Hasta La Gadget!

Some people just never put their phones down — texting, tweeting, Snapchatting, playing games. Here’s a bunch of phone accessories to make them (and their thumbs) happy.

By Christopher Wanjek, Columnist
Published: 11/22/2013 08:44 AM EST on LiveScience

At first, electronic cigarettes were a novelty — something a braggart in a bar might puff to challenge the established no-smoking policy, marveling bystanders with the fact that the smoke released from the device was merely harmless vapor.

Now, e-cigarettes are poised to be a billion-dollar industry, claimed as the solution to bring in smokers from out of the cold, both figuratively and literally, as e-cigarettes promise to lift the stigma of smoking and are increasingly permitted at indoor facilities where smoking is banned.

So, are e-cigarettes safe? Well, they’re not great for you, doctors say. What’s being debated is the degree to which they are less dangerous than traditional cigarettes.

1940 revisited

E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices, often shaped like traditional cigarettes, with a heating element that vaporizes a liquid nicotine solution, which must be replaced every few hundred puffs. Nicotine is inhaled into the lungs, and a largely odorless water vapor comes out of the device. Puffing an e-cigarette is called vaping. [Vaping: How E-cigs Work (Infographic)]

Yet the industry’s duplicity is clear to medical experts: E-cigarettes are marketed to smokers as a means to wean them off of tobacco (although studies show they don’t help much); yet the same devices, some with fruity flavors, are marketed to young people who don’t smoke, which could get them hooked.

Hooked? Yes, e-cigarettes are a nicotine-delivery system, highly addictive and ultimately harmful because of their nicotine.

Cancer and respiratory experts see the same ploy being played out today with e-cigarettes as was done in the 1940s with cigarettes, when America started smoking en masse. They often are distributed for free and pitched by celebrities and even doctors as cool, liberating and safe.

In an ad for a product called blu eCigs, celebrity Jenny McCarthy, infamous for encouraging parents not to vaccinate their children, encourages young adults to vape, enlisting words such as “freedom” and the promise of sex. In another ad, for V2 Cigs, a medical doctor named Matthew Huebner — who is presented without affiliation but is associated with a Cleveland Clinic facility in Weston, Fla. — implies that vaping is as harmless as boiling water.

As for the notion of e-cigs as liberating, the cost of a year’s worth of e-cigarette nicotine cartridges is about $600, compared with $1,000 yearly for a half-pack a day of regular cigarettes.

As for whether they’re safe, it’s a matter of comparing the advantages of one addiction over another.

E-cigarettes not a patch

One would think that vaping has to be safer than smoking real cigarettes. Experts say they are probably safer, but safer doesn’t mean safe.

“Cigarettes have their risk profile,” said Dr. Frank Leone, a pulmonary expert at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia. And just about everyone who breathes understands the risks: circulatory disease and myriad cancers, for starters. “E-cigarettes might be better off compared to that profile. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own risk profile.”

A top concern is the nicotine delivery rate, Leone said. With nicotine patches and gum, the nicotine delivery is regulated, with small amounts of nicotine released slowly into the bloodstream. But with traditional cigarettes and now e-cigarettes, heat creates a freebase form of nicotine that is more addictive — or what smokers would call more satisfying. The nicotine goes right into the lungs, where it is quickly channeled into the heart and then pumped into the brain.

Once addicted, the body will crave nicotine. And although nicotine isn’t the most dangerous toxin in tobacco’s arsenal, this chemical nevertheless is a cancer-promoting agent, and is associated with birth defects and developmental disorders.

A study published in 2006 in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, for example, found that women who chewed nicotine gum during pregnancy had a higher risk of birth defects compared to other nonsmokers.

Great unknowns

This great unknown of possible negative health effects, along with the lack of regulation of e-cigarettes, scares experts like Leone. The products come bereft of health warnings. How many pregnant women will vape following McCarthy’s promotion?

As for their merits in smoking cessation, e-cigarettes don’t appear very helpful. A study published last month in the journal Addictive Behaviors found that most smokers who used them while they tried to quit either became hooked on vaping, or reverted back to smoking cigarettes. A study published Nov. 16 in the journal The Lancet found no statistically significant difference in the merits of the e-cigarette over the nicotine patch in terms of helping people quit.

Leone said that e-cigarettes might not help people quit smoking because the device keeps addicts in a state of ambivalence — the illusion of doing something positive to mitigate the guilt that comes from smoking, but all the while maintaining the ritual of smoking.

