Aphonia and Receiving Social Security Disability Benefits | Disability Blog

Image via WikipediaThere are some voice difficulties that are marked by making vocal sounds different from what they should normally be or by having problems pronouncing words properly. An example of this is dysarthria. There are other voice problems that are characterized by an impairment in your ability to produce vocal sounds with your vocal organs. An example of this is dysphonia. Aphonia literally means “no voice”. Aphonia is a condition in which you lose the ability to speak. It may involve a complete or partial loss of your voice. You may not be able to speak at all, or you may only be able to whisper. There are two main categories of aphonia. They are organic and functional. Organic aphonia results from some kind of infection, injury or disease like laryngeal or thyroid cancer. Functional aphonia is aphonia where there is no discernable physical cause for the condition. An example of this is hysterical aphonia. As just mentioned, aphonia may be caused by physical conditions like inflammation, disease, or injury. This includes:
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Link Between Fracture Prevention and Treatment Adherence Not Fully Understood by Patients

ScienceDaily (2011-01-12) -- Newly released findings of a multinational survey conducted on behalf of the International Osteoporosis Foundation show clear disparities between patients' and doctors' perceptions of osteoporosis and its management.
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Simple Question Aids Parkinson's Diagnosis

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today

Dutch researchers said they have found a way to distinguish atypical Parkinson's disease from the more common standard form: asking patients if they can still ride a bicycle.

When the question was put to 111 consecutive patients with Parkinson's disease, nearly all those who said it had become impossible were subsequently determined to have the atypical form, according to Bastiaan Bloem, PhD, and colleagues at Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands.
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Living Longer Comes With a Physical Cost - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBaseBy NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Americans are living longer, but those added years are more likely to be a time of disease and disability.

An analysis of government data has found that while life expectancy has steadily increased over the past decade, the prevalence of heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes has also increased, and disability has grown as well.

For example, in 1998 about 16 percent of men in their 70s had a mobility problem — that is, they failed one of four commonly used physical tests. By 2006, almost 25 percent failed at least one.

Writing in the January issue of The Journal of Gerontology B, the authors conclude that people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease.
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Low Sodium May Boost Fracture Risk from MedPage Today

By Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today

Low serum sodium may be a risk factor for fractures in the elderly, a researcher said here.

In a long-running cohort study in Holland, mild hyponatremia was associated with an increased risk of nonvertebral fractures and prevalent vertebral fractures, according to Carola Zillikens, MD, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

The condition is usually considered benign, but cross-sectional studies have shown it can lead to gait instability, falls, and fractures, Zillikens reported at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

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Cancer 'is purely man-made' say scientists after finding almost no trace of disease in Egyptian mummies | Mail Online

Image via WikipediaBy Fiona Macrae

Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found.

Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.

A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than 150,000 lives a year in the UK.

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: 'In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.

'The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.'

Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn't live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones died occur.
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Vitamin D Marker for HF Deaths from MedPage Today

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Heart failure death occurred two to three times more often in people with vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency compared with those who had normal levels of the vitamin, according to data from a government survey.

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No Help for OA With Popular Supplements from MedPage Today

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today

Clinical trials of glucosamine and chondroitin -- either taken together or separately -- have failed to demonstrate a clinically significant benefit for patients with knee or hip osteoarthritis, a meta-analysis found.

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U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Publishes Final Rule to Help Veterans Exposed to Agent Orange - Disability.gov

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Veterans exposed to herbicides while serving in Vietnam and other areas will find it easier to access quality health care and qualify for disability compensation under a final rule published in the Federal Register. The new rule expands the list of health problems VA will presume to be related to Agent Orange and other herbicide exposures, which will speed up the application process. VA is adding Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease and expanding chronic lymphocytic leukemia to include all chronic B cell leukemias, such as hairy cell leukemia.

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Estimates of Deaths Associated with Seasonal Influenza --- United States, 1976--2007

Influenza infections are associated with thousands of deaths every year in the United States, with the majority of deaths from seasonal influenza occurring among adults aged ≥65 years (1--4). For several decades, CDC has made annual estimates of influenza-associated deaths, which have been used in influenza research and to develop influenza control and prevention policy. To update previously published estimates of the numbers and rates of influenza-associated deaths during 1976--2003 by adding four influenza seasons through 2006--07, CDC used statistical models with data from death certificate reports. National mortality data for two categories of underlying cause of death codes, pneumonia and influenza causes and respiratory and circulatory causes, were used in regression models to estimate lower and upper bounds for the number of influenza-associated deaths. Estimates by seasonal influenza virus type and subtype were examined to determine any association between virus type and subtype and the number of deaths in a season. This report summarizes the results of these analyses, which found that, during 1976--2007, estimates of annual influenza-associated deaths from respiratory and circulatory causes (including pneumonia and influenza causes) ranged from 3,349 in 1986--87 to 48,614 in 2003--04. The annual rate of influenza-associated death in the United States overall during this period ranged from 1.4 to 16.7 deaths per 100,000 persons. The findings also indicated the wide variation in the estimated number of deaths from season to season was closely related to the particular influenza virus types and subtypes in circulation.

