Monday February 28, 2011 Medical experiments backdrop for ethics meeting Review reveals that US doctors experimented on prisoners, mentally ill Advertiser

ATLANTA – Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States – studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. at best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. in that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect – they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense – that we don't have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected – by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. in 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger – today remembered as a public health hero – recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth – an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. all this has been done, is being done . . . by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. for example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities – not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. by the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

ATLANTA – Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States – studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. at best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. in that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect – they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease – even by the standards of their time – you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society – people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense – that we don't have today – that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected – by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. in 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger – today remembered as a public health hero – recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth – an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. all this has been done, is being done . . . by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. for example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities – not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. by the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need – the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital's board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient's written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies – along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 – proved to be a "holy trinity" that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward "Yusef" Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

"I said 'oh my God, my back is on fire! take this . . . off me!' " Anthony said in an interview with The associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. and it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. "It's not that we're out infecting anybody with things," Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT's use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it's often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

"It was unusually unethical, even at the time," said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

"When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today," said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: in the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM's sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. "They face a really tough challenge," Caplan said.

Source: Content partner // IRIN

PHNOM PENH, 7 February 2011 (IRIN) – When 46-year-old Cambodian motorbike taxi driver Gao Savvy broke his leg, he did not realize he would have to have it amputated, but he has had diabetes for five years and recently developed a condition called stenosis, a narrowing of the blood vessels, meaning doctors had no option but to amputate the injured leg.

“Now I only have my wife to take care of me. I don’t know what we’ll do next,” said Gao, who earned just US$50 a month.

Rapid lifestyle changes over the past two decades combined with poverty in Cambodia (according to government statistics, a third of the population lives below the national poverty line of 75 US cents a day) mean diabetes has become a major health problem.

The number of people with the disease is rising: Of the country’s 14.5 million inhabitants, about 352,000 adults live with diabetes, according to the 2009 Diabetes Atlas [ diabetesatlas.org/ ] published by the Belgium-based International Diabetes Federation. [ diabetesatlas.org/content/wp-data ]

In 2005, about 255,000 people suffered from diabetes, according to an article published that year in the Lancet, [ thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)67662-3/abstract ] a UK-based medical journal. Two-thirds of all cases went undiagnosed before the survey.

In 2010, Cambodia had about 8,000 diabetes-related deaths, according to the International Diabetes Federation. By contrast, the government records more than 200 malaria deaths per year, and has calculated over 1,000 HIV/AIDS-related deaths each year since the most recent prevalence data were collected in 2006.

“It’s a silent killer,” said Lim Keuky, an author of the 2005 study and head of the Cambodian Diabetes Association. “you don’t know about it until the symptoms appear, and then it might already be too late.”

Keuky’s study found a surprisingly high prevalence (5 percent) in Siem Reap, a province in the northwest, and 11 percent in Kampong Cham Province in eastern-central Cambodia.

The relatively high rates of diabetes in Cambodia were surprising, the study said, given that the country is poor, and lifestyles are still fairly traditional.

However, economic growth and urbanization mean many of Cambodia’s poor are eating processed food and not exercising enough, according to Denmark-based NGO the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF). [ worlddiabetesfoundation.org/ ]

These lifestyle changes have taken place on top of the hunger and desolation of the 1980s, the group said. [ worlddiabetesfoundation.org/composite-1183.htm ]

“most processed and unhealthy food is the cheapest option while healthy foods have become increasingly costly and beyond the reach of the poor, so the poor have no control over the risk factors,” said WDF head Anil Kapur.

Meanwhile, campaigners say diabetes is not getting enough attention from international donors.

“Foremost is the misconception among donor agencies that these [non-communicable] diseases are diseases related to affluence, and do not affect the poor, which is completely untrue,” Kapur told IRIN.

About 80 percent of all diabetes cases are in low- and middle-income countries, affecting mostly people aged 45-64, says the World Health Organization (WHO).

Globally, about four million deaths are attributed to diabetes every year, compared to three million for AIDS-related illnesses and one million for malaria. Diabetes is responsible for about 5 percent of all deaths globally each year and the figure could rise by more than 50 percent in the next 10 years if urgent action is not taken, says WHO.

According to new research published by the Lancet, [ irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91723 ] chronic diseases such as diabetes could kill up to 4.2 million people annually in Southeast Asia by the year 2030.

© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis: IRINnews.org

Public release date: 7-Feb-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Rachel Serokarseroka@aan.com651-695-2738American Academy of Neurology

ST. PAUL, Minn. ? People who spend more time in the sun and those with higher vitamin D levels may be less likely to develop multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a study published in the February 8, 2011, print issue of Neurology?, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. MS is a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord, usually with recurrent flare-ups of symptoms. It is often preceded by a first episode (or event) of similar symptoms lasting days to weeks.

“Previous studies have found similar results, but this is the first study to look at people who have just had the first symptoms of MS and haven’t even been diagnosed with the disease yet,” said study author Robyn Lucas, PhD, of Australian National University in Canberra. “Other studies have looked at people who already have MS?then it’s hard to know whether having the disease led them to change their habits in the sun or in their diet.”

The multi-site study involved 216 people age 18 to 59 who had a first event with symptoms of the type seen in MS. Those people were matched with 395 people with no symptoms of possible MS who were of similar ages, of the same sex and from the same regions of Australia.

The participants reported how much sun they were exposed to during different periods of their lives, and researchers also measured the amount of skin damage participants had from sun exposure and the amount of melanin in their skin. Vitamin D levels (from sun exposure, diet and supplement use) were measured by blood tests.

The risk of having a first event, diagnosed by a doctor, ranged from approximately two to nine new cases for every 100,000 people per year in this study. The reported UV light exposure of participants ranged from about 500 to over 6,000 kilojoules per meter squared. The researchers found that the risk of having a diagnosed first event decreased by 30 percent for each UV increase of 1,000 kilojoules. They also found that people with most evidence of skin damage from sun exposure were 60 percent less likely to develop a first event than the people with the least damage. People with the highest levels of vitamin D also were less likely to have a diagnosed first event than people with the lowest levels.

Studies have shown that MS is more common in latitudes further away from the equator, and this has been confirmed in Australia.

“Added together, the differences in sun exposure, vitamin D levels and skin type accounted for a 32-percent increase in a diagnosed first event from the low to the high latitude regions of Australia,” Lucas said.

Lucas noted that the effects of sun exposure and vitamin D acted independently of each other on the risk of first event. “Further research should evaluate both sun exposure and vitamin D for the prevention of MS,” Lucas said.

Lucas also stated that people should continue to limit their sun exposure due to skin cancer risks. she also noted that the risks of tanning beds far outweigh any possible protective effect against MS. Exposure to the sun has not been shown to benefit people who already have MS.

The study was supported by the U.S. National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the ANZ William Buckland Foundation and Multiple Sclerosis Research Australia.

The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 22,500 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit aan.com.

VIDEO: youtube.com/AANChannel TEXT: aan.com/press TWEETS: twitter.com/AANPublic

Media Contacts: Rachel Seroka, rseroka@aan.com, (651) 695-2738 Angela Babb, ababb@aan.com, (651) 695-2789

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Depression is commonly reported in people with Alzheimer’s disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment, with several studies suggesting having a history of major depression may nearly double your risk of developing dementia later in life. However, it has been unclear if depression is a symptom of the disease or a potential cause of the disease…
Alzheimer’s Reading Room

To study the relationship between Alzheimer’s and depression, researchers at Rush University Medical Center tracked symptoms of depression during the transition from no cognitive impairment to dementia and found that depressive symptoms show little change during the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The study will be published in the July 6 issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“Our study suggests that depression is truly a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease,” said lead author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, senior neuropsychologist, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, and a professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Rush. “If depression was an early sign of the disease, we would expect to see it increase prior to diagnosis and as the disease progresses. Our study found very little change.”
“Depression should not be viewed as an inevitable part of Alzheimer’s disease. If a patient with Alzheimer’s has depression, the depression should be treated,” said Wilson.

The study involved participants in the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a longitudinal study of risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease involving a population of older adults on Chicago’s south side. at three year intervals, the entire population completed a brief self-report measure of depressive symptoms and clinical evaluations for Alzheimer’s disease.

Initial analyses focused on a group of 357 individuals who developed Alzheimer’s disease during the course of the study. The study found a barely perceptible increase in depressive symptoms, a rate of 0.04 symptoms per year, during six to seven years of observation before the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and no change during two to three years of observation after the diagnosis.

