New cardiology advances save many lives
By ABBY TALLMER
Now, for a change, an uplifting item about a serious and too often somber subject: heart disease, specifically strokes and heart attacks. According to the Associated Press, a marriage between human ingenuity and technological progress has resulted in an innovative new approach to treating patients complaining of acute chest pain:
Rather than have patients with potential heart symptoms waste valuable time waiting in the emergency room to be seen and then vetted by a team of doctors before receiving crucial (and often life-saving) treatment, the ambulances of University Hospital in Newark are now routinely equipped with electrocardiogram equipment and are staffed with at least one trained paramedic who performs an electrocardiogram on people with acute chest pain before they even reach the hospital. Thus ambulance paramedics are able to send a hospital cardiologist a full electrocardiogram on incoming patients even as the vehicle is still speeding toward its destination, allowing hospital-based cardiologists to evaluate the patient’s symptoms and prescribe appropriate treatment before the ambulance even gets there, so that severely endangered patients can bypass the emergency room altogether and be rushed straight to artery-clearing angioplasty.
This system has halved “door-to-balloon time.” the period between a patient’s hospital arrival and his/her surgery. The aim of the program is to keep that “door to balloon” period to less than 90 minutes for 75 percent of patients, a drastic improvement over the 30 percent hitherto.
“One of the Holy Grails within cardiology is to shorten as much as possible the door-to-balloon time,” says Dr. Marc Klapholz, director of cardiology at the Newark hospital, as quoted by AP. University’s program, begun in June 2006, is part of a nationwide trend within U.S. hospitals to try to shave off all unnecessary time any cardiology patient spends between admittance and surgery, a trend which has allowed all sorts of hospitals across the country to treat heart attacks and other heart problems more effectively, saving countless lives and limiting damage. The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association launched what they called “the D2B Alliance” last November and, according to the AP, more than 900 hospitals have joined to date, including more than two-thirds of those which provide angioplasty. Speaking about this initiative, Yale University cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz noted that the goal of stopping the worst heart attacks within 90 minutes was considered unattainable as recently as a half-dozen years ago, whereas today some are now stopped within 30 minutes.
“I can’t tell you what it feels like to have someone come in who’s having a life-threatening heart attack and because the system works right, they leave the hospital as if nothing happened,” Dr. Krumholz told AP.
For more on this story and the “door to balloon time,” or “D2B” initiative, see the AP story at: http://news.yahoo.com and also see the “D2B Alliance” Website at: http://www.d2balliance.org/
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Don’t catch a bad mood
A story in a recent Yoga Journal (itself summarizing a recent study reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology) alerts us to the fact that bad moods are apparently nearly as “contagious” from person to person as are the regular germ-born illnesses we know to keep our distance from. The study divided participants into random teams, each with a designated “team leader.”
The results? “Researchers found that the members adopted their leader’s moods, for good or bad, within minutes.” This phenomenon, known as “emotional contagion,” has apparently been replicated in several independent psychological studies lately.
How and why does this “emotional contagion” phenomenon work? Sierra Senyak, writing for Yoga Journal, explains it this way: “Researchers say that moods spread partly because we – mostly unconsciously – mimic the body language and facial expressions of the people we interact with. And adopting the posture and expressions that fit an emotion sets off a response in the body that actually creates that emotion.” Anybody who’s ever noticed that their day tends to be qualitatively “worse” when a boss – or spouse, or ______________ (substitute someone especially significant in your own emotional life) – is in a particularly hideous mood, and gets qualitatively “better” when said authority figure / significant other is in a bright and cheery mood, will probably recognize the phenomenon.
Given this scientifically documented dynamic, what can we do to avoid replicating another’s emotions automatically? Bo Forbes, a “yoga therapist and psychologist” based in Boston, suggests “setting boundaries on how much you’ll let another person’s mood affect you, and on how much you’re willing to share someone’s emotional state just to feel connected to that person. Find little statements to say to yourself, such as ‘My boss feels this way, I don’t, and that’s okay.’ There’s always dramatic scenery around us – but it’s just scenery,” Forbes says. “Tomorrow it will be gone and replaced by something else. We don’t need to get caught up in it.”
Well, maybe, though this writer wonders whether this principal of learned detachment is one that is easier to prescribe than to practice.
For more on the study and “emotional contagion,” see:
http://yogajournal.com/health/2536
File under ‘If you say so’
When I saw the Yahoo news / Reuters headline blasting: “Hide your old pills in poop, government says,” naturally I couldn’t resist both reading it and including it in this month’s column. So here’s the scoop, for better or worse:
A November 2007 press release from the Food and Drug Administration recommends an innovative solution for a genuine and often vexing problem: What to do with old no longer used medication and how to dispose of these often strong or even often abused narcotic meds so that no one else can get their hands on them and ingest them, perhaps with fatal results.
