Over 6 million American children have the lung condition. A new study finds vitamin D may be protective among asthmatic obese children living in urban environments with high indoor air pollution. The study out of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National…
Independent associations were found between asthma and polycystic ovary syndrome as well as overweight and obesity, according to results presented here. “The results of this study need to be confirmed with results in other populations, and exploration of these relationships in longitudinal studies is needed,” Anju Elizabeth Joham, MBBS, FRACP, an endocrinologist and postdoctoral research…
Smoking is to blame for about 14 million major medical conditions among American adults yearly, a new study shows. That number is higher than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) last estimate, in the year 2000, which found that American adults suffered from 12.7 million smoking-attributable conditions. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)…
Exercise may seem daunting to your patients, but has many proven benefits for people with COPD. It will improve their ability to do more without feeling breathless and help them to rediscover activities they could no longer do. Exercise can bring specific benefits to people with lung disease, as well as general improvements to health…
More than a quarter of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and a history of smoking also have air flow limitation compatible with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Japanese study data show. Strikingly, the vast majority (87.7%) of patients found to have such airflow limitation had not previously been diagnosed with COPD, report Katsuya Onishi (Onishi…
Obesity increases the risk and progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), even for people who’ve never smoked before. A team of American and German researchers measured the waists, hips, body mass index (BMI), and physical activity of newly diagnosed COPD cases in the U.S., and published the clear link they found in the Canadian…
The spread of poor diets with large amounts of processed food, fat and refined sugar could be leading to increasing levels of inflammation in the body and, as a result, contributing to increased asthma prevalence, say researchers. The researchers looked at the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII) in people with asthma compared with healthy controls…
Newcastle researchers say they have found a link between asthma and oestrogen in young obese women. The Hunter Medical Research Institute’s Hayley Scott says oestrogen stimulates leptin, a hormone that regulates hunger, but also promotes airway inflammation. A study of 130 people found younger females tended to show a more hormone-related pattern…