courtesy of Bob Lee

Robert Lee, 42, shown here in New York's Central Park, sued his former dentist, who required him to sign a contract promising not to criticize her online.

A Maryland man who had a bad toothache has filed a class-action lawsuit against his New York dentist after she required him to sign a contract promising not to trash-talk her online -- and then fined him thousands of dollars trying to enforce it.

Lawyers for Robert Lee, 42, this week asked a New York federal court to declare that dentist Stacy Makhnevich’s contract, which effectively attempts to gag patient reviews, is unethical, invalid and illegal.

Within hours, the complaint filed by the advocacy group Public Citizen had prompted the company that designed Makhnevich’s contract to advise dentists and doctors to stop trying to muzzle negative comments posted on online sites such as Yelp, RateMD.com and others.

“We retired the form,” said Dr. Jeffrey Segal, a neurosurgeon and founder of Medical Justice Services Inc., a North Carolina firm that claims to battle medical defamation for a fee. “We probably should have retired the agreement earlier, but today’s the day we did it.” He added that he’s telling his 3,500 members to stop using the contract in the future.

The move drew praise from Paul Alan Levy, the lawyer representing Lee, but he said that Lee’s case against Makhnevich will continue and that the issues it raises remain.

“We’re glad to see that Medical Justice is not going to be peddling this agreement in the future,” Levy said.

Makhnevich did not respond to calls from msnbc.com and it was not immediately clear whether she planned to continue enforcing the contract.  A professional opera singer, Makhnevich bills herself as "the classical singer dentist of New York."

She was among hundreds of medical professionals nationwide in recent years who refused to care for patients unless they signed anti-defamation contracts. In the contracts, the doctors and dentists promised not to evade federal patient privacy protections in exchange for patients’ agreeing not to post public comments about them.

Lee sought help from Makhnevich last year after he developed an infection and severe toothache. He went to her office in agony, he says, and, although he questioned terms of the contract, he needed to be treated. So he signed.

“It was a situation of duress,” said Levy.

In Lee’s case, the contract not only demanded that he not post negative comments, it included a clause that said Makhnevich owned the copyright to any critical posts.

Lee said he didn’t think anything of that until months later, when he said he discovered that Makhnevich had overcharged him by about $4,000 for his care, submitted his records to the wrong insurance company and then refused to provide copies of the records so he could submit them correctly himself.

Frustrated, he posted complaints on medical sites that included Yelp and DoctorBase.

“Avoid at all cost! Scamming their customers!” read one post published in August.

Lee, who has since moved to Huntingtown, Md., said he also posted comments that said: “Honestly, how do you live with yourself? Just try being a decent human being.”

Within days, Makhnevich demanded that the sites remove the comments and threatened to sue Lee. She also said he was infringing on her copyright provisions and started sending invoices for fines of $100 a day. By October, the total topped $4,600, he said.

Yelp and other sites have consistently refused medical providers’ demands to remove offensive comments, citing protections under the federal Communication Decency Act.

The copyright claim was ridiculous, because posting patient comments is a classic fair use under the federal Copyright Act, Levy said. And privacy protections afforded by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, are legally binding, regardless of whether a patient agrees to refrain from publicly posting negative comments, according to the federal Office of Civil Rights.

It’s not clear whether Lee’s lawsuit will spell an end to medical gag-order contracts, but Levy said the quick action by Medical Justice was “gratifying.”

“It is outrageous that a patient would have to sign away his constitutionally protected right to get treatment for a toothache,” he added.

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Ocean Spray recalled certain lots of packaged and bulk Craisins the night before Thanksgiving. The Food and Drug Administration issued a press release on Friday.

Recalls of two iconic holiday foods on the night before Thanksgiving, the most feast-centric celebration of the year, are raising eyebrows about the way some companies notify consumers about problems.

Ocean Spray, a top cranberry producer, recalled certain lots of packaged and bulk Craisins, the sweetened dried fruit, because they may have contained hairlike metal fragments.

Giant Eagle Inc., a Pittsburgh-based grocery chain, also recalled all Valu Time brand canned pumpkin purchased on or after Aug. 30, 2011 and all Food Club brand canned pumpkin purchased on or after Oct. 28, 2011, because of "imperfections in can packaging," spokesman Robert Borella said.

Both recalls were launched on Wednesday evening, Nov. 23, just as families across America were finalizing menus and finishing shopping for their holiday feasts.

“After 20 years of doing this, businesses and governments always want to get bad news out when people will least notice,” said Bill Marler, a leading food safety lawyer based in Seattle.

Ocean Spray notified the Food and Drug Administration, which issued a press release on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Because there was no health risk, Giant Eagle officials didn't notify the FDA, Borella said. But the agency became aware of the recall and issued a press release anyway on Monday night.

In both cases, company officials won't concede there was anything odd about the timing. Ocean Spray spokesman John Isaf said only that the firm notified the FDA on Wednesday, when it launched the recall. Giant Eagle spokesman Borella said the company only became aware of the product problems on Wednesday and took quick action to notify regional media and consumers directly.

Giant Eagle even offered families the chance to return to stores for replacement pies or pie ingredients before the holiday dinner -- the next day. Ocean Spray said folks who saved the UPC code and Best Buy date could receive a refund.

FDA officials say nothing prohibits companies from waiting until the last minute before a busy holiday to recall foods consumers likely already have purchased.

“A firm may decide of its own volition and under any circumstances to remove or correct a distributed product,” said FDA spokesman Doug Karas, quoting the rules.

If there are potential health risks with the food, the firm is asked to notify FDA immediately, Karas added. They're required to submit reports within 24 hours of learning of the problem to the FDA's Reportable Food Registry.

It should be no surprise that companies would try to announce recalls when consumers might be otherwise occupied, said Marler, and, to be fair, holiday pressures could have contributed to the timing.

“It is certainly possible that holiday time off got in the way of alerting the public to problems,” he said.

Whether it was accidental or intentional, however, it’s not much comfort to families who may have served recalled food at their Thanksgiving dinners.

“Either alternative does not give the consumer much faith in the system, I am afraid,” Marler added.

What do you think? Tell us on Facebook.

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Tetra-amelia syndrome is an extremely rare genetic disorder that prevents growth of limbs. She looks like one determined kid.

Mariana Bazo / Reuters

A medical worker exercises with Yovana Yumbo Ruiz, 8, diagnosed with the Tetra-amelia syndrome, during a rehabilitation session at the clinic La Luz in Lima, Nov. 29, 2011.

Mariana Bazo / Reuters

Yovana Yumbo Ruiz, 8, diagnosed with the Tetra-amelia syndrome, lies on the floor during a rehabilitation session at the clinic La Luz in Lima, Nov. 29, 2011. Dr. Luis Rubio, the head of Yovana Yumbo Ruiz's medical case, is rehabilitating her with the hope of putting a bionic arm on her in the future.

