowed to come in was tough, said Bennett.

Dr. Michael Hall performed the surgery, and Bennett was home later the same day. At a follow-up appointment, Dr. Hall referred her to Dr. Aasim Sehbai, who told Bennett that hormone treatments were not going to work because of her type of cancer.

Bennett received chemotherapy treatments on Sept. 1, Sept. 21, Oct. 13 and Nov. 3 of 2020.

She was informed that her surgery increased her rate of survival by 75 percent and receiving chemotherapy increased her rate of survival by 15 percent.

I lost my hair shortly after the first treatment, and I had some taste issues. Water didnt even taste right, and I had some fatigue, Bennett said.

In mid-January of 2021, Bennett had what she assumed was an allergy. A chest x-ray and a scan of her lungs revealed she had pneumonia caused by the chemotherapy.

Dr. Raul Magadia informed her that the good news was she had the immune system of a 20-year-old.

Unfortunately, the bad news was that since it wasnt related to my immune system, there is not much the doctors could do, Bennett said. Antibiotics every day can cause resistance, as well as lung and kidney damage.

Bennett has a prescription for an antibiotic, and she typically makes it about 12 or 14 days before experiencing shortness of breath.

It isnt painful, just aggravating. There is no surgery that will correct it, Bennett said.

Bennett is looking into getting a percussion vest like some COVID or cystic fibrosis patients use.

Even after cancer and while dealing with pneumonia, Bennett never stays in bed all day.

I get out of bed and get dressed everyday. We just are not doing Meals on Wheels because I cannot risk exposure, she said.

The Bennetts regularly provide meals for St. Michaels clinic in Anniston, where Lanitas niece is a physicians assistant. They also regularly provide meals for the RMC COVID unit meal train.

I would go crazy if I just sat here. I just feel so fortunate that they caught it early. We dont have to go to Birmingham. We have a fantastic hospital right here, Bennett concluded.

Faith Dorn is a freelance writer in Anniston. Contact her at faith.h.dorn@gmail.com.

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Local survivor still dealing with after effects of breast cancer treatment - Anniston Star

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - A new study will investigate how the brain and body fat communicate to control the production and release of leptin, a feedback hormone that helps regulate appetite and the number of calories burned.

The project is part of the National Institutes of Healths new effort focusing on interoception, the ways in which organisms sense and regulate signals within their bodies. Heike Muenzberg-Gruening, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Central Leptin Signaling Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, is the principal investigator on this project.

Fat tissue plays an important role in our health. It stores and breaks down fat but also secretes hormones like leptin to impact energy expenditure, food intake and blood sugar levels, Dr. Muenzberg-Gruening said.

Fat cells are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, which sets off the bodys fight or flight response and impacts leptin levels. However, this brain-to-fat circuit has yet to be fully explored.

Dr. Muenzberg-Gruening will use cutting-edge techniques to identify new components of the neural circuits to brown and white fat tissue. One of those tools is immunolabeling-enabled three-dimensional imaging of solvent-cleared organs (iDISCO), which allows researchers to create three-dimensional images of structures deep inside the brain and fat samples.

Dr. Muenzberg-Gruening will also study how various physiological conditions high and low body temperature, fasting and fed states influence interactions between fat tissues, the spinal cord and the brain that are involved in temperature control and metabolic regulation.

She plans to generate a circuit model that can predict how the body adapts the amount of energy it uses under different physiological conditions.

The new project is one of seven awards involving interoception, a new research focus for NIH. Interoception is not well understood, but if the process is not working properly, a person may not sense whether they are hungry, full, cold, hot or thirsty.

Gaining a better understanding of how brain and fat tissue communicate represents an important advance, one that could help researchers find better ways to treat obesity, said Pennington Biomedical Executive Director John Kirwan, Ph.D.

