We often experience symptoms but don’t even know it. Why? Sometimes we write it off as “growing pains” or “just something that happens as you get older.” Or even still, your momma might tell you to just walk it off. As tough and as strong as we perceive ourselves to be, there are some symptoms that we just can’t afford to ignore. Ever.
Here’s a list of warning symptoms worth remembering. If you suffer from any of these, seeking immediate attention could do more than just make a difference in the quality of your life – it may save your life!
Feeling Very Full After Eating Very Little
Feeling full sooner than normal after eating and having persistent nausea and vomiting that last more than a week are warning signs that should be checked by your doctor. There are many possible causes, including pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer and ovarian cancer.
Fever that Keeps Coming Back
If you have a normal immune system and you’re not undergoing treatment, such as chemotherapy for cancer, a persistent low-grade fever — over 100.4 F — should be checked if it lasts for a week or more. If you have a fever with shaking chills, or a high fever — greater than 103 F — or if you’re otherwise severely ill, see your doctor as soon as possible.
If you have an immune system problem or take immune-suppressing drugs, fever may not be a reliable warning sign and your primary doctor or oncologist can tell you what would signal a need for an evaluation.
Persistent fever can signal hidden infections, which could be anything from a urinary tract infection to tuberculosis. At other times, malignant conditions — such as lymphomas — cause prolonged or persistent fevers, as can some medications and conditions, and reactions to certain drugs. Fever is also common with treatable infections, such as urinary tract infections. But if a low-grade fever persists for more than two weeks, check with your doctor. Some underlying cancers can cause prolonged, persistent fever, as can tuberculosis and other disorders.
Unexplained Weight Loss
You may think losing weight on accident is a blessing, but if you find that you’re losing excessive weight without trying, see your doctor. Unintentional excessive weight loss is considered to be a loss of more than:
• 5 percent of your weight within one month
• 10 percent of your weight within six to 12 months
An unexplained drop in weight could be caused by a number of conditions, such as an overactive thyroid (hyperthyroidism), depression, liver disease, cancer or other noncancerous disorders, or disorders that interfere with how well your body absorbs nutrients.
Shortness of Breath
You may not just be out of breath because you walked up some stairs–it could be something else. Feeling short of breath — beyond the typical stuffy nose or shortness of breath from exercise — could signal an underlying health problem. If you find that you’re unable to catch your breath or you’re gasping for air/wheezing, seek emergency medical care. Feeling breathless with or without exertion or when reclining is a symptom that needs to be medically evaluated without delay.
Causes for breathlessness may include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic bronchitis, asthma, heart problems, anxiety, panic attacks, pneumonia, and a blood clot in the lung (pulmonary embolism), pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension.
Changes in How You Think
Immediate medical evaluation is warranted if any of the following occur:
• Sudden or gradual confused thinking
• Disorientation
• Sudden aggressive behavior
• Hallucinations (if you have never had them)
Changes in behavior or thinking may be due to infection, head injury, stroke, low blood sugar, or even medications, especially ones you’ve recently started taking. Also seek prompt medical attention if you experience:
• A sudden and severe headache, often called a thunderclap headache, because it comes on suddenly like a clap of thunder.
• A headache accompanied by a fever, stiff neck, rash, mental confusion, seizures, vision changes, weakness, numbness, speaking difficulties, scalp tenderness or pain with chewing.
• A headache that begins or worsens after a head injury.
These headache symptoms may be caused by stroke, blood vessel inflammation (arthritis), meningitis, brain tumor, aneurysm or bleeding on the brain after head trauma.
Unexplained Changes In Bowel Habits
See your doctor if you have any of the following:
• Severe diarrhea lasting more than two days
• Mild diarrhea lasting a week
• Constipation that lasts for more than two weeks
• Unsuccessful urges to have a bowel movement
• Bloody diarrhea
• Black or tarry-colored stools
Changes in bowel habits may signal a bacterial infection — such as campylobacter or salmonella — or a viral or parasitic infection. Among other possible causes are inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer.
Short-Term Loss of Vision, Speaking or Movement Control
If you have these signs and symptoms, minutes count. These are signs and symptoms of a possible stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA). Seek immediate emergency medical care if you have any of the following:
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• Sudden weakness or numbness of the face, arm or leg on one side of your body
• Sudden dimness, blurring or loss of vision
• Loss of speech, or trouble talking or understanding speech
• A thunderclap headache
• Sudden dizziness, unsteadiness or a fall
7. Flashes of light
The sudden sensation of flashing lights may signal the beginning of retinal detachment. Immediate medical care may be needed to save vision in the affected eye.
Hot, Red or Swollen Joints
These warning signs may occur with a joint infection, which requires emergency care to save the joint and keep bacteria from spreading elsewhere. Other causes may include gout or certain types of arthritis such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Your body tries its very best to warn you when there’s trouble, so never ignore the signs. While some are not obviously alarming, they can still lead to serious health problems. Trust your body – it knows! (BlackDoctor.org by Nutritionist Mary Toscano)
Alcohol use disorder can be treated with an array of medications – but few people have heard of them
By Joseph P. Schacht, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Alcohol is responsible for more deaths than overdoses from opioids and all other substances combined, yet less than 10% of people with alcohol use disorder receive treatment.
