Category: Health

Aug. 26, 2022 – Listen up, everybody: If you’ve ever thought your favorite song made your whole body feel better, new science suggests that wasn’t just your imagination.

In fact, it’s not only music that has an analgesic, or pain-reducing, effect. Many types of sounds or noises can help, researchers have found – if they’re played at the right volume, that is.

Doctors and researchers have long known about a connection between sound and the body. Music therapy has been used for decades to help manage pain after an operation, during labor and after childbirth, and during cancer treatment.

But why this happens isn’t well understood. Some theories suggest the analgesic effects of sound are psychological – that is, they calm, or distract, a person from the pain.

This new research suggests that something deeper is at work. And the paper, published in Science, may shed light on the inner workings of the brain, revealing the circuitry operating behind this pain relief.

Want to Hear More?

Yuanyuan (Kevin) Liu, PhD, is a sensory biology and pain researcher for the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and a co-author of the study.

“Relative sound intensity might play a role in helping reduce pain,” he says. “Low-intensity sound is able to inactivate the audio-somatosensory pathway and thus the activation of the somatosensory thalamus.” That means a noise played at low volume appears to blunt activity in parts of the brain responsible for signaling pain.

In the study, scientists injected mice with a solution that caused discomfort in their paw. They then put on a variety of sounds at different intensities, ranging from pleasant music to white noise, and watched for any changes in the rodents’ behavior.

What they saw, according to Liu, suggested that the sounds “reduced reflexive paw withdrawal and aversion to painful stimuli – indicators of analgesia for rodents.” In other words, the sounds appeared to help reduce pain in the mice.

The ideal volume for pain relief was just 5 decibels above room noise, the researchers found.

“The 5-decibel low-intensity sound is related to the background sound,” Liu explains. “It is not an absolute but rather a relative value.” So, you’d want to raise the volume just a bit louder than the background noise wherever you are.

And in what might be good news for sludge metal fans, the types of sound played made no difference. Even when noises were adjusted to be “unpleasant,” playing them at the right volume still provided a pain-relieving effect.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re into Mozart or Metallica, according to the findings, at least. Either can work – so long as the tunes are played at the right volume.

The Future of Sound and Pain Management

Liu cautions that when it comes to transcribing the symphony of how body and mind respond to sound, we’re only in the opening measures.

“There’s still a long way to translate these findings in mice to the human context,” he says.

We can’t say for sure that human brains work the same as mouse brains when exposed to sound. But the findings in mice can offer clues about how our brains might operate – and therefore provide us with one piece of the puzzle in understanding how sound influences the perception of pain.

“We hope our study opens up new directions for the field of sound-induced analgesia,” Liu says. But much more research needs to be done for that to happen.

Aug. 26, 2022 – Preethi Srinivasan was an 18-year-old with a bright future in sports and academics. A state-level medalist in swimming, she was also a proficient cricket player and dreamed of representing her native India in cricket.

Her academic achievements were equally stellar, and she was enrolled in a 5-year MBA course in Chennai, India. “My life was perfect, and the possibilities seemed infinite,” she says in an interview.

Srinivasan was on a college trip with friends at the ocean. She was standing in thigh-deep water when the sand under her feet gave way and she stumbled. As a seasoned swimmer, when she realized she was falling, she dived into the water.

“As soon as my face went underwater, I felt a shock-like sensation travel through my body and instantaneously, I could not move anything” Srinivasan recounts. “I tried to stand, but nothing happened.” From that moment, she was paralyzed below the neck.

“My life as I knew it was over, but a whole new life was beginning,” she says. “I just didn’t know yet what form that would take.”

The Serenity to Accept

Annually, there are an estimated 17,730 new spinal cord injuries in the U.S. and 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide. The U.S. Senate has designated September as National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month.

People who have a spinal cord injury confront not only practical, medical, and financial challenges, but also the feeling that their lives have been permanently upended, according to Rex Marco, MD, chief medical ambassador for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. This can lead to a sense of despair and loss of meaning.

Marco himself had a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him when he was in his 50s. He had been a nationally renowned spinal surgeon and musculoskeletal oncologist as well as an active snowboarder, mountain biker, and yoga practitioner.

All of that changed when the tire of his mountain bike stalled in a dip along a trail, catapulting him headfirst over the handlebars. He heard a crack but felt no pain. He knew that if the cracking sound came from his neck, he could be paralyzed.

“I had been doing breathing exercises to find calm for several years. In that moment, I used them to calm myself,” he says.

When a friend touched his leg and hand and he couldn’t feel the touch, he realized he had broken his neck.

As he lay there, he thought of the Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” He asked for the serenity to accept whatever physical limits lay ahead.

“I knew there was less than 5% chance I’d ever walk again. I may never operate again, and I may never hold my unborn child.” Marco also knew he had to get to a hospital as soon as possible, so he helped coordinate his rescue and arrived at the hospital and then the operating room within less than 3 hours, which he describes as “miraculous.”

