Blogathon 2014

For the past couple of years, I have participated in a blogathon, meant to encourage bloggers to post every day throughout the month. The goal is to post every day, but a secondary goal for many of us is to help showcase other bloggers who are participating as well. By sharing our collective talent, our own readers may discover new blogs that they find informative and/or entertaining.

Bloggers of all types participate in this blogathon. Some are, like I am, health writers, but there are bloggers whose blogs are about food, science, finance, writing, and more. I'll be linking to a few of them throughout the month and maybe we'll be doing a guest post exchange, as we have in previous years.

So, stay tuned for the next 29 days and see what health news I can dig up and share with you all.

Sepsis contributes to 1 in every 2 to 3 deaths - Video: Faces of Sepsis

Regular readers of this blog likely know that one of my clients is a patient advocacy organization called Sepsis Alliance. Sepsis is a little known, but frighteningly common illness that affects as many as 750,000 hospitalized patients annually, and kills more than a quarter of a million Americans each year. Thousands more are left with long-term problems, such as amputations, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

How common is sepsis? The Centers of Disease Control (CDC) lists the top five causes of death in the U.S. as follows:

1. Heart disease - 597, 689
2. Cancer - 574,743
3. Chronic lower respiratory disease - 138,080
4. Stroke - 129,476
5. Accidents - 120,859

But if the CDC was monitoring sepsis deaths, the list would look like this:

1. Heart disease - 597, 689
2. Cancer - 574,743
3. Sepsis - 288,204
4. Chronic lower respiratory disease - 138,080
5. Stroke - 129,476

More people have heard about sepsis since Sepsis Alliance was founded in 2007, and more research is being done to try to find better ways to identify sepsis more quickly and to treat it more effectively. But, if we look at the results of a study presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Thoracic Society, we still have a long way to go. The study looked at almost 7 million patients to see how many patients were dying from sepsis, and the results were startling:

"We were surprised to find that as many as 1 in 2 patients dying in US hospitals had sepsis," the authors said in a release. 

So what is sepsis? Simply put, sepsis is the body's toxic (bad) reaction to an infection. It can affect anyone at any time. The infection can be as serious as one from a perforated (burst) bowel or pneumonia, or as seeming innocent as an infected hangnail or abscessed tooth. As your body tries to fight the infection, something goes wrong and your body starts to attack itself, causing a cascade of events that lead to organs shutting down and can result in death.

Who gets sepsis? Anyone can get sepsis. Sepsis Alliance just released this video, called The Faces of Sepsis, where you can meet three people who were touched by illness. You can read their stories in full in the Faces of Sepsis section of the SA website.



To learn more about sepsis, the symptoms, and the importance of early treatment, visit www.SepsisAlliance.org. It could save a life.

Red wine good, bad, yes, no? Who should we believe?

It wasn't all that long ago that there was great joy among lovers of red wine and chocolate. The announcement that these two treats (or necessities, depending on the person) could be good for you was very welcome news.

The basis of this news was the belief that resveratrol, a substance found in products like red wine and chocolate, could be cardioprotective. Studies such as this 2009 one published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, concluded:

Both wines and grapes can attenuate cardiac diseases such as atherosclerosis and ischemic heart disease. Recently, wine was also found to increase life span by inducing longevity genes. It appears that resveratrol and proanthocyanidins, especially resveratrol, present in grapes and wines play a crucial role in cardioprotective abilities of grapes and wines.

Another example is this article, which is a review of studies done on the effects of resveratrol, published in 2011 in the journal Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, in which the authors wrote:

The emerging data from human clinical trials confirms what the past decade of in vitro and laboratory animal models have suggested; resveratrol has considerable potential to improve health and prevent chronic disease in humans. We believe the evidence is sufficiently strong to conclude that a single dose of resveratrol is able to induce beneficial physiologic responses, and that either weeks or months of resveratrol supplementation produces physiologic changes that are predictive of improved health, especially in clinical populations with compromised health. However, it is not yet certain if long-term resveratrol supplementation will maintain these physiologic benefits to ultimately impact the incidence of chronic disease or extend lifespan, and the small number of human clinical trials remains dwarfed by the thousands of basic science experiments.

Not all researchers got on the resveratrol bandwagon though. In 2005, the journal Circulation published an article that wasn't so positive about the whole idea. While admitting that the research was pointing to benefits, the authors were cautious about recommending red wine:

Despite considerable data from epidemiological studies and strong suggestions from experimental research, the evidence is still insufficient to encourage patients who do not drink to start consuming red wine as part of a strategy to protect against atherosclerosis.

And now, new research is saying, nope -that resveratrol stuff isn't true. Yet another study, this time published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine said that, resveratrol in combination with a Western diet did not increase lifespan or decrease the incidence of illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer.

This was a small study, if anyone is looking for hope that it may not be really true. There were only 783 subjects who were followed over a course of nine years.

So before we start closing our wine cellars and tossing our dark chocolate, maybe we should do what is recommended for most things - consume them in moderation unless we're told by our physician to abstain.

Fibromyalgia Awareness Day - New Site Announcement

May 12 is Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. I'm marking this day by introducing my new project, 101 Answers About Fibromyalgia.

This project is dedicated to not only those who have fibromyalgia, but those who love people who have fibromyalgia. The goal is to collect at least 101 questions about the condition and gather the answers from different experts around the world.

Regular visitors to this blog know that I've written about fibromyalgia before, both here and for other outlets. There are many people living with fibromyalgia who have no idea that they have it or they believe they do, but they've not been diagnosed. So it is important to write about it and to talk about it.

According to the most recent research, a study published in 2013 found that fibromyalgia affects between 0.5 to 5 percent of the population. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States estimates that fibromyalgia affects 2% of the US population - or about 5 million adults, and that it affects women seven times more often than men.

More interesting statistics:

• While it's not a genetic disease, 28% of children who have a parent with fibromyalgia will eventually develop it themselves.
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• Adults with fibromyalgia are 3 to 4 times more likely to develop depression.
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• Thirty to 40% of people with fibromyalgia must stop working or switch jobs.
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• Fibromyalgia costs the U.S. economy an estimated $20 million per year.

Please visit my new site and leave your questions to be answered.