The current study extends estimates of influenza-associated deaths from two previous CDC studies (2,3) by adding data from four more influenza seasons for a total of 31 influenza seasons (1976--2007). Estimates are provided for three age groups (<19>1) and can be considered a lower bound for deaths associated with influenza (2,4). However, a diagnosis of influenza virus infection often is not confirmed with sensitive and specific laboratory diagnostics, particularly among older persons, and even when identified is rarely recorded on death certificates (5). Many deaths associated with influenza infections occur from secondary infections such as bacterial pneumonia or complications of chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (6). Therefore, estimates using underlying respiratory and circulatory mortality data (which include pneumonia and influenza causes) can provide an upper bound for influenza-associated deaths (2,7).
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Polio Effects Surfacing Decades Later

Image via WikipediaDecades after the last polio epidemic in the United States, people who had long since recovered from the disease are feeling its effects again. The August issue of Mayo Clinic Women's HealthSource provides an overview of post-polio syndrome, its causes and treatment options.

In the first half of the 20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in America. Paralytic polio causes pain and weakness in the arms or legs and problems with swallowing and breathing. This occurs when the polio virus attacks and kills motor nerve cells, which control muscles.

Since 1955, when the polio vaccine was introduced, the disease has all but disappeared in the United States. But in the early 1990s, patients who previously had polio and recovered began to report progressive pain and weakness in muscles and joints as well as increasing problems with fatigue.

Mayo Clinic researchers have been following a group of adults in Minnesota who had polio between 1935 and 1955 to learn more about the lingering effects of the disease. Researchers suspect that aging plays a role. "If you've already lost nerve cells in your youth because of polio and the remaining cells have been working twice as hard, you're going to have even more difficulties as you start to lose nerve cells to aging," says Anthony Windebank, M.D., neurologist and director of the Regenerative Neurobiology Program at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

In addition, people may limp or walk differently because of polio damage and, as a result, be more prone to wear and tear and arthritis in the knees. Finally, people who've learned to compensate for polio-related problems may find that the compensation causes considerable fatigue.

There's no specific treatment for post-polio syndrome itself but most symptoms can be treated or managed. For patients who suspect polio is causing symptoms, the recommendation is to seek an evaluation with a provider who understands the illness and has experience treating neuromuscular disorders.

Source: Mayo Clinic Women's HealthSource
Polio Effects Surfacing Decades Later

Genetic Markers for Living to 100 Years?: Topol on Genomics

A paper in Science, July 1, 2010, entitled "Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans," by Paola Sebastiani and colleagues from Boston University has generated intense interst and controversy.

Below is a transcript of Dr. Topol's post on The Big Flap About Pathway Genomics and Walgreen's.

The topic is exceptional longevity, and can we predict it. This is an outgrowth of the Science paper by Sebastiani and colleagues, including Thomas Perls from Boston University, [published] July 1st in Science. This paper has been responsible for generating quite a controversy, which we will get into in a minute. Basically, the main finding for looking at a large group of centenarians that the New England group has accumulated over many years and doing a genome wide association study compared to a potpourri of controls --controls that came from the Illumina database, controls that included children of parents who had died in their 70s, and even a group of Parkinson’s disease patients -- so this was one of the concerns. Another one that was raised in the post-publication phase was the problem with the chips. That is, there were different chips that were tested, one that looked at 310,000 SNPs and another one that looked at 670,000 SNPs. These were not used in all the patients, so there was some lack of potential quality control regarding the SNP markers. Nonetheless, what this group concluded in Science was that using 150 SNPs, one could predict with 77% accuracy whether you would live to centenarian status, which is a pretty big jump, of course, for not only today. It is very difficult to predict longevity. Now this has come under siege. There have been reports in the New York Times. There was a Newsweek article that was entitled “The Little Flaw in Longevity-Gene Study That Could Be a Big Problem.” There are all sorts of things in the blogosphere such as “Serious Flaws Revealed in ‘Longevity Gene’ Study” [by Daniel MacArthur]. The critical issue, though, is whether these data will hold up to reanalysis. The investigators will have to redo the model that predicts exceptional longevity, taking out the SNPs that are now known to be faulty, and see whether or not, with the replication that they had, it will all hold up. Probably there will be some dilution of the effect, but some of the genes that came out of this study like TOM40, which is a known major modulator of the APOE locus adjacent to this gene, and which has already been implicated in longevity, itself were quite striking. So, we will have to see what this will turn out. This is quite a controversial study. Longevity and the science of aging is an area of fascination, and I would be interested to get your thoughts. What was really striking was that a Wall Street Journal poll that was conducted in the days after the Science paper asked how many people would like to know whether they carry the gene markers for exceptional longevity, and 75%of people (who at least read the Wall Street Journal and go onto its website and vote) wanted to get this information.