The Jenny McCarthy blu eCigs ad hints at this notion, with such phrases as “smarter alternative to cigarettes,” “without the guilt” and “now that I switched…I feel better about myself.”

Editors of The Lancet called promotion of e-cigarettes “a moral quandary” because of this potential to replace harmful cigarettes with something slightly less harmful yet just as addictive. Other researchers agree that e-cigarettes might help some people quit, but at a population level, converting millions of smokers into vapers still addicted to nicotine might not lead to the cleaner, greener, healthier world implied by e-cigarette manufacturers.

And then there’s the issue of not knowing what’s in the e-cigarette nicotine cartridge.

“It’s an amazing thing to watch a new product like that just kind of appear; there’s no quality control,” said Dr. Richard Hurt, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center in Rochester, Minn. “Many of them are manufactured in China under no control conditions, so the story is yet to be completely told.”

The authors of The Lancet study, all based in New Zealand, called for countries to regulate the manufacturing and sale of e-cigarettes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which does not approve any e-cigarettes for therapeutic purpose, said it plans to propose a regulation to extend the definition of “tobacco product” under the Tobacco Control Act to gain more authority to regulate products such as e-cigarettes.

Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjekfor daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of “Food at Work” and “Bad Medicine.” His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.

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By Douglas Main, Staff Writer
Published: 11/22/2013 08:43 AM EST on LiveScience

A healthy 20-year-old woman was running on a beach with friends when she fell on the wet sand. After briefly standing, she fell again, and within 30 seconds, became unresponsive. Her lips turned blue and she started gasping for breath. Her friends quickly called the paramedics and performed CPR, but it didn’t help, according to a recent report of her case.

She was pronounced dead within half an hour. What happened?

According to the case report, the impact of the woman’s body on the sand when she fell was enough to prompt a rare heart condition called commotio cordis, in which the heart is jolted into an arrhythmic pattern, after which it stops altogether. The report was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

Commotio cordis is caused by an abrupt blow to the heart, usually by something small like a baseball, that strikes at a very specific time, said Dr. Emile Daoud, professor of internal medicine at the Ohio State University Medical Center, who was not involved in the woman’s case. It typically strikes kids who have less muscle and fat than adults to shield their hearts. [9 Oddest Medical Cases]

The condition results from a blow during the brief period of time after the heart contracts, when the organ is recharging itself. During this time — a span of a few milliseconds — one part of the heart has repolarized and is ready to fire, while the rest of the organ is not yet ready. If an abrupt, focused blow strikes during this time, it can cause part of the heart to fire, but not the rest of it, Daoud said.

“This throws everything into chaos,” Daoud told LiveScience. The heart goes into ventricular fibrillation, a name for the uncoordinated contraction of the ventricles (the lower chambers of the heart), and the patient usually dies from cardiac arrest.

Commotio cordis is quite rare, killing between two to four people yearly in the United States, according to the study. But once it strikes, it is deadly — only about 10 percent of U.S. patients have been resuscitated and survived.

Due to its rarity, Daoud said he has not seen a case of commotio cordis, but has colleagues who have.

Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a preventive cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, has not seen patients with the condition and hasn’t heard of colleagues seeing it, either, though she has read about it. “It’s certainly scary — these people are otherwise healthy with no underlying conditions,” she told LiveScience.

But this case was even more unusual and rare than most. The patient was an adult, but the average age of people the condition strikes is 14. She was also overweight, whereas the condition tends to strike lean people — it’s thought that fat helps shield the heart from this type of blow, the researchers said.

Moreover, the woman fell on sand, which wouldn’t be expected to cause this condition, Daoud said. Typically a very focused, hard impact is necessary, like a blow from a speeding baseball.

Even soccer balls and footballs have only rarely been found to lead to commotio cordis, Daoud added.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebookor Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.

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Not all retailers are following the likes of Walmart, Target and Kmart this year and kicking off Black Friday sales right in the middle of your Thanksgiving dinner. Some chains, including Costco, Nordstrom and BJ’s, are preserving the sanctity of Turkey Day, even if it means missing out on a few hours of the holiday shopping frenzy.

One example is Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company.

“Our company-owned stores are closed on Thanksgiving so that our associates can celebrate the holiday with their family and friends,” Jess Calyton, a Patagonia spokesperson, wrote in a statement to The Huffington Post. “This has been our tradition.”

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