An aspirin a day….

For this post I thought I would write about staying healthy, but in a slightly different manner than I’ve done in previous blogs. In older blogs I’ve written about screening, vaccinations, etc.  In this one I thought I’d talk about using a medication to stay healthy, and in this case talk about aspirin.

Aspirin has been around for more than 100 years, and perhaps is a bit under appreciated since it is an over the counter medication (meaning one can buy it without a prescription). It is also something that is derived from a natural product. Willow bark had been used to treat fevers  and it was eventually found that salicylic acid was the active ingredient. Salicylic acid was then derived from this. I won’t go into the chemistry of this (I figure if you’re a bit of science nerd like I am you probably already know, and if not I don’t want to bore you).

Most people probably think of it as a pain killer or a headache medication.  It is much more than that. Aspirin plays an important role in treatment of patients who’ve had heart attacks – it helps treatment and also helps decrease the death rate from heart attacks. It is used in primary prevention heart disease as well. In the past high dose aspirin was used in the treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis. It’s use in this latter population (at least for treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis) has been eclipsed by other medications. However it still should be used to treat/prevent heart disease in this group of patients.

Use of aspirin in ischemic stroke patients is advised as well.

Though less studied at this point, aspirin use to prevent recurrent deep venous thrombosis, is a consideration (this is after someone has been treated with coumadin for an acceptable length of time).   A link to a review on this subject can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24745726

There is some evidence linking aspirin intake to a decreased chance of developing colon cancer. At the moment there is not enough evidence to routinely suggest people take aspirin solely to prevent colon cancer. There is also some evidence that it only helps prevent colon cancer in certain groups of people – those that have a particular form of a particular gene. The only recommendation is for aspirin to help reduce the risk of heart disease.

Aspirin, like any other medication, has its downside as well. It can cause stomach ulcers. If the ulcers are large enough they can cause a lot of bleeding. It should not be used in children, except in rare circumstances and even then only then under the guidance of a pediatrician or other health care provider who provides a lot of treatment to children (EG pediatric rheumatologists, family practice physicians, etc).

Should doctors be environmentalists/advocates for the environment?

One thing that sometimes crosses my mind is whether physicians and other health care workers should also be environmentalists. After all the environment does play a role in people’s health. Contaminated water lead to outbreaks of water born diseases (John Snow, a London physician in the mid 1800’s is credited [at least in part] for ending a Cholera outbreak  by convince authorities to block use of a water pump at the center of the outbreak).  The cholera outbreak following the earthquake in Haiti several years ago is another example. Polluted air leads to increased respiratory disease.

Though in the U.S. and other developed nations with functioning governments, the chances of contaminating water with sewage is low. The one exception could be when severe weather overloads the septic systems in an area. However even in the Northeast U.S. where I live, beaches are monitored for coliform bacteria (this is a generic term for bacteria that live in our guts) and closed when the counts are too high.

Air quality effects health of populations – there were reduced hospitalizations in parts of Ireland after there were bans placed on burning coal.  When lead was taken out of gas (well, actually prevented from being put in gasoline…), blood levels of lead dropped. It’s a neurotoxin and high blood levels can affect brain development in children (hence the ban of lead in paint in the U.S.), and function in adults. For water, it’s not just bacterial contamination/pollution that is important. Chemical pollution can also affect health. Toxins can build up in the food chain – this is part of the reason why it’s suggested that pregnant women limit their intake of certain fish, for example. Mercury builds up in fish at the top of the food chain, such as in Tuna, and can adversely affect people neurologically and adversely affect developing brains. Studies continue to show an association between air pollution and respiratory  deaths.

Given the number of of medications that are derived in whole or part from the plant and animal world (aspirin, reserpine, taxol, digoxin, penicillin, streptomycin, are all plant and fungal products), an argument could be made that making sure plant and animal species don’t become extinct because it might affect future drug discovery. Before you say “but wait,….” think of this: heparin is derived from the linings of Pigs. ACE inhibitors were discovered through research on snake venom. There are some newer medications for Type 2 Diabetes which are derived/grew out of research on saliva from a lizard known as the Gila monster.

 

Men’s Health

My previous post was about women’s health. In this post I am going to review a couple of aspects of Men’s health. Most of the things men should be doing are things  people of both genders should be doing to stay healthy: stop smoking, exercising, eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight (or loosing weight if overweight).  Staying up to date with immunizations, such as yearly flu vaccination, is also important. Getting screened yearly for hypertension is important. Skin cancer screening is also important, though this might only need to be done every 2 years depending on whether you have any suspicious moles or lesions, prior history, you and your dermatologist’s comfort levels for yearly vs every other year screening. Cholesterol screening at appropriate intervals is important (a healthy male in his 20’s with no risk factors for heart disease only needs his cholesterol checked every 5 years or so. Older men and those with risk factors require monitoring more frequently and perhaps yearly if risk factors are present or if on treatment to lower cholesterol). I won’t get into more details about screening or other issues covered already in other posts.