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Medical News: Clinical, Economic Costs of Dysphagia Are High - in Critical Care, General Critical Care from MedPage Today

By Nancy Walsh, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Dysphagia among hospitalized patients -- particularly the elderly -- not only lengthens hospital stays and increases the risk of dying, but also carries significant economic burdens.
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A Caution on Antacids for Older Patients - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

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By PAULA SPAN

They’re among the most widely prescribed medications in the world. They’re reasonably safe for most people to take. That’s why drugs that reduce stomach acid — used to combat heartburn, acid reflux and ulcers — don’t get much scrutiny from doctors, or from patients.

“When patients were admitted to our geriatric wards, a lot of them didn’t have clear indications for taking these drugs,” said Dr. Ian Logan, a Scottish physician and co-author of a recent editorial on acid suppressants in the journal Age and Ageing. “And they’d remained on them for a lot longer than they should have.” One of his patients had been taking an acid-reducer for 15 years.

Dr. Logan and two colleagues with Britain’s National Health Service decided to sound the alarm — rather, to sound it once more, as researchers began discovering problems with these drugs years ago. “They do have significant side effects, especially in older patients,” Dr. Logan told me in an interview.
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Vital Signs: Breast Cancer Screening Among Women Aged 50--74 Years --- United States, 2008

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Breast cancer remains the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In 2006 (the most recent data available), approximately 191,410 women were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and 40,820 women died (1). The incidence and mortality have been declining since 1996 at a rate of approximately 2% per year (2), possibly as a result of widespread screening with mammography and the development of more effective therapies (3). Mammography use declined slightly in 2004, but rose again in 2006 (4,5). This Vital Signs report updates mammography screening prevalence in the United States, using data from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).
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When I’m 164 - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

by Paula Span

My theory is that the more intensely involved we are with caring for the very old and sick, the less appealing the notion of ever-longer lifespans becomes.

I can practically hear legions of New Old Age readers — hip-deep in elder tasks, in decisions and tussles and exhausting responsibilities — chorusing, “More years of this? Please, no.” A number of older readers have expressed similar sentiments here themselves.

But what if longevity didn’t involve an extended period of managing chronic illnesses and coping with frailty and disability, as so often happens now? What if we were talking about years of health and vigor, decades or even centuries in which we barely felt the impact of age? About not merely (merely!) defeating killers like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, but achieving near-immortality?

Such visions, and the emerging science that might make them possible, have intrigued Jonathan Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, for years.
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Despite health challenge, senior athlete stays in the lineup

By Michael E. RuaneThe big first baseman trudges across the pristine infield, his walker leaving a crooked trail in the dirt. He has bandages on his knees, a bald spot where he hit his head against a door frame and an old shoulder dislocation from a spill at home.

He's already bushed because it's late in the day and this is when he starts to fade. Plus, it's 90 degrees. And sweat is staining the dark blue T-shirt with the number 25 on the back and "Mustangs" on the front. But it's game time. The hot afternoon is giving way to the shadows of evening. And Bob Soulen, 69, who has Parkinson's disease, is going to play some ball.
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The Vanishing Mind - Promise Seen for Detection of Alzheimer’s - NYTimes.com

By GINA KOLATA

Dr. Daniel Skovronsky sat at a small round table in his corner office, laptop open, waiting for an e-mail message. His right leg jiggled nervously.

A few minutes later, the message arrived — results that showed his tiny start-up company might have overcome one of the biggest obstacles in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. It had found a dye and a brain scan that, he said, can show the hallmark plaque building up in the brains of people with the disease.

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How Do Deaf Blind People Communicate?

by Tom Babinszki

In an earlier post, I have written about how a deaf blind person does her daily tasks with the help of assistive technology. Let us now focus more on the communication devices that deaf blind people use to connect with other people and exchange information with the world around them.

There are many ways for deaf blind people to communicate. The methods that they use vary with the degree or combination of their vision and hearing loss, their background, and education. And with the recent advancements in assistive technology, deaf blind people are now finding more ways to connect with other people, whether they are sitting side-by-side or kilometers apart.
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Additional Resources:

Words in My Hands: A Teacher, a Deaf-Blind Man, an Unforgettable Journey

BP Variation Linked to CVD from MedPage Today

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by Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today

If your blood pressure fluctuates up and down over time, you may be at increased risk of cerebrovascular disease, researchers said.
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