By The Survivors Club Staff
July 14, 2009

The Survivor of the Week award goes to Hannah Clark, a young British woman who proves that the healing power of the human heart.

In 1995, British doctors came up with a radical idea to save 11-month-old Hannah who was experiencing heart failure. In a so-called "piggyback operation," they implanted a donor heart from a 5-month-old baby directly into Hannah's own failing heart.  The theory behind the operation was that the donor heart would pump while Hannah's heart rested.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 14, 2009

The Survivors Club grew by 131 people last night when a Southwest Airlines plane made an emergency landing in West Virginia after a hole opened in the body of the plane and the cabin lost pressure.

Flight 2294 bound for Baltimore-Washington landed in Charleston, W.Va., about 50 minutes after its departure from Nashville, according to the Charleston Daily Mail.  No injuries were reported.

Passenger Brian Cunningham told NBC's Today show that he had dozed off in his seat when he was awakened by "the loudest roar I'd ever heard."

"There was no pop, no creak, no explosion-like noise," Cunningham went on.  "There was just a loud roar. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I got the baseball cap out of my face and I look up and there's the sun coming through the ceiling. ... I saw sky where I shouldn't be seeing it."

What caused the hole in the plane?  So far, experts are stumped, according to The Christian Science Monitor.  Metal fatigue and corrosion are immediate suspects.  They were both involved in the 1988 gash in an Aloha Airlines 737 that resulted in rapid decompression, killing one flight attendant (who was sucked out) and injuring 65 passengers and crew.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 13, 2009

Count your moles. That's the key lesson from scientists who have discovered two new genes that double your risk of developing melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In 2009, 68,720 people will be diagnosed with melanoma in the US, according to the National Cancer Institute.  Some 8,650 people will die from the disease.

According to a new study in the journal Nature Genetics, the number of moles on your skin is the most important factor in your risk of getting melanoma -- even greater than your exposure to the sun.  Indeed, the new study says that sunshine only causes a small percentage of melanoma cases.

Warnings about the health risk of sun exposure are overstated, according to the study's authors.  The real public health focus should concentrate on people most at risk – namely anyone with more than 100 moles on their body, redheads and people with fair skin. 

People at risk should be taught to check their moles for changes in shape, size or color.

For more on surviving and thriving with skin cancer, please visit The Survivors Club Skin Cancer Support Center.

For more on the new study, please keep reading...

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 10, 2009

If you're unlucky enough to have a heart attack or heart failure, where you live may determine whether you survive.  According to a new study in the medical journal Circulation, patients may be three times more likely to die in some US hospitals than others.

Hospitals in northeastern states like Massachusetts and New Jersey have the lowest death rates while those in Arkansas, Oklahoma and California have the highest death rates, according to researchers from Yale University School of Medicine.

The new study offers insight into the best places for the cure and treatment of heart attacks.  "This suggests that patients' outcomes are dependent, at least in part, on the hospital that provides their care," Krumholz said in an American Heart Association press release.

From CBSNews.com:

Top 3 Hospitals with Lowest Heart Attack Death Rates

Heart Hospital Of Austin (TX) -- 10.9%
New York-Presbyterian (NY ) -- 11.1%
NYU hospital Center (NY) -- 11.1%

Bottom 3 Hospitals with Highest Heart Attack Death Rates

Southwest, Mississippi Regional (MS) -- 24.9%
Hospital Damas Inc. (PR) -- 24.5%
Jefferson Regional Medical (PA) -- 23.9%

Where does your state and hospital rank?  

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 10, 2009

You're awaiting test results from the doctor, but she never calls. You breathe a sigh of relief.  No news is good news, right?  Wrong.

It turns out that seven percent of the time, doctors fail to let patients know about abnormal cancer screenings and other tests, according to a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.  At some offices, the failure rate was zero while at other offices, it was as high as 26 percent.

These mismanaged results can pose an immediate health danger and a long-term threat.  "Failure to report abnormal test results can lead to serious, even lethal consequences for the patient," says lead author Dr. Lawrence Casalino of Weill Cornell Medical College.  "It really does happen all too often," he goes on.

"If you've had a test, whether it be blood test or some kind of X-ray or ultrasound, don't assume because you haven't heard from your physician that the result is normal," Casalino warns.

Medical offices that use electronic records systems did worse or no better than those with old-fashioned paper systems in the study of more than 5,000 patients.  The study examined tests including cholesterol blood work, mammograms, Pap smears and screening tests for colon cancer.

What can you do to make sure you get your test results?

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 9, 2009

Here's our survivor story of the day drawn from the Salem News in Massachusetts.  As you'll see, the story cites research from The Survivors Club. Above all, it's a remarkable account of a woman who died from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and then was revived.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 8, 2009

It all started one Sunday when a Virginia man read his church bulletin.  A stranger in his parish needed a kidney so Thomas F. Koontz offered one of his own.  Koontz was grateful to God that his teenage daughter Sage had recently been saved from brain cancer.  When Koontz's fellow parishioner found a more suitable donor, he called Johns Hopkins Hospital, asking if anyone else needed a kidney.

With this single action, the 54-year-old Marine's started a chain of events, as The Baltimore Sun describes, that allowed eight - yes, eight -- people to get new kidneys, enabling them to survive and thrive in the face of kidney failure and other life-threatening kidney problems.

"God helped me, so I was trying to give something back to God," he told The Sun.  "You only need one kidney."

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 7, 2009

Between 40 to 60 percent of new marriages will eventually end in divorce, according to the experts.  Indeed, for every two marriages that occurred in the 1990s, there was one divorce.  Within the first five years of marriage, the probability of divorce is 20 percent.  Within the first 10 years, the chances are 33 percent.  Every year in the US, more than one million children face the challenge of parents splitting up.

How does a family survive? 

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has just written a thoughtful and revealing essay about her 12th anniversary.  "That's how long we've been divorced," she writes, "one year longer than we were married."

"While we did not survive as a couple," she continues, "at least we've survived in the joint parenting of our daughters. We have gotten to the point where there is really nothing left to work out -- and it feels completely natural to be able to sit on a beautiful beach or stroll through the lovely streets of Agios Nikolaos (in Crete, Greece) together."

"God," our youngest daughter said the other day, "it's hard to remember you guys are divorced."

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 6, 2009

It's a good time to be a mouse with Alzheimer's disease...

New research on mice suggests that caffeine, the chemical in tea, coffee and soft drinks might have potential as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. 

Specifically, the research found that drinking the equivalent of five cups of coffee per day (or, gulp, 20 soft drinks) could reverse memory problems associated with Alzheimer's.

By The Survivors Club Staff
July 6, 2009

Including the recent Indian Ocean crash of Yemenia Flight 626, there have been 13 commercial plane crashes with just one survivor, according to Dr. Todd Curtis of Airsafe.com and CNN.  Five of those sole survivors were minors and four were crew members, accounting for around 75 percent of the total.

One of the most extraordinary sole survivor stories involves Julianne Koepcke, a 17-year-old flying in South America on a stormy Christmas Eve in 1971.  Indeed, Julianne's survival story might belong in The Survivors Club "Hall of Fame," if there were such a thing.