Tag: Columns

Rediscovering the Kitchen, and Other Tips for Heart Health

Paul Rogers

First the bad news: After decades of major progress in reducing deaths from diseases of the heart and blood vessels, the decline in cardiovascular mortality has slowed significantly, according to the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers called their findings alarming, suggesting that cardiovascular benefits from medical interventions may have reached a saturation point and that further improvements depend largely on changes in society and personal behavior.

The new data, published in June in JAMA Cardiology, covered the years from 2000 through 2014. From 2000 through 2010, the annual rates of decline for all cardiovascular deaths heart diseases and stroke averaged 3.69 percent for men and 3.98 percent for women. But since 2011, the rates of decline dropped to a mere 0.23 percent for men and 1.17 percent for women.

These findings point to near stagnation in controlling cardiovascular diseases and deaths, Dr. Stephen Sidney and colleagues wrote. And, they noted, the reasons are not difficult to discern. Based on data from the latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2011-12, Americans did better in controlling three major risk factors smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, often with the help of medication but many more people became obese and developed Type 2 diabetes.

According to data from the survey, the prevalence of adult obesity rose from 22.9 percent in 1988-1994 to 34.9 percent in 2011-12, and the C.D.C. found that the prevalence of diabetes nearly tripled, from 2.5 percent in 1990 to 7.2 percent in 2013.

Furthermore, the national survey showed, the percentage of adults who in 2012 were consuming an ideal diet that could minimize life-threatening damage to blood vessels was near zero.

Its not that these grim data were unexpected. Four years ago, Dr. Richard J. Jackson, a professor and former chairman of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicted that the current generation of young Americans (those born since 1980) may be the first to live shorter lives than their parents.

Even earlier, in 2007, Dr. Earl S. Ford of the C.D.C. and Dr. Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool wrote that unless measures were taken to transform the abhorrent risk factor profile that currently characterizes much of the U.S. population and dangerous trends were reversed, mortality rates among younger adults may represent the leading edge of a brewing storm.

Now for the good news: Neither medical innovations nor genetic interventions are needed to turn the tide on cardiovascular diseases and deaths and restore their once-significant declines. And the very same changes needed to improve cardiovascular health may also help prevent many common cancers, diabetes, arthritis, cognitive decline, depression and osteoporosis.

Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, a chief architect of a 2010 strategic plan to improve cardiovascular health, said: The whole may be greater than the sum of the parts. We shouldnt assume that chronic diseases automatically occur with aging. Living healthfully until we die is an achievable goal.

Dr. Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist and preventive medicine specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, chaired an American Heart Association committee of experts that adopted the recommended changes. Instead of focusing on the negative, the plan aims to achieve ideal cardiovascular health through ideal health behaviors and ideal health factors.

Heres how the committee defined ideal: No smoking; maintaining a body mass index below 25; being physically active; following current dietary guidelines; and maintaining an untreated total cholesterol level of less than 200 milligrams, an untreated blood pressure level of less than 120 over 80, and a fasting blood glucose level of less than 100 milligrams.

The committee had hoped that fostering these seven health behaviors and targets would, by 2020, improve the cardiovascular health of all Americans by 20 percent while reducing deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20 percent.

But current trends project at best a 6 percent improvement.

Although most of us are born with the potential for ideal cardiovascular health, fewer than half of all adolescents have retained five or more of the seven behaviors and factors at ideal levels, Dr. Lloyd-Jones wrote in 2014. And things get progressively worse with age until ideal cardiovascular health becomes rare above age 60, he said.

Still, he has not given up hope for a better result.

Now for the details. First and foremost, quit smoking or never start. Heart risks drop significantly within a year of quitting and eventually reach those of a nonsmoker.

Next, get regular physical exercise, at least 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous activity, or a combination of the two. Keep in mind that this is the minimum amount of physical activity needed to glean health benefits. More is better.

Exercise should be part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth. I do a combination of moderate and vigorous exercise every day. It energizes me and helps me control my weight without having to watch every calorie.

As for diet, the committee recommended focusing on foods, not nutrients. (As Dr. Lloyd-Jones put it, We dont eat nutrients.) It refrained from suggesting how many calories people should eat, since caloric needs vary tremendously based on an individuals basal metabolic rate, body size, lean body mass and physical activity.

Rather, it suggested a version of the DASH diet (for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) that was successfully tested by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It calls for four and a half or more cups of fruits and vegetables a day; two or more 3.5-ounce servings of fish each week; three ounces of fiber-rich whole grains a day; at most 36 ounces of sugar-sweetened drinks (less than 450 calories, or the equivalent in other sweets) a week; four or more weekly servings of nuts, legumes and seeds; and no more than two servings a week of processed meats.

At the same time, limit saturated fats to less than 7 percent of total calories and daily sodium to 1,500 milligrams for people with high blood pressure and no more than 2,300 milligrams (or one teaspoon of salt) for everyone else. Currently, Americans consume an average of 3,500 milligrams of sodium a day, most of it from processed and restaurant foods.

