Girl loses finger to tight Band-Aid

After two weeks, the fingertip was dead and had to be cut off. Photo / Supplied

A toddler’s fingertip had to be amputated after a sticking plaster left on for two weeks cut off her blood supply.

The 3-year-old cut the tip of her right index finger on glass, says a report in yesterday’s New Zealand Medical Journal on what is thought to be the first case of its kind.

Her parents dressed the wound with Band-Aids, one placed length-wise, the other around the finger.

“After initially complaining of pain, she refused to have the dressing removed despite multiple attempts by her parents,” plastic surgeon Marcus Bisson and registrar Jonathan Heather wrote in the report.

After two weeks, her parents took her to Hutt Hospital but the flesh at the fingertip had died. A photo of the hand in the Journal shows blackened dead flesh almost to the first joint.

The authors said this was the first case of a Band-Aid-type plasters cutting bloodflow that they knew of.

They said people without health care training might not be aware of the risk that the pressure of sticking plasters could restrict bloodflow.

“Adhesive-dressing removal may be facilitated by the application of peanut oil or alcoholic hand steriliser. These simple steps may have avoided such a disastrous complication of an initially trivial wound.”

Last night, Auckland GP Dr John Cameron said: “Be very careful putting dressings completely around fingers or toes. Make sure any dressing is reasonably loose, firm enough to hold on but free enough not to cause discomfort.

“If it causes any discomfort get it checked out, and don’t leave dressings on for too long – no more than 48 hours, or earlier if the kid is complaining of severe pain.”

A Band-Aid spokesman said all packets warned that the dressings should be changed daily.

Older People Must Work Out More to Keep Muscles

Study Shows People Over Age 60 Need to Lift Weights More Often to Maintain Muscle Mass

July 8, 2011 -- The older you get, the more you may have to work to maintain your muscles, according to a new study.

Researchers report that men and women over the age of 60 have to lift weights more often than younger adults to maintain muscle mass and muscle size.

"Our data are the first to suggest that older adults require greater weekly maintenance dosing than younger individuals to maintain resistance-training-induced increases in muscle mass," study co-researcher and physiologist Marcas Bamman, PhD, of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, says in a press release.

The study is published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

The researchers write that preventing sarcopenia -- muscle loss that occurs as we get older -- is "one of the most pressing challenges of biomedicine in our aging society." And resistance training, such as lifting weights, is the best means of prevention.

However, life often gets in the way of regular exercise. "A major limiting factor of RT [resistance training] as a therapeutic approach to sarcopenia is the second key ingredient that defines efficacy -- sustainability," the researchers write.

So they set out to determine the impact that scaling back a weight-lifting regimen would have on muscles and strength.

Seventy adults were recruited for the 48-week study, which was sponsored in part by the National Institute on Aging. Thirty-nine of the study participants were aged 60 to 75; the remainder ranged in age from 20 to 35.

For the first four months, everybody did the same exercises three times a week: three sets of knee extensions, leg presses, and squats. Each participant steadily increased the amount of resistance over that period. By the end of this first part of the study, everyone -- young and old -- had gained muscle.

The second phase was designed to reveal how much of that muscle would be lost to inactivity or reduced exercise. To start, the researchers randomly divided the participants into three groups. Then, for the next 32 weeks, one group did no exercise at all, another group did the same exercises as before but only one day per week, while the third group reduced their regimen to one set of exercises once a week.

By the end of the study, the differences between the young and old groups were striking. The younger participants who continued to exercise showed little or no reduction in the muscle gains they had made during the previous phase of the study, despite the less frequent and less intense workouts.

Members of the older group, by contrast, lost muscle mass when they scaled back their training regimen, indicating that they need to lift weights more often than young people to keep their muscles buff. Their strength, however, remained the same.

"Among the old," the researchers write, "neither prescription was sufficient to maintain the gains in muscle size."

And maintaining muscle mass, the researchers conclude, is essential to healthy aging. "The positive health benefits of increased muscle mass among older adults extend well beyond muscle performance," they write.

Those benefits include increased aerobic capacity, better fatty acid metabolism, and improved bone and joint health.

"Therefore, we recommend progressive RT continue indefinitely for the health and functional status of all individuals," the researchers write.

