Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502160099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BALTIMORE - Doctors may soon tell patients who complain of tension headaches: ``Take two massages and call me in the morning.''
A study suggests tension headaches start with previously undiscovered tissues that link the brain with upper neck muscles.
If that's right, prescriptions to relax tense neck muscles could challenge the $2.2 billion headache remedy market.
``This may help get at the problem either with different pharmaceutical treatment or hopefully no pharmaceutical treatment - massage, relaxation therapy or an ice pack,'' said Dr. Walker L. Robinson, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center and one of three doctors who conducted the study.
Most over-the-counter pain relievers such as aspirin, ibuprofen and acetominophen don't stop what's actually causing the pain; they just make it easier to ignore.
In a report delivered to a conference of neurosurgeons in Phoenix this week, the Doctors said studies on 25 cadavers suggest that when neck muscles contract, they pull on the newly discovered connective tissue.
That tissue, in turn, pulls on the highly sensitive dura mater, a thin membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. Strained nerves in the dura mater appear to cause the headache, they said.
In other words, a tight neck yanks on an area of the head that's full of nerves.
- Associated Press
Anti-Semitic acts up 10% in 1994
WASHINGTON - Anti-Semitic acts rose 10.6 percent in the United States last year, surpassing 2,000 for the first time with a doubling in attacks by neo-Nazi skinheads, the Anti-Defamation League said.
Reported incidents of assaults, threats and personal harassment of Jews rose to 1,197 from 1,079 in 1993, the league said in a survey released Wednesday. Last year's incidents included the murder of 16-year-old Aaron Halberstam, a Hasidic student shot while riding in a van on New York's Brooklyn Bridge, and a sword attack on two 13-year-old boys in Memphis, Tenn.
The survey reported 869 acts of anti-Semitic vandalism, the first increase since 1991, and a rise in arson crimes.
Eighteen Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, down from 25 in 1993.
The ADL, a civil rights group that fights anti-Semitism, reported a total 2,066 incidents last year, the highest in the survey's 16-year history.
- Associated Press
Homeless alcoholics getting trench fever
BOSTON - Trench fever, a scourge of soldiers in both world wars, has reappeared among homeless alcoholics.
The illness is spread by lice and was especially common during World War I, when more than 1 million soldiers caught it. The disease is rare except in wartime, although in recent years it has been found in AIDS patients.
Now, doctors in both the United States and France have discovered the disease in alcoholic men living on the streets. No one knows whether it is a new affliction of cities or one that has been there unnoticed all along.
Two reports on the disease were published in Thursday's today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Associated Press
by CNB