Monday, November 20, 2017

Having a dog can extend a single person's life

From Health Day 11/17/17
FRIDAY, Nov. 17, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- Here's to keeping your health on a tight leash: New research suggests that having a dog might boost a single person's life span.
The study tracked more than 3.4 million Swedes, middle-aged and older, for 12 years. All were free of heart disease at the beginning of the study.
The researchers reported that dog owners who lived alone were 11 percent less likely to die of heart disease and a third less likely to die from any cause, compared with those who lived alone and didn't have a dog.
For more click here.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) helps children and adolescents with OCD (Obsessive compulsive disorder)

Children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who respond to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) appear to continue to experience benefits from the therapy even after their initial course of treatment ends, according to a study published Wednesday in theJournal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Other research has suggested that CBT for pediatric OCD is a durable therapy, but these studies had been limited by either small samples sizes or having CBT combined with other treatments. 

For more click here.

183,000 Americans have died from prescription opioid drug overdoses in the last 16 years.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 183,000 people in the United States died from prescription opioid overdoses such as OxyContin (oxycodone) and Vicodin (hydrocodone).

For more click here.

I provide clinical supervision for some substance abuse counselors working towards their licensure at a substance abuse agency in Western New York State. Last week on 09/21/17, in our meeting, one of the counselors shared with the group that two of her clients have died of overdoses in the last 10 days and another counselor shared that one of her former clients had died recently as well.

STDs hit all time high in U.S. in 2016

TUESDAY, Sept. 26, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- New cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States reached an all-time high in 2016, federal health officials reported Tuesday.
There were 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 470,000 cases of gonorrhea and 28,000 of syphilis reported that year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in its annual report on STDs.
And the diseases are on the rise in a number of groups, including women, infants, and gay and bisexual men.
For more click here.