Medical Journal, Health Articles

The varieties of pathways to dysfluent reading: comparing subtypes of children with dyslexia at letter, word, and connected text levels of reading.

J Learn Disabil. 2008 Jan-Feb;41(1):47-66

Authors: Katzir T, Kim YS, Wolf M, Morris R, Lovett MW

The majority of work on the double-deficit hypothesis (DDH) of dyslexia has been done at the letter and word levels of reading. Key research questions addressed in this study are (a) do readers with different subtypes of dyslexia display differences in fluency at particular reading levels (e.g., letter, word, and connected text)? and (b) do children with dyslexia identified by either low-achievement or ability-achievement discrepancy criteria show similar differences when classified by the DDH? To address these questions, the authors assessed a sample of 158 children with severe reading impairments in second and third grades on an extensive battery and classified them into three reader subtypes using the DDH. The results demonstrated that the three DDH subtypes exhibited differences in fluency at different levels of reading (letter, word, and connected text), underscoring the separate reading profiles of these subtypes and the different possible routes to dysfluency in reading disabilities. Furthermore, the results suggest that the different patterns among DDH subtypes are primarily driven by the ability-achievement discrepancy group. The implications of these findings are discussed for intervention, reading theory, and a more refined understanding of heterogeneity.

PMID: 18274503 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

(Source: Journal of Learning Disabilities)

Original post by Journal of Learning Disabilities

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Learning strategies and study approaches of postsecondary students with dyslexia.

J Learn Disabil. 2008 Jan-Feb;41(1):85-96

Authors: Kirby JR, Silvestri R, Allingham BH, Parrila R, La Fave CB

The present study describes the self-reported learning strategies and study approaches of college and university students with and without dyslexia and examines the relationship of those characteristics with reading ability. Students with (n = 36) and without (n = 66) dyslexia completed tests measuring reading rate, reading comprehension, reading history, learning strategies, and learning approaches. The results indicated that students without dyslexia obtained significantly higher scores than students with dyslexia in their reported use of selecting main ideas and test taking strategies. Students with dyslexia reported significantly greater use of study aids and time management strategies in comparison to students without dyslexia. Moreover, university students with dyslexia were significantly more likely to report a deep approach to learning in comparison to university students without dyslexia. Reading ability correlated positively with selecting main ideas and test taking strategies and negatively with use of study aids. The authors interpret the learning strategy results as consequences of and compensations for the difficulties that students with dyslexia have in word reading.

PMID: 18274505 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

(Source: Journal of Learning Disabilities)

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I am not stupid, I have dyslexia.

Nurs Stand. 2008 Jan 2-8;22(17):61

Authors:

PMID: 18240820 [PubMed - in process]

(Source: Nursing Standard)

