Parathyroid Disorders

Most people have four pea-sized glands, called parathyroid glands, on the thyroid gland in the neck. Though their names are similar, the thyroid and parathyroid glands are completely different. The parathyroid glands make parathyroid hormone (PTH), which helps your body keep the right balance of calcium and phosphorous.

If your parathyroid glands make too much or too little hormone, it disrupts this balance. If they secrete extra PTH, you have hyperparathyroidism, and your blood calcium rises. In many cases, a benign tumor on a parathyroid gland makes it overactive. Or, the extra hormones can come from enlarged parathyroid glands. Very rarely, the cause is cancer.

If you do not have enough PTH, you have hypoparathyroidism. Your blood will have too little calcium and too much phosphorous. Causes include injury to the glands, endocrine disorders, or genetic conditions. Treatment is aimed at restoring the balance of calcium and phosphorous.

NIH: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

Quitting Smoking

What are the health risks of smoking tobacco?

Quitting smoking is important for your health. Besides being the leading cause of cancer in the United States, smoking tobacco harms most organs of your body and causes many other health problems.

Tobacco smoke contains many chemicals and can even be harmful even if you don't smoke. Exposure to secondhand smoke can increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. If you're pregnant, it can harm your fetus.

It can be difficult to quit smoking. That's because smoking also causes addiction to nicotine, a stimulant drug in tobacco. Nicotine addiction makes it harder to stop, but quitting smoking can improve the quality and length of your life.

Tobacco use is the most common preventable cause of death. The more years you smoke and the more cigarettes you smoke each day, the higher your risk. Quitting smoking can help reduce your risk of health problems as well as improve the quality of your life.

Some initial benefits of quitting include:

• Lower heart rate and blood pressure
• Less carbon monoxide in the blood (carbon monoxide reduces the blood's ability to carry oxygen)
• Better circulation
• Less coughing and wheezing
• Sense of smell and taste return

In the long term, quitting tobacco can help you live a longer life. Your risk of getting cancer decreases with each year you stay smoke-free.

There are many ways to quit smoking. Common methods used to help quit smoking include:

• Counseling with a health care provider about your smoking habits, readiness to quit, and setting a quit date.
• Smoking aids such as nicotine replacement products or medicines to help reduce nicotine addiction. These may not be right for you if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, a teenager, or if you have certain medical issues or take certain medicines.
• Smoking reduction by slowly reducing the number of cigarettes per day, or stopping smoking altogether, often called "cold turkey."

You may need to try different things, but a mixture of counseling and quit-smoking medicine has been shown to be the best method.

Some people think that switching to e-cigarettes can help to quit smoking, but that has not been proven. These battery-operated smoking devices look like cigarettes but work differently. Using an e-cigarette is called vaping. Researchers still have a lot to learn about the health effects of using e-cigarettes.

When you stop or cut back on smoking, you may have short-term effects such as irritability, anxiety, moodiness, weight gain, or trouble sleeping. These are called withdrawal symptoms. You can work with your provider to help reduce these symptoms and find the best way for you to quit.

NIH: National Cancer Institute

Radiation Exposure

What is radiation?

Radiation is energy. It travels in the form of energy waves or high-speed particles. Radiation can occur naturally or be man-made. There are two types:

• Non-ionizing radiation, which includes radio waves, cell phones, microwaves, infrared radiation and visible light
• Ionizing radiation, which includes ultraviolet radiation, radon, x-rays, and gamma rays

Background radiation is all around us all the time. Most of it forms naturally from minerals. These radioactive minerals are in the ground, soil, water, and even our bodies. Background radiation can also come from outer space and the sun. Other sources are man-made, such as x-rays, radiation therapy to treat cancer, and electrical power lines.

Radiation has been around us throughout our evolution. So our bodies are designed to deal with the low levels we're exposed to every day. But too much radiation can damage tissues by changing cell structure and damaging DNA. This can cause serious health problems, including cancer.

The amount of damage that exposure to radiation can cause depends on several factors, including:

• The type of radiation
• The dose (amount) of radiation
• How you were exposed, such as through skin contact, swallowing or breathing it in, or having rays pass through your body
• Where the radiation concentrates in the body and how long it stays there
• How sensitive your body is to radiation. A fetus is most vulnerable to the effects of radiation. Infants, children, older adults, pregnant women, and people with compromised immune systems are more vulnerable to health effects than healthy adults.

Being exposed to a lot of radiation over a short period of time, such as from a radiation emergency, can cause skin burns. It may also lead to acute radiation syndrome (ARS, or "radiation sickness"). The symptoms of ARS include headache and diarrhea. They usually start within hours. Those symptoms will go away and the person will seem healthy for a little while. But then they will get sick again. How soon they get sick again, which symptoms they have, and how sick they get depends on the amount of radiation they received. In some cases, ARS causes death in the following days or weeks.

Exposure to low levels of radiation in the environment does not cause immediate health effects. But it can slightly increase your overall risk of cancer.

Before they start treatment, health care professionals need to figure out how much radiation your body absorbed. They will ask about your symptoms, do blood tests, and may use a device that measures radiation. They also try get more information about the exposure, such as what type of radiation it was, how far away you were from the source of the radiation, and how long you were exposed.

Treatment focuses on reducing and treating infections, preventing dehydration, and treating injuries and burns. Some people may need treatments that help the bone marrow recover its function. If you were exposed to certain types of radiation, your provider may give you a treatment that limits or removes the contamination that is inside your body. You may also get treatments for your symptoms.

