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February is Heart Health Month

Hand making heart

This February is heart health month.  A time to think about a vital organ that has multiple meanings.  General health, spiritual health, love of friends and family and a time to think of others.  As one of NYC’s oldest medical training schools, we’ll focus on the health (and encourage the spirit and love!)

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States. Every year, 1 in 4 deaths are caused by heart disease.  In the United States, the most common type of heart disease is coronary artery disease (CAD), which can lead to heart attack because of decreased blood flow.  Fortunately, you can greatly reduce your risk for CAD through lifestyle changes and, in some cases, medication.

The good news? Heart disease can often be prevented when people make healthy choices and manage their health conditions. Communities, health professionals, and families can work together to create opportunities for people to make healthier choices.

Make a difference in your community: Spread the word about strategies for preventing heart disease and encourage people to live heart healthy lives.

Heart Health

How can February American Heart Month make a difference?

We can use this month to raise awareness about heart disease and how people can prevent it — both at home and in the community.

Here are just a few ideas:

  • Encourage families to make small changes, like using spices to season their food instead of salt.
  • Motivate teachers and administrators to make physical activity a part of the school day. This can help students start good habits early.
  • Ask doctors and nurses to be leaders in their communities by speaking out about ways to prevent heart disease.

How can I help spread the word about Heart Health?

We’ve made it easier for you to make a difference. This toolkit is full of ideas to help you take action today. For example:

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Five Types of Excessive Drinking

Excessive Drinking

With a career in Health & Human Services, you can focus on helping others. Alcohol abuse is a problem many people face and help from someone trained can be a life changing experience for all involved.

This article from Medical News Today sheds light on excessive drinking.

New research reveals five types of excessive drinking and shows which type is more prevalent at certain ages.

According to new research, there are five types of problematic drinking.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), approximately 16 million individuals living in the United States have alcohol use disorder (AUD).
Experts describe AUD as a “chronic relapsing brain disease” where a person drinks compulsively, often to the point of it interfering with their daily life.
However, AUD is more complex than a person simply drinking excessively.
According to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5), 11 criteria help a professional decide if someone has an AUD. If the person meets two of these criteria during a 12-month period, a doctor will consider they have the condition.

New research has now added even more nuance to the issue of problematic drinking. There are five types of excessive drinking within AUD, concludes the new study, which appears in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.
Furthermore, each distinct profile has its own set of symptoms and tends to be more common at certain ages, the paper shows.

Ashley Linden-Carmichael led the new study. She is an assistant research professor of biobehavioral health and faculty affiliate at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University in State College, PA.

5 age-related AUD profiles revealed

Linden-Carmichael and her colleagues examined the data on 5,402 participants, aged between 18 and 64 years old, who were enrolled in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions and had met the criteria for an AUD in the past year.

The researchers applied a new method called latent class analysis to study subtypes or “profiles” of people with an AUD, clustering together those who shared the same symptoms, as well as drinking too much. The analysis revealed five AUD classes:

• “Alcohol-induced injury” characterized 25 percent of the participants. People with this profile engaged in risky behavior and got into dangerous situations that might have caused injury.
• “Highly problematic, low perceived life interference” characterized 21 percent of the participants. This group said that their alcohol consumption did not have any adverse effect on their lives and did not affect their family, work, or social obligations, despite also reporting that they experienced many AUD symptoms.
• The “Adverse effects only” profile included 34 percent of the participants, who reported hangovers or alcohol withdrawal symptoms.
• “Difficulty cutting back” was a profile prevalent among 13 percent of the participants. People in this category struggled or were unable to cut back on their drinking.
• “Highly problematic” was the final category, which made up 7 percent of the total number of participants who had every symptom of AUD.

Additionally, the analysis revealed how common each profile was when people were at different ages.

“The adverse effects only and highly problematic, low perceived life interference classes were particularly prevalent among younger adults,” write the authors, whereas “the difficulty cutting back and alcohol-induced injury classes were more prevalent as age increased.”
The main implication of the findings, says the study’s lead author, is that we need tailored treatments for people with AUD.

“We need to think beyond whether someone has an alcohol use disorder, yes or no, and take a look specifically at what they’re struggling with and whether they’re in a particularly risky class,” says Linden-Carmichael.

“Additionally, while young adults are most at risk for an alcohol use disorder, it’s clear that it’s also an issue for people in middle age or in older adulthood, too. But it might look different, and they may be struggling with different aspects of drinking.”

 

Therapists could consider, for example, that when someone is a young adult, they should be looking for that person experiencing withdrawal symptoms […] Conversely, if someone is older, they could look for struggles with cutting back their drinking or alcohol-related injuries.”

