Get younger-looking skin

Who doesn't want to look younger? Taut, blemish-free, smooth skin is what most women dream of and are even willing to go under the knife for. Few realize that a stress-free life and a daily skincare regime can help you postpone looking your age.

Inside out

You are what you eat. Just scrubbing your face clean everyday will not work well enough if you do not cleanse your system internally by eating the right food. Clinical nutritionist Dr Nupur Krishnan says, "Eating a diet rich in colourful fruits and vegetables can help protect against ageing. Tomatoes, red bell pepper and citrus fruits are rich in Vitamin C, while green leafy vegetables, sweet potatoes and bright orange vegetables have carotids that also reverse ageing."
Vitamin E is essential for skin elasticity and can be found in avocado and nuts like walnuts and cashew nuts, she adds. Dietitian Deepshikha Aggarwal says, "Anti-oxidants that are present in blueberries, cranberries and Alvera can help fight bacteria and keep your skin
looking bright."

Fluid formula

With age, you are more vulnerable to dehydration and your dry skin can make you look older than you are, as it encourages fine lines to become prominent. You may have already heard this a hundred times before, but at least eight to ten glasses of water a day is essential.

Deepshikha says, "Avoid caffeinated drinks. They increase wrinkle formation and also lead to skin darkening. Have green tea instead if you want to bring a healthy glow to your skin."
The idea is to keep your body hydrated all the time - if you are not too fond of water you can have fruit smoothies, Chas, vegetable soups, unsweetened natural fruit juice, low-fat milk and soy milk.

Screen your skin

People have not really understood the importance of sunscreen - they are neither regular nor very particular about the sun protection factor (SPF) of their sunscreen. Doctors say unprotected skin can get irreversibly damaged, and this damage invariably shows up on the skin in the form of fine lines, dark spots and pigmentation.
Cosmetologist and dermatologist Dr Jamuna Pai says, "You should apply sunscreen regularly and not just once a day." Make sure the SPF is at least over 30, say experts.

Do it daily

If you want your skin to retain its healthy radiance and youthful look, you must stick to a basic skincare routine. Dr Apratim Goel, dermatologist, says, "Before your go off to bed, remove all traces of makeup with a makeup remover and then cleanse your skin with a facial cleanser. Then use a toner and a hydrating and nourishing moisturiser. Do this without fail."

Tips and toes


If you want to guess the age of someone you should look at their hands and feet, because age lines appear there first. Aesthetician Ritu Tanwar states that one should care for the skin on the hands and feet just like the face and neck. "Ideally, you should use creams that are meant especially for hands and feet rather than the general moisturiser, because it is quite different from facial skin. Exfoliate and scrub your hands and feet regularly and before retiring for the day, make sure that you apply something creamy and nourishing on them. A fortnightly (weekly would be better) pedicure will do you good in the monsoon because feet tend to get dirty. A monthly manicure is also recommended," she suggests.

Fibre lowers bowel cancer risk

Eating more cereals and whole grains could reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer, a BMJ study says.

Researchers from Imperial College London found that for every 10g a day increase in fibre intake, there was a 10% drop in the risk of bowel cancer.

But their analysis of 25 previous studies found that fruit and vegetables fibre did not reduce risk.

A cancer charity called for more detailed research on the quantity and type of fibre to eat.

Eating fibre and whole grains is known to help protect against cardiovascular disease, but experts say that any link with colorectal cancer is less clear because studies have not had consistent results.

Reviewing the results of all previous observational studies in this area, researchers in London, Leeds and the Netherlands analysed data provided by almost two million people.

Their conclusion, published in the British Medical Journal, is that increasing fibre intake, particularly cereal fibre and whole grains, helps prevent colorectal cancer.

Whole grains include foods such as whole grain breads, brown rice, cereals, oatmeal and porridge.

Dagfinn Aune, lead study author and research associate in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Imperial College London, said their analysis found a linear association between dietary fibre and colorectal cancer.

"The more of this fibre you eat the better it is. Even moderate amounts have some effect."

Adding three servings (90g per day) of whole grains to diets was linked to a 20% reduction in the risk of colorectal cancer, researchers said.

Cancer Research UK data shows that the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with colorectal cancer in the UK is estimated to be one in 14 (6.9%) for men, and one in 19 for women (5.4%).

