Health Headliners of the Week

As we do every week, we've culled the most important articles we brought you based on breaking stories from around the world that can help you and your family stay well. Whether you missed these items the first time they appeared or you caught them and could use a refresher, our goal is to help you stay up-to-date on medical research that can impact your life. Read on for our to stories from September 7th to September 13th 2012.

We hope you'll like what you find and come back every Friday for a new installment!

Five Things You Should Know about Thyroid Cancer

By Robin Westen

We’re not nearly as familiar with thyroid cancer as we are with breast or prostate cancer, but it’s the fastest-increasing cancer in both men and women in the U.S. The thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland at the base of your throat, secretes hormones and affects metabolism and body temperature. Here are the five essential facts you should know about this illness:

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Watch: Distracted Driving Dangers Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

To see the video, click here.

Health Close-Up: Living With Multiple Sclerosis

By Sherry Amatenstein

Practically from the womb, Dr. Ronda Beaman had been an over-achiever. The 58-year-old California native recalls, “Probably to make up for my parents’ lack of interest in me, I was the girl scout who sold the most cookies, earned every badge possible, had to be the fastest, strongest, the most fit…” Flash forward to age 38. The over-achiever extraordinaire was an aerobics instructor and fulltime college professor at Arizona University in Flagstaff who also drove five hours round-trip twice weekly to do coursework in Phoenix for a Ph.D. in Leadership. She and her husband of one year were talking about having a baby to add to the two boys from her first marriage. Ronda sighs, recalling, “There were inexplicable weird symptoms - a glass of water would drop out of my hands, my eyes started darting back and forth real fast…”

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Visiting Nurse Association: An Underutilized Organization

By Teri Borseti

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that a trustworthy person will stop by your ailing mother’s house a couple of times a week to make sure she's safe and comfortable? Or how about the widow who just returned home from the hospital after an illness? It would be a comfort to know that someone would swing by and help her with light housework, a little laundry or to prepare a meal. It would be even better if a medical professional could visit and check vitals, have a medication changed, or offer help with a catheter.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Health Close-Up: Living Well with Hepatitis C

By Sherry Amatenstein

For 56-year-old Susan Schenck, the worst part of being informed 12 years ago that she had the blood-borne virus Hepatitis C was the doctor’s “gloom and doom prophecies about sudden cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer and death” if she didn’t immediately submit to a regimen of drugs.

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Watch: What Is Inflammatory Breast Cancer? Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

To see the video, click here.

Varicose Veins: Not Just a Cosmetic Issue

By Sondra Forsyth

My mother was a first grade teacher who was on her feet for most of the day so my father, a doctor, encouraged her to put them up the minute she got home. He even went so far as to get her a hospital-style electric bed that allowed her to sleep with her legs raised. As a kid, I thought this was kind of extreme but apparently my dad was on to something.

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Need Will Power? Watch TV Re-Runs. Couch potatoes, rejoice! Trying to stick to a healthy eating regimen? Kick the nicotine habit? Cut back on drinking? The key to accomplishing these goals may be as simple as settling down to watch re-runs of your favorite old TV shows. This unlikely finding comes from a study done at the University of Buffalo, New York and published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Of course, you still need to get up off the couch and do some exercise, but at least the time you spend ogling the tube has now been (apparently) vindicated.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Getting Through Grief

By Robin Westen

None of us travels through life without experiencing loss and the grief that accompanies it. But it’s important to be able to move through the process and get to the other side of it. Otherwise, mental health experts warn, we may put ourselves at risk for psychological as well as physical illnesses. Here’s help in assisting you through your feelings of sadness and grief:

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How Cortisol Makes You Fat and Angry

By Sara Gottfried MD

Have you heard of the “cortisol switch?”

Here’s the scenario. When you’re stressed, you feel the positive vibe of cortisol – the rise of energy, the focus, the charge, the ascent. Cortisol is the main stress hormone made in your adrenal glands and it’s designed to get you out of danger. It has three main jobs: raise blood sugar (to feed muscles so you can run or fight), raise blood pressure, and modulate immune function.

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