Mariana Bazo / Reuters

Yovana Yumbo Ruiz, 8, diagnosed with the Tetra-amelia syndrome, draws on the floor during a rehabilitation session at the clinic La Luz in Lima, Nov. 29, 2011.

Mariana Bazo / Reuters

Dr Luis Rubio holds Yovana Yumbo Ruiz, 8, diagnosed with the Tetra-amelia syndrome, during a rehabilitation session at the clinic La Luz in Lima, Nov. 29, 2011.

Follow @msnbc_pictures

by Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

A woman's risk of having a heart attack may begin to rise even before she is born, a new study suggests, and the findings may help researchers better understand the nature of heart disease in women.

The study found women's risk of having a heart attack increased more than eight times if they had changes in certain genes; these changes were previously found to be brought on by stress experienced in the womb, such as not getting enough nutrients.

"Health really starts in the womb," said study researcher Bas Heijmans, a molecular epidemiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

The findings support the idea that conditions during early life, such as the habits of a mother during pregnancy, influence her baby's risk of later developing heart disease, Heijmans said.  Ultimately, the researchers would like to find genetic "signatures " that can tell the tale of someone's early life, such as an exposure to alcohol or cigarette smoke. Those signatures could then be used as markers for the persons' risk of disease later in life, Heijmans said.

The findings are published in the Nov. 17 in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

DNA in early life
The study involved 1,654 participants ages 70 to 82 who hadn't had a heart attack before the study's start. After three years, 122 people had suffered a heart attack. The researchers compared the DNA of these individuals to that of 126 participants who had not experienced a heart attack, but were similar in age and other characteristics.

The researchers looked for changes, called epigenetic changes, in six genes known to be influenced by the in utero environment. During such a change, a chemical "tag" is added to a section of DNA.

They found epigenetic changes in two of the genes were associated with an increased risk of heart attack. Women with a tag on one gene were 2.8 times more likely to have a heart attack, and women with a tag on both genes were 8.6 times more likely to have a heart attack, compared with women who didn't have these changes.

However, more work is needed to validate the results. The new study was conducted in adults, so the researchers don’t know exactly what experiences the participants had during the prenatal period.

Men and women
No association between changes in the genes and heart attack risk was found for men. The researchers aren't sure why this is,but it could be that men tend to have heart attacks at earlier ages than the participants included in the study, masking the effect of the gene changes in the study group, Heijmans said.

Because the study was small, these estimates of increased risk for women should be interpreted with caution, Heijmans said. Larger studies that included a wider range of age groups are needed to determine more accurate risk estimates, Heijmans said.

• 6 Ways to Make Sitting All Day Healthier
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Getty Images stock

Dreams can serve as your brain's personal psychotherapist by helping process bad memories, experts say.

Ever since the dawn of humanity, people have wondered about the purpose of dreams. We’ve imbued these mental meanderings with all sorts of powers, from forecasting the future to providing a window into the soul.

But scientists say they now know what dreams are for: they sooth the sting out of troubling memories. And when dreams don’t do their job, horrific memories can take over a person’s life, as they do with PTSD, a new study suggests.

Matthew Walker and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the brain uses dreams to strip the emotional content from memories of painful events.

Here’s how the researchers think it works. During dream, or REM, sleep, our brain chemistry changes, leaving us with lower levels of stress hormones. While we’re in this quieter state, the brain mulls over what happened and then files away the memory – but with less emotion attached.

 So, when everything works right, when we later recall these events we’ll remember what happened, but less of the pain associated with them.

Walker and his colleagues tested their theory in an intriguing, but simple, experiment.

The researchers asked 35 healthy volunteers to lie in a brain scanner while looking through a series of 150 images, which ranged from bland to emotionally jarring. One image might show a tea kettle, for example, while another might show the aftermath of a horrific car accident. As they were looking at the images, the volunteers were asked to rate the emotional intensity of what they were viewing.

Half the volunteers looked at the images in the morning, while the other half looked at the images just before bedtime. Twelve hours later the volunteers were asked once again to look at and to rate the images while being scanned. This meant that half the volunteers had a night’s sleep in between scans.

What the second set of scans and ratings showed was telling. Volunteers who had slept through the night rated the horrific photos as far less emotionally charged – and their brain scans showed a much lower level of activity in the amygdala, a brain region central to emotional processing.

It’s like dreams become the brain’s psychotherapist, Walker explains. Just as we can benefit from reviewing disturbing events in the safety of a therapist’s office, our brain benefits from processing these same types of events in the quieter dream state.

Walker suspects that the system short-circuits in PTSD sufferers because their brains are  constantly charged up even during dreams. And research in veterans with PTSD appears to bear this out, Walker says. When veterans with PTSD are given medications that knock back a neurotransmitter that keeps the brain in an excited state, sleep appears to improve symptoms of the disorder.

 “We’re hoping to provide the mechanism by which that drug has its effect,” Walker says.  

What types of things do you dream about? Tell us on Facebook.

Read more Vitals. It's good for you!

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An 8-year-old Ohio boy weighing 200 pounds was taken from his family last month and put into foster care by officials who said his mother wasn't doing enough to control his weight. That was the wrong call, says Arthur Caplan, an msnbc.com contributor and professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"I think it's a bad policy," Caplan told Tamron Hall, host of MSNBC's NewsNation. "Moving kids out of the home is wrenching for them, they're going to live with strangers. You're creating emotional turmoil."

Caplan, an msnbc.com contributor, says the solution is working with the entire family to change behavior. "The problem with an overweight child doesn't end with the child and moving him out of the house because he's going to come back to the house. You're going to have to figure out ways to change bad habits with the whole family." 

Caplan noted that the child may also be indulging outside of his mother's watch. "This parent, unless you're going to monitor the kid 365-days a year, 24 hours a day, who knows where [he] may be getting the food. [The parent] may be making the effort to get the kid to be less obese."

Not only is it bad for the child to be taken from his home, it's bad for the foster care system as well, he said.

"It can't be the right answer to turn to foster care. There are too many overweight kids. You'd overwhelm the foster care system if this became the policy."

Caplan also fears that children from low-income parent homes with limited access to healthy foods will be targeted.  

"Does anyone really think a 200-pound kid in a rich family household out in the burbs is going to be put into foster care? Because I don't. I think it's going to fall mainly on the single moms, on the poor since they don't have the resources to resist this. Plus, we have no reason to think this will work. There's no study that shows taking kids out of the home and putting them somewhere else is going to make him skinnier." 

What do you think? Tell us on Facebook.

