The Wall Street Journal (11/20, Landro, Subscription Publication) reports in “The Informed Patient” that US medical centers are now developing programs to help better care for youngsters and adolescents who sustain concussions. Because young people’s brains are still growing, concussions may cause some serious long-term problems. The new programs are meant to inform parents, school nurses, athletic coaches and even pediatricians exactly how to care for a kid with a concussion and how to prevent further complications and damage. Researchers have also found a biomarker in the brain, which when combined with magnetic resonance imaging, may help physicians assess a patient’s long-term post-concussion prognosis. This past summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put together a task force charged with developing guidelines on concussion to be shared with physicians and emergency departments in the near future.

Related Links:

— “Fresh Efforts to Improve Teens’ Concussion Care,”Laura Landro, Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2012.

USA Today (11/20, Hellmich) reports, “People who are jobless at some point during their lifetime because they were laid off, fired or quit may be at an increased risk of having a heart attack after age 50,” according to a study published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The AP (11/20, Tanner) reports that investigators “analyzed data on more than 13,000 men and women aged 51 to 75 taking part in an ongoing health and retirement survey partly sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.” For the past 20 years, “participants have been interviewed every two years about their employment and health.” Altogether “there were 1,061 heart attacks during the study.”

The Los Angeles Times (11/19, Bardin) “Booster Shots” blog reports that the investigators “found that being unemployed was associated with a significantly increased risk of heart attack, with such subjects having heart attacks at 1.35 times the rate as people who were not unemployed.” The researchers also found that “each time somebody lost a job, their risk went up: People who had lost four jobs during the study had heart attacks at 1.63 times the rate of those who did not lose a job.”

Related Links:

— “Study: Unemployment may raise risk of heart attack,”Nanci Hellmich, USA Today, November 19, 2012.

The Washington Post (11/20, Kulkarni) reports that “for many of those who seek treatment for” eating disorders, “getting a full range of insurance coverage can be difficult.” Additionally, the article notes that “treatment of eating disorders is complicated because it often involves medical care, mental health services and nutritional therapy, requiring a team of specialists — often a” primary care physician, “a therapist, a psychiatrist and a dietitian.” According to the Post, “patients argue that insurers don’t adequately cover all those services, although estimates of how many patients receive coverage vary.”

Related Links:

— “Eating disorders often leave patients facing difficult insurance hurdles,”Shefali S. Kulkarni, The Washington Post, November 19, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/16, Bardin) reported, “While the lion’s share of youth anti-smoking efforts has focused on cigarettes, a new report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease suggests more needs to be done to reduce the number of teens smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs.”

A recent report said that “18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year. And what’s particularly concerning to the study authors…is that many young people don’t seem to recognize that hookah use carries serious health risks: Hookah smoke contains many of the same toxins as cigarettes and has been associated with a similar laundry list of diseases such as lung cancer and respiratory illness.”

Related Links:

— “Teenage hookah smoking rates must be reduced, experts say,” Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2012.

On its front page, the New York Times (11/19, A1, Quenqua, Subscription Publication) reports, “Pediatricians are starting to sound alarm bells about boys who take unhealthy measures to try to achieve Charles Atlas bodies that only genetics can truly confer. Whether it is long hours in the gym, allowances blown on expensive supplements or even risky experiments with illegal steroids, the price American boys are willing to pay for the perfect body appears to be on the rise.”

In fact, “in a study to be published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, more than 40 percent of boys in middle school and high school said they regularly exercised with the goal of increasing muscle mass,” with 38 percent saying “they used protein supplements,” and about six percent admitting to experimenting with steroids. The piece goes on to explain the anabolic steroid use in men may cause testosterone production to stop.

But it is not just boys who are trying to “increase muscle size or tone,” USA Today (11/19, Healy) reports. In “some cases, they are nearly as widespread among girls,” the study found. The “study is a reminder that parents and physicians need to be aware that these behaviors are going on and that they need to be discussed with their adolescents, says Joel Brenner, medical director of the Sports Medicine Program at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Va., and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness.”

While “the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances is clearly dangerous and needs to be avoided…inappropriate changes to diet or exercise can also be hazardous, he says.”

Related Links:

— “Muscular Body Image Lures Boys Into Gym, and Obsession,” Douglas Quenqua, New York Times, November 19, 2012.