| The death of a friend and Better heart, better sex |
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(CNN) -- It's never easy when you get that phone call, even when you've known for years that it might be coming. But on Friday, I got the call that someone I loved had died.Just five days earlier, my friend Marci and I had been making plans for our kids to go trick-or-treating together, and now she's gone. I can't write that Marci Smith lost her battle with brain cancer, because Marci hated that phrase. Her husband, Tim, thinks she just didn't like the concept of losing at anything.Actually, in my book, she beat cancer. Her disease was diagnosed when she was 43, when her son Joshua was 3 years old. Her doctor told her that statistically speaking, she had three to six months to live. That was in February 2007.She beat cancer not just in the length of the time she survived, but in how she lived these last 4 years. As the cancer invaded Marci's brain and the chemotherapy poisoned her body, her spirit remained clean. [Read the full article] Editor's note: Joseph Bocchini is the Chairman of the Deparment of Pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport and chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices working group on the HPV vaccine for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.(CNN) -- During the recent Republican presidential debate, the issue of vaccinating girls against human papillomavirus, or HPV, came up several times, and some statements have been made that may concern parents of children scheduled to receive the vaccine.The statements questioned the safety of HPV vaccines and the rationale for the recommendations for their use from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.HPV vaccines have the promise of improving the lives of both women and men. [Read the full article] (Health.com) -- People with depression are more likely to have a stroke than their mentally healthy peers, and their strokes are more likely to be fatal, according to a new analysis published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Depression is a relatively minor risk factor for stroke compared to high blood pressure (hypertension) and other health conditions and behaviors that damage blood vessels, the researchers say. Still, their analysis suggests that as many as 4% of the estimated 795,000 strokes that occur in the United States each year can be attributed to depression."If you have depression but no other health issues, you probably don't have to pay too much attention to stroke risk," says An Pan, Ph.D., the lead author of the analysis and a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston. [Read the full article] 
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