Related stories:

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Featurepics.com

Chocolate ice cream is a frequent catch-all for botched batches of other flavors, which are doled out in small amounts and mixed with the dark, rich treat in order to avoid waste and expense. Reworking food is a common practice, industry experts say.

When a school lunch supplier repackaged moldy applesauce into canned goods and fruit cups, it drew a sharp warning from federal health regulators last month -- and general disgust from almost everyone else.

“I was appalled that there were actually human beings that were OK with this,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists. “This is a case of unsafe food. They are trying to salvage that to make a buck.”

But even as Food and Drug Administration officials prepare to re-inspect Snokist Growers of Yakima, Wash., to ensure that the applesauce maker keeps toxin-tainted fruit off store shelves, federal officials and industry experts acknowledge that Snokist is not alone in “reworking” faulty food.

Turning imperfect, mislabeled or outright contaminated foods into edible -- and profitable -- goods is so common that virtually all producers do it, at least to some extent, sources say.

“Any food can be reconditioned,” said Jay Cole, a former federal inspector who now works as a senior consultant with The FDA Group, a firm that specializes in helping manufacturers comply with industry regulations.

“It’s how people do their business,” added Shelke, founder of Corvus Blue, a Chicago-based packaged goods consulting firm.

It may be something benign, such as misshapen pieces of pasta that are re-ground into semolina, or something unexpected, like a batch of mislabeled blueberry ice cream mixed in with chocolate to avoid waste.

It might be something unappetizing, such as insect parts sifted out of cocoa beans or live bugs irradiated -- and left behind -- in dried fruits like dates and figs.

Or it could be something alarming, such as the salmonella Tennessee bacteria detected last year in huge lots of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, a flavor enhancer used in foods from gravy mix and snack foods to dairy products, spices and soups. 

Some 177 products were recalled in 2010, but bulk HVP products from Basic Food Flavors Inc. of Las Vegas, Nev., were allowed to be reconditioned by heat-treating the foods to kill the salmonella, according to the FDA. The reprocessed foods were then distributed and sold.

No question, FDA regulations do permit foods to be reconditioned, said William Correll, the agency’s acting director of compliance.  That leeway can avoid both waste and expense, he explained.

“Some things can be adulterated and fixed, and you’re not throwing out food that would otherwise be OK,” Correll said.

That’s why chocolate ice cream becomes the catch-all when other flavors aren’t quite right, said Shelke. If a producer accidentally botches a batch of blueberry, small amounts of the mistaken treat can be mixed into future bins of chocolate, where the dark color and rich flavor mask any error.  

The key, however, is that the process must render the food safe for consumption. 

That’s why Snokist Growers drew such a strong warning. In the case of the moldy applesauce, there are a couple of problems, Correll said. Mold is tricky because when contamination is extensive, it’s not enough to simply remove the obviously tainted parts and then zap the food with heat.

Snokist officials claim that their heat process kills patulin, the most common toxin produced by mold in apples, and renders the food commercially sterile. But FDA officials counter that the firm’s thermal process is not adequate to ensure that other heat-stable mycotoxins are eradicated from the food.

“Mold is not an easily reconditionable product,” Correll said. “It’s not OK to take moldy tomatoes and make them into tomato paste.”

Not that some food firms don’t try. It’s no secret that the FDA allows certain levels of expected contaminants to remain in foods, simply because a zero-tolerance standard would be impossible to meet, officials said.

The agency’s “defect action levels” are used to define the point at which food becomes adulterated and subject to enforcement. Below that level, however, some unappetizing substances make it through.

The FDA allows, for instance, an average of 225 insect fragments or 4.5 rodent hairs per 8 ounces of macaroni or noodle products. An average of 20 or more maggots of any size is permitted per 3.5 ounces of drained canned mushrooms, or per half-ounce of dried mushrooms. When it comes to mold, an average count of 15 percent is OK for canned cranberry sauce.

Because such levels are permitted, some food producers propose to combine faulty and sound products to lower the overall level. An apple-juice maker might ask to mix juice with high counts of mold with a batch with low counts, for instance. But, Correll said, that’s not allowed.

“Dilution is not the solution,” he said.

Similarly, companies that propose to eliminate a serious contaminant without addressing the source are turned down. He recalled a seafood firm with faulty bathroom practices that led to canned crab contaminated with fecal E. coli bacteria. Heat-treating would have eradicated the bugs -- but not the problem, Correll said.

“If food is adulterated in an unacceptable way, reconditioning won’t fix it,” he said. “You can’t cook the poop out of it.”

FDA officials couldn’t provide an estimate of the number of reconditioning requests received from food firms each year. But in 2009, the agency started a new Reportable Food Registry, which requires notification of hazards to human health. At least 2,240 reports were logged in the registry’s first year, including the salmonella-tainted vegetable protein.

Many producers faced with faulty food simply want to minimize their losses without harming public health, said Peter Quinter and Jennifer Diaz, lawyers with the Florida firm Becker & Poliakoff, which represents importers of foreign food.

Such firms want to avoid having product refused, so they go to great expense to salvage products such as insect-infested rice for future consumption, Diaz said. Grain products can be sifted, re-inspected, repackaged – and sent on to grocery stores.

“Taking the ick factor away is that the product is no longer contaminated,” she added.

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Ocean Spray is recalling certain lots of packaged and bulk original flavor Craisins -- sweetened dried cranberries -- because they may be contaminated with small, hairlike metal particles.

Ocean Spray announced the voluntary recall late Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, one of the most cranberry-centric holidays of the year. The company initiated the recall on Wednesday, according to spokesman John Isaf. It wasn't clear when officials became aware of the problem.

Company officials say certain lots of Craisins in 5-ounce, 10-ounce and 48-ounce packages are affected by the recall, as well as bulk sweetened dried cranberries in 10-pound packages.

Isaf would not give an exact total of volume of cranberries recalled, saying only that it was "very small," or less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the total pounds of dried cranberries produced annually.

However, in an e-mail to a New England business newspaper summer, Isaf reportedly said that dried cranberry production at the firm's Middleboro site would increase from 40 million pounds a year to 60 million pounds annually. Using that figure, the recall could involve about 150,000 pounds of sweetened dried cranberries.

Officials said they've received no reports of consumers harmed by the metal fragments. They added that the particles are unlikely to cause injury. The fragments were caused by a malfunction on a piece of equipment on the production line at one of the firm's cranberry-making facilities. The problem has been identified and corrected, Isaf said.