More than 29.5 million Americans ages 12 and up had alcohol use disorder – the medical term for the disease commonly known as alcoholism – in 2022, when the most recent national data was published.
The condition is characterized by a pattern of heavy alcohol consumption with loss of control over drinking despite negative social, occupational or health consequences.
Deaths from excessive alcohol use have sharply increased in recent years, to 178,000 in the United States in 2021, up from 138,000 five years earlier. The greatest increase occurred during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alcohol is responsible for more deaths than overdoses from opioids and all other substances combined, and it accounts for 1 in 5 of all deaths of people ages 20 to 49. Alcohol-associated deaths occur from a variety of causes. These include alcohol’s long-term effects such as cancer, liver disease and heart disease as well as its short-term effects such as motor vehicle accidents, poisoning and suicide.
Many effective treatments exist for alcohol use disorder, including psychotherapy, peer support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and SMART Recovery, and medications. I’m a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, and for the past 15 years, my research has focused on evaluating medications for alcohol use disorder.
Alcohol use disorder is vastly undertreated
With the onset of the opioid epidemic in the past two decades, medications for opioid use disorder, such as methadone and buprenorphine, have entered the public consciousness. But medications for alcohol use disorder are less familiar to the public and used less frequently.
While 22% of patients with opioid use disorder receive medications to treat it, the rate of medication treatment for alcohol use disorder is much lower. Less than 10% of people with alcohol use disorder receive any treatment in any year, and less than 3% receive medications for it.
Regrettably, many people with alcohol use disorder don’t recognize the severity of their drinking and its effects on others, and many do not realize that effective medications are available.
Medications approved for alcohol use disorder
As of May 2024, three medications have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of alcohol use disorder. The oldest and best known of these medications is disulfiram – sold under the brand name Antabuse – a compound that was first used in the American rubber industry.
In 1937, a rubber plant physician observed that workers exposed to disulfiram displayed adverse reactions to alcohol, including nausea, vomiting and tachycardia – meaning fast heart rate. Subsequent research determined that disulfiram inhibits alcohol metabolism, leading to the accumulation of acetaldehyde. This causes many of the symptoms of a hangover immediately after alcohol ingestion, making drinking unpleasant.
Disulfiram is effective for reducing drinking but must be taken daily by mouth, which limits its utility if patients do not take it on this schedule.
A more recently FDA-approved – and more effective – medication for alcohol use disorder is the opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone. It blocks opioid receptors and prevents opioids – both “exogenous” opioid drugs and “endogenous” opioids produced in the brain – from activating these receptors.
Naltrexone reduces dopamine release from alcohol, blocking some of the pleasurable effects of drinking. Importantly, it also reduces alcohol craving, likely through its effects on dopamine that is released in response to cues, such as the sight, smell and taste of alcohol. Naltrexone is effective for reducing heavy drinking but less effective for complete abstinence from alcohol.
Naltrexone can be taken daily by mouth or injected once per month, making it a better option for patients who might struggle to take a daily oral medication. Interestingly, it also reduces heavy drinking when taken sporadically prior to anticipated drinking occasions. A similar opioid antagonist, nalmefene, is approved in the European Union for alcohol use disorder.
The third FDA-approved medication, acamprosate, also reduces alcohol cravings, but its molecular effects are less well understood. Results from European clinical trials have shown that it can help people reduce their drinking, but results from U.S. trials have been less positive.
‘Off-label’ medications
Several medications have demonstrated encouraging effects on drinking in randomized controlled trials but are not yet FDA-approved for alcohol use disorder. Instead, they are used “off-label,” meaning that physicians use their discretion to prescribe them for an unapproved indication. The most promising medications are approved for treating epilepsy.
Precision medicine
An important recent focus of research, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, on alcohol use disorder medications has been the application of a “precision medicine” approach to identify patients for whom a particular medication is more likely to have a large effect.
For example, my work and others’ has found that people who both drink heavily and smoke cigarettes are more likely to benefit from naltrexone. This may be because the additive effects of alcohol and nicotine on dopamine release in reward-related brain regions makes these people particularly likely to benefit from a medication that can block dopamine release by alcohol.
Finally, recent research suggests that gabapentin may be more effective in people with a history of alcohol withdrawal.
On the horizon
The search for robustly effective medications to treat alcohol use disorder is a significant area of current research. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism funds a multisite research program, in which my laboratory participates, that has evaluated a number of promising candidate medications in Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical trials. The FDA typically requires medications to demonstrate efficacy in at least two Phase 3 trials prior to approval for a new purpose.
Finally, anecdotal reports of reduced interest in alcohol among patients taking GLP-1 agonists – medications that mimic the action of glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1), a hormone produced by the body after eating – have prompted intense interest in the potential of these medications to treat alcohol use disorder. These include Ozempic and Wegovy, which are FDA-approved for diabetes and weight loss. My laboratory and several others are conducting trials of these medications, with results expected in the next one to two years. Alcohol use disorder is a devastating condition for which better treatments are desperately needed. Approved and off-label medications are currently available. As research into new medications continues, patients should seek providers who use evidence-based treatments to have the greatest likelihood of success in gaining control over their drinking. (The CONVERSATION)