He considers himself fortunate that he never despaired because he had already been using practices that deepened his sense of meaning and he drew upon them after his accident.

“I knew it was important for me to do my best to live in the present moment and not dwell on the past or worry about the future; just try to smell and taste and listen and feel. I did that throughout the day and tried to be as present as possible.”

‘Why Not Me?’

After her accident, Srinivasan at first did fall into despair. “I didn’t cope well with what had happened and tried to escape this new reality any way that I could,” she says.

She felt an acute sense of loss. “For the first 18 years of my life, I had effortlessly excelled in every area, and the future seemed to be brimming with infinite potential,” she says. “Then, in just a split second, it was all over, and I found myself having to come to terms with life in a wheelchair.”

What was especially painful was how others treated her. “I had been looked up to all my life, seen as a role model and hero, and now suddenly people looked down on me as if I ceased to exist. I couldn’t bear it. I felt invisible and invalidated and tried to shut myself away for 2 years.”

She wondered what she could have done to deserve such a fate. “I was shattered. Who was I? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to die.”

Her parents’ unconditional love and wisdom slowly brought her out and gave her a deeper understanding of life. Srinivasan’s father advised her not to ask, “Why me? Why did this happen to me?” Instead, he advised asking, “Why not me?”

He encouraged Srinivasan to use her injury as an opportunity. “Your body is going,” he told her. “Everyone’s body is going – if not today, then 10 years from today, and if not 10 years, then 50 years. Look within and find that within you which can never be taken away, which can never go.”

It was the beginning of a profound inner journey. Srinivasan began expressing herself through mouth paintings. “Slowly, I started feeling passionate about life again,” she says. “My parents gave me a beautiful spiritual lineage, and through grace, I started healing from within.”

‘There Is a Plan for Me’

Several weeks before the accident, Marco had started a practice of beginning the day with listing three things he’s grateful for, three things he’s excited about, a daily focus, a daily affirmation, and a daily exercise plan. He placed this practice into his new reality.

“I felt grateful for life, grateful for my breath, and grateful for my recovery program,” he says. “I felt excited to see my family, my friends, and my caregivers. My daily affirmation was, ‘I am enough,’ and my daily exercise plan was to get out of bed and into the chair.” At night, when he couldn’t sleep well, the nurses played a guided meditation for him.

“These practices gave me meaning and purpose, and I knew there was and there is a plan for me, although I wasn’t sure what the plan was,” he says.

Ultimately, Marco became involved with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. “Christopher Reeve was a childhood hero of mine, and I watched him play Superman,” Marco says. “I remember the day he got injured, and I remember his appearance at the Oscars when he was on a ventilator, which was so inspirational to me.”

Marco remembered that speech when he was in the intensive care unit. “I knew I wanted to do something that he did, which was try to find a cure and raise money for spinal cord injury research, which is part of my role in the foundation, as well as increasing mental health awareness, and introducing more people to mindfulness and mindfulness-based meditation.”

Founding Soulfree

When Srinivasan’s father was alive, he “took care of everything,” allowing her and her mother to be in a “bubble of safety, insulated and isolated.” But after his sudden death of cardiac arrest in 2007, there was no source of financial support. Some years later, her mother had cardiac bypass surgery.

“We began to wonder what would happen to me if my mother could no longer take care of me, and we began to look for long-term care facilities in India that were equipped to care for a person in my condition,” Srinivasan says.

She was “shocked” to find out that, throughout all of India, there wasn’t a single long-term care facility where a person with a spinal cord injury (SCI) could live with dignity. “So if the parents or family of a woman in my condition is unable to care for her, there’s nowhere to go,” she says.

She started to hear horrifying stories “Family members of women with SCI often think of a disabled daughter as shameful and refuse to feed or care for her. Two families even provided their daughters with poison and encouraged them to kill themselves.”

The lack of support for people with spinal cord injuries led Srinivasan to found Soulfree, an organization dedicated to creating long-term care centers around India that are equipped to care for those with severe disabilities permanently and ensure they will be trained for jobs and financial security, she says.

In addition to her work with Soulfree, Srinivasan is a motivational speaker, holds a master’s degree in psychology, and is and a senior research fellow pursuing her PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.

“I know I’m being kept alive on this earth for some greater purpose,” she says. “I’m content in being fully alive in this moment and trying to spread love, light, and laughter in this world.”

Helpful Resources

Research shows that people who have supportive family, friends, and community and a spiritual connection have an easier time dealing with the challenges of finding new identity, meaning, and purpose after a spinal cord injury.

The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s National Paralysis Resource Center offers free resources about living with paralysis, including a blog in which people with spinal cord injuries describe how they found meaning after their accident. Getting psychotherapy or becoming involved with a support group (in-person or online) or peer counseling, such as through the Foundation’s Peer and Family Support Program, can also help.

