Word: chronical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Steadily, the line between diseases of the rich (heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer) and those of the poor (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria) has blurred. As citizens of developing nations get fatter and take up tobacco-smoking - habits of the developed world - they are also under increasing threat from the same chronic noncommunicable diseases (CNCD) that ail the wealthy...
...change the course of that fate, a coalition of major health agencies from Australia, Canada, China, Britain and the U.S., which together control 80% of the world's public health-research funding, announced today the formation of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD). "Our focus is on reducing the burden of chronic diseases in developing countries," says Leszek Borysiewicz, the chief executive of the U.K. Medical Research Council. "It's critically important to make these interventions now." (Read how health workers are helping fight killer diseases in the developing world...
...lesson can be learned from health care in the developed world, it's that chronic diseases are a lot less costly when they're prevented from the start: up to 80% of premature death from heart disease, stroke and diabetes can be avoided with basic behavioral changes and inexpensive drug treatments. But so far there has been little effort to tailor those interventions to low- and middle-income nations, such as China and Brazil, where chronic diseases are expected to take a serious toll in coming decades. "Avoiding tobacco, improving nutrition and getting more exercise - we know this works," says...
...GACD hopes to pool its members' experience and resources to identify, test and implement the best ways to slow the progress of chronic diseases - both in developed and developing nations. That will be a tall order, particularly since no specific funding has been allocated for the GACD and because chronic diseases work slowly and frequently fall to the bottom of global health priorities. It's important to remember also that the rising rate of chronic diseases in developing nations does nothing to relieve the co-existing burden of infectious diseases like tuberculosis - many such countries now face a "double burden...
Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says...