Have You Had Your Shingles Shot?

By Denise Foley for Completely You

A few months ago, retired Pennsylvania journalist and radio talk show host Pat Wandling woke up with a strange pain in her back. “My skin hurt,” recalls Wandling. She didn’t think much of it until the next day when, while watching television, she leaned back in her chair and her back started to burn. Eventually, the pain spread to her waist, where a rash appeared.

She called her doctor. “I thought it was shingles,” says Wandling. And it was. It was a mild case of this often excruciatingly painful disease, caused when the dormant chickenpox virus -- varicella zoster -- reactivates and begins reproducing. The pain is the result of damage to the nerve endings where the virus lives -- usually quietly -- after a case of chickenpox.

Older people like Wandling, who jokingly describes herself as “fearfully close to 80,” are more susceptible to the disease because immunity to shingles declines with age. In fact, about 1 million people get shingles every year; the average lifetime risk is about 30 percent. And it occurs among the young too, sometimes more painfully.

So Why Don’t People Get the Shot?
Wandling says she knew that a shingles vaccine was available, but it didn’t occur to her to get it. “I didn’t think it was necessary, like the flu or pneumonia shot is. I’ve had those. I never thought I would get shingles. I thought it was something old people get,” says Wandling, laughing.

She’s not alone. The shingles vaccine has been around since 2006, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), less than 15 percent of those who should get the shot -- people 50 and older -- actually do. Read more about the vaccine from the CDC here.

Why? The vaccine is fairly effective, reducing shingles by roughly 51 percent in people 60 and older, though that drops off to only about 38 percent after 70. It also has few side effects. Most important, it cuts the risk of postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) -- a painful and literal afterburn that can go on for months or even years after the blistering shingles rash has disappeared -- by as much as 67 percent. PHN is reason enough to get vaccinated: It can be so severe that it interferes with your appetite and sleep and is most common in those over 60.

One reason the vaccine, called Zostavax®, hasn’t been in demand is that it hasn’t been available. Delays and back orders have left it in short supply. In addition, it’s expensive -- $160 to $195 a dose. Not covered by Medicare Part B, it is included in Part D, but there is usually a co-pay, which can be an expensive burden for those on a fixed income. Partly because of the shortages, doctors haven’t been pushing it either, says the CDC.

But having shingles once, or knowing someone who’s suffered from it, might be motivation enough to dig deep and pay whatever it takes to avoid it. After her brief bout with it, Wandling says she’ll be getting the vaccine to prevent a worse experience. “I was very lucky this time, but it’s a brutal disease.”

For more great health & lifestyle content, visit me here at Completely You

Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

The Surprising Health Benefits of Texting

By Denise Foley for Completely You

Did you know that adults send and receive an average of 41.5 text messages a day? That’s a lot of sentence fragments and Internet slang. LOL.

But if those messages have smiley faces, or Web shorthand like HAYT (i.e., “How are you today?”) or <3U (i.e., “I love you”), it could be good for your mental health.

That’s the counterintuitive finding of a group of University of California Berkeley researchers who learned that people who felt depressed, isolated or alone felt more connected and cared for when they received text messages asking them about their moods and the positive things they experienced and reminding them to take their medications. “When I was in a difficult situation and I received a message, I felt much better. I felt cared for and supported. My mood even improved,” wrote one participant in the study, which looked at a group of depressed patients in a cognitive behavior therapy group at San Francisco Hospital.

So why do I say this is counterintuitive? Other than the fact that I’m a texting curmudgeon -- I do it, but I hate it -- other studies have focused more on what’s bad about the practice. Teens who do it to excess are more likely to have sleep problems, feel depressed, do poorly in school, do drugs, become binge drinkers, fight and have sex. States are cracking down on texting while driving because it’s a potentially life-threatening distraction. And we’ve all seen the YouTube video of the busily texting woman plunging into the Mall fountain. Ouch.

This study, published in the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, proves that modern technology can not only be used for good, it should be. Loneliness -- scientists call it social isolation -- can be dangerous to your health.

University of Chicago social scientist John Cacioppo studies the biological effects of loneliness. He’s found that it can lead to atherosclerosis -- that’s hardening of the arteries -- which itself spawns high blood pressure and problems with memory and learning. Lonely people’s immune systems are also less effective at fighting off viruses and other invaders.

Feeling lonely can even be deadly. In Cacioppo’s latest study, published in January, older people (50 and older) who felt lonely were more likely to die over a six-year period than those who didn’t feel lonely.

It takes a second to type “R U OK?” with your thumbs. Who would have thought it might save somebody’s life?

Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Could Bacteria Be Making You Fat?

By Denise Foley for Completely You

It may be the best excuse for being fat since the invention of “I have a glandular problem.” Seems like we might now be able blame bacteria for our excess pounds.

Current research is exploring the guts of obese people and lab animals for evidence that bugs make us overweight. Specifically, gut bacteria: intestinal microbes that store the energy from the food we eat as a spare tire or muffin top.

If you’re thinking “Ew, bacteria in my intestines?” and have images of the dinner table scene from Alien quivering in your head, relax. We all have bacteria colonies living below our equator -- 100,000 billion of them, in fact. The truth is that bacterial cells in the human body outnumber our own cells 10 to 1. That begs the question: Which is the parasite and which the host?

