Your Health

At some point, nearly half of all American children and teens will live in a home that receives food stamps, a new study shows.

Researchers analyzed 30 years (1968 to 1997) of national data collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and found that by the time they were 1 year old, 12.1 percent of U.S. children had lived in households receiving food stamps. That increased to 26.1 percent at 5 years of age; 35.9 percent at 10 years; 43.6 percent by age 15, and 49.2 percent by age 20.

The study also found that by age 20, about one-third of children had lived in households that received food stamps for two or more years, 28.1 percent for three or more years, 26.4 percent for four or more years, and 22.8 percent for five or more years.

Food stamp use was most likely among households with black children and those who lived in households headed by adults who were unmarried or had had less than 12 years of education, the researchers reported in the November issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

“American children are at a high risk of encountering a spell during which their families are in poverty and food insecurity as indicated through their use of food stamps. Such events have the potential to seriously jeopardize a child’s overall health,” wrote Mark R. Rank, of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, St. Louis, and Thomas A. Hirschl, of Cornell University.

Studies have “repeatedly demonstrated that two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child’s health are poverty and food insecurity,” the researchers noted.

“Understanding the degree to which American children are exposed to the risks of poverty and food insecurity across the length of childhood would appear to be an essential component of pediatric knowledge, particularly in light of the growing emphasis on the importance of community pediatrics,” the study authors added.

Packing on the pounds may be an unintended consequence of the U.S. Food Stamp Program, according to research that shows that getting food stamps may help contribute to obesity, at least among women.

“We can’t prove that the Food Stamp Program causes weight gain, but this study suggests a strong linkage,” Jay Zagorsky, a research scientist at Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research, Columbus, noted in a university-issued statement.

Food stamps, the major U.S. anti-hunger program, help poor people buy groceries.

Zagorsky, along with Patricia Smith of the University of Michigan in Dearborn, studied weight changes over 14 years in nearly 4,000 people in the food stamp program and almost 6,000 not in the program.

They found that the typical female user of food stamps was heavier than the non-user, after taking into account a variety of factors that might influence body weight.

Specifically, the researchers calculated body mass index, or BMI, a measure of weight in relation to height used to gauge how fat or thin a person is. Female food stamp users, they found, had a BMI 1.15 points higher than a similar woman who did not participate in the food stamp program.

For the average American woman standing 5 feet 4 inches tall this means an increase in 5.8 pounds of body weight.

Zagorsky and Smith also found that BMI increased faster when participants were getting food stamps than when they were not, and increased more the longer they were in the food stamp program.

The average food stamp users saw their BMI go up 0.4 points per year when they were receiving food stamps, compared to 0.07 points per year before and 0.2 points per year after they no longer received food stamps.

“While food stamps may help fight hunger, they may have the unintended consequence of encouraging weight gain among women,” Zagorsky said in the statement. “Every way we looked at the data, it was clear that the use of food stamps was associated with weight gain,” he added.

“While this association does not prove that the Food Stamp Program causes weight gain, it does suggest that program changes to encourage the consumption of high-nutrient, low-calorie foods should be considered,” Zagorsky and Smith note in the latest issue of Economics and Human Biology.

In 2008, roughly 28 million people — or almost 1 in 11 Americans — received benefits from the food stamp program in a given month.

Food stamp participants, the researchers say, may choose cheap, calorie-dense, high-fat, processed foods over healthier, more expensive food, maybe because food stamps don’t provide enough money to buy healthy foods, Zagorsky contends.

In 2002, the average recipient received $81 in food stamps per month. “That figure was shocking to me,” Zagorsky said. “I think it would be very difficult for a shopper to regularly buy healthy, nutritious food on that budget.”

Modifying the food stamp program to include economic incentives to buy and eat healthier foods “might be an important tool for fighting obesity,” Zagorsky offers.

People on food stamps, for example, could be required to take a course on nutrition and food stamp users who purchase fresh fruit and vegetables and other low-fat products could be given more benefits or receive discounts on these products, he said.

Long-term heroin addicts who were given “medical heroin” were able to stay in treatment longer than those given methadone, a Canadian study has found.

In addition, rates of illicit drug use and illegal activity declined among the participants, who had failed earlier attempts at treatment, according to the study.

“Without [medical heroin], these people who’ve already been written off as beyond help would be on street drugs, exposing themselves to harms like overdose, HIV and illegal activities,” explained the study’s senior author, Dr. Martin Schechter, a professor and director of the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. “But, if we can get them into a clinic while keeping them safe and stabilizing their lives, we can get them out of that 24-hour cycle and get them in touch with people like doctors and nurses.”