Perhaps the biggest controversy in mens health is prostate cancer screening. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force actually recommends against routine screening for prostate cancer in healthy men of all ages. Even the American Urological association recommends against screening for prostate under the age of 64 and in men with life expectancy of less than 10 years. For screening, a conversation with your primary care doctor is warranted before getting the test. The main reason it is controversial is that one runs the risk of finding a prostate cancer which is indolent (slow growing), non aggressive that one is likely to die with than of – meaning one is likely to die of some other disease before the prostate cancer becomes a problem. At this time we don’t have enough information to know what low grade/early prostate tumors are going to become aggressive and turn into problems. One therefor runs the risk of over treating something that would not be a problem.

Occasionally I’ve had patients ask for testosterone levels and had to talk to patients about testosterone replacement. Testosterone levels are not something  routinely checked unless there is a clinical reason (if there is loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, and so forth, then it’s worth getting). Testosterone replacement has been associated with an increased risk of heart disease so replacement benefits needs to be worth the increased risk.

Although I probably run the risk of repeating myself by saying this, but reducing the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, colorectal cancer by exercising, watching what one eats and getting appropriate screening applies to men’s health as well.

Random Thoughts on Women’s health

I’m dividing this post into two parts. The first is on the recommendations for screening in females. The other part is some general thoughts on women’s health in general (and are somewhat generalizable to anyone’s health, male or female). The recommendations are taken from USPSTF related sites.

If you’ve read any or all of my earlier posts, you know I’m into screening and catching diseases early, especially if there is treatment for the particular disease.

Women should get pap smears every 3-5 years with HPV testing. The frequency depends on a woman’s age, whether the pap smear is negative and the results of HPV testing. It is important that the HPV testing be done via one of the five tests that are FDA approved: the unapproved tests from what I understand are more prone to error. Ask your doctor if he or she knows whether the lab he or she uses is FDA approved.

Screening for STIs (sexually transmitted infections) is suggested. This includes syphilis and HIV in high risk individuals.

Breast cancer screening (mammography) is done every 1-2 years starting at 50 (the old recommendations were every two years starting at 40, then yearly after age 50). BRAC testing should only be done if there is a family history of breast, ovarian, peritoneal cancer.

Bone density should be done at least once after age 64. However one can consider doing bone densitometry at an earlier age.

As much time and energy that people put into screening for breast cancer, cervical cancer, etc I think there a tendency forget about screening for heart disease and colorectal cancer, things I think people tend to see as “a man’s disease”.   However in 2010, 23.5% of deaths in women were due to heart disease,  and 22.1% were due to cancer deaths (this includes all cancer deaths, not just breast cancer).  Lung cancer killed 70,000 women whereas breast cancer killed 40,000 women that same year. These are  for the most part “lifestyle diseases” in as much as most lung cancer is caused by smoking; diet, lack of exercise, obesity contribute to heart disease. These are all things that are modifiable to a  great extent.

healthcare disparities

A few months ago there was an article in a prominent medical journal about an association with one’s income and place of death (it was looking at hospice patients only). The higher one’s income the more likely someone was to die at home with hospice rather than in a nursing home or hospital.

As a practicing physician,  that there are healthcare disparities bothers me. There are multiple factors that go into this. Some are patient related (limited english skills, little/no social support in cases of people with little mobility), some are patient and societal (I would put literacy here, not just health literacy). As of 2013 I would hope that being a member of a minority would not have an effect on one’s healthcare. There is evidence  – and i don’t recall which journal I saw this in – that minorities that go to hospitals that have good healthcare results do as well as non minorities, and those that go to hospitals with less good results have corrispondingly poorer outcomes. In this case I guess we could argue for putting systems in place for all health care institutions to give health care with good results.

One thing physicians get measured on are things like checking cholesterol levels, glycosylated hemoglobin A1c’s twice a year, etc. However  to just focus on measures like that take time and energy away from measuring and doing other things that ‘count’. Sending someone for a test and usually takes less time than spending 1/2 an hour educating patients as to why those measures count and how to take care of their health. There have been articles that have brought this issue up. There are easy answers. However, I have a feeling that at least as of 2014, having processes in place to be sure that patients are educated about disease prevention and self management would go a lot farther in preventing complications than would checking a glycosylated hemoglobin twice a a year.

