Polyphor reinvents itself after abandoning antibiotic trial

Polyphor reinvents itself after abandoning antibiotic trial
Reuters: Health
Drugmaker Polyphor is hiring new managers and shifting focus after a trial of its top antibiotic hopeful proved too dangerous to continue, the Swiss company said on Wednesday.

AstraZeneca's Tagrisso gets China OK for type of lung cancer

AstraZeneca's Tagrisso gets China OK for type of lung cancer
Reuters: Health
AstraZeneca Plc said on Wednesday it had received marketing authorization from China's National Medical Products Administration for its top-selling drug, Tagrisso, to treat adults with a form of lung cancer.

5 Ways to Create a Work-Life Balance That Will Keep Your Marriage Safe

Do your responsibilities overwhelm you?

Finding a healthy work-life balance can feel impossible when you’re trying to juggle time with your family against all of your responsibilities.

But the best way to assure you get the quality time you need from both is to establish boundaries by using time management to figure out what tasks you need to complete in a given day or week.

There’s a ton of relationship advice and marriage advice out there about how to speak your partner’s “love language” by spending quality time with them, but knowing how to balance that against everything else you need to get done can be difficult.

“Work-life balance” has definitely become a favorite buzz-phrase nowadays. It was first coined in the UK in the 1970s, then migrated to the U.S. in the 80s, and now any savvy prospective employer will assure you that you’ll have the perfect dose if you work for them.

You can also call it work-life integration, blend, or harmony. My personal favorite is Adam Grant’s “work-life rhythm.” He says, “Work-life balance sets an unrealistic expectation of keeping different roles in steady equilibrium. Instead, strive for work-life rhythm. Each week has a repeating pattern of beats — job, family, friends, health, hobbies — that vary in accent and duration.”

Of course, there are plenty of lists extolling the best careers for work-life balance or the “highest-rated companies …” or even tips for organizations who want to encourage it for their employees.

However you label it, it all means the same thing — work-life balance is the ability to manage your professional workload and obligations in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your personal life and relationships.

And if you’re married, the commitment to creating a healthy rhythm between your working and playing hours takes on an even wider perspective.

Now it’s not just your own values and priorities you need to consider, but also those of your spouse as well … at least if you’re committed to making your relationship as successful as your career!

Many couples are on the verge of crashing and burning because one — or both — of them has lost sight of the vows they made on their wedding day. Loving, honoring and respecting your beloved does not mean routinely coming home late or working every weekend.

Of course, that’s bound to happen occasionally, but a steady practice definitely erodes your connection to the other important parts of your life … first and foremost, your partner and family.

Here are 5 simple tips for creating a healthy work-life balance that will strengthen your relationship and keep you from feeling overwhelmed:

1. Set Boundaries at Work.

This is first because it allows you to better manage all of your other commitments to maintain a positive work-life rhythm.

The first step is to simply say no. Obviously, if your boss has a big project for you, you can’t turn it down, but be clear about how full your plate is and what you’re able to take on. Don’t become the go-to person who says yes to everything … you might make everyone else happy, but you’ll end up miserable.

Make a promise to yourself to leave work at a reasonable time. Even if you can’t manage it every day, you’re establishing a precedent for yourself and your co-workers.

Another great time management tip is to plan your day in “chunks.” If your boss does hand you that major project, chop it up into manageable one- to two-hour pieces.

That way, you won’t feel like you have to complete it all at once and can leave work at a decent hour, knowing you have another block of time to work on it tomorrow.

And you get to have dinner with your sweetie!

2. Manage Your Digital Connections at Home and at Work.

This is certainly part of setting boundaries, but it deserves a spot of its own simply because of the role that all of your various “screens” play in your lives!

How much time do you spend responding to personal texts or emails during the workday? Remember that’s time you’re not spending getting work done so you can leave on time.

Let your friends know you may not be getting back to them immediately — schedule short breaks to handle personal stuff in bunches so you’re not constantly interrupted.

All those minutes you spend getting re-focused add up to one big time-eater.

Likewise, at home, turn the notifications off on your phone! Be fully present for your partner … maybe even put it in another room when you’re having a nice dinner or even just watching your favorite show.

If you have any doubts about how your addiction to your smartphone is affecting your lives on every level, read Manoush Zamorodi’s Bored and Brilliant — it’s a fascinating read and it’ll blow you away.

3. Schedule Date Nights (not Just for Couples With Kids!)

It’s all about quality time with the one you love. You’ve both got busy schedules, so don’t leave it to chance. At the beginning of each week, pull up your calendars and see what’s best for both of you.

Obviously, you’ll want to see friends after work, or get a massage, or take that cool cooking class you’ve been eyeing for a while, too. The “life” part of the work-life balance equation includes all of that, but you want to be sure to keep your marriage at the top of your priority list.

For instance, you could have your Friday nights set in stone, but then also try to come up with at least one other night during the week when you’re both home to make dinner (or order out) and hang together.

