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Posts published in “Health & Fitness”

Center for Disease Control Reports Black Teen Birth Rate at an All-Time Low

By goodblacknews on August 22, 2014


New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dismantles some long held myths about teen sexuality. The birthrate for teens in the United States hit an all-time low in 2013.
The government agency reports 277,749 babies were born in 2013 to mothers who were under the age of 20. That is the lowest number recorded since the CDC began collecting birthrate data in 1940.  Between 1991 and 2012, the rate for Non-hispanic Black teens saw the largest decline of 63%, and birthrates were down in all 50 states.
According to the CDC, this is the result of “a number of behavioral changes, including decreased sexual activity, increases in the use of contraception at first sex and at most recent sex, and the adoption and increased use of hormonal contraception, injectables, and intrauterine devices.”
 

Among Black teenagers, birth rates fell less than 20% from 2007 to 2012 in the District of Columbia and Michigan, while rates in 13 states fell at least 35%.
In 2012, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic teen birth rates were still more than two times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic white teens, but despite widely held beliefs about black women’s reproduction, Black teens do not, in fact, have the highest birth rate in the country. So the next time anyone tries to point the finger at Black women celebrities for encouraging teen sex, like Bill O’Reilly did in April, their handwringing can be easily refuted with CDC data.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock, CDC
Source: CDC
article via forharriet.com

Intel, 50 Cent Pair Up on Headphones That Can Measure Your Heart Rate

By goodblacknews on August 17, 2014
Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson attends an autograph signing event at SMS Audio.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson attends an autograph signing event at SMS Audio. (Marcel Thomas | FilmMagic | Getty Images)
Chipmaker Intel and SMS Audio, the consumer electronics company founded by 50 Cent, are partnering to launch a pair of heart-rate-measuring headphones.
The SMS Audio BioSport In-Ear headphones have an optical light sensor in the earbuds that, combined with other sensors, infer the wearer’s heart rate during both intense exercise sessions and regular, continuous wear.
Unlike LG’s heart-rate monitoring earphones, the Intel-SMS earphones pull power from your smartphone’s audio jack, which means there’s no additional charging required. And rather than requiring the user to go through a proprietary app, these earphones integrate directly with popular app RunKeeper. The companies say there are likely more app integrations coming.
The BioSport In-Ear headphones will launch sometime in the last quarter of the year. Pricing has not been announced.
For SMS Audio, the partnership with tech giant Intel and the new product are part of an effort to gain traction in a crowded headphone market. NPD analyst Ben Arnold has said that, while the premium headphone market has grown 16 percent over the past year, SMS Audio’s dollar share has shrunk to less than one percent. The company’s headphones, which range in price from $70 to more than $200, have gotten mixed reviews.
For Intel, it’s another step in the wearables market. At the International CES earlier this year, Intel revealed a variety of small-device prototypes, seemingly intent not to miss the early wearable wave the way it did with mobile.  In May, Intel showed off a “smart” shirt, embedded with sensors and conductive fibers, that it expects could ship sometime next year.
And just yesterday, the company announced it had teamed up with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to launch wearable devices that would monitor and gather data around Parkinson’s disease. That data will be shared with researchers, who will study the effects of Parkinson’s medications on motor skills.
—By Lauren Goode, Re/code.net.

The Tempo, an Activity Tracker for Seniors, Lets You Know When Something's Wrong

By goodblacknews on August 14, 2014

CarePredict is building a smartwatch that’s designed to monitor the elderly while maintaining their independence. The Tempo is a wrist-worn sensor that keeps an eye on someone’s activity patterns, and should it spot an anomaly, raise the alarm. It works by mapping out a general schedule of the day, and observing changes like an unusual mid-day nap or if someone has remained still in one room for too long. It’ll even observe trends over a much longer period of time, so if someone’s walking pace slows over a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to see it and address any underlying issues.
The hardware comes in four parts: along with the watch, you’ll need a wireless charging plate, room beacons to help the Tempo orient itself and a wall-mounted communications hub. It’s from the latter of that group that the data will be pushed to the cloud, enabling families and others to keep an eye on their parents while at work or on holiday. Unfortunately, the product isn’t yet ready for prime time, so like so many things nowadays, has taken to crowdfunding to raise enough cash to finish the job. This time out, you’ll have to throw upwards of $170 towards Fundable if you want one of the first units, with four room beacons and three months of free monitoring.