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The Prevention Prescription, part 3

In my previous two posts I’ve written about different kinds of prevention (eg, primary, secondary, etc as well as vaccination which is a form of primary prevention). In this post I am going to talk about a couple of different things relating to prevention.

The first is that there are preventative measures which sometimes fall into more than one category. By this I mean that if we counsel someone to change their diet and exercise more because they’ve had a heart attack, give them aspirin, a statin, etc. that we’re engaging in tertiary prevention. However if they are on their way to becoming diabetic but because of the change in diet and increase the amount of exercise they do, and therefore lower their risk of Diabetes Mellitus, then one could argue that’s primary prevention (or secondary if they have metabolic syndrome…).

I’m a firm believer in using medication to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, etc when and if appropriate. However, I think we give short shrift to diet, exercise and sleeping enough as preventative measures to prevent or delay multiple medical problems.  Even if someone needs to be on medication, lifestyle changes are important to keep up. Exercise and diet do not become less important just because someone’s started medication. One recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine comparing intensive lifestyle changes+usual care as compared to usual care did not reduce death. However there was evidence for a better quality of life and less need for medication, at least early on. There is a lot of evidence that enough exercise and good dietary practices can prevent and delay Diabetes. And for those that are cost conscious, a half an hour a day of walking is a lot cheaper than most medications!

There is a push by some physicians to actually prescribe exercise the same way we prescribe medications. Books have even been published on the matter!!

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The Prevention Prescription, Part 2

In my last post I talked about vaccination, which is a form of primary prevention: it is the prevention of disease. There is also the concept of secondary prevention. In the case of secondary prevention, one has already has a disorder and doesn’t know it. Secondary prevention prevents the disease from getting to the point where it causes symptoms or complications (this is paraphrasing the definition on the CDC website). The example the CDC website uses is excising/taking a biopsy of a suspicious skin lesion before it becomes cancerous. Colonoscopy could also be put in the category of secondary prevention if pre cancerous polyps are found and removed before they become cancerous.

Sometimes it can be difficult to convince people to do some secondary prevention. Colonoscopy is one such item it is sometimes challenging to convince people to do. It is inconvenient as one needs to take a day off from work (if one is of working age and is working), has to have someone who’s willing to drive them home and requires taking things to clean their colon out so the colonoscopy can be done. When someone has a problem that can only be diagnosed by colonoscopy (eg: weight loss, fevers, and blood in the stool which could be a sign of inflammatory bowel disease, for example) people are worried enough about their health to get it.

Tertiary prevention is when one is trying to prevent complications or side effects of a disease which is already present. Examples of this are anticoagulation in people with atrial fibrillation, use of ACE inhibitors to prevent or slow kidney disease in diabetics.

In my next post I’ll take more about prevention and why it’s important.

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The Prevention Prescription, part 1

I suppose this is going to have some overlap with some of what I’ve already written. Even though I treat adults, I am routinely (every month or two)  giving people vaccines against various preventable diseases. Tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis being the most common vaccination I give, though I think perhaps only vaccination against influenza could be as or more as that in absolute numbers.  By the time most people get to me, they’ve had a majority of their vaccinations (except perhaps for those that didn’t exist when they were growing up or weren’t recommended outside of certain high risk groups).  Most people don’t seem to have a problem with getting a Tetanus/Diphtheria/Pertussis booster. Influenza vaccination seems harder to take for some people.

Other folks seem to take offense at getting any immunizations at all. Perhaps if we went back in time to an  era when people died of polio (1952 saw what is reported to be the worst epidemic in U.S. history: 57,628 cases,  3,145 died and 21,269 people were left with paralysis of some degree). People developed rubella while pregnant (between 1962 and 65 when there was a worldwide pandemic – an estimated 12.5 million rubella cases occurred in the United States.  There were a resulting  2,000 cases of encephalitis, 2,100 neonatal deaths, and 20,000 infants born with Congenital Rubella Syndrome).

I could go on about how vaccination has either eliminated disease (the last case of smallpox was in 1978) or vastly reduced the number of affected people. In some countries, vaccination has eliminated diseases (the U.S. has been polio free for the past 30 years) or vastly reduced the rate (only 223 reported cases worldwide in 2012 with only three countries being considered endemic for polio).