And remember to get rid of your phone during those times.

There are a ton of articles about how your cellphone is negatively impacting your brains and your relationships — even when it’s face down and turned off!

4. Create Meaningful Rituals to Anchor Your Day.

A marital ritual is really just a conscious, intentional commitment to support, nurture, and re-connect with your partner. It can be a simple one, like making sure you kiss each other goodbye in the morning, and greet each other with a hug when you come home at night.

Some ideas may take a little extra planning … like breakfast by candlelight, or scheduling a monthly couples’ massage. Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages can give you some great ideas for ways to connect more deeply with each other through your individual love languages.

Other regular rituals might be to make dinner together, to check in by phone or text during the day, to make a lunch date once a week, or to shower together. (You might want to plan that last one for a Friday or Saturday night so you can segue into the bedroom!)

Focus on creating a consistent, loving, mutual self-care practice with your partner. That way, when work is particularly crazy, you’ll still have a solid foundation to fall back on in your marriage.

5. Watch How You Communicate, Both in the Office and at Home.

If you work in one of those environments, where it’s the norm to gripe about your spouse, don’t engage!

It’s tempting to want to fit in with the crowd, but find another way to connect with your co-workers that doesn’t involve wife/husband-bashing. It’s an insidious way to undermine your own marriage, and frankly, disrespectful to the person you promised to love and honor.

And on the home front, while you don’t want to bring your work stress home with you, you also don’t want to stonewall your partner when they ask about your day. Share your frustrations and let them know what you need from them — cheerleading, advice, or just to listen.

One fun coming home ritual that can help diffuse work stress is to share your day like a weather report.

“Sunny skies this morning when I got a compliment from my boss, followed by a rainstorm when a deal fell through. But that created a tailwind, and I made a bunch of good sales calls after that.” Definitely a little corny, but it gets the information across and can open up to a deeper conversation.

Even with the best intentions and a passionate commitment to creating a healthy work-life rhythm, there will be days when everything just all falls apart. The perfect storm happens when both you and your partner have bad days and you haven’t had a chance to really connect in a while.

There’s not much you can do about the bad day, but if you’ve been compassionately ruthless in following most of your work-life balance hacks, your marriage won’t take too much of a hit! And maybe it’ll be a wake-up call to get back on track if either or both of you have fallen off the work-life balance train.

This guest article was originally published on YourTango.com: 5 Ways To Create A Work-Life Balance So Your Job Doesn’t Ruin Your Marriage.

Drug rehab: She spent more than $110,000. Her son still died.

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U.S. judge orders big drug companies to face opioid trial

U.S. judge orders big drug companies to face opioid trial
Reuters: Health
A U.S. judge on Tuesday rejected efforts by major drugmakers, pharmacies and distributors to dismiss claims that they caused the nation's opioid crisis, clearing the way for a scheduled landmark trial even as he pushes for a nationwide settlement.

Dear Mark: Health Effects of Neutering, Grain-Free Dog Diets, Ideal Dog Diet

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering three questions from last week’s Weekly Link Love comment section. They’re all about dogs. First, are their negative health effects of neutering or spaying? Second, do grain-free dog diets give dogs dilated cardiomyopathy, a kind of heart disease? What’s the alternative? And third, what is in my opinion the ideal dog diet—and should everyone be feeding it to their dogs?

Let’s go:

Mark, wouldn’t neutering dogs cause some long term negative health effects in them, as I assume it would in humans?

As you might expect, removing a dog’s testicles or ovaries—major reproductive and endocrine organs—can have negative effects. That’s just common sense, and we have observational studies paired with physiological mechanisms to make the case. The best-studied complications are cancer and joint disorders.

Among German shepherds, 7% of intact males were diagnosed with a joint disorder. 21% of males who’d been neutered before age 1 had a joint disorder. 5% of intact females were diagnosed; 16% of spayed females were diagnosed.

Among a group of 700+ golden retrievers, 5% of intact males had hip dysplasia, while 10% of early neutered males had it. No intact dogs had ever had any cranial cruciate ligament (an important ligament in the dog knee) tears, while 5% of early neutered males and 8% of early spayed females had torn one. 10% of early neutered males had a diagnosis of lymphoma, three times the rate of intact males. In females, late spaying (after 1 year of age) seems to have increased the rate of certain cancers, including hemangiosarcoma (a blood vessel cancer) and mast cell (breast) tumors.

Similar results with regards to joint disorders have also been found in labrador retrievers.

Both spaying females and neutering males appears to increase the risk of heart cancer, a fairly common cancer in dogs. Spayed females have the greatest risk of all.

Early spayed or neutered Rottweilers have an increased risk of bone cancer, another common disease to the breed.

Neutered/spayed dogs have a higher risk of hypothyroidism.

Intact dogs have higher metabolisms and lower appetites. The opposite is true for neutered dogs, which could explain the rise in pet obesity.