Which brings me to a final recommendation of my own: Rediscover your kitchen. No matter how busy you are, finding time to prepare healthy foods for yourself and your family should be a top priority.

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The Hazards of Ankle Sprains

Paul Rogers

Many fashion-conscious women wear high heels to show off their legs. But in truth, given the extraordinarily high incidence of ankle sprains, we’d probably all be better off if we had thick stumps like an elephant’s to connect our feet to our legs.

Every day in the United States, about 28,000 people sprain an ankle. Too often the injury is dismissed as “just a sprain,” with no specific treatment and a return to full activity before it has completely healed. Fully 45 percent of all athletic injuries are ankle sprains, and players often go back into the game with little or no treatment as soon as the pain subsides.

In fact, according to the International Ankle Consortium, a global group of researchers and clinicians who study ankle injuries, 55 percent of people who sprain an ankle never seek professional treatment in the aftermath of the injury.

Yet the majority of ankle sprains are doomed to recur. That’s because they often result in a chronically unstable joint that tends to “give way,” poor balance, a distorted gait, difficulty exercising, weight gain, diminished quality of life and early arthritis. Not to mention the expense of dealing with health problems that can result from being overweight and sedentary living.

Sound scary? It should, says Phillip A. Gribble, an athletic trainer at the University of Kentucky and co-director of the International Ankle Consortium, who hopes that knowing the potential consequences of ankle injuries will prompt more people to treat them with respect and seek proper treatment. Even better, he said, would be if more people took steps to prevent injury in the first place. And that, ladies, may include leaving those spike heels in the store.

Dr. Gribble was one of several experts who recently presented the latest technical information on ankle sprains to the National Athletic Trainers’ Association meeting in Baltimore. In a study of 3,526 adults who responded to a questionnaire, more than half, or 1,843, had previously sustained an ankle injury. Those who had injured their ankles tended to weigh more, had greater limitations in their daily activities and were more likely to have cardiovascular or respiratory conditions than those who remained injury free.

While ankle sprains are most common among physically active people, especially amateur and professional sports players and dancers, the general public is hardly immune. The injury can result from walking on an uneven surface (especially while wearing high heels or platform shoes), misstepping off a curb or staircase, being pulled erratically by a dog on a leash, even playing around in the yard with children or friends.

It doesn’t take much. I know — years ago, I sustained two bad sprains, one stepping on a stick while trimming a hedge and the other missing the last step while exiting a plane in the dark. I am now extremely careful about where I walk and what I put on my feet, especially when hiking in the woods (boots are de rigueur).

Most ankle sprains result when the foot abruptly turns in under the leg so that the sole of that foot faces the opposite leg, unduly stretching the ligament on the outside of the ankle. The extent of the injury can range from a minor strain to a complete tear, and the rate and extent of healing can vary greatly.

In one report to the athletic trainers’ convention, 12 college students who had sprained an ankle still had an incompletely healed, overstretched ligament a year after the injury, which “may explain the high percentage of patients that develop chronic ankle instability,” said Tricia Hubbard-Turner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Even though fewer than half of ankle sprains receive medical attention, the injury is so common (an estimated incidence of 2.06 ankle sprains per 1,000 people a year) that it is the leading lower extremity injury that results in an emergency room visit, according to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

As with any injury, ankle sprains are best prevented. One of the best approaches is to improve one’s balance with exercises that train the body to stay upright and maintain control in all kinds of positions. Dr. Gribble recommends spending time standing on one foot, at first on a firm surface, then with eyes closed, then on a soft surface like a pillow. As a final challenge, practice balancing on a wobble board, he said.

Muscles surrounding the ankle can be strengthened by wrapping a towel around the foot for resistance, then moving the foot up, down, in and out. Do stretching exercises that increase the flexibility of the legs, hip and torso to guard against any unanticipated awkward movements.

When participating in sports like basketball, soccer and tennis — which involve jumps or quick changes in direction that can put ankles at risk — consider taping or bracing the ankles to increase their stability.

Finally, avoid being a weekend warrior who indulges in a sport full tilt without adequate preparation. Build up gradually, practice the skills involved and make sure to keep needed muscles strong.

Should you sprain an ankle, avoid the all too common layman’s advice to “walk it off.” At a minimum, leave the game or whatever you were doing and avoid putting weight on that foot to give the injured joint adequate rest. If the injury is severe, you may need to use crutches.

If you do sprain an ankle, apply ice wrapped in a cloth for 15 to 20 minutes every two or three hours for two days, then once a day until pain and swelling are gone. Sit or lie down as much as possible with the injured ankle elevated above the hip. To further minimize swelling, wrap the ankle in an elastic bandage, starting at the toes and working up to the leg.

Seriously consider a medical consultation, especially if pain and swelling persist for more than a few days. Although in most cases, an X-ray or M.R.I. is not needed to make an accurate diagnosis, the injury could be more serious than a simple sprain. Ask about physical therapy, which can strengthen the joint and help prevent reinjury.

Most important of all, don’t rush back into activity before healing is complete and normal, pain-free range of motion has been restored. Reinjuring the ankle can result in permanent pain and disability and the health consequences noted above.