The More of This Bacteria You Have, the More Calories You Absorb
Fortunately, most of our gut bacteria are beneficial to our digestive and immune system. Still, a number of studies have found that obese people are more likely to have a lopsided ratio of bacteriodes to other gut microbes.

Bacteriodes are known for their efficiency in breaking down carbohydrates and slipping the calories to us, potentially promoting weight gain. Other microbes also help our cells absorb sugar, which may also pile on the pounds. By one estimate, gut bacteria may produce 100-200 more calories a day. Conservatively, that could mean a weight gain of 10 pounds a year.

And Bacteria Can Boost Your Appetite Too!
Evidence that gut bacteria are involved in obesity is so strong that the leader of one research team in Germany told the journal Nature that he could diagnose obesity with roughly 85 percent accuracy just from knowing the amount of certain intestinal bacterial species a person harbors.

Emory University scientists proved the bacteria-obesity link: They found that certain kinds of bacteria might encourage overeating in mice that have a genetic disorder affecting the immune system and that also have metabolic syndrome -- a dangerous constellation of symptoms including high cholesterol, high blood pressure and insulin resistance (prediabetes). When normal mice got a transplant of gut bacteria from the genetically damaged mice, they also overate, got fat and developed metabolic syndrome. (Read more about the study here.) The Emory researchers are now looking at humans with metabolic syndrome to determine if they have the same gut environments as the obese mice.

Can You Give Your Fat-boosting Bacteria the Boot?
Scientists are still trying to figure that out. And, unfortunately, they probably won’t for a while. As Coyle told me, it’s unclear whether losing weight depends on changing your bacterial balance -- or if your bacterial balance changes if you change your diet. And there’s no evidence, he says, that giving people probiotics (healthy bacteria) helps either.

But diet does seem to make a difference. When Washington University School of Medicine researchers transplanted gut bacteria from fat mice on high-fat diets to lean mice, the lean mice became fat too. So the best advice is to avoid a high-fat diet. We should all be doing that anyway.

Perhaps one day doctors will be able to replace an overweight person’s gut bacteria with that of a thin one and solve the obesity problem. But for now, says Coyle, “all this is in its infancy, with more to come.”

Want more healthy diet tips and research? Check out my recent article, “Fish Oil: The One Benefit You Haven’t Considered”


Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Broken Heart Syndrome: A Real and Dangerous Condition

By Denise Foley for Completely You

Within days after my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack at 55, my grieving grandmother suffered a heart attack herself. At the time, doctors told her children she had about six months to live. She was 90 when she died of a series of small strokes. She had never had another heart attack.
That was the start of a general familial disdain for doctors and their opinions, but recent studies suggest that we may have been wrong about the doom-saying physicians who treated my grandmother back in the 1950s. What they diagnosed as a heart attack may, in fact, have been something now known as broken heart syndrome.

The name sounds cute, but it’s actually descriptive. It reflects something doctors have observed over time: People who’ve lost loved ones can develop a mysterious condition that mimics a heart attack. Acute emotion or trauma can trigger the release of a surge of the stress hormone adrenaline that simply stuns the heart. The left ventricle, which is the heart’s main pumping chamber, is unable to contract and pump blood. It is, quite literally, a blow to the heart.

It is a heart attack -- just not one caused by blocked arteries or a blood clot. It’s serious: It can kill you if you don’t get help in time. But it doesn’t leave lasting heart damage, and it may never happen again.
While relatively rare -- it happens in an estimated 1-2 percent of people diagnosed with a heart attack -- broken heart syndrome (aka stress cardiomyopathy) is about nine times more common among women than men. About 6 percent of women who are diagnosed with a heart attack actually have broken heart syndrome. And a recent Penn State University Hershey Medical Center study suggests a reason why: They found that emotional stress hurts women’s hearts more than men’s.


They tested their hypothesis using math questions, the usual stress provoker in stress-related studies. When women were stressed by mental arithmetic -- and badgering by the researchers -- a Doppler ultrasound test that measured blood flow through their hearts found they were more likely to have less blood flow to their hearts than men.

I talked to Dr. Chester Ray, lead study author and professor of medicine and cellular and molecular biology at Penn State, who explained that less blood flow meant less oxygen in the heart. And less oxygen means, well, we don’t do well without it. But we especially don’t do well without it when we’re under stress.

“When your heart beats faster or your blood pressure is up, as it is when you’re mentally stressed, your heart has to work harder and requires even more oxygen,” he explained. “The only way to get more oxygen is to increase blood flow to the heart.”

When the women in his study were grappling with subtracting the number seven from a series of random numbers -- just thinking about it makes my palms start sweating -- their coronary arteries were, to borrow an old Zen saying, pushing the river instead of going with the flow. They were restricting rather than opening up, stifling blood flow instead of increasing it.

“That response makes the heart more susceptible to problems, especially if the stress is chronic,” says Ray.

The take-home message here? There’s no way to avoid stress; it’s as much as part of daily life as breathing. But it may help you to take a few deep breaths a few times a day. Studies have found that deep breathing -- from measured yogic breathing to a deep sigh -- can help you recover quicker from mental stress. Or work 10 minutes twice a day into your schedule for meditation; no mantra required -- just a mental break. Try it the next time you’re balancing your checkbook.

Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.