Carers tell of assaults by disabled loved ones

One-third of people who care for ill or disabled loved ones suffer injuries and abuse from the people they look after.

Assaults on family carers by those they support are a hidden problem revealed in a survey of more than 650 by Carers NZ.

Chief executive Laurie Hilsgen said these injuries were mainly strains, sprains and back injuries sustained during everyday care.

But carers who completed the survey also told of injuries from assaults by the people they supported.

Examples of assault included biting, scratching, hair pulling, stabbing and punching, and were often a result of behavioural changes after brain injuries, or conditions such as dementia.

Ms Hilsgen said that, like other forms of abuse, these problems were hidden by many.

“There is a stereotype that if abuse is occurring, the carer must be the abuser because they are ‘able-bodied’. But carers are victims too.”

The chief executive of Age Concern Counties Manukau, Wendy Bremner, said stress, anxiety and psychological abuse could be some of the main challenges carers came across.

Without help, finding information and support in these areas was “difficult, exhausting, lonely and, at times, overwhelming”.

Carers are New Zealand’s biggest health workforce and their unpaid work has an annual economic value of at least $ 7 billion.

Carers NZ and the Carers Alliance of more than 40 national not-for-profit organisations have started the first social and political awareness campaign seeking improved recognition and support for carers. The Government is already taking steps to answer the We Care campaign’s calls.

To join the campaign, visit www.facebook.com/wecarenz

CAREWORN

* 35 per cent of carers suffer injury and abuse.

* 90 per cent of carers are of workforce age (16-65).

* 27 per cent support someone with complex needs.

* 45 per cent care for a loved one 24/7.

* 24 per cent have provided care for more than 16 years.

What Do Men Want? Turns Out It's Cuddling

Study Suggests Men Value Cuddling as an Important Ingredient in Relationship Happiness

July 7, 2011 -- Who says real men don't like to cuddle?

In a study that refutes gender stereotypes, researchers looking at couples in long-term relationships have found that men value cuddling and caressing as important for their relationship happiness more than women do.

For women, sexual functioning predicted relationship happiness, says researcher Julia R. Heiman, director of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington.

The study included about 200 men ages 40 to 70 and their female partners from each of five countries, including the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Japan, and Spain. More than 1,000 couples participated.

The findings on gender differences in what made people happy and sexually satisfied were surprising, Heiman says.

"In longer-term relationships, we didn't expect a lot of differences between men and women," she tells WebMD.

But there were. ''Women reported significantly more sexual satisfaction than men, and men more relationship happiness than women, contrary to our hypothesis," she writes.

The study is published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The couples answered questionnaires separately about their relationship happiness and sexual satisfaction. Most of the couples were married, Heiman says. About 90% had children.

The men's median age was 55 (half were older, half were younger); the women's median age was 52. The median relationship length was 25 years.

"Most were happy sexually and in their relationship," Heiman says, so the results may not apply to the general population.

When the researchers looked at what predicted relationship happiness, they found distinct differences between men and women, Heiman tells WebMD.

What mattered for men? "Their partner's orgasm, kissing and cuddling often, being touched and caressed by their partner often, and their sexual functioning, as well as being in good health," she says.

In women, relationship duration and their sexual functioning predicted happiness in their relationship, Heiman found.

"The sexual functioning score was a combination of variables," she says. It included level of desire, frequency of arousal, frequency of lubrication, and frequency of orgasm.

When it came to sexual satisfaction, the other focus of the study, physical intimacy and sexual functioning were important for both men and women. For men, more frequent recent activity and fewer lifetime sexual partners was linked with more sexual satisfaction.

Heiman cannot explain the link between fewer partners and greater sexual satisfaction. She speculated it could be those who have had many partners are not typically sexually satisfied and are constantly searching for new partners.

For men, the longer they were in a relationship, the greater their relationship happiness and sexual satisfaction.

However, women in relationships of 20 to 40 years were less likely than men to report relationship happiness. Women tended to show lower sexual satisfaction early in the relationship and greater levels later.

"Women start out less sexually satisfied between years zero and 15, and are significantly more sexually satisfied at duration years 35 and above," Heiman says. That may have to do with the responsibilities of child-rearing earlier, she says.

