Network solutions
June 28th, 2008 · No Comments
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Study: drinking coffee lowers liver cancer risk
June 28th, 2008 · No Comments
Coffee is my best friends during my finals. When my roomate saw me having coffee so often, she warned me that coffee is one of the risk factor of cancer. But i m not very sure about. Today i read these news about a study which concluded that coffee lowers liver cancer risk. How true is it? Following is the article about the study.
Coffee drinkers may be at less risk of liver cancer — the third most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide — based on a prospective population-based study that confirms an inverse relationship between coffee consumption and liver cancer risk.
The study also found that higher levels of gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT) in the blood were associated with an increased risk of developing the disease.
Researchers led by Gang Hu at the University of Helsinki set out to examine the associations between coffee consumption and serum GGT with the risk of liver cancer in a large prospective cohort. Residents of Finland drink more coffee per capita than the Japanese, Americans, Italians, and other Europeans, so Hu and colleagues studied 60,323 Finnish participants ages 25 to 74 who were cancer-free at baseline. The Finns were included in seven independent cross-sectional population surveys conducted between 1972 and 2002 and followed up through June 2006.
The participants completed a mail-in questionnaire about their medical history, socioeconomic factors and dietary and lifestyle habits. For a subset of participants, clinical data was available, including serum levels of GGT. Data on subsequent cancer diagnoses was collected from the country-wide Finnish Cancer Registry.
Based on their answers to the question: “How many cups of coffee do you drink daily?” the participants were divided into five categories: 0-1 cup, 2-3 cups, 4-5 cups, 6-7 cups, and 8 or more cups per day. After a median follow-up period of 19.3 years, 128 participants were diagnosed with liver cancer.
The researchers noted a significant inverse association between coffee drinking and the risk of primary liver cancer. They found that the multivariable hazards ratio of liver cancer dropped for each group that drank more coffee. It fell from 1.00, to .66, to .44, to .38 to .32 respectively.
“The biological mechanisms behind the association of coffee consumption with the risk of liver cancer are not known,” the authors point out.
They also found that high levels of serum GGT were associated with an increased risk of liver cancer. The hazard ratio of liver cancer for the highest vs. lowest quartile of serum GGT was 3.13. “Nevertheless,” they report, “the inverse association between coffee consumption and the risk of liver cancer was consistent in the subjects at any level of serum GGT.”
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Medical Ids
June 20th, 2008 · No Comments
During last week, emergency rescue rotation, I found that our medical systems need to be improved. There are lots of drugs that may cause problem to patients.
Some patients may have allergy to certain drugs, for example penicillins. If doctors, apply penicillins as treatments to penicillin allergic patient, the patient may get worse.
So to prevent this, all detailed and clear notifications should be noted. If record all the medical data to a small medical card, it is impossible. So now there is a way to keep the data. It is through Medical Bracelet, it come with all size.
So get one for yourself today.
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The frogs
June 20th, 2008 · 1 Comment
A farmer came into town and asked the owner of a restaurant if he could use a million frog legs. The restaurant owner was shocked and asked the man where he could get so many frog legs! The farmer replied, ‘There is a pond near my house that is full of frogs - millions of them. They all croak all night long and they are about to make me crazy!’ So the restaurant owner and the farmer made an agreement that the farmer would deliver frogs to the restaurant, five hundred at a time for the next several weeks.
The first week, the farmer returned to the restaurant looking rather sheepish, with two scrawny little frogs. The restaurant owner said, ‘Well… where are all the frogs?’ The farmer said, ‘I was mistaken. There were only these two frogs in the pond. But they sure were making a lot of noise!’
[ Next time you hear somebody criticizing or making fun of you, remember, it’s probably just a couple of noisy frogs. Also remember that problems always seem bigger in the dark. Have you ever laid in your bed at night worrying about things which seem almost overwhelming like a million frogs croaking? Chances are pretty good that when the morning comes, and you take a closer look, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.]
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