One might ask why an internist is writing about vaccinating against “childhood diseases”.  Viruses and bacteria do not know the ages of the people they infect. A lot of diseases are mild(er) in children but have higher complication rates in adults. Varicella (the chicken pox virus) can come back in adulthood and cause shingles as well as an encephalitis. Varicella is also a worse disease in adulthood and not everyone gets the disease in childhood. It’s now routinely recommended that if one is going to be around young children (I.E. infants) or in healthcare that people get vaccinated against Pertussis to prevent it spreading. People forget or don’t know how many lives have been spared because of vaccination and that a lot of diseases that caused death and disability are thankfully gone or almost gone. Part of my job is not just to treat illness but try and prevent it as well. With vaccinations it’s important not to forget them even in adults. It’s a matter of public health (preventing pertussis spreading to one of my patients’ children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, etc): prevention of disease in my adult patients as well as those they come in contact with.  I also am trying to prevent disease on the individual patient level as well. If my patients aren’t getting the natural ‘booster shots’ of exposure to their (grand-)children while they’re infectious for varicella, there is the potential for waning immunity which puts them at risk for reactivation (I.E. Shingles in the case of varicella).

As time goes by, I think there is, and will be an appreciation that vaccination isn’t ‘The Answer” for everything. There is an appreciation that immunity wanes for some vaccinations, eg tetanus and diptheria, which is why it’s recommended to get boosters. It may be the case for the MMR vaccine as well. That immunization doesn’t always prevent a given disease is not  a reason to avoid vaccination. If we thought that way in other areas of our lives, we would not lock our car doors, the doors to our houses, look both ways before crossing the street because “doing these things don’t prevent cars being stolen, houses broken into or being run over by a car”.

Sometimes convincing people of the power of prevention is the hard part.

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The good old days?

Medical Knowledge and technical savvy are biodegreadable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack. – Lewis Thomas

When in medical school (and after) a common quote is that 50% of what you learn in medical school will be obsolete in 5 years. Sometimes it even feels like things come and go out of fashion however. I’m old enough to have seen theophylline come in and out of the lineup for treatment of asthma/reactive airway disease (at least to some degree) a few times. When I come across quotes like the one above, several thoughts come to mind.

One thought is what my grandfather would think of medical practice in the twenty first century. He went to medical school in the 1930s and got interested in Urology while serving in the Army during World War II. He retired in the mid 1970s. He lived until the 1990s, long enough to see me graduate medical school. When he started, there essentially no antibiotics, no antihypertensives, no real way of treating cancer other than surgery (I would have to check to see when radiation began to be used for treating certain tumors). Some early antihypertensive medications actually had to be started in the hospital for patients’ safety. Vaccination for smallpox and for Rabies were the only (or two of the few) vaccinations available. Diseases such as Polio, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Influenza and  tetanus killed/disfigured/disabled thousands of people if not tens of thousands or millions worldwide yearly (this is something people who are anti-vaccination seem to forget as Smallpox has been eradicated, Polio, Measles, Mumps and are thankfully rare. I have never seen someone affected by pre natally affected by Rubella).  I have a whole host of medications to treat hypertension, diabetes, varicella, bacterial infections and so forth that my grandfather’s generation of health professionals could just dream about.

Secondly, the business of medicine has changed drastically as well. I have heard stories as to how patients paid him with vegetables they grew in their own gardens. Though I won’t say much more here (it’s not germane to this particular blog post).

Thirdly,  sometimes people will say that we can’t seem to make up our minds as to what’s good for people or bad. For example, for years eggs were made out to be bad for us because of the amount of cholesterol in them. Now, they’re ok to eat as part of a balanced diet (though like many things, you can have too much of a good thing…). It’s just that as we learn more, the message about things gets more nuanced. Eating fats in your diet isn’t bad, though you can have too many of the ‘bad’ kinds of fat. Not all carbohydrates are bad: Too much refined sugar is bad, complex carbohydrates (as in FIBER) are good. This also can be seen in what medications are considered first line for treatment of certain diseases, sometimes a new(er) medication is better to start with than an old, more established medication. Other times, an old medication can treat a disease just as well as a newer one.

Secondarily to this several thoughts come to mind. One is that with all the
medications available for almost every conceivable disorder, we  – and I mean both doctors and patients – forget that we shouldn’t rely on a pill to fix everything. In the case of things like Type 2 Diabetes, prevention by diet and exercise will do far more than pills or injections can. Of course there are people who’d still develop Type 2 Diabetes, so for those who’d say “well my uncle/father/neighbor/etc did everything right and still developed DM-2 (or hypertension or whichever disease you’re talking about that can be prevented/delayed or modified by diet)…” I would use this analogy. We lock our car doors when we park them. When we leave our homes we lock the doors. In both cases peoples’ cars and homes still get stolen or broken into. Sometimes we  forget that some of the tools available to my grandfather’s generation are still just as valid and useful today: it’s that  we know more about how diet and exercise  work than they did. I think, however, doctors and patients sometimes miss that for the allure of taking a ‘new or improved’ medicine because its “more modern” than the old fashioned way of doing something or that it’s just easier to take a pill than it is to count calories and exercise more or do some exercises to help reduce a symptom such as back pain.

