The study covered a national sample of 1,550 women and 1,455 men, aged from 57 to 85, who were part of the 2005-2006 National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. The survey collected data on social life by interviewing them, as well as data about their sexuality, health, and a broad range of biological measures.

The researchers of National Institutes of Health realized that a history of sexually transmitted disease has a serious influence on sexual health later in life. It was also found that people who had an STD were more likely to have had sexual experiences over their lifetimes that included more risks and multiple sex partners.

You may read more information about this interesting study in "Sexual Dysfunction Among Older Adults: Prevalence and Risk Factors” published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Over 60 cities in USA are lucky to take part in large trial of new method.

The main purpose of the procedure is to reduce or eliminate the need for patients to take Coumadin.

The study started out because over two million people in USA suffer from serious heart condition refered as atrial fibrillation. it is considered that these patients are 250% more likely to have a stroke. Eventually, a small device might start saving millions of Americans from having a stroke.

The procedure of stroke prevention is simple. A small parachute-like device is placed near the left appendage of the heart. Being set there, this small device starts working and stops clots from leaving the heart and traveling to the brain. Dr. Almany, the main reseacher and the author of the idea, says in the interview: "When drug-coated stents came, it was a big deal to us. I mean, it's made a huge dent on morbidity in the United States."

So, we hope that the wave of strokes will be stopped by the new invention.

However, high-dose injections of vitamin C, also refered as ascorbic acid, has ben hown to reduce tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. This result has been given by researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report in the August 5, 2008.

In their experiment the researchers traced ascorbates anti-cancer effect to the formation of hydrogen peroxide in the extracellular fluid surrounding the tumors. Normal cells were unaffected.

The conclusion is that natural physiologic controls precisely regulate the amount of ascorbate absorbed by the body when it is taken orally.

So, scientist advise you to eat food that contain more than 200 milligrams of vitamin C daily. This may be two oranges and a serving of broccoli. If you do this, your body prevents blood levels of ascorbate from exceeding a narrow range.

Vitamin C plays a critical role in health, and a prolonged deficiency leads to scurvy and eventually to death.

Simply improving one's mood should be motivation enough to seek treatment for depression, but the emerging evidence about the benefits of treating depression for the prevention of, or recovery from, other diseases might persuade even more patients to seek treatment for their depression.

The new study suggested the importance of identifying and treating depression if we want to beneft most from treatment of cardiovascular disorders.

Here are some important steps to improve your healthcare quality:

1. Tell all of your doctors about other doctors who treat you.

2. Always bring copies of your medical records and laboratory test to your primary health care provider.

3. Talk to your doctors about possible interations between madications for treatment of your disorders.

To find out if your child is overweight just count his body mass index (BMI). A child above the 95th percentile is considered overweight, whereas a child who's BMIs is between the 85 and 95 percentiles has risk of becoming overweight. This index can be counted for children from 2 to 18 years old.

If you made calculations and realized that your child is overweight, o the following:

- Make sport games tradition for your family -this will make all of the family members burn extra calories and stay healthy.

- Do not eat too much yourself. Make a company for your child in maintaining a healthy diet.

- Children don't need big adult portions of food. Just serve meals on smaller plates and bowls. Don't make your child eat everything from his or her plate.

- Store sweets out of sight.

- Make a rule: eat meals only in the kitchen or dining room.

- When you prepare food, focus on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains for meals and snacks.

- Do not buy sodas, sports drinks, energy drinks, and iced teas. Drink water, milk, or 100-percent fruit juice (preferably diluted) instead.

While your child is small, you play the most important role in shaping and maintaining his health. With your help only your child can become a healthy adult.

The study presented on 59th Annual Meeting in Boston tried to estimate whether the probability to have Parkinson's disease was higher among people who were taking antidepressant medications than in people who were not taking these medications. They considered people who developed and was diagnosed Parkinson's disease and looked if they were taking antidepressant medications. It appeared that people who were taking antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to develop Parkinson's disease as those who were not taking antidepressants.

