Alberta Health Services has launched a six-week series of free workshops for people suffering from chronic pain and diabetes starting this month.
Better Choices, Better Health™ will run at two health centres in Edmonton. One workshop is for people living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes while the other is for patients with chronic pain.
Trained volunteers, many of whom live with a chronic disease, lead workshops.
The goal is to help people solve problems and set goals, manage medication, deal with difficult emotions and eat healthy and increase physical activity.
Diabetes workshops will be held Wednesdays, May 21 to June 25 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the East Edmonton Health Centre (7910 112 Avenue). For more information or to register, call 780-401-BOOK (2665).
Chronic pain workshops will be held Tuesdays, May 6 to June 10, 2014 from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. in Conference Room B at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital (10230 111 Avenue). For more information or to register, call 780-401-BOOK (2665).
There is no significant difference in infant vaccination rates before and after an epidemic, says new research.
Researchers from the University of Washington presented their findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Vancouver, B.C. on Monday.
Washington state experienced a pertussis (whooping cough) epidemic from Oct. 1, 2011, through Dec. 31, 2012, and infants were hit the hardest. The highly contagious bacterial disease causes uncontrollable, violent coughing that can make it hard to breathe.
In the study, researchers compared the proportion of three- to eight-month-olds who had received the recommended number of doses of whooping cough vaccine before and during the epidemic. There was no significant increase in the receipt of whooping cough vaccines statewide for infants during the epidemic.
Results did show however considerable variability in vaccination rates among different counties.
“We have always assumed that when the risk of catching a disease is high, people will accept a vaccine that is effective in preventing that disease,” said Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, lead investigator.
"This finding may challenge the assumption that vaccine acceptance uniformly increases when risk of disease is high. We don't fully understand what improves vaccine acceptance.”
A strong handshake can indicate power, confidence, health, or aggression, but it can also indicate a person’s true age, says new research.
Researchers from Stony Brook University in New York reviewed findings from more than 50 published studies that focus on handgrip strength.
The study showed that a handgrip strength test could be used as a measure for aging to compare different population groups.
"We found that based on this survey, a 65-year-old white woman who had not completed secondary education has the same handgrip strength as a 69-year-old white woman who had completed secondary education,” said Serguei Scherbov, one of the researchers.
“This suggests that according to a handgrip strength characteristic their ages are equivalent and 65-year-old women age four years faster due to lower education attainment.”
Previous studies have shown that measuring age simply by the number of years people have lived does not measure variations in the aging process correctly.
Researchers are looking into new measures of aging based on people's characteristics, such as their longevity, health and disability status.
"Our goal is to measure how fast different groups in a society age. If some group is getting older faster than another, we can ask why that might be and see whether there are any policies that could help the faster aging group,” added Scherbov.
