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HEALTHBEAT SHOW NOTES .... Episode #217 - Recorded September 4, 2009

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of HealthBeat, Chiropractic OnLine Today’s Health, News and informational Podcast.

• Extreme Obesity and Lifespan

• Vitamin D and Immune System

• And Finally, a story about Trends in Health Care Costs in People with Spinal Problems

For HealthBeat, This is Dr. Todd Eglow!

Welcome to HealthBeat Podcast #217, recorded September 4, 2009.  As a reminder, we will be updating our RSS feed for this podcast in the near future, so please surf to ChiropracticRadio.com to access our older podcast playlist.

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HealthBeat is Chiropractic OnLine Today’s radio program, providing current news and commentary about Chiropractic and Health.

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And Now for some news ….

Extreme Obesity and Lifespan

Extremely obese people — those who are 80 or more pounds over a normal weight — live three to 12 fewer years than their normal-weight peers, a new study shows.

Just being overweight or moderately obese, however, has little or no effect on life span, the research found. The finding adds to the growing body of evidence that being slightly overweight may have no influence on life expectancy, but being severely overweight trims years off people's lives.

Overall, about 66% of adults in the USA are either overweight or obese. About one-third of people are in the obese category, meaning they have a body mass index of 30 or greater.

Body mass index, or BMI, is a measure based on height and weight. About 6% of people are extremely obese — that is, they have a BMI of 40 or greater.

Economists with RTI International, a non-profit research organization in Research Triangle Park, N.C., analyzed national data on 366,000 people. Among the findings being published online in the journal Obesity:

• Overall, excess weight was responsible for the loss of roughly 95 million years of life in the USA in 2008.

Finkelstein and obesity experts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have conducted additional research that shows the high medical costs of extra pounds. They recently published a study that showed obese Americans cost the country an estimated $147 billion in weight-related medical bills in 2008, double the amount a decade ago.

Obesity now accounts for 9.1% of all medical spending, up from 6.5% in 1998, they found. Overall, an obese patient has $4,871 in medical bills a year compared with $3,442 for a patient at a healthy weight.

Surf to our Show Notes for more information - http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2009-08-25-obesity-lifespan_N.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-27-costofobesity_N.htm

Vitamin D and Immune System

A new study from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, has concluded that one key part of the immune system, the ability of vitamin D to regulate anti-bactericidal proteins, is so important that is has been conserved through almost 60 million years of evolution and is shared only by primates, including humans – but no other known animal species.

The fact that this vitamin-D mediated immune response has been retained through millions of years of evolutionary selection, and is still found in species ranging from squirrel monkeys to baboons and humans, suggests that it must be critical to their survival, researchers say.

In a new study in the journal BMC Genomics, researchers from OSU and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center describe the presence of a genetic element that's specific to primates and involved in the innate immune response. They found it not only in humans and their more recent primate ancestors, such as chimpanzees, but also primates that split off on the evolutionary tree tens of millions of years ago, such as old world and new world primates.

Vitamin D prevents the "adaptive" immune response from over-reacting and reduces inflammation, and appears to suppress the immune response. However, the function of the new genetic element this research explored allows vitamin D to boost the innate immune response by turning on an antimicrobial protein. The overall effect may help to prevent the immune system from overreacting.

Vitamin D deficiency is an issue of growing concern among many scientists, due to changing lifestyle or cultural trends in which many people around the world get less sun exposure and often inadequate dietary levels of the vitamin. It's a special problem with the elderly, which often have reduced exposure to sunlight and less ability to produce vitamin D in their skin – and at least partly as a result, are more susceptible to bone fractures, chronic inflammation and infectious disease.

As always, COTs HealthBeat recommends discussing all Nutritional advice with a Qualified Healthcare Professional.

Surf to our Show Note for more information - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090818182053.htm

Trends in Health Care Costs in People with Spinal Problems

A study in the September 1, 2009 edition of the journal Spine looked at an analysis of nationally representative survey data for spine-related health care expenditures, utilization and self-reported health status.

The objective was to study trends from 1997 to 2006 in per-user expenditures for spine-related inpatient, outpatient, pharmacy, and emergency services; and to compare these trends to changes in health status.

An average of 1774 respondents with spine problems was surveyed per year; the proportion suggested an increase in the number of people who sought treatment for spine problems in the United States from 14.8 million in 1997 to 21.9 million in 2006.

A 49% increase in the number of patients seeking spine-related care (from 12.2 million in 1997 to 18.2 million in 2006) was the largest contributing factor to increased outpatient expenditures.

The study concluded that expenditure increases for spine-related inpatient, prescription, and emergency services were primarily the result of increasing per-user expenditures, while those related to outpatient visits were primarily due to an increase in the number of users of ambulatory services.

Surf to our Show Notes for more information - http://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/Abstract/2009/09010/Trends_in_Health_Care_Expenditures,_Utilization,.19.aspx

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Finally, I leave you with the following quote:

"Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself."
– Elie Wiesel

For Chiropractic OnLine Today’s HealthBeat, This is Dr. Todd Eglow.

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