Original post by Nursing Standard

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Restless leg syndrome increases ones risk for heart disease and stoke by two fold. The more severe your symptoms, the more frequent your symptoms, the greater the risk. This was the largest study of its kind and enrolled over 3500 participants.
The study found people with RLS were more than twice as likely to have cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease. The results remained the same after adjusting for age, sex, race, body mass index, diabetes, high blood pressure, high blood pressure medication, HDL/LDL cholesterol levels, and smoking.
The more movement one has at night, hence your legs twitching and contracting, the higher your sleeping blood pressure. This could be one way of dissecting the results.
via Consumer Affairs
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If you visit your local supermarket on Wednesday morning the first thing you’ll notice is that the isle that last week was full of holiday candy is now filled with expensive branded “diet” foods.It’s diet season. For the next four weeks people will eat diet bars, diet shakes, diet drinks, diet pills, and they’ll drive up the price of boneless chicken breast. They’ll clog the gyms and make it miserable for those of you who go to the gym every month.It all ends the last week of January when the supermarkets move the diet food off the feature shelves and replace it with chips, dips, and Cheez Whiz for the Super Bowl. At that point most people’s diets will have completely failed and they’ll give up for another year. If you’ve decided it’s time to burn off those holiday pounds, good for you! But if you’d like to succeed on this year’s diet, here are a few tips gleaned from my years of dieting adventures which you can read about in more detail on my Low Carb Diet Facts web site:1.Avoid packaged “diet” foods and drugs. Many of them are full of soy, which is far from healthy. You can find out the facts about soy from this excellent book: The Whole Soy Story by Kayla T. Daniel. They are also filled with tons of additives of the sort you’d never eat in anything home cooked: glycerine, maltitol, modified food starch, etc. Many of these will raise your blood sugar–especially maltitol and glycerine. Raised blood sugar and/or insulin levels cause hunger. Not only that, but bars and shakes filled with chemicals do not replace the high quality protein you find in good meat and cheese nor do the chemicals in them replace the nutrients you’ll find in fresh salad greens and vegetables. A month of living on diet bars and shakes will leave you depleted of many nutrients and that, too, can make you hungry. If you want to lose weight eat small portions of real food. Meat, soup, salad, green vegetables, cheese, colorful berries. If you keep your blood sugar flat, you will avoid hunger, which is the main benefit of a low carb diet for those of us with diabetes. If you aren’t hungry, it’s a lot easier to cut down on what you eat. 2. Be realistic about how much you will lose each week. At the start of any diet you may see a dramatic drop in your weight. This is due entirely to flushing water out of your body and reducing your stomach contents. After that initial drop, you will very slowly start to lose real weight. How much? You can see some very revealing graphs showing how much weight dozens of devoted low carb dieters lost over a period of many months HERE. As you can see after the first couple weeks when people lose a lot of water weight, the median weight loss for a woman who weighs between 150-250 lbs is 4-5 lbs a month. That’s about one pound a week. So if you have 50 pounds to lose, and “only” lose 1 pound a week you’re doing great.If you’re an older lady, like me, don’t even dream of losing a pound a week. A pound a month may be more like it, thanks to the natural slowing of metabolism that occurs for everyone as we get older. 3. Exercise has benefits, but weight loss is NOT one of them.The people who sell gym memberships will promise you that going to the gym alone will cause you to lose weight. This is not true. The “calorie burning” counts you see displayed on the machines in the gym are completely fictional. This was recently documented by Gina Kolata writing in the New York Times HERE.Many of us find that exercise makes us hungry. This is particularly true for people with diabetes because exercise makes our blood sugar fluctuate. If you come home from the gym ravenous and eat a couple hundred calories under the impression you’ve burned off more, you’ll gain weight, not lose it. Exercise to look hot, build strength, and maintain cardiovascular fitness. To get slim, cut out food. If you aren’t sure what you are eating, invest in a food scale, weigh portions and look up the calories in that exact portion. If you don’t know how much to eat, calculate your metabolic need with this handy tool: Calories Per Day Calculator. Be sure to describe yourself as “sendentary” as you probably are unless you are training for a marathon, play Football, or hang wallpaper for a living. Most of us way overestimate our activity level, even if we go to the gym. A study of successful dieters who kept large amounts of weight off for many years found many of them only started exercising after losing the weight. That was my own experience and a whole year of near daily gym attendance did not help me lose further weight. I maintained my weight loss without exercise for several years thanks to some orthopedic problems, too.So don’t fall for the hype about exercise. Weight is about how much food you eat. 4. Cutting Carbs Helps but Calories RuleThe people who earn millions selling diet books and doing infomercials always tell you that their diet is all you need for success. Most of them greatly oversimplify the issues involved in dieting. I’ve met people who have lost large amounts of weight on just about any diet you can think of. I’ve also met people who have stalled on every possible diet, too.So I am not going to tell you that if you cut the carbs weight will drop off like magic and you can eat luxuriously while watching pounds fade away. I find it easier to lose weight when I cut carbs–but only if I also cut my calories down significantly. Avoiding carbs controls my hunger and makes it possible for me to cut down on what I eat without feeling deprived. But for me it is the calorie levels alone that make the difference in my weight. The main reason I cut carbs is to bring down my blood sugar to healthy levels. 5. Some Diabetes Meds Make Weight Loss Very ToughAvandia and Actos will pack baby fat cells on you and make it impossible to lose weight. Insulin can cause weight gain, especially, it seems, Lantus, though Levemir is supposed to cause little or no weight gain. I gained no weight on R insulin but did gain, rather dramatically, on Lantus. One reason to cut carbs if you are on insulin is to cut down the amount of insulin you need, this may also help you with weight loss. Insulin is a fat building hormone. Some diabetes drugs may help with weight loss–if you cut back on what you eat while taking them. Metformin and Byetta are the only drugs with proven weight loss effects, but those effects are very modest. Studies show most people who take these drugs over a year lose only a couple pounds. You can harness their power to lose more if you cut back on what you eat. 6. Diet Pills are Dangerous and Usually IneffectiveAlli will keep you from metabolizing fat which is NOT healthy for your body as it leaches out fat soluable viatmins. But even if you can tolerate it, at the end of a year the studies show you probably won’t lose more than a couple pounds and you won’t keep those pounds off if you stop the drug. Is this worth the risk of pooping in your pants? That’s the best known side effect of drugs that block fat digestion. The over the counter “fat burners” are either complete scams or contain ephedra and other stimulants that are not good for your long-term health and may be very dangerous if you, like most people with diabetes, have a tendency towards high blood pressure. In that case, they can cause strokes. So if you must experiment with one of these, check your blood pressure regularly. Mostly though, they are likely to lighten only your wallet. No over the counter drug will “blocks carbs.” There is prescription drug that does, Acarbose (Brand name Precose) but the side effects of this drug are horrendous gas so bad that its maker, Bayer, stopped marketing the drug shortly after introducing it because even though it is mildly effective, no one would take it for very long. I could take one Precose a day and block about 15 grams of carbs, but quite frequently the gas would be very overwhelming. Unless you are all done with social life involving other humans, you probably don’t want to block carbs. If a “carb blocker” does not give you gas, it isn’t blocking carbs, because any carbs that reach your gut not digested will ferment there thanks to the helpful bacteria we all have. 7. The Dirty Little Secret the Diet Books Leave OutIf you lose a significant amount of weight you will have to eat at a calorie level only one or two hundred calories higher than the calorie level you ate at to lose weight. All the studies show this to be true. It is the major reason that people are unable to keep off the weight they lose on diets. So if you are serious about losing weight, you have to accept that the diet you’ll have to eat for the rest of your life to maintain that weight loss will be one very much like the one you were eating while you lost the weight. In short, you’ll have to stay on a diet for the rest of your life or all the weight will come back. The people who profit from writing diet books rarely tell you this. They sell a ton of books to people who lose a ton of weight and then pack it right back on and become the market for New and Improved diet books by authors who pretend to have found yet another “diet secret.” Even with those few books that do tell you this, experience shows that the readers ignore it, certain that THEY will somehow not find weight loss maintenance the problem that 95% of all other dieters have found it to be. It’s ugly, but it’s reality. And if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you better take it seriously. That’s why it is a lot better to lose weight slowly but steadily eating a diet of foods you enjoy eating rather than going on any extreme diet which deprives you of things you love to eat. Do that, and you’ll spend your diet looking forward to eating those foods as soon as the diet is over and when you burn out on dieting you will end up eating all those foods and they will pack the weight right back on. If you are serious about weight loss, the diet is never going to be over. (Source: Diabetes Update)