Liz Ferro's "Girls With Sole" Non-Profit Helps Young Women Overcome Life's Challenges Through Fitness

By goodblacknews on July 16, 2014

TODAY
Six days a week, Liz Ferro packs up her car and drives throughout Cleveland to teach young women yoga, swimming and other fitness-based activities. But it isn’t all about breaking a sweat.  “It washes away all the cobwebs,” Ferro told TODAY. “Not just out of my brain, but off my heart.”
After using fitness to recover from her own difficult childhood, Ferro now runs Girls With Sole, a non-profit organization committed to helping young women learn to overcome life’s challenges through exercise. “It’s so much easier for them to feel down on themselves,” she told TODAY.
TODAYFerro hits the road throughout the week to work out with pre-teen and teenage girls in schools, juvenile detention centers, social services and other organizations throughout the Cleveland area. “My car looks like a sporting goods store exploded in it,” she said. “It’s almost like Meals on Wheels, but we’re fitness and wellness on wheels.”
Girls With Sole, which she founded in 2009, is largely inspired by Ferro’s own past. She lived in four different foster homes as a child. By the time she was adopted, she had been sexually abused and experienced other traumas while bouncing from home to home.
“Sports and fitness was the thing that made me find the empowerment to be able to handle it and resilience to move on and keep moving forward,” she explained. “Even in the darkest times, it literally saved my life.”
Ferro is now turning to the next generation of young women to show them how to use healthy coping mechanisms, including running, swimming, biking and yoga, in the face of hard situations, whatever they may be.
“School has stressed me out so much, and I could always look forward to Wednesdays, when I would see Liz and I would see her smile and her energy,” eighth-grader Gina said. “People feed off that.”
When Girls With Sole participant Jada finished her first 5K, it meant more than crossing a finish line.  “It makes me feel like I can achieve something in my life,” she said. “Coming here brings the happiness out of me instead of sadness.”
Click here to see video of this story.
article by Amy Eley via www.today.com

Coming Home: Tracy Morgan Released From Rehab

By goodblacknews on July 14, 2014

Rio 2 Premiere - Arrivals
Tracy Morgan is going to continue on his road to recovery at home now that he’s been released from rehab.
A month after suffering critical injuries from a six-car pile-up that killed his friend James McNair, MTV News reports that the “30 Rock” star left the facility where he’d been healing on Saturday morning.
Tracy, who was wheelchair-bound yesterday, went home just as news of his lawsuit of againt Wal-Mart got out. “In regards to the reports of a lawsuit, I can confirm that Tracy, along with the other victims of this horrific accident, have filed suit,” the comedian’s rep said in a statement.
Now that Tracy’s well enough to head home, his caretakers don’t plan to slack off in their duties to get him back to his old self. “Tracy has been released from the rehabilitation center and will continue his recovery efforts at home with an aggressive outpatient program,” the statement read.
Nearly every detail of Tracy’s accident, and the resulting fallout, have been followed closely by media outlets. Now, he’s hoping to get a little peace and quiet.
“He asked me to pass along his sincerest gratitude to everyone who has helped him get to this point,” Tracy’s rep said. “He would also appreciate some privacy during this crucial point in his recovery.”
article by Sonya Eskridge via hellobeautiful.com

Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles Set to Reopen in Early 2015

By goodblacknews on July 1, 2014

mlk set to reopenThe embattled Los Angeles’ Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital is set to reopen in early 2015 according to hospital officials, giving residents in its surrounding community access to much needed care as well as job opportunities. The hospital originally opened in 1972 serving the African American and Latino community with various types of medical services until the year 2007. The “heaven sent” hospital as it is known to many members of the community was shut down due to high patient deaths, unqualified staff, hygiene issues, and medical scandals. The shut down resulted in the loss of hospital jobs and lack of nearby emergency rooms for the community.
According to the MLK Community hospital website, “The hospital is expected to serve 1.2 million residents from all over South Los Angeles including Compton, Inglewood, Watts-Willowbrook and Lynwood.”
Not only will the hospital create jobs for people in the community, but it will also provide more than 10 inpatient and outpatient services including but not limited to Anesthesiology, Cardiology-medical and diagnostic, Emergency medicine, Endocrinology and Gastroenterology. The new hospital will also have 131 beds, a 21-bed emergency department, a critical care unit, and labor and delivery services.
“We’re not done yet, we have a lot to do and we are going to do it,” said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. “We are putting in the kind of services that meet the needs and the demands of that population.”
The hospital will take new measures to ensure and decrease hospital scandals, hygiene issues, and unqualified staff by hiring the highest quality staff and using modern day technology. The hospitals mission is to “provide compassionate, collaborate, quality care and improve the health of our community. Our vision is to be a leading model of innovation, collaboration and community health care.”
For more information visit: http://www.mlkcommunityhospital.org
article by Kimberlee Buck via lasentinel.net