However, the study said there was no evidence that fibre in fruit and vegetables played a part in reducing risk.

A previous study which showed a reduction in risk with high intake of fruit and vegetables suggests that compounds other than fibre in fruit and vegetables could account for this result, said the authors.

They also said that the health benefits of increasing fibre and whole grains intake was not restricted to colorectal cancer.

"It is also likely to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, overweight and obesity, and possibly overall mortality," the researchers said.

Protecting grains

Mark Flannagan, chief executive of Beating Bowel Cancer, said the research supported the charity's current advice.

"These results support what we already know about the link between dietary fibre and a reduced risk of bowel cancer, although more work is needed to clarify the quantity and types of fibre we should be eating to reduce risk.

"We recommend that people eat a healthy balanced diet that includes plenty of dietary fibre, such as grains, cereals, fruit and vegetables to reduce the risk of developing bowel cancer.

"It is encouraging to know that simple changes to your diet and lifestyle could help protect you from the UK's second biggest cancer killer."

Yinka Ebo, senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said the review added weight to the evidence that fibre protects against bowel cancer.

"It shows that certain sources of fibre, such as cereal and whole grains, are particularly important.

"Eating plenty of fibre is just one of many things you can do to lower your risk of developing the disease, along with keeping a healthy weight, being physically active, cutting down on alcohol, red and processed meat, and not smoking."

In an accompanying editorial in the BMJ, Professor Anne Tjonneland from the Danish Cancer Society, said whole grain products should be made more appealing to shoppers.

"To increase the intake of these foods in Western countries, the health benefits must be actively communicated and the accessibility of whole grain products greatly improved, preferably with a simple labelling system that helps consumers to choose products with high whole grain contents."

Cancer of the large bowel, also known as colorectal cancer, is a common form of cancer in developed countries - but occurs much less frequently in the developing world.

Alcohol Kills More than AIDS, TB or Violence

Alcohol causes nearly 4 percent of deaths worldwide, more than AIDS, tuberculosis or violence, the World Health Organization warned on Friday.

Rising incomes have triggered more drinking in heavily populated countries in Africa and Asia, including India and South Africa, and binge drinking is a problem in many developed countries, the United Nations agency said.

Yet alcohol control policies are weak and remain a low priority for most governments despite drinkings heavy toll on society from road accidents, violence, disease, child neglect and job absenteeism, it said.

Approximately 2.5 million people die each year from alcohol related causes, the WHO said in its "Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health."

"The harmful use of alcohol is especially fatal for younger age groups and alcohol is the world's leading risk factor for death among males aged 15-59," the report found.

In Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), every fifth death is due to harmful drinking, the highest rate.

Binge drinking, which often leads to risky behavior, is now prevalent in Brazil, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine, and rising elsewhere, according to the WHO.

"Worldwide, about 11 percent of drinkers have weekly heavy episodic drinking occasions, with men outnumbering women by four to one. Men consistently engage in hazardous drinking at much higher levels than women in all regions," the report said.


Health ministers from the WHO's 193 member states agreed last May to try to curb binge drinking and other growing forms of excessive alcohol use through higher taxes on alcoholic drinks and tighter marketing restrictions.

DISEASE AND INJURY

Alcohol is a causal factor in 60 types of diseases and injuries, according to WHO's first report on alcohol since 2004.

Its consumption has been linked to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, poisonings, road traffic accidents, violence, and several types of cancer, including cancers of the colorectum, breast, larynx and liver.

"Six or seven years ago we didn't have strong evidence of a causal relationship between drinking and breast cancer. Now we do," Vladimir Poznyak, head of WHO's substance abuse unit who coordinated the report, told Reuters.

Alcohol consumption rates vary greatly, from high levels in developed countries, to the lowest in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and southern Asia, whose large Muslim populations often abstain from drinking.

Homemade or illegally produced alcohol -- falling outside governmental controls and tax nets -- accounts for nearly 30 percent of total worldwide adult consumption. Some is toxic.

In France and other European countries with high levels of adult per capita consumption, heavy episodic drinking is rather low, suggesting more regular but moderate drinking patterns.

Light to moderate drinking can have a beneficial impact on heart disease and stroke, according to the WHO. "However, the beneficial cardio-protective effect of drinking disappears with heavy drinking occasions," it said.

