Disease

DEAR ABBY: My mother's Alzheimer's became apparent after she was in a car accident. I should have noticed the signs earlier, but I didn't. Her body recovered, her mind did not. I built a new house with a separate suite for her. My wife and I tried to care for her for a year, but I'm disabled and Mom was afraid of my wife. There was never a moment's peace. Fearing for our collective health, I finally placed Mom into an assisted living facility. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life.

About two years ago, Fredric Kornberg was in his Bermuda hotel on business when his eyesight started doing strange things. The smoke detector on the ceiling seemed to be moving, he said, and the pinstriping on his car became "distorted, wavy. " Kornberg, 81, a Bala Cynwyd resident, was diagnosed soon after returning home with an eye disorder called macular degeneration - the leading cause of vision loss in the United States for those 60 and older. Luckily for Kornberg, doctors began treatment early enough to save his vision, but many others are going untreated and becoming blind.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of a signal moment in advertising history: the first time a problem was turned into a social stigma so a company could sell a product to fix it. In 1922, Gerard Lambert was in his office at the family's pharmaceutical company in St. Louis. One of his employees read him an article in a British medical journal that used the word halitosis to describe bad breath. Lambert's father had helped invent a product called Listerine, which dentists used as an antiseptic and which Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. marketed for a whole range of uses, from treating gonorrhea to cleaning floors.

LONDON - Health officials on Thursday reported 61 confirmed and suspected cases of Legionnaires' disease in Scotland, an outbreak that has left one man dead. Of the 61 cases, all in the Edinburgh area, 24 were confirmed, Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland's Parliament. The rest were suspected cases. The illness is contracted by breathing in small droplets of water contaminated with the Legionella bacteria. The symptoms are similar to those of flu, including coughs, fever, and chills.

Please floss and brush, by all means. It's still good for your teeth and gums. But don't imagine that you're going to ward off heart disease in the process. That's the message of a new "scientific statement" from an expert committee of the American Heart Association, which analyzed more than 500 papers and articles on the topic. The idea that periodontal disease might impair the cardiovascular system dates back more than a century, according to the statement, published in the journal Circulation, and the hypothesis had a resurgence beginning about 20 years ago. Indeed, people with bad gums are more likely to have strokes, heart attacks, and hardening of the arteries.

Question: My triglyceride level was 419 and my doctor recommended that I take the drug Tricor to lower it. Since I feel fine, do I need to take it? Why is an elevated triglyceride level bad? What raises the triglycerides? Answer: Triglycerides are a part of the total cholesterol in your blood. For years, we weren't quite sure whether or not treating triglycerides made a difference in preventing heart disease. High levels over 400 usually got treated, while numbers between 200 and 400 were treated at the doctor's discretion.

The Inquirer is presenting one profile a day of participants in the May 6 Blue Cross Broad Street Run. See full coverage at www.philly.com/broadstreetrun . When Tim and Susan Burke were dating, 20 years ago, they did a 182-mile bike ride sponsored by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. "That was a great opportunity to get to know each other," said Tim, 44, of Clarks Summit, Pa., "but who knew way back then that less than 10 years later, I'd be diagnosed with MS. We joke now that we should have done a ‘Powerball' bike ride.

WASHINGTON - Be happy - it seems to be good for your heart. Scientists have long known that Type A personalities and people who are chronically angry, anxious, or depressed have a higher risk of heart attacks. Now a Harvard review of the flip side of that psychology concludes that being upbeat and optimistic just might help protect against heart disease. Rather than focusing only on how to lessen heart risks, "it might also be useful to focus on how we might bolster the positive side of things," said lead researcher Julia Boehm of the Harvard School of Public Health.

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. - Proposed changes to U.S. Department of Labor rules would make it easier for coal miners and their families to obtain black-lung benefits, while a West Virginia congressman aims to reduce the amount of paperwork they have to fill out in the first place. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - dubbed "Obamacare" by critics - requires the Office of Workers' Compensation Program to reinstate two provisions of the Black Lung Benefits Act that were eliminated in 1981.

In the summer of 1793, people in Philadelphia began dying of a mysterious disease, later identified as yellow fever. By the end of the year, the illness had killed one in 10 Philadelphians, yet the devastation also strengthened the city. Determined to prevent future outbreaks, leaders created the Water Works, revived public parks and improved hospital care. Former mayoral candidate Sam Katz and his son Philip tell this tragic, gruesome, yet inspiring story in the latest installment of their 12-part video documentary on this city's history titled, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.