"How long you have been with a partner may impact how happy and how sexually satisfied you are," she says of the findings.

The study was funded by Bayer-Schering.

Size Counts When It Comes to Sex

Study: Being Too Thin or Fat Is Linked to Sexual Problems in Men, but Appears to Help WomenBy Brenda Goodman
WebMD Health News

July 7, 2011 -- Being very thin or fat appears to increase the odds that a man will experience some kind of sexual difficulty, but the same may not be true for women, a new study shows.

The study, a survey of more than 5,500 adults in Denmark, finds some surprising and complicated associations between lifestyle factors and sexual health.

In men and women, for example, body size -- being either too thin or obese -- appears to be related to the risk of having sexual problems. For men, those extremes increase the risk. Women in those ranges, on the other hand, appear to have less sexual difficulty.

The study shows that being very thin is associated with 22 times the risk that a man will experience some kind of persistent sexual dysfunction, including erectile dysfunction (ED), inability to orgasm, premature ejaculation, and pain with sex, compared to men who are normal weight.

Similarly, men with very large waists, over 40 inches, had a 71% increased risk of having some kind of sexual trouble compared to men who had a waist size under 37 inches.

“What I found interesting was that the number of men who were underweight, or had low BMI [body mass index], had various elevated risks for sexual difficulties,” said Edward O. Laumann, professor of sociology and an expert in human sexuality at the University of Chicago.  He was not involved in the current research.

He says having a large waist and a high BMI, which is also associated with health conditions like heart disease and diabetes, has long been known to be associated with an increased risk of sexual dysfunction in men.

Understanding why having a low BMI might also increase the risk is “less straightforward to figure out” and will require more research, he says.

Being underweight appeared to cut a woman’s chances of having sexual difficulties in half compared to a normal-weight, sexually active woman.

And obese women, with BMIs over 30, had 70% less chance of experiencing some kind of sexual dysfunction than their normal-weight counterparts.

Sexual problems tracked among women in the study including vaginal dryness, inability to orgasm, pain with intercourse, and vaginismus -- involuntary spasms that tighten or close the vagina.

“The differences between men and women with respect to sexual dysfunction were surprising,” says study researcher Morten Frisch, DSc, associate professor at the Staten Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. “There may be a plausible explanation. Women who experience trouble may quit having sex altogether while men may continue, particularly into the older ages.”

Among other surprises in the study for women: Those who reported using marijuana in the last year were about three times more likely than those who did not to report being unable to orgasm.

And women were intense exercisers and competitive athletes were more than four times more likely than those who were light exercisers to report experiencing vaginismus.

“People know very well that these lifestyle factors are not good for their health in terms of heart disease and cancer and other things. Nevertheless, there is a continued consumption of these drugs and unhealthy lifestyles and they affect sexual health as well as physical health,” says Frisch.

The study is published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

CDC: Untreatable Gonorrhea a Possibility

Resistance to Last Gonorrhea Drug Class Is Emerging

July 7, 2011 -- The CDC is warning that gonorrhea resistant to known antibiotic treatments could soon be a reality in the United States.

A report in Friday’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report  highlights gonorrhea's declining susceptibility to cephalosporins, which is the only remaining class of antibiotics available to treat the common sexually transmitted disease (STD).

While cephalosporin treatment failures have not been documented in the U.S., CDC officials say they are seeing “concerning trends” that suggest such failures are not far off.

“We do fear that based on what we are hearing around the world, we will see cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea,” CDC Director of STD Prevention Gail Bolan, MD, tells WebMD. “We don’t know when this is going to happen, but the hope is that we have a few years to identify other treatments.”

Bolan points out that since sulfonamides became the first successful gonorrhea treatment in the 1940s, emerging antibiotic resistance has been a frequent challenge.

“First we lost our ability to use sulfa drugs to treat gonorrhea and then we lost penicillin,” she says.

And in just the last decade, growing resistance to ciprofloxacin and other drugs in the class of antibiotics known as fluroquinolones led the CDC to recommend against their use for the treatment of gonorrhea.