Ashley Linden-Carmichael

The lead author also shares some of her directions for future research. “I’m interested in seeing, for example, if someone has a certain profile at a younger age, what happens to them later?” Linden-Carmichael says.
“If a person is in the adverse effects only class at 21, what does their drinking look like at age 60? Do they escalate or slow down? If we could have a similarly large study but follow them across age, that would be the most intuitive and most beneficial for practice,” concludes the researcher.

READ ARTICLE HERE

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Cancer Patients and Fitness Trackers

Cancer Patient using Fitness tracker

Fitness trackers can be valuable tools for assessing the quality of life and daily functioning of cancer patients during treatment, a new study has found. The trackers, also known as wearable activity monitors, include commercial devices worn on the wrist that log a wearer’s step counts, stairs climbed, calories, heart rate and sleep.

As students of the Medical Field, keeping up to date with trends and discoveries in the medical industry make for a better career and better career advancement opportunities.  As we all know, Cancer is a growing concern in our population. Any insight into treatment can prove to be a life saver or lifestyle enhancer.

“One of the challenges in treating patients with advanced cancer is obtaining ongoing, timely, objective data about their physical status during therapy,” said Andrew Hendifar, MD, medical director for pancreatic cancer at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute. “After all, patients typically spend most of their time at home or work, not in a clinic, and their health statuses change from day to day.”

Hendifar was the principal investigator and Gillian Gresham, PhD, postdoctoral scientist at the cancer institute, was the first author for the study, which was published online in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Data Gathered Can Help Assess Cancer Patient Treatment

The study focused on 37 patients undergoing treatment for advanced cancer at Cedars-Sinai. They wore wrist-mounted fitness trackers throughout the study except when showering or swimming. Sets of activity data were collected for three consecutive visits during treatment. After the final clinical visit, patients were followed for six months to gather additional clinical and survival outcomes.

Investigators then compared data from the trackers with patients’ assessments of their own symptoms, including pain, fatigue and sleep quality, as collected from a National Institutes of Health questionnaire. These data sets also were compared with two common scales used to gauge physical status and overall health: the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status (ECOG) and Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS) scales.

Results suggested that objective data collected from wearable activity monitors can supplement and enhance current assessments of health status and physical function, which are limited by their subjectivity and potential for bias, Gresham said. In the study, increased daily step and stair activity correlated with more positive ratings of a patient’s condition on the provider surveys and lower rates of adverse events and hospitalization.

“Data gathered through advancements in technology has the potential to help physicians measure the impact of a particular treatment on a patient’s daily functioning,” Gresham said. “Furthermore, continuous activity monitoring may help predict and monitor treatment complications and allow for more timely and appropriate interventions.”

As a next step, investigators plan to study long-term use of the monitors in a larger, more diverse group of advanced cancer patients and correlate that data with clinical and self-reported outcomes. “Our hope is that findings from future studies with wearable activity monitors could lead to development of individualized treatment and exercise plans that may result in increased treatment tolerability and improved survival outcomes for patients,” Hendifar said.

“We are at the beginning of a revolution in healthcare in which digital wearables, coupled with broadband telecommunication, will allow remote monitoring of cancer patients and anticipate the need for intervention before symptoms occur,” said Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, director of the cancer institute. “This type of work has the potential to tailor our standard follow-up regimens for cancer to each patient, offering truly ‘precision follow-up’ that is better for patients, providers and society.”

For more information about the information above, please visit ScienceDaily

Interested in a career in Health Care or building a better career in the medical field? Speak to one of our admissions reps today at Mandl School, The College of Allied Health. Call 212-247-3434 anytime.

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National HIV Testing Day 6/27

National HIV testing day is Wednesday June 27.

June 27th is an important day, it is National HIV Testing Day.  In an effort to keep our students at Mandl School, their families and everyone informed of news and events related to health care, it’s important to spread the word that June 27th is National HIV Testing Day. We have come so far in testing and treating HIV but there are still people living with HIV and may not know it.

National HIV Testing Day (NHTD), a day to encourage people to get tested for HIV, know their status, and get linked to care and treatment if they have HIV. This year’s theme, Doing It My Way, Testing for HIV, reminds us that each person has their own reasons why they test for HIV and their own unique ways of Doing It.

About 1.1 million people in the United States have HIV.