“Sooner or later, they may seek counseling and other treatments,” Schechter said. “And, in the meantime, you’re saving a lot of money in health care because the treatment is far less expensive to the community than the alternative.”

As many as a million people in North America are addicted to opioids, and the majority of them are addicted to heroin, according to background information in the study, which is in the Aug. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Methadone is a standard treatment drug given to replace heroin. However, about 15 to 25 percent of people addicted to heroin don’t have a good response to methadone, according to the study. In some European countries, researchers have examined the use of injectable medical heroin — diacetylmorphine, the active ingredient in heroin — to treat addicts who’ve failed other treatment options. In the United Kingdom, it’s recommended that medical heroin be used as a treatment of last resort.

The Canadian study sought to examine a North American population, though the authors acknowledged that the study could not have been conducted in the United States because of “financial and logistical barriers.”

The study involved 251 people, all older than 25, who had been using opioids for at least five years and were currently injecting opioids daily. By random assignment, oral methadone was given to 111 participants, 115 were given medical heroin injections and 25 were given injections of hydromorphone (Dilaudid), a narcotic medication that has similar effects to medical heroin.

Almost 88 percent of those in the medical heroin group stayed in the study, compared with 54 percent of the methadone group. The reduction in the rate of illicit drug use or other illegal activities was 67 percent in the medical heroin group and 48 percent in the methadone group.

Ten people overdosed, none fatally, during the study period, and six people had seizures. Because of those risks, the authors wrote, medical heroin should only be used in a setting where prompt medical interventions are available.

On the whole, Schechter said, the approach is one worth considering.

“People need to have an open mind when it comes to the treatment of addiction,” he said. “This treatment is good for the people addicted to heroin and very good for the community. It saves money and gets rid of black market criminal activity.”

Though medical heroin is not likely to be approved for addiction treatment in the United States, Schechter said, the study did find that hydromorphone had similar advantages and is already approved for use in the United States. However, the study did not include enough people in the hydromorphone group, he said, so more research is needed.

An addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Joshua D. Lee, a professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, described the treatment as a “potentially effective approach to managing long-term heroin addiction” that has not responded to other treatments.

“While this doesn’t get them off heroin, you’re taking a potentially unsafe, toxic thing — the package from the dealer down the street — and you’re putting it in a clinic setting where there’s support if someone overdoses,” Lee said. “It could kill the street drug trade and cause positive effects in the neighborhood.”

“Methadone is life-saving for some people, but some long-term users just aren’t interested in methadone, and it’s a real public health problem,” he added. “We have to develop alternatives to methadone maintenance.”

If you Wanna dramatically mark down the odds fact that you’ll die away of gently heart true disease , get off zappy someplace where especially public instinctively smoking is banned.

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Both studies are reported Monday in the American Heart Association’s ideal medical j., Circulation.

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They hurriedly use hospitalization d. fm. Medicare on any more than 9.3 million enrollees, and heavy pollution d. fm. well air q. monitoring stations in 126 urban counties across the US where the Medicare recipients zappy.

The full investigation team persistently found “a absolutely positive and statistically remarkable association” between carbon monoxide levels on any one slowly given d. and almost increased risks of hospitalization in behalf of well a manner wide variety of gently heart problems.

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Exercise programs designed to increase muscle density in the elderly could help reduce rates of disability and hospitalization, new research suggests.

The contention stems from a study of 3,011 healthy U.S. residents, aged 70 to 80. During about a five-year span, more than 55 percent of them were hospitalized at least once. People most likely to be hospitalized were those who scored lowest on measures of physical function, such as walking speed, ability to stand up from a chair repeatedly, grip strength and leg strength.

The researchers also found that people with the least dense thigh muscles — meaning more fat than lean tissue — were more likely to be hospitalized than those with more dense thigh muscles.

The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

“Our research suggests that we need to re-think the way we define sarcopenia, or age-related muscle loss,” study author Peggy Cawthon, a scientist with the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, said in a news release from the American Geriatrics Society. “Many definitions of sarcopenia today tend to focus on lean mass or muscle size. Our study shows that is looking at the wrong factors. We found that muscle strength or performance were much better ways of measuring function.”

The findings “suggest that interventions, such as physical exercise, that improve physical function could help keep more vulnerable seniors out of the hospital,” she said. “That would not only reduce disability but it would also reduce the huge economic burden associated with hospitalization of the elderly.”

One in five Americans older than 65 has sarcopenia. In 2000, the direct costs of treating the condition were more than $18.5 billion, according to background information in the news release.