One of the most effective ways to curb drinking, especially among young people, is to raise taxes, the report said. Setting age limits for buying and consuming alcohol, and regulating alcohol levels in drivers, also reduce abuse if enforced.

Some countries restrict marketing of alcoholic beverages or on the industry's sponsorship of sporting events.

"Yet not enough countries use these and other effective policy options to prevent death, disease and injury attributable to alcohol consumption," the WHO said.

Alcohol producers including Diageo and Anheuser Busch InBev have said they recognize the importance of industry self-regulation to address alcohol abuse and promote curbs on drunk drinking and illegal underage drinking.

But the brewer SABMiller has warned that policy measures like minimum pricing and high excise taxes on alcohol could cause more public health harm than good by leading more people to drink homemade or illegally produced alcohol.

Dirty Air Triggers More Heart Attacks than Cocaine

Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday.

Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit.

The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use.

Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

"Physicians are always looking at individual patients -- and low risk factors might not look important at an individual level, but if they are prevalent in the population then they have a greater public health relevance," he said in a telephone interview.

The World Health Organization (WHO) describes air pollution as "a major environmental risk to health" and estimates that it causes around 2 million premature deaths worldwide every year.

Nawrot's team combined data from 36 separate studies and calculated the relative risk posed by a series of heart attack triggers and their population-attributable fraction (PAF) -- in other words the proportion of total heart attacks estimated to have been caused by each trigger.

The highest risk PAF was exposure to traffic, followed by physical exertion, alcohol, coffee, air pollution, and then things like anger, sex, cocaine use, smoking marijuana and respiratory infections.

"Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are exposed to (it)," the researchers wrote. "PAFs give a measure of how much disease would be avoided if the risk was no longer present."

A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia exceeds the WHO's air quality guidelines and that toxic cocktails of pollutants results in more than 530,000 premature deaths a year.

While passive smoking was not included in this study, Nawrot said the effects of second-hand smoke were likely to be similar to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research which found that bans on smoking in public places have significantly reduced heart attack rates.

British researchers said last year that a ban on smoking in public places in England led to a swift and significant drop in the number of heart attacks, saving the health service 8.4 million pounds ($13 million) in the first year.

Tim Chico, a heart specialist at the University of Sheffield who was not involved in this research, said it would help health authorities focus on which are the most important triggers.

"However, what triggers the heart attack should be considered the "last straw." The foundations of heart disease that lead to a heart attack are laid down over many years," he said in an emailed comment. "If someone wants to avoid a heart attack they should focus on not smoking, exercising, eating a healthy diet and maintaining their ideal weight."

Guidelines to Help Prevent Heart Attack Deaths

When doctors follow guidelines for treating patients after a heart attack, more patients survive, according to a new study from Sweden published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The findings show that "things that we test in clinical trials do work in real life (and) make huge impacts on mortality," said Dr. Debabrata Mukherjee, a cardiologist at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso who wrote a commentary published with the study in JAMA.

Despite better adherence to guidelines, there is still room for improvement in Sweden and abroad, researchers said -- which should be accompanied by still better outcomes for patients.

In the current study, Dr. Tomas Jernberg of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and his colleagues consulted a database of over 61,000 patients treated in Sweden between 1996 and 2007 for a certain kind of heart attack that damages a lot of heart muscle.

During that period, Sweden introduced new guidelines outlining the best way to treat patients who had just had a heart attack.

And over those 12 years, treatments that have been proven to help heart attack patients - including drugs to break up blood clots and procedures to open arteries - became more common.

For example, statins were prescribed to 23 percent of heart attack patients in 1996 and 1997, compared to 83 percent in 2006 and 2007. Just 12 percent of patients had an angioplasty after a heart attack at the beginning of the study, compared to 61 percent by the end.

At the same time, fewer patients died after having a heart attack in the study's later years. The chance of dying in the year following a heart attack dropped from 21 percent to 13 percent.

Jernberg and his colleagues calculated that patients who were treated in the mid-2000's lived an average of 2.7 years longer after their heart attack than patients from the mid-1990's.

But not all hospitals have been quick to make standard treatments the norm, Jernberg said.

"There are variations (in) how quickly they adopt new treatments," he told Reuters Health in an email. "These variations are not as large as in previous years, but there is still room for improvement."

Mukherjee said that the story is the same in the United States: positive changes, but not everyone fully on board.