The recalled product lots (only dates followed by the letter M are affected) are:

• 5-oz. Craisins UPC: 00293-000 Best By Dates/Letter: Oct 27 2012 M
• 10-oz. Craisins UPC: 29456-000 and 29464-000 Best By Dates/Letter: Oct 27 2012 M, Oct 28 2012 M, Oct 29 2012 M
• 48-oz. Craisins UPC: 00678-318 Best By Dates/Letter: Oct 27 2012 M, Oct 28 2012 M, Nov 3 2012 M, Nov 4 2012 M, Nov 5 2012 M, Nov 6 2012 M, Nov 7 2012 M, Nov 10 2012 M, Nov 11 2012 M.
• 10-lb. bulk ingredient & food service UPC: 03477-000 Best By Dates/Letter: 30 Oct 2013 M, 31 Oct 2013 M, 1 Nov 2013 M, 5 Nov 2013 M. 

  Ocean Spray urged consumers to destroy the product, save the UPC label and Best By dates and contact the Ocean Spray consumer hotline at 1-800-662-3263.

Miami Gardens Police via NBC Miami

Oneal Ron Morris, shown after her arrest, is accused of injecting a victim's buttocks with a mixture of cement, Fix-A-Flat, mineral oil and Superglue.

News that Oneal Ron Morris was arrested for injecting a woman’s buttocks with a combination of cement, Fix-A-Flat, mineral oil and Superglue stunned readers. But even more shocking are the photographs of the alleged perpetrator that reveal the incredible size of her rear end. Her curves would make Jessica Rabbit blush! While the vast majority of the population inquiring about buttock enhancement would refuse treatment by an fake physician, photos reveal that Morris likely acted as a walking advertisement for her illegal practice.

So just how did Morris’s behind become so massive? I truly doubt that she partook in her own dangerous cocktail of injections. While these substances may work for repaving a road or patching a tire, they are dangerous when injected into living tissue. She would have likely found herself in the hospital (like her alleged victim) with large, festering wounds. In addition, the two traditional techniques of buttock augmentation -- solid silicone implants and fat injections -- are unlikely to have dramatic enough results to create proportions such as hers.

As a cosmetic surgeon making an educated guess, I suspect Morris, a 30-year-old transgender woman, maximally enhanced her buttocks using polypropylene string implants obtained overseas or through the black market.

Polypropylene string implants were used to enhance breasts back in the late 1990s prior to being banned by the FDA in 2001.  These implants consist of yarn-like string that gradually absorbs water and expands in size when surgically implanted into the body.  If these string implants are in place long enough, they can result in a massive, cartoonish enlargement, as can be seen in the breasts of a handful of adult entertainers.

While I’ve never heard of polypropylene being implanted into the buttocks, it’s very possible Morris underwent this procedure. The best treatment for polypropylene string implants is surgical removal.

If Morris does have polypropylene string implants and does not have them removed, she can expect her buttocks to continue to grow until they eventually drag on the ground.

Dr. Anthony Youn is a board-certified cosmetic surgeon in the Detroit area who has been featured on "Dr. 90210" and runs a popular celebrity cosmetic surgery blog. He is the author of the new, irreverent memoir "In Stitches."

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

A transmission electron micrograph shows some of the structural details of the H3N2 flu virus that infected patients in Indiana and Pennsylvania earlier this year. The virus was formed through the reassortment of two other flu viruses.

Three children in Iowa have come down with a new type of flu virus previously linked to pigs, but this time the bug appears to have been spread by people.

The children, who live in rural Webster and Hamilton counties, did not become seriously ill, said Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, medical director for the Iowa Department of Public Health. But the detection of the virus known as swine-origin A/H3N2 in patients who hadn't had contact with animals raises concerns about potentially greater spread of a new type of flu.

"We have pretty good evidence of person-to-person spread," Quinlisk said. "None of the children or anyone around them had exposure to swine, turkeys or other sources."

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had previously detected seven cases of people with the new H3N2 virus that appears to have acquired a gene that may make it more transmissible from H1N1, the flu that sparked the so-called swine flu pandemic in 2009. Flu viruses often swap genetic parts. Officials say the new virus was probably formed when a pig became infected with the H3N2 virus and the H1N1 virus at the same time.  

The new bug has components of human, avian, H1N1 and swine flu viruses, all mixed together in what scientists call a recombinant virus.

The first new H3N2 case was identified in a child in Indiana in July, and has been followed by cases in Pennsylvania, Maine and, now, Iowa.

In the previous cases, however, the patients either had direct exposure with pigs, or exposure to a person who'd been around pigs. In the new cases, it appears that one of the children transmitted the flu to the other two, and none of them had any animal exposure, Quinlisk said. She declined to identify the children or their ages, saying only they were younger than 18. No further cases have been identified in the past week, she said.

The Iowa cases are nothing to panic about, health officials emphasized. The H3N2 flu causes symptoms similar to the regular seasonal flu, including fever, cough, fatigue, body aches and loss of appetite. 

"People need to be most concerned about the regular, everyday seasonal flu," Quinlisk said.

But Iowa health officials are now testing samples of people with flu-like illness to detect further spread of the new bug. And CDC officials have asked states across the country to be vigilant in looking for it, said Dr. Joe Bresee, the agency's influenza and epidemiology branch chief.

The current seasonal flu vaccine being offered by doctors and clinics was not developed to protect against the H3N2 virus. It contains some antigens similar to a flu virus that circulated in the 1990s, so some people who had the flu then or were vaccinated could have some immunity, but it's not clear how much, Quinlisk said. The Iowa children apparently had not been vaccinated, she added.

With the new cases, CDC officials have confirmed 31 cases in the U.S. of the new swine-origin virus since 2005, including 10 with the H3N2 virus that carries the M gene from the 2009 H1N1 virus.

The best prevention for the new flu, as with any flu, is to wash hands frequently, cover coughs and sneezes and limit spread of germs by staying home when you're sick, health officials said.

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Twentieth Century Fox

Meg Ryan showed millions of women how to convincingly fake it in an iconic scene from "When Harry Met Sally."

Half of you ladies have faked an orgasm at least once, scientists claim. Maybe you knew the real thing just wasn’t gonna happen, so you wanted to wrap it up and go to sleep. Perhaps you didn’t want to bruise his ego.

Or maybe you thought it was a way to keep your man from straying.

At least that’s what a new study concludes.

“By having an orgasm, women are signaling to their male partner that ‘I’m selecting you,’” lead author Farnaz Kaighobadi says.

Kaighobadi, a research fellow at Columbia University, and her coauthors wanted to see whether women would be more likely to send that signal, even if they weren’t really feeling it at the moment, if they suspected their mate of infidelity.

For their study, Kaighobadi and her coauthors recruited 453 straight women who’d been in a relationship for at least six months. The young women – 22, on average – all lived in south Florida. They were asked if they thought their partner would cheat if given a chance and if they’ve done so-called “mate retention acts,” like call their man at unexpected times to see if he was really home alone watching ESPN or held his hand when other women were checking him out.