If you’re going to neuter a dog, I’d recommend waiting as long as you can. At the least 1 year, and ideally longer until sexual development completes. That allows the dog’s joints, muscles, and skeletal tissue to reach its full potential.

Also realize that the sex hormones aren’t only about sex or physical/structural development. They also help determine mental and psychological development.

Interesting SwS post about dogs. I would caution people to make assumptions canines need the same diet as people. Recently, many folks are discovering that dogs on a grain free diet seem to have a higher likelihood of developing hart issues. My house is kind of an n=14 experiment and I would guess that our dogs get on the active side in terms of exercise. We also have three dozen sheep, two dozen ducks, and a bunch of chickens. My wife is a dog trainer so in addition to our dogs she works with a bunch more. Too much info to post here but look up diet-associated dilated cardiomyopathy and some of the recent studies. The research is not yet to the stage where they know what causes DCM but it appears that dogs that are on “boutique exotic grain free (BEG) diets seem to be much more likely to develop DCM.

The way this research is presented in the media, most people assume that the problem with grain-free diets are that they’re too high in meat. That dogs need “heart healthy whole grains,” just like people supposedly do.

The reason “grain-free” dog diets are linked to dilated cardiomyopathy is not that these animals are eating too much beef, lamb, chicken, and fish protein. It’s that they’re replacing the grains with potatoes and peas, lentils, and other legumes and inducing taurine deficiency. Taurine deficiency-induced cardiomyopathy is well-established in cats, who cannot synthesize taurine on their own and must consume it directly in the diet. Dogs can synthesize taurine themselves, but they’re also adapted to a diet rich in taurine-rich meat, so it’s smart and evolutionarily congruent for them to also eat high-taurine diets—which must contain meat.

Say what you will about grains. I’m no fan of them for dogs (or humans, for that matter), but they do possess the amino acid precursors for taurine synthesis.

A response from a veterinary nutrition researcher at Tufts University claims that taurine probably isn’t the cause, instead suggesting that the “exotic meats” found in grain-free diets are likely candidates. She goes on to warn against raw-fed diets as well, since they “increase your dog’s risk of many other health problems.” She fails to specify which health problems raw meat and bone diets increase, but since she has some acronyms after her name we can trust her.

It’s odd, because I’m aware of some actual benefits to feeding dogs raw meat and bone diets:

Improved immune gene expression, indicating lower inflammatory status compared to kibble-fed dogs.

Improved gut biome compared to kibble-fed dogs.

Purina funded the Tufts University veterinary nutritional center where the writer of the article resides, which may or may not have affected her opinions.

In your opinion what should we feed our dogs?

Ideally, we should feed our dogs a well-formulated, nutrient-dense diet based on raw animal foods: muscle meat, bones, organs, seafood, eggs, quality dairy, and select supplemental foods. In other words, the ideal dog diet would look a lot like a really good carnivorous human diet.

The problem is that you have to do it right. It’s easy to do it wrong. One thing the dog food companies are pretty good at is avoiding gross deficiencies. The calcium:phosophorus ratio will be right. Most of the nutrients may be synthetic additions to refined junk food, but the basics will be there. This doesn’t always hold (see the dilated cardiomyopathy scandal mentioned above), of course, and it tends to cause chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes from mismatched macronutrients, but at least a kibble fed dog probably won’t develop osteoporosis.

Certain fish are dangerous when fed raw without adequate preparation. Pacific-caught salmon off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington can carry parasites that kill dogs (and other canids like wolves and coyotes). Freezing long enough at a low-enough temperature will kill the parasite, but you really have to be careful.

Dogs need to eat bones for the calcium and to keep their teeth clean, but they can break teeth on the wrong kind of bone. Load-bearing ruminant bones are good for gnawing, but not for eating. Do you know the difference?

Dogs need connective tissue, just like people. People can just throw some collagen powder in their coffee. Dogs really can’t. Are you going to seek out chicken feet, pork skin, beef tendons, green tripe for your raw-fed dog?

Dogs need organs, and not just liver. They need heart and kidney. Can you source it? You willing to handle it?

Dogs who spend all their lives on kibble only to be given a plate of turkey necks, beef liver, and lamb trim might not know what to do with themselves. Just like people who’ve spent their lives in restrictive high-heeled shoes can get into trouble when they try running a marathon in bare feet, dogs who are used to hoovering up kibble can get into trouble when they try to eat a neck for the first time.

None of this stuff is a deal-breaker. It can be done. Ideally, it should be done. But it does take time and energy to do things right. It’s harder—and better, don’t get me wrong—than just dumping some kibble in a bowl.

I’ll write more on this in the future. For now, check out this older post on raw-feeding dogs I did (and this one for cats).

Take care, everyone. Thanks for reading and if you have any follow up questions, let them loose down below.

The post Dear Mark: Health Effects of Neutering, Grain-Free Dog Diets, Ideal Dog Diet appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Longevity Biomarkers Found in Mice. A new study on mice looks at 8 different longevity interventions and compares their influence on rodent health and genes.

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