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The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on 27th December issued a warning to consumers who bought Whittier Farms dairy foods not to consume any of their milk products for the time being because there is a risk they could be contaminated with listeria bacteria.Whittier Farms is a family run dairy business based in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts , USA, that provides fresh farm milk to consumers mostly via home delivery in the greater Worcester/Shrewsbury area. [click link for full article]

Original post by Diabetes Notes

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Using genetically altered mice, scientists in the US have shown that lack of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), in certain parts of the brain, leads to overreating and may be a contributing factor to the rising obesity epidemic. The researchers said the study is relevant to humans because, for instance, a quarter of Americans are estimated to carry the mutated form of the BDNF gene. [click link for full article]

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Ok, so here is my New Years Resolution List, as it pertains to both my diabetes and my personal life. Please promise not to laugh and remember that everyone is different and we all have things we need to work on in life. I think the hardest part is looking at yourself in that mirror and admitting your flaws and imperfections, no matter how big or small.
I will call this… Kendra’s Top 3 New Years Resolution List For Diabetes And Life
For my diabetes…
1. I will make sure that I exercise at least 5 days a week for at least 45 minutes. (none of this 3-4 days a week cause I am so darn tired). After all this will give me more energy and make me feel better about myself and my head much clearer.
2. I will make sure that I eat my 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day. I have gotten a bit lazy and will only eat a salad and an apple for the day, in the way of fruits and veggies. That is not enough, and I will try to get back in my groove.
3. I would like to stay healthy with my above mentioned exercise and food and lose 7-10 pounds by May. That is safe and “doable”. This would help me stay in check with my blood sugars and ensure another healthy year on the diabetes front. (fingers crossed)
My personal goals/resolutions…
1. Have more patience with my kids. I feel like I yell too much. (there is just too many of them, haha)
2. Learn to say the word no to others that want/need my help. I know this seems selfish but I have too much on my plate and am a people pleaser that feels like I am drowning!
3. Learn to reflect more and be happy/content with all that I have. Learn to understand the meaning of appreciation more. This is a tough one that I think so many struggle with. Got any tips???
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The AMA is urging all smokers to put their health first in 2008 by making a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking for good. AMA President, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, said today that making a clean start at the beginning of the year was an ideal way to tackle the difficult goal of quitting smoking. “Quitting is hard at the best of times, so the New Year is a great time to start before other sources of stress can distract you from your goal,” Dr Capolingua said. [click link for full article]

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The twentieth anniversary of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987′s (OBRA) passage is an appropriate time to assess the progress made to ensure that America’s oldest and most vulnerable citizens receive the highest quality nursing home care. [click link for full article]

Original post by Diabetes Mine

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