As researchers suspected, women who thought their men were more likely to be cheating louts were more likely to stake their claim – and fake an orgasm.

Read more from the Vitals blog. It's good for you!

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By Rachel Rettner
My Health News Daily

Taking even slightly too much Tylenol over a period of several days can lead to an overdose with deadly consequences, a new study says.

The study looked at what are called "staggered overdoses," in which a person repeatedly exceeds the daily recommendation through small overdoses. This is in contrast to the more familiar single overdose, when a person takes too many pills at once.

In the study, staggered overdoses of acetaminophen  (which is found in Tylenol and other pain releivers) were more deadly than single overdoses, even though people who experienced staggered overdoses typically took smaller total amounts of acetaminophen than those who experienced a single overdose.

Doctors may not identify staggered overdoses right away, researchers added. People with a staggered overdose may have levels of the drug in their blood below what a standard blood test would indicate as an overdose, even when their liver is badly damaged.

People taking acetaminophen should stay within the recommended limits of the drug and take even less of it when they are on other painkillers, said study researcher Kenneth Simpson of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The researchers defined an overdose as taking more than 4,000 milligrams of acetaminophen in a 24 hour period. The Food and Drug Administration also sets the maximum dose at 4,000 milligrams.

And, Simpson said, doctors should realize the criteria used to identify overdose patients do not work as well for staggered overdoses.

The study was published online in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Simpson and colleagues examined information from 663 patients with liver problems caused by acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol) who were admitted to an Edinburgh hospital between 1992 and 2008.

The researchers found that nearly a quarter of them (161 patients) had taken staggered overdoses.

On average, staggered overdose patients took 24 grams (24,000 milligrams) of acetaminophen, typically over several days. Single-overdose patients consumed 27 grams (27,000 milligrams) at once, or six times the recommended dose for a whole day.

A total of 60 patients died from a staggered overdose, and 140 patients from a single overdose. This equates to a mortality rate of 37.3 percent among the staggered overdose group, and 27.8 percent in the single overdose group. Staggered overdose patients also were more likely to have liver and brain problems, require kidney dialysis and need help with breathing.

Close to 60 percent of the staggered overdose group said they had taken the drug to relieve pain, including abdominal or muscular pains, headache or toothache.

During a staggered overdose, the drug likely builds up in the liver and kills the cells, Simpson said.

Staggered overdose patients may have fared less well because they did not receive the appropriate treatment soon enough, or because they had been drinking alcohol along with acetaminophen, he said.

The new study "sheds light on the fact that the maximum recommended daily dose should be strictly adhered to," said Dr. Joshua Lenchus, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Acetaminophen also appears in combination with other drugs in certain prescription products. In January the Food and Drug Administration asked all manufacturers of acetaminophen to lower the dose in a single tablet to 325 mg. Even at this dose, people who take two tablets every four hours for 24 hours come close to the 4,000 mg limit. (Packets of regular Tylenol pills, which contain 325 mg, say: "Do not take more than 12 tablets in 24 hours.")

"It's pretty easy for people to take just a couple of tablets every four hours," Lenchus said.

Doctors need to consider the possibility of overdoses when patients come to the hospital after taking acetaminophen, even if the patients have not obviously taken many pills at once, Lenchus said.

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By Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

Eating canned food every day may raise the levels of the compound bisphenol A (BPA) in a person's urine more than previously suspected, a new study suggests.

People who ate a serving of canned soup every day for five days had BPA levels of 20.8 micrograms per liter of urine, whereas people who instead ate fresh soup had levels of 1.1 micrograms per liter, according to the study. BPA is found in many canned foods — it is a byproduct of the chemicals used to prevent corrosion.

When the researchers looked at the rise in BPA levels seen in the average participant who ate canned soup compared with those who ate fresh soup, they found a 1,221 percent jump.

"To see an increase in this magnitude was quite surprising," said study leader Karin Michels, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The levels of BPA seen in the study participants "are among the most extreme reported in a nonoccupational setting," the researchers wrote in their study. In the general population, levels have been found to be around 1 to 2 micrograms per liter, Michels said.

The study noted that levels higher than 13 micrograms per liter were found in only the top 5 percent of participants in the National Health and Examination Survey, which is an ongoing study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We are concerned about the influence of [hormone-disrupting] chemicals on health in general, and BPA is one of them," Michels told MyHealthNewsDaily.

The study is published online todayin the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Weigh in on Facebook: Will this finding impact how much canned soup you slurp?

Soup for lunch

The study included 75 people, whose average age was 27. One group of participants ate 12 ounces of fresh soup every day at lunchtime, while the other ate the same amount of canned soup each day. Urine samples were collected from the participants on the fourth and fifth days of the study.

BPA was detected in 77 percent of people who ate the fresh soup, and all of the people who ate the canned soup, according to the study.

Only a few studies had previously looked at BPA levels from eating canned foods, and those relied on asking people how much of the food they usually eat comes from cans, Michels said. The new study was the first in which researchers randomized participants to eat a small serving of canned food or fresh food, and measured the resulting difference in their urine BPA levels, she said.

"We've known for a while that drinking beverages that have been stored in certain hard plastics can increase the amount of BPA in your body. This study suggests that canned foods may be an even greater concern, especially given their wide use," said study researcher Jenny Carwile, a doctoral student at Harvard.

BPA and health

A 2008 study of 1,455 people showed that higher urinary BPA levels were linked with higher risks of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and abnormal concentrations of certain liver enzymes, even after factors such as age, body mass index and smoking were taken into account.

And other studies have linked BPA levels in a woman's urine during her pregnancy to health problems in her child.

It is not known how long the levels of BPA might remain high, according to the study. However, it is also not known whether such a spike, even if it isn't sustained for very long, may affect health, the researchers wrote.

The study was limited in that all of the participants were students or staff at one school, and a single soup brand (Progresso) was tested, but the researchers wrote that they expected the results to apply to canned foods with a similar BPA content.

"Reducing canned food consumption may be a good idea, especially for people consuming foods from cans regularly," Michels said. "Maybe manufacturers can take the step of taking BPA out of the lining of cans — some have already done this, but only a few."

The study was funded by the Allen Foundation, which advocates nutrition research.

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Could taking one of these vitamins lead you down the path of bad behavior? Yes, say researchers.

Taking supplements may lead to poorer health, not because of what they do to your body, but what they do to your mind.

When people take supplements they get a false sense of invulnerability, a new study shows. And that can translate into a greater tendency to head down the path of risky behavior.

The intriguing study published in Psychological Science, found that people didn’t even need to be given real supplements for this devil-may-care attitude to develop – they just needed to be told they were swallowing something healthful.