There are steps you can take to prevent or reduce radiation exposure:

• If your health care provider recommends a test that uses radiation, ask about its risks and benefits. In some cases, you may be able to have a different test that does not use radiation. But if you do need a test that uses radiation, do some research into the local imaging facilities. Find one that monitors and uses techniques to reduce the doses they are giving patients.
• Reduce electromagnetic radiation exposure from your cell phone. At this time, scientific evidence has not found a link between cell phone use and health problems in humans. More research is needed to be sure. But if you still have concerns, you can reduce how much time you spend on your phone. You can also use speaker mode or a headset to place more distance between your head and the cell phone.
• If you live in a house, test the radon levels, and if you need to, get a radon reduction system.
• During a radiation emergency, get inside a building to take shelter. Stay inside, with all of the windows and doors shut. Stay tuned to and follow the advice of emergency responders and officials.

Environmental Protection Agency

Benefits of Exercise

We have heard it many times before -- regular exercise is good for you, and it can help you manage your weight. But if you are like many people, you are busy, you sit most of the day at your job, and you haven't yet changed your exercise habits. The good news is that it's never too late to start. You can start slowly and find ways to fit more physical activity into your life. To get the most benefit, you should try to get the recommended amount of physical activity for your age. If you can do that, the payoff is that you will feel better, may help prevent or control many diseases, and will likely even live longer.

Regular exercise and physical activity may:

• Help you get to and stay at a healthy weight. Along with diet, exercise plays an important role in maintaining a healthy weight and preventing obesity. If you are at a healthy weight, you can maintain it if the calories you eat and drink are equal to the amount of energy you burn. To lose weight, you need to use more calories than you eat and drink.
• Reduce your risk of heart diseases. Exercise strengthens your heart and improves your circulation. The increased blood flow raises the oxygen levels in your body. This helps lower your risk of heart diseases such as coronary artery disease and heart attack. Regular exercise can also lower high blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels, all of which are risk factors for heart disease.
• Help your body manage blood glucose (blood sugar) and insulin levels. Exercise can lower your blood glucose levels and help your insulin work better. This can reduce your risk of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. And if you already have one of these diseases, exercise can help you manage it.
• Help you manage a chronic health condition. For example, regular physical activity may help reduce pain and improve function in adults with arthritis. It can also help support daily living activities for people with disabilities. This may help them be more independent.
• Help you quit smoking. Exercise may make it easier to quit smoking by reducing your cravings and withdrawal symptoms. It can also help limit the weight you might gain when you stop smoking.
• Improve your mental health and mood. During exercise, your body releases chemicals that can improve your mood and make you feel more relaxed. This can help you deal with stress, manage anxiety, and reduce your risk of depression.
• Help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age. Exercise stimulates your body to release proteins and other chemicals that improve the structure and function of your brain.
• Strengthen your bones and muscles. Regular exercise can help kids and teens build strong bones. Later in life, it can also slow the loss of bone density that comes with age. Doing muscle-strengthening activities can help you increase or maintain your muscle mass and strength. For older adults, this can mean staying independent, like being able to get in and out of a chair or bed without help.
• Reduce your risk of some cancers, including colon, breast, uterine, bladder, esophageal, kidney, stomach, and lung cancer. There are different ways that physical activity may lower the risk of these cancers. For example, it can strengthen your immune system and reduce inflammation in your body. It also helps prevent obesity, which is a risk factor for many cancers.
• Reduce your risk of falls. For older adults, doing balance and muscle-strengthening activities can help reduce your risk of falling.
• Improve your sleep. Exercise can help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
• Boost your energy. Exercise helps your heart and lungs work better, which can leave you feeling more energetic throughout the day.
• Improve your sexual health. Regular exercise may lower the risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) in men. For those who already have ED, exercise may help improve their sexual function. In women, exercise may increase sexual arousal.
• Increase your chances of living longer. Studies show that physical activity can reduce your risk of dying early from the leading causes of death, like heart disease and certain cancers.

Here are some tips to help you make exercise part of your daily routine:

• Make everyday activities more active. Even small changes can help. You can take the stairs instead of the elevator. Walk down the hall to a coworker's office instead of sending an email. Wash the car yourself. Park further away from your destination.
• Be active with friends and family. Having a workout partner may make you more likely to enjoy exercise. You can also plan social activities that involve exercise. Consider joining an exercise group or class, such as a dance class, hiking club, or volleyball team.
• Keep track of your progress. Keeping a log of your activity or using a fitness tracker may help you set goals and stay motivated.
• Make exercise more fun. Try listening to music or watching TV while you exercise. Also, mix things up a little bit - if you stick with just one type of exercise, you might get bored. Try doing a combination of activities.
• Find activities that you can do even when the weather is bad. You can walk in a mall, climb stairs, or work out in a gym even if the weather stops you from exercising outside.
• Remember that some physical activity is better than none. Do what you can! Even 5 minutes of physical activity has real health benefits.

Biopsy

A biopsy is a procedure that removes cells or tissue from your body. A doctor called a pathologist looks at the cells or tissue under a microscope to check for damage or disease. The pathologist may also do other tests on it.

Biopsies can be done on all parts of the body. In most cases, a biopsy is the only test that can tell for sure if a suspicious area is cancer. But biopsies are performed for many other reasons too.

There are different types of biopsies. A needle biopsy removes tissue with a needle passed through your skin to the site of the problem. Other kinds of biopsies may require surgery.