Mediorta | An Ultimate Health and Fitness Blog.

We all know children are increasingly facing the need to diet and follow weight loss programs. Like their parents, young people are taking in too many calories and failing to get as much exercise as they require for optimum health. The proof is in the pudding, as they saying goes. While North American children lead the way in packing on the poundage, they are hardly alone. A recent study in England by the government-backed National Child Measurement Programme found that, at the time they enter primary school, about 23 per cent of British children are either overweight or obese. By the time these children complete primary school, nearly 32 per cent are overweight or obese. Interestingly, this weight gain among children is occurring even though the schools are significantly increasing the average amount of exercise time available per week during classroom hours. In 2002, less than 25 per cent of British students aged five to 16 received two hours of exercise weekly. Now, following a ramping up of the school exercise program, the figure has risen to about 85 per cent. What the heck ate the kids doing? This raises the question — what the heck are the kids doing? As it turns out, not all of them use the time available to them to work up a sweat. The issue, according to the Guardian, is one of motivation. Kids who aren’t into sports and exercise don’t feel inspired to get active simply because somebody tells them to. A study by researchers at the State University of New York at Albany looked into the motivations of middle school students for pursuing, or not, regular exercise. They found that one of the factors influencing motivation was ability. Those who felt they weren’t skilled at sports were less likely to be motivated by personal enjoyment than those who were more athletic. Clearly, parents of children who are not athletically inclined have an additional challenge on their hands in keeping them active and their weight down. One solution is to look for ways to incorporate exercise and physical activity into family life. Try buying bikes for mom, dad and the children and going on regular family excursions. Another tactic is to turn trips to the store for things like groceries into occasions for family walks. Walking to school, rather than catching a ride, is also good form exercise and helps develop healthy habits. Encouraging abilities builds confidence Every child has an aptitude for some form of sports or physical exercise. Encouraging these abilities will build confidence that could lead to self-generated motivation. Look for opportunities to foster positive feelings about exercise. You never know: a positive attitude about one form of exercise could lead to a wider interest in being active and staying fit. For children that have put on weight and won’t engage meaningfully in exercise, formal dieting and weight loss efforts could be required. But it would be much better if the child were to develop a personal interest in physical activity, and then keep the weight off through healthy lifestyle choices.

Some of the most interesting parts, in the order I remember them (vs in the order mentioned in the article):

• Men can develop major and permanent health problems soley from too much sex, but women can’t. (Not talking about disease transmission or abuse here; specifically referring to “having too much sex.”)
• Regular sex promotes dental health. (For women, anyway.)
• Men should masturbate almost daily to help them avoid cancer. (”Go digital,” it says, and while I know they’re referring to fingers, I can’t help but think of all the ways in which sex-tech can add variety to this healthy habit.)
• Prolonged abstinence in women can cause loss of vaginal function. (Hence one doctor’s recommendation of using vibrators to preserve vaginal health.)
• The more sex you have, the longer you are likely to live. (“The relationship found between frequency of sexual intercourse and mortality is of considerable public interest.”)

HCV damages the liver, one of the body’s most important organs. Symptoms of both acute and chronic infections are easily confused with less serious and shorter-term illnesses. In fact, most infected people are relatively free of physical symptoms — signs of liver damage may not occur for a couple of decades. Unfortunately, by the time the disease becomes apparent, liver damage can be considerable and even irreversible.

HCV is not related to the other hepatitis viruses (A-E) and diagnostic tests readily distinguish them. The virus is usually detected by an antibody test. Unlike many other infections, the presence of antibodies in the blood does not mean recovery. Although rare, recovery does occur; it can be confirmed using highly sensitive diagnostic tests that detect the viral genome (RNA). Unfortunately, such tests are not yet licensed and there is laboratory variability.

Roughly 50 percent of chronic carriers do not even know they have hepatitis C, a disease that moves through specific stages of liver damage. Currently, diagnosis of the stage requires a liver biopsy, i.e., removal of a very small piece of the liver, and evaluation of an even smaller piece using a microscope. The rate of progression is highly individual and can be characterized as slow, medium or fast. For most people it is slow, i.e., after 20 years of chronic infection, only 20 percent of individuals progress to cirrhosis. Alcohol and other hepatitis viruses hasten progression of the disease. Thus, if they know they are infected, individuals can help themselves by not using alcohol, and by getting vaccinated to prevent hepatitis A and B.

Treatments

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved treatments that can get rid of the virus and make the liver more normal. Three are interferons and the fourth combines interferon and ribavirin. Unfortunately, none of these drugs is very effective (approximately 5 percent of infections are eradicated with interferons and 35 percent with the combination) and all have significant side effects. Currently, there is no way to predict who will or won’t respond. However, the best responses are seen in those patients with HCV variants (genotypes) 2 and 3, less severe fibrosis, and who are female or are under the age of 40 years. It is important to note that genotype 1, which predominates in this country, is least responsive to treatment.
Challenges and Research Priorities

Better treatment and prevention strategies will come from carefully designed, innovative, and cross-cutting research studies that will help us learn why some people recover from the infection and others do not; understand how the virus reproduces and causes disease in the body; and develop more effective and safer therapies as well as vaccines.

Importance of Increasing Awareness

The fact that most people lack symptoms and may have been infected years earlier, taken together with the drugs now available to treat the disease, make it important for individuals to report accurate personal histories to their physicians so that detection and treatment of hepatitis C begins as early as possible.

Hepatitis C virus infection is an increasing public health concern. Without more effective therapies that produce recovery, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts that deaths due to HCV will double or triple in the next 15 to 20 years due simply to the length of time most people in the United States have been infected.