For their study, Taiwanese researchers gave placebo pills to 82 volunteers, half of whom were told the capsules contained vitamins. The rest were told the truth – that these were simply sugar pills.

The big surprise came when the researchers surveyed the two groups. Those taking phony supplements reported a greater sense of invulnerability and less of a desire to exercise. They also were more likely to consider engaging in casual sex, sunbathing and binge-drinking.

At the end of the study the two groups were told they could choose between a healthful meal and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure enough, more of those in the group who were told they'd taken a supplement said they’d prefer the buffet.

The findings come as no surprise to Leslie Bonci, director of sports nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“You see this even in professional athletes,” Bonci said. “Sometimes they attribute to supplements superhuman properties that let them off the hook for healthy behaviors. They’ll say, ‘I’m taking this supplement so it doesn’t matter what I eat.’”

Bonci lays the blame on ads that show healthy fit people taking supplements. You don’t see this kind of advertising for all the foods that actually do lead to good health she said.

And those ads lead to unreasonable expectations, Bonci said.

“We this face challenge every day,” she added. “And it’s not just athletes. There are many patients who believe there is exercise in a bottle.”

People have just come to expect that pills can cure everything, said Dr. Andrew Leuchter, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Laboratory of Brain, Behavior and Pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We live in a society that is very oriented towards taking medication,” Leuchter said. “People feel like they can take a pill and it will almost immunize them from any unhealthy lifestyle choices”

And then there’s the fact that human beings are very good at keeping two contradictory ideas in their heads at once. “It’s one of those quirks of human nature,” Leuchter said. “We do something we think will enhance our health but at the same time we’re happy to do something that may in the long term be detrimental.”

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It's not clear why chicken jerky products seem to be causing illnesses and even deaths in dogs, federal Food and Drug Administration officials say.

Chicken jerky treats may be to blame for dozens of new reports of mysterious illnesses and some deaths in dogs, prompting a renewed warning for pet owners by the Food and Drug Administration.

At least 70 dogs have been sickened so far this year after reportedly eating chicken jerky products imported from China, FDA officials said. That’s up from 54 reports of illness in 2010. Some of the dogs have died, according to the anecdotal reports from pet owners and veterinarians.

FDA officials say they have not been able to find a cause for the illnesses. Extensive chemical and microbiological testing has failed to turn up a specific contaminant and officials did not identify a specific brand of treats. They note that the reports of illness have not conclusively been tied to chicken jerky products, also sold as chicken tenders, chicken strips or chicken treats.  

The new warning follows previous FDA cautions about chicken jerky treats in 2007 and 2008. But after a high of 156 reports of illness in 2007, the number of complaints dropped. Now, it's rising again.

Dog owners and vets are reporting that animals may be stricken with a range of illnesses within days or hours of eating chicken jerky, including kidney failure and Fanconi syndrome, a condition characterized by low glucose.

Symptoms may include decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea, increased water consumption and increased urination. If dogs show any of these signs, stop feeding the animal the chicken jerky products, FDA officials said. If signs are severe or persist for more than 24 hours, seek veterinary help.

Most dogs have recovered, officials said.

Illnesses can be reported to the FDA’s Pet Food Complaint site.

Will you change what kind of treats you give your dog? Tell us on Facebook.

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What should someone dying of cancer do when the last-ditch drug that they have relied upon is shown not to work? 

And what do insurance companies and government programs do about coverage when bad news arrives showing that the expensive life preserver to which many are clinging does no good -- and may actually accelerate a more miserable death? 

These are precisely the horrible dilemmas that many women dying of end-stage breast cancer face with the Food and Drug Administration’s finding that the drug Avastin does not work.

In 2008, the FDA allowed Avastin to be marketed as a treatment for incurable breast cancer. The approval came under a "compassionate access" program that allows very sick patients access to drugs before all the data that drug companies need to gather to show proof of efficacy has been collected.  All the data on Avastin is now in.  It does not show any real benefit to women in this desperate situation.

Still, many women with no other option will want to give Avastin a try. And they may be right in that the failure of a drug to show any benefit to a big number of women does not mean that no individual woman might benefit a tiny bit.  Still, the picture painted by the data is bleak, the drug costs about ten thousand dollars a month, and it is most likely just to make you sicker as you die.

Those now on Avastin should be allowed by their insurers to make the choice to stay on. The cost is large but it would be wrong to deny the drug to those who want to keep taking it even if the most likely result is that these women will provide the final sample of evidence that Avastin is a failure. But, for new patients not on the drug, the only fair option is to let them have access but not to pay for Avastin with government or private insurance money. 

The hope that Avastin might extend the lives of those dying from breast cancer is gone.  Those who still want to rely on the drug as they die should not be denied that last choice -- as poor as that choice may be. 

But there is no ethical argument in favor of paying for a very expensive drug that does not work for new patients, even when there is nothing else to offer.

Breast cancer drug revoked for 'life-threatening' risks

Jemal Countess / Getty Images

After six years of marriage, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are splitting after rumors of infidelity. Here, they are shown at the launch party for

Demi and Ashton (you don’t really need their last names, do you?) have called it quits. Or, rather, Demi has called it quits, apparently, following rumors of Ashton’s moments with a-woman-not-Demi while visiting San Diego.

I write that not because you necessarily care about Ashton and Demi – though a lot of people seem to – but because it brings up the issue of monogamy and if we humans are truly built for it.

The full answer, as you might expect, is pretty complicated. I am currently writing a book with Emory University neuroscientist Larry Young, one of the world’s leading experts in pair bonding -- the way biologists talk about “love” and monogamy in animals -- that attempts to lay it out. But the short answer depends on two things: First, what do we mean when we say monogamy? Second, what’s going on in our brains?

According to Young, only about 3 to 5 percent of mammals form pair bonds between males and females. But even among those that do, “monogamy” does not necessarily mean sexual exclusivity. It means the partners share a social glue, raise a family together and comfort and defend each other. They might very well have sex with the neighbor critter down the block, though.

"Whether humans are monogamous by nature is debatable, and a matter of semantics," Young said.

Monogamy resides in the brain. Young studies voles, small, furry critters found all over North America. One species, prairie voles, is generally monogamous. Another species, the meadow vole, is not. These two species look virtually identical, and even when you look at their genes, there’s barely any difference. But subtle variations in parts of key, brain-related, genes make one monogamous and one promiscuous.

Even within prairie voles, there’s variation. Some are faithful, some play the field. Mounting evidence suggests this is true for people, too.

We know there are differences between human genders, too, with men reporting higher rates of infidelity than women (though women have been slowly catching up). There are several reasons why this might be so, but one is fundamental: Men, especially younger men, have evolved to be readily turned on. Female libido can vary significantly by cycle day.   