Bolan says the pattern of resistance now emerging for the oral cephalosporin drug cefixime and the injectable cephalosporin ceftriaxone is strikingly similar to that seen with the fluroquinolones.

For both drug classes, the first reports of treatment failures came from Asia. The first evidence of declines in drug susceptibility in the U.S. have occurred on the West Coast.

The July 8 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report  includes an analysis of cephalosporin susceptibility for nearly 6,000 test samples collected annually between 2000 and 2010. Drug susceptibility was analyzed based on minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC), which is a measure of the lowest concentration of antibiotics needed to stop a bacterium’s growth in the lab.

The analysis revealed that:

While the overall number of test samples that were found to have decreased susceptibility to cefixime was small, a concerning increase was seen in recent years -- from 0.02% in 2000 through 2006 to 0.11% in 2009 and 2010.Twelve of the 13 specimens from 2009-2010 with decreased susceptibility to cefixime were from men who have sex with men.The Western United States saw the biggest elevations in declining susceptibility; Hawaii had the biggest increases during the period (from 0% to 7.7%), followed by California (0% to 4.5%).

Untreated or inadequately treated gonorrhea can lead to infertility in women and is associated with an increased risk for acquiring HIV in both sexes.

6 Best Summer Foods for Weight Loss

Lighten up your diet this summer with these refreshing foods and drinks.

You don’t need to starve yourself on a wacky fad diet if you want to look better in your shorts or swimsuit this summer. 

The secret to weight loss is to choose healthy foods and take in fewer calories than you burn. And it's just easier to make better food choices in summertime, when heavy, high-calorie dishes seem less appealing. The best foods for weight loss in summer are light, refreshing and, most important, keep you out of the hot kitchen.

How to Eat Less and Enjoy It More

By Geneen Roth Want to cut calories without cutting out all your favorites? Learn to pay attention — real attention — to food. A few years ago, I was working on my laptop, developing a new workshop program, when one of my favorite series of all time came on TV — Pride and Prejudice (the one starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, although let's be frank: Is there any other?). So I nestled into the couch, preparing to divide the next six hours between my work and Jane Austen's most...

Read the How to Eat Less and Enjoy It More article > >

The single easiest way to trim calories from your summer diet, experts say, is to load up on nature’s bounty. Produce is at its peak in summer. Delicious fruits and vegetables abound at farmers' markets and in your local grocery. Besides being low in calories, produce is loaded with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber.

"Enjoy fresh produce in season. You will be thrilled at how fresh, delicious, and satisfying it tastes," says Susan Moores, RD, a St. Paul, Minn. nutrition consultant. "Save the oranges and apples for fall, and load up on fresh berries, melons, greens, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, beets, pea pods, and all the super-nutritious and low-calorie fruits, greens and vegetables that grow in the garden this time of year."

As a bonus, you can forget about portion control when it comes to fresh fruit and vegetables, Moores say.

"Go for it, because it is hard to do much damage to your waistline with these super-nutritious edibles," says Moores

To keep your cool and cut your time in the kitchen, start with prepared produce, such as cut-up fruit and washed greens. Add rotisserie chicken, prepared soups, and pre-threaded kabobs when you need something a bit heartier. Pre-prepped foods may cost a little extra, but they save time in the kitchen. 

Here are dietitian's picks for some of the best foods to help with weight loss during the summer.

Moores loves all kind of produce but says cold soups are among her favorite low-calorie dishes.  Chilled soups like gazpacho or cucumber-dill that contain lots of chunky vegetables are a great way to start a meal.

"Research shows that a low-calorie, broth-based soup at the beginning of the meal will fill you so you eat less at the meal," Moores says.

Who doesn’t love diving into a crisp, juicy slice of watermelon when it's hot outside?

"Half of the watermelon comes from water," Moores says. "It’s a wonderful way to satisfy thirst and a yen for something sweet."

For Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, a plate of grilled vegetables is a summertime must-have. She recommends keeping a plate of grilled onions, bell peppers, zucchini, carrots, eggplant, asparagus, and garlic in your fridge. You can use them to make dishes like:

Grilled vegetable and goat cheese saladsGrilled vegetable pitasGrilled vegetable, ricotta, and fresh herb pasta and frittatas