Archive for September, 2011
Tips To Help Running
If you want to shape up, walking, jogging and running can all provide a step in the right direction. Experts say these activities are not only excellent aerobic exercise but they can be the easiest and natural route to fitness.
Running or walking outside, however, may not always be a natural choice. If you’re not enthusiastic about running or walking in winter weather or summer humidity, or if you live somewhere where there are few sidewalks or where there’s a lot of traffic, you may want to invest in a state-of-the-art treadmill.
A treadmill can make it easier to achieve fitness goals and the latest treadmills offer many fun, motivating features that let you track progress.
Not all treadmills are created equal and a badly designed treadmill may ultimately do more harm than good.
It’s important not to settle because a bad short-term choice could have serious long-lasting health consequences.
Since exercise should be a life-long habit, you want a treadmill that will protect potentially fragile joints.
When you exercise on concrete sidewalks, for example, the impact shock is “bounced” back to your knees and hips, because concrete is a rigid material.
This can also be true of rigid, heavy steel treadmills.
When choosing a treadmill, look for one with active shock management features like those featured on PaceMaster treadmills. The tri-flex system uses three components to protect joints:
- A custom-designed deck flexes with every foot strike.
- Elastomer cushions further absorb the impact shock.
- Aluminum frames provide strength but also flex more than steel.
As a result, your joints can stay healthier for longer.
Digital Mammography : Increasing Accuracy and Patient Comfort
There’s encouraging news for women. Not only is it becoming easier to catch and treat breast cancer in its earliest stages, but new technologies are making the process of diagnosing the disease more comfortable for the patient-and more accurate as well.
The National Cancer Institute recommends mammography screenings every one to two years for women over 40 and annually for women over 50. In addition, women at high risk of developing breast cancer (for example, women with a strong family history of breast cancer or who test positive for the BRCA breast cancer gene) are encouraged to begin annual mammography screenings even earlier-sometimes as young as 25-and should consult a physician.
Benefits and risks
- Early detection of small breast cancers greatly improves a woman’s chances for successful treatment. If breast cancer is caught and treated while it is still confined to the breast ducts, the cure rate is close to 100 percent.
- Clinical studies in the U.S., Sweden and the Netherlands have suggested that deaths from breast cancer could be cut by between 36 and 44 percent if screening mammography were performed annually on all women in their 40s.
Digital mammography
One of the most recent advances in breast cancer screening is digital mammography. Digital mammography uses essentially the same system as conventional mammography, but is equipped with a digital receptor and a computer instead of a film cassette.
Digital mammography systems such as Siemens Medical Solutions’ Mammomat® NovationDR enable faster and more accurate viewing of the dense tissue of the breast. Images are acquired digitally and displayed immediately on the system monitor.
According to a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, digital mammography was significantly better than conventional mammography at screening women in any of the following categories:
- -under age 50;
- -any age with very dense or extremely dense breasts; or
- -pre- or perimenopausal women of any age.