L.A. Barbers To Use $8.5 Million Grant To Screen Black Men For Hypertension

By goodblacknews on June 24, 2014

Black Barber Shop Health Outreach Program Launches Tour (thumbnail)Barbershops are central to the narrative of Black manhood in the United States.
It is where jokes are cracked, friends are made, issues debated, and, soon, where blood pressure will be tested.
According to the Daily Breeze, Dr. Ronald G. Victor, the head of Cedars-Sinai’s hypertension center, will use a $8.5 million grant to help train Black barbers to check men for high blood pressure.
“Uncontrolled hypertension is one of the biggest health problems facing the African-American community today,” said Victor, the Burns and Allen Chair in Cardiology Research. “Hypertension is called the silent killer because there are no symptoms. We need to find a way to reach out to the community and prevent the serious complications caused by high blood pressure because all too often, by the time a patient finds out they have the condition, the heart and kidneys already have been damaged.”
Read Cedars-Sinai’s statement on the groundbreaking project below:

A Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute physician has been awarded an $8.5 million grant aimed at enlisting African-American barbers in the fight against hypertension, a deadly condition that can cause strokes, heart attacks and organ failure, and which is particularly devastating to African-American men.
Ronald G. Victor, MD, director of the Hypertension Center in the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, was the first to subject increasingly popular barbershop-based health programs to scientific scrutiny with randomized, controlled testing. His study, published in 2011 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, showed that if barbers offered blood pressure checks during men’s haircuts and encouraged patrons with hypertension to follow up with physicians, hundreds of lives could be saved annually.
Now, with the grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Victor is about to start a new, randomized, controlled clinical trial that will include 500 African-American male patrons of 20 Los Angeles-area barbershops. All participants will have uncontrolled hypertension and be longtime customers of the participating barbershops. The goal of the new trial is to test the effectiveness of barbershop hypertension programs and whether expanding such programs is feasible and cost-effective.
The Cedars-Sinai-led research study will be conducted in partnership with several California medical centers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67 million American adults have hypertension. Of that number, 53 million are aware of their condition, 47 million are treated, and 31 million have it under control. Among African-Americans, 43 percent of men and 45.7 percent of women have hypertension, compared to 33.9 percent of White men and 31.3 percent of White women.
Victor’s 2011 study concludes that if hypertension intervention programs were put in place in the estimated 18,000 African-American barbershops in the U.S., it would result in the first year in about 800 fewer heart attacks, 550 fewer strokes and 900 fewer deaths.
“We hope that the new trial’s outcomes will show an even greater benefit while lowering the cost of providing high-quality healthcare for hypertension in a high-risk population,” Victor said.
article via newsone.com

Physician Darrell Gray Works to Use Telecommunications to Extend Care to Underserved Neighborhoods

By goodblacknews on June 18, 2014

Darrell M. Gray, II MD
Darrell M. Gray, II MD

The man came into the emergency room of St. Louis’ Barnes-Jewish Hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Having no insurance, he had avoided medical care as long as he could, but the pain had finally become too intense.
The gastroenterologist called in to consult that day was Darrell Gray, a young physician from Baltimore doing a fellowship at the hospital, which is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.  The patient, in his late 40s or early 50s, had blood in his stool and a mass in his stomach.
“It didn’t take much more diagnostic work to understand that, feeling the mass and seeing that his history of passing blood, this was likely a cancer,” Gray recalls. “Here’s a young guy who comes in with what was later found to be metastatic cancer. At that point I really couldn’t do much for him.”
That experience, and others like it, prompted Gray to continue his already extensive training, which included the fellowship, a residency at Duke, and medical school at Howard University. To top that off, he spent the last year at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Gray got a taste of public health work during his fellowship. While in St. Louis, he designed a bridge program to connect disadvantaged populations with the health care system. His target population was African-American men, who have a higher incidence of colorectal cancers than the general population, a reality that, in poorer neighborhoods, is compounded by other barriers to health care, such as a lack of insurance, a lack of knowledge about preventive measures, and chronic unemployment.
To reach these men, Gray contacted area churches, gave short educational presentations during the community announcement portion of Sunday services, and followed up with those who contacted him, connecting them with screening services and primary-care physicians. The experience was satisfying, but also made him realize how much he didn’t know.
“I realized from that program that there were some areas I needed strengthening in: health policy, public health, population health,” Gray said. “While I enjoy seeing a patient in the office, I want to be able to impact populations.”
Gray, who graduates this spring with a master’s in public health, said he has benefited greatly from his year at HSPH. In addition to his academic work, he shook hands with the prime minister of Namibia, met with the former health minister of Kenya, met senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, and met with Jonathan Woodson, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.
“I had high expectations coming in, but it has exceeded my expectations,” said Gray, who is at HSPH on a Mongan Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority Health Policy.

