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| Updated: 1/24 8:08 pm |
Published: 1/24 2:58 pm |
A new study has found that people who smoke cut their life span short by at least ten years. But if they quit, they can get some, or even all, of those years back.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine says smokers can undo the damage they've done, even if they don't stop smoking until middle age.
Tim Mcafee, M.D. with Centers For Disease Control & Prevention says: I want to be sure that people who are over forty understand that quitting smoking still gives incredible benefits. If you quit even in your fifties you're going to add five-six years to your life expectancy, there's still nothing else that's as powerful.
About 35-million Americans smoke.
Scientists say smokers here are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than non-smokers and about 60 percent of those deaths are directly attributed to smoking.
Things kids swallow
Not all foreign objects that a child puts in their mouth are a major concern when they're swallowed.
Dr. Allison Brindle is a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital. She says coins are only a problem if they cause a child to have trouble breathing.
Crayons and pet food, dirt and grass are other common things kids put in their mouth and grass is only a problem if it's been treated with pesticides.
Brindle says one thing that's always an emergency is batteries.
Dr. Brindle says, "If your child swallows a battery, a small battery, or a magnet, those things can actually can cause harm and may not pass through. A battery can leak toxic materials once it's ingested and magnets, especially if more than one goes down, they can actually adhere to one another across the GI tissues."
Brindle says gum is not for babies or toddlers. But if they do manage to swallow a piece, it should pass through the digestive system like anything else.
Baby born with outside heart is released from hospital
A 3-month-old baby in Houston with a rare congenital malformation has been released from the hospital.
Audrina Cardenas was born on October 15 with one third of her heart outside her body.
In a six-hour surgery last November, Texas Children's Hospital doctors reconstructed her chest cavity. Doctors also made her a pink chest field to protect the baby's heart.
Her mother Ashley is relieved her daughter is doing well enough to be released.
"She's doing really good,” she says. “She'll be going home on a little bit of oxygen, very little; she's going home on a feeding tube, but hopefully with OT help we'll be able to get her feeding through a bottle."
Only eight babies in a million are born with this rare congenital malformation. Most don't live longer than three days.