We don’t like to think that something we regard as so basic depends on a couple of molecules in our heads, the action of which can be determined by how we develop in our mothers’ wombs, or certain life events, but such forces do act on our brains, making us more or less likely to have extra-monogamy sex.

It’s not, as Demi suggested in her press statement, just a question of “values” or “vows.” How monogamy plays out for each of us also has a lot to do with how we are wired.     

Would cheating be a deal-breaker for you in your relationship? Tell us on Facebook.

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Lisa Poole / AP file

Heavy bags are a real downer.

The charity workers staking out your favorite holiday shopping site with collection cups in hand may have chosen the exact right spot to prick your conscience, a new study suggests.  

It’s not that you feel guilty for your purchasing power.  It’s about the weight of your shopping bags.

Researchers found that when we are physically weighed down, with anything from groceries to gifts, our thoughts inescapably turn to serious -- weighty -- subjects.  Apparently, the wiring in our brain sparks directly from physical weight to psychological weight.

When we’re toting a big haul, we're more likely to be suddenly struck by the importance of current events or issues in the world around us, according to the report published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior.

“We found that carrying a heavy load leads consumers to feel an unrelated event as being more important and more stressful,” said the study’s lead author Meng Zhang, an assistant professor in the department of marketing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For the new study Zhang ran a series of experiments on more than 100 people to look at the impact of heavy loads on thinking.

In her experiments, Zhang asked a group of volunteers to carry a shopping bag with bottles of water that weighed about 10 pounds. A comparison group carried bags with empty water bottles. The volunteers were told the experiment was to determine how much weight consumers might be willing to carry while shopping.

Survey: Are your kids spoiled by the holidays?

Later, both groups were asked questions, such as how important it is for people to express their opinions in public, how important it was to read nutrition labels, or how important it was that people stay socially connected.

Sure enough, volunteers carrying the heavy bags tended to score higher on their answers to the societal questions. In other words, people carting around heavy bags were more likely to say lots of stuff was really important.

Perhaps even more intriguing was Zhang’s discovery that people could be nudged to think about the importance of weighty societal issues just by asking them to read narratives that included words such as “heavy,” “tons,” and “loaded.”

Is there an antidote to the psychological consequences of carrying a shopping bag loaded down with holiday loot?

Apparently there is.  In another experiment Zhang determined that the psychological impact of a heavy load could be diminished when people thought about lightweight objects, such as balloons and feathers.      

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The fertility rate is dropping, statistics say. People are simply having fewer children. Experts think the reason can be traced to financial planning by would-be parents wary of their futures.

But is that really the case? Do couples really behave this rationally? A large percentage of all pregnancies are unplanned, so isn’t it also possible that stress, anxiety, boredom, and damaged relationships brought on by economic gloom and doom are simply killing the national sex life?

While some couples no doubt do plan carefully, and opt to delay having children until sunnier days arrive, says psychologist, therapist and TODAY contributor Gail Saltz, people are also preoccupied with money worries. She senses that many more people are experiencing anxiety and stress, and possibly depression, because of the economic pressure of the past four years.  

“And when people are worried, they don’t feel like having sex,” she explained. “This is especially true for women. It is darn near impossible for a woman to have an orgasm if she is terribly anxious. A woman can physically have sex, but desire, arousal, orgasm, everything across the board is affected.”

Picture the couple who’s scrimping and saving to make ends meet. They’ve cut out restaurant dinners, movie tickets, vacations, theater-going. They’re sitting in front of the TV in sweatpants watching another episode of “NCIS” or “30 Rock.” They look at each other think, "My God, the last thing I want to do is have sex with this person."

“If you can’t spend any money doing anything fun, if that’s sucked out of the relationship, too, you’ve got no novelty, no playtime,” Saltz explained. Both are critical to stoking libido.   

Finally, there’s the inevitable sniping between partners. “Money is the number one thing people fight about,” Saltz said, “but you don’t even have to disagree about it. If you are anxious or one partner is depressed, well, that’s the person you are intimate with and so it gets taken out on you. You have to negotiate it all, and then, no, you don’t really feel like having sex.”

So it’s probably not only considered financial planning that’s responsible for the drop in birth rates – a drop that also occurred during the Great Depression, by the way. Maybe it’s that America is stressed out, bored, and more than a little cranky. 

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By The Associated Press

J.M. Smucker Co. is recalling thousands of 16-ounce jars of its Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter Chunky because of possible salmonella contamination.

The Ohio-based company says the jars covered in the recall would have been purchased in the last week or so. They have "Best if Used By" dates of Aug. 3, 2012 and Aug. 4, 2012, plus the production codes 1307004 and 1308004.

Smucker says 3,000 jars are being recalled from stores. Another 16,000 had never left warehouses.

Salmonella is bacteria resulting in fever, cramps and diarrhea that lasts for several days and can require hospitalization.

Smucker says no illnesses have been reported.

The product was distributed in: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

While more boys than girls are treated for ADHD, a new report shows that among adults, the numbers have flipped. Women’s use of medications for the condition has soared in the past decade, surpassing that of men.

From 2001 to 2010, the number of American women ages 20 to 44 who took ADHD drugs skyrocketed more than 250 percent, according to the report from Medco Health Solutions. Researchers analyzed trends in the use of mental health medications among about 2.5 million insured Americans.

Among all 20- to 44-year-olds, about one in 50 took ADHD medications in 2010 — 1.9 percent of women, and 1.8 percent of men, whose use increased more than 150 percent from 2001 to 2010. One factor for the rise in adults taking ADHD drugs might be that all five medications indicated for treating the condition have been approved since 2001.

Since ADHD doesn’t pop up all of a sudden in adulthood, it's likely that women who started taking meds in the past decade flew under the radar until they became adults, says Dr. Lenard Adler, director of the Psychiatry and Neurology Adult ADHD Program at the New York University School of Medicine.

That’s because girls are less likely than boys to exhibit the “H”—for hyperactivity—in ADHD, so boys with the condition are more likely to be noticed, says Adler, who was not involved with the Medco report. But as children grow into adulthood, he says, the “attention deficit” component of ADHD becomes more prominent, because grown-ups have a lot more to keep track of.

The girls whose ADHD had gone unrecognized, chalked up to laziness or lack of motivation in school, grow into women who stumble when they encounter the real world of work and family. They can’t hold jobs, and, because they are so disorganized, they pay their bills late, if at all, lose track of appointments and misplace their kids’ school permission slips.

Parenthood often leads to adults finally getting an ADHD diagnosis, Adler says. “Many times for a parent, what will bring them in to be diagnosed is they have a child who’s been diagnosed.” The parents might recognize that their child’s symptoms are ones they themselves have dealt with for years.