More resources and suggestions can be found at:

Aug. 26, 2022 – Healing a broken bone isn’t always a straightforward process of putting on a cast and waiting for the body to do its thing with time. The many materials that make up our bones have different densities and interact in several ways that affect whether a fracture heals correctly.

A fracture that doesn’t mend properly is called a nonunion, and in a long bone, such as a leg bone, it can be disabling. And doctors can’t always tell when a nonunion has occurred, much less how to predict how likely it is ahead of time. But research into bone imaging techniques is on the way to change that and give doctors a glimpse ahead to help them find problems earlier.

Mechanical engineering researchers at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, are using bone imaging and virtual mechanical testing to develop a more accurate model of the healing process.

A virtual model can help doctors recognize when a bone strays from a healthy healing process so they can step in sooner. The key is to better understand the physical process in the healing zone where the fracture is actually being repaired.

Inside the Cast

The healing process starts when the body recognizes the fracture and sends out immune cells to cause inflammation. Swelling is the body’s warning signal to stop using the injured part.

Blood cells also collect around the injury, and this mass of cells – a hematoma, or a blood clot – fills the space in the break. Over the next week, a type of soft bone called callus gradually replaces the blood clot and holds the bone together, though not strongly enough to begin using the bone yet. After several weeks, the callus has time to harden, and then hard bone begins to replace the hard callus.

But it’s difficult to see how well these later stages are occurring on X-rays since hard callus and hard bone look so much alike. Engineers are working to understand the mechanical properties of bone and callus, such as mass and density, so they can better predict when hard bone has fully replaced the callus. Predicting it too soon could get in the way of the healing process if the person uses the bone normally before it’s fully healed.

Previous computer models couldn’t accurately tell hard callus from hard bone, largely because callus itself is made up of different types of tissue with different physical properties.

But this new research relies on testing the stress put on the bone during twisting. The researchers fed those testing results and corresponding CT images into a computer to model the healing process. Brighter areas on the image represent stiffer, harder bone, so their work helped investigators figure out the cutoff point when the material stops being callus and changes to bone. Knowing this cutoff point can help identify sooner when a nonunion is occurring, which in turn can help doctors to better understand how and why the healing process is failing so they can help.

FRIDAY, Aug 26, 2022 (HealthDay News) – – A total of 84 people across four states have now been made ill by E. coli, in an outbreak possibly tied to contaminated lettuce used in sandwiches sold at Wendy’s restaurants.

“Since the last update on August 19, 2022, 47 more illnesses have been reported to CDC,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an updated statement released Thursday. That includes 53 cases in Michigan, 23 cases in Ohio, 6 in Indiana and 2 in Pennsylvania.

Illnesses from infection with the gastrointestinal bacterium have often been severe.

“Thirty-eight people have been hospitalized, including 8 people in Michigan who have a type of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome,” the CDC said, although “no deaths have been reported.”

The exact source of the outbreak has not been officially confirmed, but the CDC said that in 84% of cases people reported eating at Wendy’s before they became ill.

“Of 17 people with detailed information about what they ate at Wendy’s, 15 (88%) reported eating romaine lettuce served on burgers and sandwiches,” the agency noted.

On Aug. 19, Wendy’s announced that it had removed romaine lettuce from its sandwiches in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“Wendy’s is taking the precautionary measure of removing the romaine lettuce being used in sandwiches from restaurants in that region,” the CDC said. “Investigators are working to confirm whether romaine lettuce is the source of this outbreak, and whether romaine lettuce used in Wendy’s sandwiches was served or sold at other businesses.”

Romaine lettuce sold in grocery stores does not appear to be affected, the CDC said, and people can still eat at Wendy’s and eat the romaine lettuce in the salads it sells. Wendy’s explained in a statement that the lettuce used in its salads is not the same as that used in its sandwiches.

“We are fully cooperating with public health authorities on their ongoing investigation of the regional E. coli outbreak reported in certain midwestern states,” the company said. “While the CDC has not yet confirmed a specific food as the source of that outbreak, we are taking the precaution of discarding and replacing the sandwich lettuce at some restaurants in that region.”

Most people with an E. coli infection “start feeling sick 3 to 4 days after eating or drinking something that contains the bacteria,” the CDC said. “However, illnesses can start anywhere from 1 to 10 days after exposure.” Illnesses typically last from 5 to 7 days.

What to Do:

• Watch for symptoms of severe E. coli, which include diarrhea lasting more than three days or diarrhea accompanied by a fever higher than 102˚F, bloody diarrhea, vomiting and a lack of urination.
• If you suffer from these symptoms, call your doctor immediately.
• Keep track of what and where you ate in the week before you got sick and report it to your local or state health department.

More information

For more on the outbreak, head to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.