Certainly this cannot be interpreted as statistical evidence that antidepressants cause Parkinson's disease," said Miguel Hernan, MD, DrPH, of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. However, though the relationship is only apparent, the suggestion that depression is an early symptom of the disease exists and should be studied more.

To hold this study, researchers learned a database of three million people in the UK and identified 1,052 people with Parkinson's disease. After this they matched them with 6,634 people without Parkinson's disease and looked at antidepressant medical history before the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. It appeared that the risk of development of Parkinson's disease was the same for both men and women across all age groups. Also scientists emphasized that the disease didn't depend from the type of antidepressants patients took.

Luis A. Garcia-Rodriguez, M.D., M.Sc. of the Spanish Centre for Pharmacoepidemiologic Research, Madrid, Spain, considered more than one thousand of patients who had been referred to a specialist or hospitalized because of stomach bleeding between 2001 and 2005.

Since the early 1990s there were many case reports that made scientists suggest a link between SSRIs and bleeding in the upper gastrointestinal tract. "Antidepressants are widely used and this requires research to make better estimates of bleeding risk and to name factors that may increase the risk more. It appears particularly important to determine whether using acid-suppressing agents may reduce the risk," the authors write.

Individuals with upper GI bleeding were significantly more likely than controls to be taking SSRIs (5.3 percent vs. 3.0 percent) or venlafaxine (1.1 percent vs. 0.3 percent). However in more than 10,000 patients the same age and sex studied did not have upper GI bleeding.

Previously there was a common belief that 90% of patients recover within four to six weeks, with our without treatment. But The George Institute for International Health made some experiments which proved that prognosis of recovering from lower back pain is not as good as guidelines and challenges claimed in clinical practice.

Professor Maher said that it was proved that nearly thirty percent of patients did not recover from the original episode of acute back pain within a year. These results are very important because they confirm that low back pain is a serious health problem and there exists significant need for improvement in its management.

During the study, Professor Chris Maher, The George Institute, Australia and colleagues considered 973 patients with acute low back pain for one year. Only 50% of them had fully recovered from the original episode of pain. During one year of study around 40% of patients reported that their back was still causing them pain.

For many people back pain becomes a long-lasting problem that seriously impacts their life. We clearly need to rethink our approach of back pain treatment.

Dr. Shai Rozen, assistant professor of plastic surgery told us that many specialists previousely considered patients with neuropathy to have irreversible condition that they cannot be helped. However diabetic neuropathy is nerve-related pain - a complex problem caused by variety of factors including the length of time the patient had diabetes. Doctor emphasized that surgery they offer may be helpful only in patients they suspect have pressure on their nerves in addition to their neuropathy. UT Southwestern offers surgery on peripheral nerves, which originate from the spine.

Several studies have demonstrated that the nerves may increase in diameter in diabetic patients. This leads to compression of certain nerves in the leg that may worsen the pain and cause loss of sensation at the bottom of the foot. About one-third of patients with diabetic neuropathy have compression of nerves. Patients with this problem can chose the type of treatment. In these patients, if conservative treatment has failed, is surgical nerve release.

About one out of every six patients with ulcers require amputations - accounting for the nearly 100,000 amputations per year in the U.S. because of diabetes.

It's sort of proof of a concept, or an idea that's been around for years, said one of the researchers. The idea that genetic mutations associated with a disease can be triggered by environmental exposures is not a new. You can have a gene for many diseases but never have the disease if you aren't exposed to triggers. The trigger here is the environment. For example, you may have allergy because you have mutated genes and you live in area with lots of flowers. But you may have this mutation and never suffer from allergy if you are not triggered to allergens.

The study discovered just another trigger for eczema and these are cats. Eczema, or atopic dermatitis begins in the first year of life for 65 percent of the people who have the condition. There are many genes responsible for asthma and allergies. In the foreseeable future, it will be possible to profile a child for the risk of these diseases.

The study was published in the June issue of PLoS Medicine.