Advancing age can effect seniors and their teeth. For some dry mouth can be an issue.  Dry mouth is caused by reduced saliva flow. Dry mouth can be the result of cancer treatments, certain diseases, such as Sjögren’s syndrome, lupus and an infection of the salivary glands, anemia, and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as side effects of certain medications.  Aging is also another cause of dry mouth.

While age can impair the sense of taste diseases, medications, and dentures can also contribute to this sensory loss.  Make sure that when you see your dentist for your regular check ups you go over all your medications in order to get proper dental care treatment.

For three years, University of Utah researchers have been deploying a computer-based design program called SketchUp in workshops to teach and develop life skills for youth on the autism spectrum. An earlier study showed that using the program helps kids develop their spatial and visual acuity, as well as to leverage those strengths to build positive social interactions.

Scientists have identified an underlying genetic cause for a rare disorder of motor neurones, and believe this may help find causes of other related diseases. Disorders of motor neurones are a group of progressive neuromuscular disorders that damage the nervous system, causing muscle weakness and wasting. These diseases affect many thousands of people in the UK. A number are inherited but the causes of the majority remain unknown, and there are no cures.

Dry mouth is caused by the reduced saliva flow.  There are several causes of dry mouth which include:

* Medications side effects: Dry mouth is often a common side effect of many prescription and even nonprescription drugs.

* Diseases and Infections:  Dry mouth can also be a side effect of certain disease and infections such as  Sjögren’s syndrome, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, anemia, cystic fibrosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and mumps.

* Medical Treatments: Dry mouth can be a side effect of certain medical treatments  such as radiation to the head and neck and chemotherapy treatments for cancer.

* Lifestyle:  Your lifestyle can cause dry mouth issues as well. Smoking or chewing tobacco can affet saliva production and aggravate dry mouth. As well as  Continuously breathing with your mouth open can also contribute to dry mouth.

Increased levels of the hormone c in young black males correlate with an unhealthy chain of events that starts with retaining too much salt and results in an enlarged heart muscle, researchers say. The findings indicate physicians may want to reach for aldosterone inhibitors early in their effort to control blood pressure and reduce cardiovascular risk in young black males.

Due to advancing age many seniors at a higher risk of darkened teeth. Darkened teeth is caused to some extent by changes in dentin, and by a lifetime of consuming stain causing foods and drinks.  Seeing a dentist regularly for cleaning and check up will help to prevent and treat darken teeth issues.

A new study from the US finds people who drink more than 4 cups of caffeinated coffee a day have half the risk of dying from oral/pharyngeal (mouth and throat) cancer as people who drink it either occasionally or not at all. However, the researchers say their findings need to be confirmed by more research, and for now should just be received as good news for coffee drinkers and not be used as a reason to recommend everyone should drink 4 cups of coffee a day.

Substantial health benefits could be achieved by implementing taxes on sugary drinks and foods high in saturated fats, as well as subsidizing fruit and vegetables. According to researchers, the foods that should be taxed are those which pose serious health risks to the general public. Soft drinks are known to increase blood pressure and can cause obesity. Foods high in saturated fat increase a person’s levels of bad cholesterol which increases their risk of developing serious life threatening conditions such as atherosclerosis, stroke and even heart attack.

As an international community, our collective failures on climate change are having critical consequences. Today climate change has become one of the major challenges to the basic human rights to life, food, health, water, housing and self-determination.

Nonrefractive visual impairment, not due to needing glasses, has increased significantly among Americans in recent years, and the higher incidence of diabetes may be responsible. The finding came from new research, conducted by a team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, and was published in JAMA, December 12 issue.

In 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said to find out what was in President Obama’s health care bill Congress would have to pass it. After nearly three years, it has become obvious why Congressional Democrats wanted to hide the facts from the public before the president’s health care bill became the law. You’ve probably read about the 21 new taxes the bill requires in an effort to impose an individual insurance mandate, and how the law cuts more than $700 billion out of Medicare to fund a new entitlement. But you may not know about the impact that President Obama’s health care law will have on the states.

The Affordable Care Act also required states to expand Medicaid to cover more individuals beginning in 2014, but fortunately the Supreme Court’s ruling made this expansion optional. Even though the federal government is supposed to pick up a significant percentage of states’ expansion cost, the Obama administration is already seeking to limit its support to states that don’t expand their programs as much as the law originally required. It sounds as though a bad deal has the potential to get worse – and our state can offer some clues as to what will happen for states that choose to expand their program.

Policy makers have been trying to replace Medicare’s fee-for-service payment system for years with approaches that pay one price for an aggregation of services. The intent is to reward providers for offering needed care in the most appropriate and cost-effective manner. Medicare’s first payment change designed to accomplish such a change was the hospital prospective payment system, introduced during 1983–84. But because it focused only on hospital care, its impact on total Medicare spending was limited. In 2011 Medicare began a new initiative to expand the “bundled payment” concept to link payments for multiple services that patients receive during an episode of care.

The goal of Medicare’s current bundled payment initiative is to provide incentives to deliver health care more efficiently while maintaining or improving quality. This article provides a detailed analysis of how Medicare implemented the hospital prospective payment system, how hospitals responded to the new incentives, and lessons learned that are applicable to the bundled payment initiative. The lessons include that any Medicare payment reform needs to continuously respond to the many different components of the health system and that payment reform should be coupled with analogous reforms in private insurance payment, so that providers receive consistent signals to alter their behavior.

Medicare’s new hospital pay-for-performance program for all acute care hospitals will begin in October 2012. It will be the largest Medicare quality improvement initiative for hospitals to date. Using 2009 data on hospital performance, we calculated hospital performance scores and projected payments under the new program for all eligible hospitals. Despite differences across hospitals in terms of performance, expected changes in payments were small, even for hospitals with the best and worst performance scores. Almost two-thirds of hospitals would experience changes of just a fraction of 1 percent. Although the program will in effect redistribute resources among hospitals, our data suggest that the redistribution is not likely to cause major problems because the amount being redistributed is also small. These results raise questions about whether the new pay-for-performance program will substantially alter the quality of hospital care, and they highlight the challenges of designing effective quality improvement incentives.

Since his days in the Nixon White House, Stuart Altman has searched for ways to bring America’s health care needs and aspirations in sync with America’s pocketbook.