This 5-year project is supported by the National Center for Complementary & Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number AT011676-01. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

###

About the Pennington Biomedical Research Center

The Pennington Biomedical Research Center is at the forefront of medical discovery as it relates to understanding the triggers of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. The Center conducts basic, clinical, and population research and architected the Obecity, USA awareness and advocacy campaign to help solve the obesity epidemic by 2040. The Center is affiliated with Louisiana State University. The research enterprise at Pennington Biomedical includes over 480 employees within a network of 40 clinics and research laboratories, and 13 highly specialized core service facilities. Its scientists and physician/scientists are supported by research trainees, lab technicians, nurses, dietitians, and other support personnel. Pennington Biomedical is located in state-of-the-art research facilities on a 222-acre campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more information, see http://www.pbrc.edu.

Pennington Biomedical Research Center

6400 Perkins Road

Baton Rouge, LA 70808

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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NIH will fund study of how the brain and fat tissue communicate - EurekAlert

In this Article In this Article In this Article

It's true: Being short on sleep can really affect your weight. While you weren't sleeping, your body cooked up a perfect recipe for weight gain.

When youre short on sleep, its easy to lean on a large latte to get moving. You might be tempted to skip exercise (too tired), get takeout for dinner, and then turn in late because youre uncomfortably full.

If this cascade of events happens a few times each year, no problem. Trouble is, more than a third of Americans aren't getting enough sleep on a regular basis. Yet experts agree that getting enough shut-eye is as important to health, well-being, and your weight as are diet and exercise.

Skimping on sleep sets your brain up to make bad decisions. It dulls activity in the brains frontal lobe, the locus of decision-making and impulse control.

So its a little like being drunk. You dont have the mental clarity to make good decisions.

Plus, when youre overtired, your brain's reward centers rev up, looking for something that feels good. So while you might be able to squash comfort food cravings when youre well-rested, your sleep-deprived brain may have trouble saying no to a second slice of cake.

Research tells the story. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutritionfound that when people were starved of sleep, late-night snacking increased, and they were more likely to choose high-carb snacks. In another study done at the University of Chicago, sleep-deprived participants chose snacks with twice as much fat as those who slept at least 8 hours.

A second study found that sleeping too little prompts people to eat bigger portions of all foods, increasing weight gain. And in a review of 18 studies, researchers found that a lack of sleep led to increased cravings for energy-dense, high-carbohydrate foods.

Add it all together, and a sleepy brain appears to crave junk food while also lacking the impulse control to say no.

Sleep is like nutrition for the brain. Most people need between 7 and 9 hours each night. Get less than that, and your body will react in ways that lead even the most determined dieter straight to Ben & Jerrys.

Too little sleep triggers a cortisol spike.This stress hormone signals your body to conserve energy to fuel your waking hours.

Translation: Youre more apt to hang on to fat.

Researchers found that when dieters cut back on sleep over a 14-day period, the amount of weight they lost from fat dropped by 55%, even though their calories stayed equal. They felt hungrier and less satisfied after meals, and their energy was zapped.

Sleep deprivation makes you metabolically groggy," University of Chicago researchers say. Within just 4 days of insufficient ZZZs, your bodys ability to process insulin -- a hormone needed to change sugar, starches, and other food into energy -- goes awry. Insulin sensitivity, the researchers found, dropped by more than 30%.

Heres why thats bad: When your body doesn't respond properly to insulin, your body has trouble processing fats from your bloodstream, so it ends up storing them as fat.

So its not so much that if you sleep, youll lose weight, but that too little sleep hampers your metabolism and contributes to weight gain.

In todays world, snoozing can be difficult, particularly when all your screens (computers, TVs, cell phones, tablets) lure you into staying up just a little longer.

The basics are pretty simple:

SOURCES:

Alfredo Astua, MD, director of sleep medicine, Beth Israel Mount Sinai, New York.

National Sleep Foundation.

CDC.

Hanlon, E. Sleep, February 2016.

Nedeltcheva, A. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, January 2009.

Hogenkamp, P. Psychoneuroendocrinology, September 2013.

Shlisky, J. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, November 2012.

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Does Sleep Affect Weight Loss? How It Works