Minneapolis St. Paul Mental Health Blog

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MaryAPRN.com/ Advanced Practice Psych LLC

Supplements and Health | Why you should skip the pills, go for the real food

Why you should skip the pills, eat real food for the benefits | Supplement Health

Today’s commercials tend to over-hype the message, especially when it comes to taking supplements / vitamins. It is as if ‘The food you eat isn’t enough’. Western thought process has been under scrutiny for pushing the idea that 'more is better'.

If the antioxidants that occur naturally in our food, like broccoli and carrots, are good for us, a supplement with the same thing must also be good. But that’s not quite true.

Truth: Antioxidants can help stop damage to our cells, but only so much is helpful, after that it becomes a negative, here is what was recently discovered:

Antioxidants are touted as protectors of our health because they eliminate free-radicals that damage molecules in cells and tissues by grabbing electrons from them, making those molecules, in turn, unstable.

This process can then snowball until a cell dies or even a whole organ collapses, such as in liver failure or heart failure. An antioxidant should stop the electron-grabbing radicals, and keep us healthy.

On this basis, a group of scientists proposed in 1981 the creation of a nutritional supplement to fight free-radicals. They reasoned that since many observational epidemiological studies had shown that people who eat lots of vegetables are at lower risk of colon cancer, heart disease and many other bad conditions, then the “active” ingredient should be identified and put into a pill. They thought that it must be beta-carotene, which helps make carrots orange, because it’s an antioxidant.

What's better than a pill?

But it’s not that simple. The constant interplay between electron acceptors (radicals) and donors (antioxidants) is a finely balanced and very complicated biochemistry at the core of how living cells survive and grow. When there is too much of either acceptors or donors, the system is out of balance, and damage can occur. So extra antioxidants aren’t necessarily a good thing.

But in the late 1980s, two intervention trials, one in Seattle and the other in Finland, started. Interventions trials are hugely expensive to do well, and these were no exception.

For the Seattle trial, approximately 18,000 men and women were randomized in 1988 to receive either a tablet containing beta-carotene or a tablet containing no active ingredient, which is the famous placebo. The plan was to follow the men and women for 10 years; the researchers hypothesized they would observe a lower lung cancer risk in the beta-carotene tablet group, hopefully much lower.

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better outcomes from primary care by nurse practitioners | Real Data

Having NP's with more influence / prescribing rights, the data for health care is positive for NP's.

US Medicare patients with diabetes who receive their care from nurse practitioners are slightly less likely to be hospitalized for a potentially preventable condition compared with those cared for by physicians, according to a study published recently in Medical Care.

"These results may represent a valid finding of better outcomes from primary care delivered by nurse practitioners," write Yong-Fang Kuo, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "Alternatively, they may have resulted from confounding by selection biases not completely controlled for in the analyses."

The researchers compared potentially preventable hospitalizations from 2007 to 2010 among 345,819 Medicare patients with any diagnosis of diabetes. Of these, 93,443 patients had received all their primary care from nurse practitioners (a total of 136,348 person-years), and 252,376 patients had received all their care from a generalist physician (553,890 person-years).

Nurse practitioners' patients had a 10% lower risk of hospitalization for a potentially preventable condition (odds ratio [OR], 0.90) and a 6% lower risk of hospitalization for poor diabetes control, such as hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia (OR, 0.94), compared with patients of physicians. Similarly, the odds for hospitalization for other conditions was slightly lower among nurse practitioners' patients than among physicians' patients (OR, 0.96).

All-cause mortality between the groups was not statistically different over 4 years, however. In the nurse-practitioner group, 17.15% of patients died, compared with 16.97% of physicians' patients (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.97–1.03).

"We find it surprising that the findings of lower rate of potentially avoidable hospitalization among nurse practitioners patients still hold true, despite use of multiple advanced analyses to adjust for complexity and severity of illnesses between diabetes patients cared for by nurse practitioners vs MDs," coauthor Mukaila A Raji, MD, told Medscape Medical News.

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Mental Health | Supplements and Nonprescription Drugs, FDA warns

Mental Health Update | Beware of Imported Supplements and Nonprescription Drugs, Warns FDA.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a safety alert to consumers regarding imported products marketed as dietary supplements and non-prescription drug products, often sold at ethnic or international stores, flea markets, swap meets, or online.

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Reducing the risk of anxiety for ADHD children | Mental Health Update

ADHD children, getting beyond anxiety thru the use of psychostimulants

A new review of studies involving nearly 3,000 children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) concludes that, although anxiety has been reported as a side-effect of stimulant medication, psychostimulant treatment for ADHD significantly reduces the risk of anxiety.

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