Because dementia may reduce the accuracy of self-report, in a subgroup of 340 participants, researchers conducted additional analyses of change in depressive symptoms by interviewing family, friends and other who were close to the study participants. Neither Alzheimer’s disease nor its precursor, mild cognitive impairment, was associated with change in depressive symptoms during a mean of three years of observation.

The results were consistent across all demographics. There was no evidence that sex, age, education or race modified the trajectory of depressive symptoms before or after Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed.

“Here is this terrible disease that robs people of who they are and their ability to function and yet it doesn’t make them depressed,” said Wilson. “Alzheimer’s may disrupt the ability to have prolonged bouts of negative emotions, in much the same way it disrupts many other activities.”

The study authors suggest additional studies of patients with Alzheimer’s disease for longer periods to determine if depressive symptoms may eventually decrease as the disease becomes more severe.

In addition, researchers at Rush continue to look at why depression increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The study was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ National Institute on Aging (NIA). Co-authors include G.M. Hoganson, BS; K.B. Rajan, PhD; L.L. Barnes, PhD; C.F. Mendes de Leon, PhD; and D.A. Evans, MD.

Alzheimer’s Disease — Advice and Insight

• What’s the Difference Between Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia?
• 60 Good Reasons to Subscribe to the Alzheimer’s Reading Room
• About the Alzheimer’s Reading Room
• Alzheimer’s Disease and the Five Stages of Grief
• What is Alzheimer’s? What are the eight Types of Dementia?
• Alzheimer’s Disease CareGiving — Insight and Advice (20 articles)
• Test your Memory for Alzheimer’s Disease (5 best self Assessment Tests)
• Alzheimer’s World — Trying to Reconnect with someone Suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease
• Worried About Alzheimer’s Disease — you Should Be
• Does the Combination of Aricept and Namenda Help Slow the Rate of Decline in Alzheimer’s Disease Patients
• Alzheimer’s Disease Statistics
• Is it Really Alzheimer’s Disease or Something Else?
• Ten Symptoms of Early Stage Alzheimer’s Disease
• Ten Tips for Communicating with an Alzheimer’s Disease Patients

Bob DeMarco is the Founder of the Alzheimer’s Reading Room and an Alzheimer’s caregiver. The blog contains more than 2,255 articles with more than 272,100 links on the Internet. Bob resides in Delray Beach, FL.

The Alzheimer’s Action Plan  

The Art of Dementia Care

Original content Bob DeMarco, the Alzheimer’s Reading Room

IMPORTANT HEALTH INFORMATION FOR BABY BOOMERS

many baby boomers suffer from a breathing disorder called COPD or “chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder”. According to recent research the number of baby boomers suffering from the condition is expected to increase as the boomers age.

A new large international study conclude that the incidences of COPD is likely to be a doubling of the previous estimates and that the majority of sufferers are undiagnosed and untreated

Smoking is the number one cause of COPD and it is imperative for people with breathing problems such as shortness of breath and wheezing to be tested for COPD, particularly if they have a history of smoking and are over 40.

Statements from medical professionals indicate that many suffer COPD in silence. it creep up on people and many blame their symptoms on aging.

Numbers published earlier this year by the medical journal The Lancet found that about 11.5 per cent of men and 8.5 per cent of women suffer from COPD.

“The devastating impact of COPD must be taken seriously.”

COPD is a gradual destruction of the lungs by noxious fumes and it is irreversible.

While COPD is not curable, the symptoms can be treated, especially if the condition is detected early. Early detection of COPD can significantly improve outcomes and quality of life for patients

There are puffers and inhalers similar to those used by people with asthma that help with breathing. (However, the conditions are very different: Asthma is lung inflammation, often triggered by allergies.)

People with COPD can also undertake exercise programs and pulmonary rehabilitation programs. In the advanced stages, sufferers can also use supplemental oxygen in a portable tank.

Do you have COPD?

Here is a brief Lung Health Test designed to help people recognize the symptoms of COPD.

People who are over 40

and are current or former smokers should visit their doctor if

they answer “yes” to any of the following questions:

Do you cough regularly?

Do you cough up phlegm regularly?

Do even simple chores make you short of breath?

Do you wheeze when you exert yourself, or at night?

Do you get frequent colds that persist longer than those of other people you know?

The doctor will perform a spirometry test, which involves blowing into a tube to measure lung function.

If you are a candidate for COPD you should see your doctor as soon as possible.

Source: The Lung Association

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