Angela Bassett and Kimora Lee Simmons Design Medical I.D. Bracelets for Charity

By goodblacknews on March 29, 2014

Here at GBN we are always thrilled to hear about a great cause. We are particularly impressed with Angela Bassett and Kimora Lee Simmons joining up with Hope Page Designs (www.hopepaige.com) and adding their style to medical i.d. bracelets. The celeb-designed bracelets benefit their cause of choice.  100% of the profit goes to the charity.  Now this is practical jewelry that we simply adore!
Angela Bassett
Image “The twins and I really enjoyed creating a bracelet together to support the Rahel Formula Fund’s goal to feed Ethiopian orphan newborns. 
Angela’s Cause: Adoption Ministry of Youth with a Mission. This cause supports women and their families facing an unintended pregnancy by providing housing, medical care and a life plan.
Image 1
Kimora Lee Simmons
“Medical alert bracelets save lives every day. My daughters and I are proud to design one that’s fabulously fashionable. It’s a safe way to be chic!”
Kimora’s cause: JDRF is the leading global organization focused on type 1 diabetes T1D research with the vision to improve the lives of all people affected by T1D.
article by Lesa Lakin
 

10 Tips For Managing Allergies While Traveling

By goodblacknews on March 23, 2014

african american family beach travel
Whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, it’s hard to enjoy yourself if you’re worried about how your allergies may act up. Outside of your usual routine, it can be challenging to manage food and pollen allergies in new environments, but it’s not impossible. Careful preparation before traveling will not only make things smoother for you, but also help you avoid a life-threatening allergic reaction or inconvenient sinus discomfort that could cost you a trip to the doctor instead.
Use these tips to help allergy-proof your next trip.
Researchers estimate that up to 15 million Americans have food allergies, with the number steadily increasing, especially among children. According to Dr. William Calhoun of the University of Texas Medical Branch, it’s extremely important for people with food allergies to be even more cautious while traveling and “watch their dietary intake.”

  • Read labels and ingredients when shopping and eating away from home.
  • Bring your own snacks, especially if you’re on a flight serving peanuts and you have a peanut allergy.
  • Carry an ID card that lists all foods you’re allergic to, as well as your emergency contact information. You can present this card at a restaurant, or have it on you in case of a medical emergency.
  • Pack extra medications, including your epinephrine autoinjector. An epinephrine autoinjector, sometimes called by the shortened brand name Epipen, is the only treatment for anaphylaxis, a life-threatening reaction that can include difficulty breathing and closure of the throat.
  • Translate your allergies if traveling abroad in the language of your destination. Resources are available online to assist you.

Environment Allergies
From outdoor pollen to indoor dust and pet dander, several things in your environment can trigger an allergic reaction. Dr. Clifford Bassett, director of Allergy & Asthma Care of New York, recommends being extra prepared no matter what environment you think you’re traveling to.

  • Bring dust mite-proof allergy covers for pillows and mattresses to protect against dust mites in unfamiliar sleeping quarters.
  • Pack a big hat and sunglasses to keep pollens out of your hair and eyes. The bigger the better!
  • Request a pet-free hotel room or floor.
  • Research the pollen levels in your destination and plan outdoor activities accordingly. You can check pollen levels via the National Allergy Bureau website.
  • Bring saline nasal spray to keep your nasal passages moist, especially on long, stuffy flights.

If you have serious allergies, or are planning an extended trip, the best prep may be to consult your doctor first!
Visit the BlackDoctor.org Allergy center for more articles.
article via blackdoctor.org