Government researchers — particularly those at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – came up with the following recommendation: Don’t flush your drugs, as they can be potentially toxic to fish and other creatures. Rather, wrap them up and hide them in used kitty litter or other disposal points of pet droppings, the government advises. I’ll let the talented writers at Yahoo and Reuters take it from there:
“A pilot program at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA] is looking at ways people can safely dispose of unused prescription drugs that are liable to be abused.
“[Though] the Food and Drug Administration recommends flushing some of the most dangerous ones down the toilet, including the strong, addictive painkillers oxycodone and fentanyl and stimulants such as methylphenidate, environmentalists worry about the effects on fish and amphibians.
“On its Web site at
http://www.samhsa.gov/rxsafety/, SAMHSA recommends [other, more ecologically conscious] ways to disguise leftover pills. [As follows]: ‘Mixing prescription drugs with an undesirable substance, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter, and putting them in impermeable, nondescript containers, such as empty cans or sealable bags, will further ensure the drugs are not diverted.’
“Of course some people do not drink coffee. But maybe they have a pet ferret. ‘Ferret waste, like nearly any other form of pet waste, can be effectively used to help prevent the abuse of unused prescription drugs,’ SAMHSA spokesman Mark Weber said.
“This news delighted the American Ferret Association, [which said:] ‘The U.S. government declares ferret poop to be an effective weapon against drug abuse...’ ”
For more on this problem – which is truly a serious one – and the government’s, shall we say, unorthodox recommendations for dealing with it, see: http://news.yahoo.com.
(And no, skeptical readers, it is not April Fool’s and I did not make this up. These are your valuable tax dollars at work.)
Be a mensch, get a flu shot!
We are, as you will no doubt not need to be reminded, in the dregs of winter. And what comes along with snow and holidays and so on in winter? The flu, that’s what.
We all know this, yet each year too many people either delay getting their flu shots till the vaccine is scarce and / or till it’s too late, or refuse to get one altogether, reasoning that “I don’t need it,” or “I should save the vaccine for other people,” or even “Getting the vaccine will give me the flu.” (The latter is a commonly held misconception that couldn’t be more incorrect; getting a flue shot will protect you from the flu rather than transmit it to you.)
So now it’s time for my lecture. All of you, as readers who are presumably above the age of 50, need flu shots and should go get them as soon as possible if you haven’t already. Flu shots are advised for all children, people with weakened immune systems, and people who are getting on in years. You are a member of the target audience that the flu vaccine is specifically made for. Further, by not getting a flu shot, you don’t just short change yourself but you potentially endanger many others, especially members of the vulnerable populations previously listed, with whom you come into contact and to whom you could easily transmit the extremely communicable flu virus.
The flu is a serious, and at this point, totally avoidable illness. At its best it is unpleasant and extremely debilitating; at its worse it can cause a host of respiratory and / or other diseases — such as pneumonia — that are potentially fatal. So call your doctor now and arrange to get a flu shot – do not pass Go, do not delay. (If you don’t have a doctor
and / or are on a limited income, call 311 and tell the city operator that you are a senior citizen and thus de facto a member of one of the especially vulnerable groups for whom flu shots are especially recommended, and that you want and need a flu shot. He or she will steer you toward one of the many city clinics or health or community centers in your area that administers flu shots without charge.)
Can I please have your attention?
Study finds older adults are NOT more easily distracted than younger folks
I’ll end this column on a cheery note. According to the ArcaMax HealthNews service (reporting on a study conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and presented at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego), older adults are “no more distracted” than younger adults when switching from one sense to another, despite predominant mythology on the subject.
Dr. Paul J Laurenti explained the results thus: “There are two kinds of attention we were interested in studying – voluntary attention and involuntary attention. We all know we can choose to focus on one sense and ignore another. For instance, you might be able to ignore the sounds of the television while you read the paper. But sometimes a very salient stimulus can capture your attention anyway – for instance, if the fire alarm went off while you were watching TV.”
The study measured both voluntary and involuntary attention of 48 participants, 50 percent of whom were between the ages of 18 and 38; the other half were from 65 to 90 years old. All participants performed the same tasks. Commented Christina Hugenschmidt, another researcher involved with the study: “Older adults were also quite similar to younger adults in how much of their attention was captured involuntarily. Even as we age, this study suggests that the brain’s ability to engage multi-sensory attention remains intact.” So there.