"We've certainly gotten better, (but) we're not at 100 percent. And even now, hospitals differ," Mukherjee told Reuters Health.

He emphasized that patients can help ensure they get the best treatment after a heart attack by educating themselves on different procedures and medications, and by knowing that treatment doesn't end when they leave the hospital.

For example, "We see a lot of problems with patients who stop taking their medication when they start feeling better," Mukherjee said. But those medications need to be taken long-term to prevent future heart problems.

That long-term mentality needs to apply to doctors as well, said Dr. Robert Yeh, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the study.

"Really, the episode of care...goes from when the patient presents with a heart attack and really extends for the years following to make sure they don't develop complications," Yeh told Reuters Health.

Researchers also proposed quicker feedback for doctors and "decision support" - which requires doctors to answer questions about the treatment they are giving a patient as they give it - to improve adherence to guidelines.

And improvements in treatment need to happen faster, said Dr. Eric Peterson, a cardiologist at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, who is also an editor at JAMA.

"The bad news is that was a 12-year period of time to do something that we needed to do," Peterson told Reuters Health of the new Swedish findings. "That's way too long. Think about how many patients along the way ... didn't get treated before we got to those high rates of adherence."

Still, Yeh said, the study as a whole represents "a real success story."

Yoga and stretching both ease chronic back pain

Weekly yoga classes eased pain and improved functioning in some people with chronic lower back pain -- but the yoga sessions weren't any better than regular stretching classes, according to a new study.

Researchers found that participants in both types of classes had better functioning and fewer symptoms after three months than back patients who were only given a book with advice on preventing and managing pain.

"We've known for a while... that exercise is good for back pain," said Dr. Timothy Carey, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who wrote a commentary published with the study.

Yoga, he told , "seems to be a perfectly good option for people with back pain, but it is not a preferred option."

Finding that yoga and stretching had about equal effects means it was probably the stretching involved in yoga -- and not the relaxation or breathing components of the practice -- that helped improve functioning and pain symptoms, researchers report today in Archives of Internal Medicine.

For the study, they divided 228 adults with long-lasting back pain into three groups. Patients in the first two groups went to either weekly yoga or stretching classes for 12 weeks and were asked to practice on their own between classes. Both types of classes focused on stretching and strengthening the lower back and legs.

Patients in the third group were given a book with back pain-related exercise and lifestyle advice and information on managing flare-ups.

After the 12-week program, people who had gone to the group classes reported significantly lower scores on a questionnaire measuring how much pain interferes with daily activities, compared to those given the book.

The questionnaire rated daily "disability" level on a scale of zero to 23, with 23 being the most severe. At the 12-week mark, the exercise groups had dropped from an initial average score of 10 in the yoga group or nine in the stretching group to between four and five in both groups. The people who received the book started with an average score of nine and at 12 weeks had dropped to about a seven.

More participants who did either yoga or stretching also said that their back pain had diminished or was gone. Sixty percent of people in the yoga group reported improvements in pain, compared to 46 percent in the stretching classes and just 16 percent of people who only got the books.

Three months after the end of classes, symptom improvements were similar in people who had done either stretching or yoga, and still better than in the third, non-exercise group.

And at both the end of class sessions and three months later, twice as many of the class participants reported cutting back on pain medications, such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAIDs) -- about 40 percent versus 20 percent in the book group.

"Here is an option that is something worth trying," said Karen Sherman from the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, who led the study.

With either stretching or yoga classes, she told Reuters Health, practice is a must for patients. "There is absolutely no treatment that works for everybody... (but) if they're willing to practice, they should go ahead and give it a try."

Carey said the findings suggest that the best type of exercise for people with back pain depends on their preferences and what's convenient.

"It's important that people do exercise they enjoy," he said -- that way, they're more likely to stick with it. And, "you don't need to drive 50 miles to the nearest yoga class if there's not one near you," Carey added.

He highlighted group exercise in general as a way to stay motivated that's also relatively inexpensive.

Sherman said attending a single yoga or stretching session costs about $20, but probably varies in different parts of the country. That would be cheaper than other options for managing lower back pain, such as acupuncture and massage or talk therapy.

And, she added, "Once a person learns how to do these in a way that's safe for them, they can do them on their own."

The study was funded by the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

While it didn't include people with severe back pain -- so the findings don't necessarily apply to them -- Carey said that "almost anyone with back pain can benefit from stretching exercises."