When I was in medical school my grandfather remarked how everything in the New England Journal of Medicine was about immunology and antibodies. As I read the the New England Journal, I am beginning to get the same feeling, though  now I’d say it’s all about genetics as there are more articles about DNA and genetic mutations. In several cancers, specific mutations and chromosomal changes have been targeted as they lead to a gain in function (or lead to a protein being produced constantly rather than being produced in a regulated fashion). Knowledge of this has led to some medications being developed that are less toxic than what’s usually used for cancer. How this will affect the treatment of other diseases remains to be seen. Will Asthma, Hypertension and Rheumatoid Arthritis be treated someday with medications that block whatever the root cause is, or perpetuates the disease? Only time will tell.

If someone were to ask me if I’d rather be a doctor now or when my grandfather started his practice, I’d have to say now. I can do a lot more for my patients than he could when he started. It also means however, that keeping up with changes in what we know or think we know about how best to treat patients I think is harder because of the sheer volume of things to read and keep up on is larger. Even if it means I’m accused of ‘flip flopping’ because new recommendations and papers seem to point in a different or opposite direction from what was said before. This is why physicians keep up with what’s new in whatever specialty they’re in. It’s the price we pay for 50% of our knowledge becoming obsolete every few years.

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Four of the best things to do for your health.

Correlation between smoking and lung cancer in...

Correlation between smoking and lung cancer in US males, showing a 20-year time lag between increased smoking rates and increased incidence of lung cancer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Four of the best things to do for your health.

1) Don’t start smoking. Stop smoking if you’ve already started.

 If someone asked you to pick up a habit that increased the risk of all of the following (and would cost you roughly $33-77 dollars a week depending on where you live, brand, etc), would you do so? Here are some of the things that smoking increases the risk of: lung cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer, esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, cervical cancer, vascular disease including aortic aneurysms and strokes. It increases the risk of fractures in post menopausal women. It increases the risk of low birth weights in infants. There is an increased chance of developing cataracts. For men in their 30s and 40s, it increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by 50%.

According to the CDC, smoking contributes to 443,000 deaths annually in the U.S.

2) maintain a healthy weight.

obesity raises the risk of multiple diseases: Diabetes Mellitus – type 2, high blood pressure, colon cancer (though the mechanism isn’t known how). It increases the risk of breast cancer (adipose tissue has an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen), osteoarthritis and more. There are no easy ways of doing this. At its simplest it means taking in the same amount of calories you expend. Granted if you’re overweight, you need to expend more calories than you take in.

3) Exercise

On top of helping maintain a healthy weight, excercise has many beneficial effects. Exercising reduces the risk of alzheimer’s disease, some cancers, it can improve mood, helps reduce blood pressure and can help prevent and treat diseases such as type 2 diabetes.  The suggested minimum is 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week, which comes out to approximately 20 minutes a day. It can be something as simple as walking. The what of exercise (what kind) is less important than the regularity of actually getting exercise.

4) Have a healthy diet.

Potential health benefits of apple consumption...

Potential health benefits of apple consumption. (See Wikipedia:Apple#Health_benefits). Model: Mikael Häggström. To discuss image, please see Template talk:Häggström diagrams (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Diet is the mainstay treatment in a lot of diseases. Whether it’s DM-2, high cholesterol, coronary heart disease (even if you’re on medication for any of these, maintaining an appropriate, healthy diet becomes no less important). In one study coming out of Lydon, France (known as the Lydon Study), people who were put onstandard treatment and who were switched to mediterranean diet with N-3 fatty acid supplementation (as opposed to just the  standard treatment) decrease their mortality after a heart attach by 66% (their mortality went from 17% down to 10%). This was independent of weight loss, decrease in cholesterol, etc. A dietary/lifestyle program promoted by Dr. Ornish which uses lifestyle changes, exercise and a vegetarian low fat diet (10-20% of calories from fat rather than the 20-30 used in the AHA step II diet) has been shown to reverse Coronary Heart Disease and is covered by medicare. A mediterranean style diet is also associated with decreased death from heart disease, a decreased risk of certain cancers as well as a decreased risk of dementia. At this point I won’t go into a huge discussion about diet (I’m likely to blog more about this in the future on multiple occasions).

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