In the 1.1 million people, 1 in 7 don’t know they have HIV. Many people have HIV for years[1.86 MB] before they get a diagnosis. For those who are living with undiagnosed HIV, testing is the first step in maintaining a healthy life and reducing HIV transmission. CDC recommends that everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 get tested for HIV at least once as part of routine health care and those at high risk get tested at least once a year. Some sexually active gay and bisexual men may benefit from more frequent testing (every 3 to 6 months).

Get tested for HIV

Knowing your HIV status gives you powerful information to help keep you and your partner healthy. Join us on NHTD to raise awareness about the importance of HIV testing and early diagnosis of HIV. Share why and how you are getting tested for a chance to be featured on the Doing It My Way social wall.

Knowing your HIV status helps keep you and your partner healthy. Visit Doing It to learn more.

What Can You Do?

Get the facts. Learn about HIV, and share this information with your family, friends, and community.

Get tested. The only way to know for sure whether you have HIV is to get tested. To find a testing site near you, use the Doing It testing locator, text your ZIP code to KNOWIT (566948), or call 1-800-CDC-INFO. You can also use a home testing kit, available in drugstores or online.

Protect yourself and your partner. Today, we have powerful tools to prevent HIV and help people with HIV to stay healthy. If you have HIV, start treatment as soon as possible after you get a diagnosis. The most important thing you can do is take HIV medicine as prescribed by your doctor.

HIV medicine lowers the amount of virus (viral load) in your body, and taking it every day can make your viral load undetectable. If you get and keep an undetectable viral load, you can stay healthy for many years, and you have effectively no risk of transmitting HIV through sex to an HIV-negative partner. To make sure you keep an undetectable viral load, take your medicine as prescribed, and see your provider regularly to monitor your health.

There are many other actions you can take to prevent getting or transmitting HIV:

  • Use condoms the right way every time you have sex. Learn the right way to use a male condomor a female condom. Check out the condom locator to find condoms near you.
  • If you are HIV-negative but at high risk for HIV, take daily medicine to prevent HIV, called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Use the PrEP locatorto find a PrEP provider in your area.
  • Talk to your doctor about post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP)if you think you have been exposed to HIV in the last 72 hours and are not on PrEP.
  • Choose less riskysexual behaviors.
  • Limit your number of sexual partners.
  • Get tested and treated for other sexually transmitted diseases.
  • Never share syringes or other equipment to inject drugs (works).
  • Remember, abstinence (not having sex) and not sharing syringes or works are the only 100% effective ways to prevent HIV.

You can learn more about how to protect yourself and your partners and get information tailored to meet your needs from CDC’s HIV Risk Reduction Tool(BETA).

Read full article here

At Mandl School, Our pledge is to provide our students with the finest Allied Health academic programs and training available in the New York City.  It is our mission to educate men and women, regardless of their backgrounds, to serve ably and effectively in the allied health industry. For more information about starting a career in Health Care, please contact us here or call 212-247-3434.

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Bone Marrow Registry Event

Bone Marrow Registry

Bone Marrow Registry will take place at Mandl School on June 6, 2018.

Each year, nearly 17,500 people, ages 0-74, in the United States are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses where a bone marrow transplant or umbilical cord blood transplant (also called a BMT) from a related or unrelated matched donor is their best treatment option. A bone marrow or cord blood transplant replaces a patient’s diseased blood-forming cells with healthy cells.

Mandl School, The College of Allied Health takes this issue quite seriously.

We have organized a Bone Marrow Registry Event for June 6, 2018 in our facilities. We expect a large crowd to attend and hope anyone who reads this will join us or contact us at how they can register at a different time.

Bone Marrow transplant

A well-matched donor is important to the success of a transplant.

Doctors look for a marrow donor or cord blood unit with a human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue type that closely matches the patient’s. HLA are proteins, or markers, that the immune system uses to recognize the cells that belong in the body and those that do not.

Because tissue type is inherited, you might expect that a family member would be the best match. However, only 30% of patients will have a relative who matches and is able to donate. The other 70%, or approximately 12,000 people, need someone like you to donate their healthy marrow.

Even with nearly 29 million potential marrow donors and 712,000 cord blood units available worldwide, it is harder for patients of racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds to find a match. Because tissue type is most likely to match someone of the same race and ethnicity, donors of these racial and ethnic heritages are especially needed:

American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian
Black or African-American
Hispanic or Latino
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
Multiple race

A close match between a patient’s and donor’s tissue type can improve the chances of a successful transplant. When a patient searches for a donor, sometimes he or she finds a closely matched donor, sometimes not. A patient could be waiting for someone like you.

You can read more from the Health Resources and Services  Administration HERE

Contact us to learn more about our programs, special events and the Mandl School, the College of Allied Health.

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