Moms-to-Be Cautioned on Low Weights
Of all the questions in medicine whose answers seem always to be changing, the most common may be: How much weight gain in pregnancy is right? Now, the federal government’s National Center for Health Statistics enters the fray, analyzing recommendations precise enough to defy those moderne obstetricians who say the actual number of pounds is essentially irrelevant and whatever feels right is right.
The government researchers note that current weight gain objectives agree on a range of not less than 22 pounds nor more than 27 pounds. But they cautioned there is a problem among U.S. women--they are inadequately informed that there is a minimum amount of weight they should gain in order to deliver a healthy baby--not just a top limit over which a mother-to-be shouldn’t go.
Thus, the researchers say, the 22-pound bottom minimum needs more emphasis. The team found that 40% of married mothers questioned in 1980 had been given no weight-gain limit by their doctors and 12% to 21% reported they were given a limit of less than 22 pounds. Substandard weight gains, the researchers noted, are associated with low birth weight babies.
Commenting on the findings, Dr. Ronald Chez of University Hospital in Newark, N.J., suggested in the American Journal of Public Health that obstetricians make a point of providing better and more detailed nutrition and weight gain information to expectant mothers.
With a longstanding reputation for hipness and unwanted status as a major AIDS center, San Francisco would seem a place where teenagers might be reasonably well informed about acquired immune deficiency syndrome and other sexually transmitted diseases.
But a new study by a team at UC San Francisco has uncovered some surprisingly unhip attitudes among Bay Area teen-agers that may be a telling commentary on how uninformed young people are on such questions. Among findings of the study--a questionnaire sample of 1,326 San Francisco adolescents--are these misconceptions:
A total of 41.9% think AIDS can be acquired by kissing; 3.3% think AIDS is no more serious than having a cold; 11.6% believe all gay men have AIDS; 17.1% think AIDS can be transmitted just by touching someone; 15.7% fear AIDS can be spread by contact with a comb or hairbrush; 10% believe you can get AIDS by shaking hands with someone who has it, and 6.8% think AIDS can be avoided by regular exercise.
Another 28.9% agreed with the statement, “I’ve heard enough about AIDS and I don’t want to hear any more about it;” 84.6% figured anyone at all can get AIDS and 15.3% think that simply being around someone with AIDS is enough for the disease to be transmitted.
“We conclude,” the researchers observed in the American Journal of Public Health, “that development and implementation of school health-education programs on AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are needed in this population.”
Since insurance reimbursements and the Medicare program started paying for intraocular lens implants--a major advance in the surgical treatment of cataracts--such eye operations have been one of the biggest growth industries in medicine. Marketing of lens implants has developed into a major controversy among eye doctors as physicians have resorted to newspaper advertisements, radio spots and even billboards to push the operation. Fees generally ranged upward of $1,500 per eye.
But now, a study hints that the expansion of the lens implant market may be subsiding as the available pool of eyes to be operated on has been exhausted.
The new survey shows that intraocular lens implants may be leveling off at a rate of about 1 million operations a year nationwide, with 929,000 lenses installed in the 12-month period ending in February of this year. There had been earlier estimates that, by 1990, there could be as many as 2 million cataract surgeries a year.
Writing in the current issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology, the team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, notes that there are major signs of a slowing in the growth of lens implants, with only 11,000 more put in between the six months ending in February, 1986, compared with the previous six months.
DOCTOR’S LEXICON--We’re all held together, in many respects, by the same thing. Obviously, this does not refer to our psyches, but to that part of physiology called connective tissue . Consisting of the tendons, cartilages and ligaments, connective tissue is, in a sense, the nuts, bolts and lubricants of the body that permit physical motion of the skeleton--especially the limbs. Tendons connect muscle to bone and permit the contraction and flexion of muscle to pull and push on arms, hands, feet and legs. Ligaments connect bones to one another, establishing the range of motion in things like knees. Cartilage is the body’s natural lubricant, eliminating friction where bone meets bone and providing shape to organs like ears.