When a child is diagnosed with ADHD, he says, there’s a 30 percent to 40 percent chance that a parent has it, too. Of those parents, the moms are more likely to seek professional help than the dads, explains Russell Barkley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina who’s long studied ADHD in adults. And in the last couple of years, Barkley says, he’s been interviewed for a number of articles about ADHD in women, which have probably heightened awareness.

Adler says he’s glad the data show more women are seeking treatment, but since 4.5 percent of adults are thought to have ADHD, it's clear that less than half are getting help. “There’s a large group out there still not being treated,” he says.

Hospitals around the country may already have the technology to inexpensively diagnose – or rule out – Alzheimer’s disease, two new studies suggest.

The studies looked at an MRI method that can cheaply and accurately detect changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Currently doctors who need an accurate diagnosis must send patients off to a center with a PET scanner. Along with a higher price tag, images from PET scanners require the use of radioactive tracers which carry some risks if a patient is tested repeatedly.

 One of the new studies was published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, the other in Neurology.

 "This can become a useful way of diagnosing the disease and managing therapy," said study co-author Dr. John Detre, a professor of neurology and radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "It can also be used an inexpensive and non-invasive way to document a patient’s response to new drugs. You can repeat tests without risk since you don’t have to inject a radioactive substance every time you want a new measurement."

PET scanners look at how the various brain regions use glucose – the fuel that keeps us thinking. Doctors can tell by the pattern of glucose use whether a brain is developing Alzheimer’s because nerve cells use less glucose when they are beginning to fail. The pattern of bright and dull spots on a scan tell doctors whether brain regions typically hit by Alzheimer’s have been damaged.

The new MRI technique looks at blood flow in each brain region. Detre and his colleagues showed that patterns of blood flow in Alzheimer’s patients mirrored those of glucose use, which means that MRI scans can give the same information as more expensive PET scanners.

The new technique may also help drive drug discovery. Pharmaceutical companies developing Alzheimer’s treatments could inexpensively track patients and, because there is little exposure to radiation, follow-ups can be more frequent with less risk to trial participants, Detre said.

The new method requires only a standard MRI machine and computer programs that are already available to medical centers, Detre said. So, if the technique catches on, it could be widely available in a very short time.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, no matter how early the disease is diagnosed. But patients can use an early diagnosis to get their lives in order while they are still cognitively intact and also as a chance to sign up for clinical trials.

Early Alzheimer's disclosures to become more common

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The reasons many teenage girls start taking birth control pills may surprise you.

Just because your teenage daughter wants to go on the Pill doesn’t mean she’s necessarily planning on having sex, Mom and Dad.

In fact, a third of teenage users go on the Pill for non-contraceptive reasons, most commonly menstrual pain relief, more regular periods — which could help prevent migraines in some -- and clearer skin, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute.

As far as she knows, author Rachel Jones says, this is the first time anyone has looked at Pill use for reasons other than to prevent pregnancy. “Even my colleagues were surprised when we first ran the numbers.”

Jones based her report on numbers from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the CDC.  The report's data were gathered using in-person interviews with 7,356 women ages 15 to 44.

Pill users were asked whether they took it for any of several reasons besides birth control: cramps or pain during their period; treatment for acne or endometriosis or regulation of their periods; or for some other purpose (although a few oral contraceptives are approved for treating in acne in women who also want to prevent pregnancy, the other non-contraceptive uses are “off-label”).

Many women said they used it for non-contraceptive reasons other than those listed, Jones says, noting that some perimenopausal women take the Pill to smooth their path to menopause.

An estimated 18 percent, or 11.2 million, women between the ages of 15 and 44 are currently on the Pill. About 14 percent of Pill users — representing 1.5 million U.S. teens and women -- take it only for non-contraceptive reasons, she says. About half of them have never had sex.

In addition, 9 percent of sexually experienced oral contraceptive users haven’t had sex in three months or more but continue to take the Pill. “They do have sex unexpectedly, so they’re prepared for it," Jones says. Plus, she says, they probably like having fewer cramps, a better complexion and regular periods.

Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, decided to look at non-contraceptive uses of the pill after interviewing teens about issues related to sex. The girls “were really fascinated and interested in the pill for menstrual regulation.”

She says she hopes her report will get the word out that teens and women take the Pill for “real immediate health concerns,” not necessarily because they’re sexually active and don’t want to get pregnant.

Jones recalls one girl who went to see her doctor with her mom. “I have really painful periods,” the girl told the doctor. “Would the Pill be appropriate?” Jones says the girl’s doctor turned her down because she wasn’t sexually active.

Then, Jones says, there was the teenage boy who blanched when his girlfriend told him she wanted to go on the pill to ease her cramps. “No, don’t,” he urged his girlfriend. “Your parents are going to think we’re having sex.”

Nearly 5 million contact lenses shipped to consumers are being recalled by CooperVision Inc. in an expanded action that includes a second Avaira brand that may be contaminated with silicone oil residue and linked to blurred vision, eye injuries and severe pain.

CooperVision Inc. officials on Tuesday added Avaira Sphere contact lenses to an August recall of Avaira Toric lenses because certain lots failed to meet quality standards because of the oil residue, according to a press release from the company's Pleasanton, Calif., office. Denise Powell, a company spokeswoman, said the line produced 6.6 million Avaira Sphere lenses affected by the recall, but 4.9 million were actually shipped.

The move comes after the federal Food and Drug Administration issued a Class I warning about the products and pressured the company last month to increase public notice about the recall of nearly 780,000 Avaira Toric lenses. Class I recalls are the most serious kind and involve problems in which there is a reasonable chance of serious adverse health consequences or death.

As of late October, the FDA had received at least 40 reports of problems associated with various CooperVision contact lenses, agency records show. At least 15 mentioned Avaira Toric and at least two mentioned Avaira Sphere, according to data shared by Phyllis Entis, who maintains the eFoodAlert blog. An FDA official was not available to discuss the new recall Tuesday.

Dozens of Avaira Toric users reported problems ranging from hazy vision and pain to severe injuries, including torn corneas, which required emergency medical treatment. Company officials were accused of issuing a "stealth recall" in August that left many consumers unaware of the problem.

Company officials noted that no product lines other than Avaira Toric and Avaira Sphere use silicone oil to manufacture the products. The firm expects to set aside a reserve of $9 million for the costs of the expanded recall. All told, the company expects to spend $23.2 million on the Avaira recalls, according to the press release.  

Consumers with problems or questions related to the recalls should contact the company at 1-855-526-6737. The firm says it has reached out to affected consumers to ensure their safety.  

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