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The Narcissist Next Door

Paul Rogers

Does this sound like anyone you know?

*Highly competitive in virtually all aspects of his life, believing he (or she) possesses special qualities and abilities that others lack; portrays himself as a winner and all others as losers.

*Displays a grandiose sense of self, violating social norms, throwing tantrums, even breaking laws with minimal consequences; generally behaves as if entitled to do whatever he wants regardless of how it affects others.

*Shames or humiliates those who disagree with him, and goes on the attack when hurt or frustrated, often exploding with rage.

*Arrogant, vain and haughty and exaggerates his accomplishments; bullies others to get his own way.

*Lies or distorts the truth for personal gain, blames others or makes excuses for his mistakes, ignores or rewrites facts that challenge his self-image, and won’t listen to arguments based on truth.

These are common characteristics of extreme narcissists as described by Joseph Burgo, a clinical psychologist, in his book “The Narcissist You Know.” While we now live in a culture that some would call narcissistic, with millions of people constantly taking selfies, spewing out tweets and posting everything they do on YouTube and Facebook, the extreme narcissists Dr. Burgo describes are a breed unto themselves. They may be highly successful in their chosen fields but extremely difficult to live with and work with.

Of course, nearly all of us possess one or more narcissistic trait without crossing the line of a diagnosable disorder. And it is certainly not narcissistic to have a strong sense of self-confidence based on one’s abilities.

“Narcissism exists in many shades and degrees of severity along a continuum,” Dr. Burgo said, and for well-known people he cites as extreme narcissists, he resists making an ad hoc diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

The association’s diagnostic manual lists a number of characteristics that describe narcissistic personality disorder, among them an impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, grandiosity and feelings of entitlement, and excessive attempts to attract attention.

Dr. Giancarlo Dimaggio of the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy in Rome, wrote in Psychiatric Times that “persons with narcissistic personality disorder are aggressive and boastful, overrate their performance, and blame others for their setbacks.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, people with a narcissistic personality disorder think so highly of themselves that they put themselves on a pedestal and value themselves more than they value others. They may come across as conceited or pretentious. They tend to monopolize conversations, belittle those they consider inferior, insist on having the best of everything and become angry or impatient if they don’t get special treatment.

Underlying their overt behavior, however, may be “secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation,” Mayo experts wrote. To ward off these feelings when criticized, they “may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person.”

Dr. Burgo, who sees clients by Skype from his home in Grand Lake, Colo., noted that many “grandiose narcissists are drawn to politics, professional sports, and the entertainment industry because success in these fields allows them ample opportunity to demonstrate their winner status and to elicit admiration from others, confirming their defensive self-image as a superior being.”

The causes of extreme narcissism are not precisely known. Theories include parenting styles that overemphasize a child’s special abilities and criticize his fears and failures, prompting a need to appear perfect and command constant attention.

Although narcissism has not been traced to one kind of family background, Dr. Burgo wrote that “a surprising number of extreme narcissists have experienced some kind of early trauma or loss,” like parental abandonment. The family lives of several famous narcissists he describes, Lance Armstrong among them, are earmarked by “multiple failed marriages, extreme poverty and an atmosphere of physical and emotional violence.”

As a diagnosable personality disorder, narcissism occurs more often in males than females, often developing in the teenage years or early adulthood and becoming more extreme with age. It occurs in an estimated 0.5 percent of the general population, and 6 percent of people who have encounters with the law who have mental or emotional disorders. One study from Italy found that narcissistic personality traits were present in as many as 17 percent of first-year medical students.

As bosses and romantic partners, narcissists can be insufferable, demanding perfection, highly critical and quick to rip apart the strongest of egos. Employee turnover in companies run by narcissists and divorce rates in people married to them are high.

“The best defense for employees who choose to stay is to protect the bosses’ egos and avoid challenging them,” Dr. Burgo said in an interview. His general advice to those running up against extreme narcissists is to “remain sane and reasonable” rather than engaging them in “battles they’ll always win.”

Despite their braggadocio, extreme narcissists are prone to depression, substance abuse and suicide when unable to fulfill their expectations and proclamations of being the best or the brightest.

The disorder can be treated, though therapy is neither quick nor easy. It can take an insurmountable life crisis for those with the disorder to seek treatment. “They have to hit rock bottom, having ruined all their important relationships with their destructive behavior,” Dr. Burgo said. “However, this doesn’t happen very often.”

No drug can reverse a personality disorder. Rather, talk therapy can, over a period of years, help people better understand what underlies their feelings and behavior, accept their true competence and potential, learn to relate more effectively with other people and, as a result, experience more rewarding relationships.

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Keeping the Disruption of a Move in Perspective

Camilla Engman

At midnight, the ice cube dispenser on the refrigerator is not merely dripping. Water pours onto the floor. I drop down towels, empty the accumulated cubes from their plastic container and pop it back inside the freezer.

“Was that the right thing to do?” I ask my husband, who is trying to sleep. “For goodness sakes,” Don says, getting out of bed. We must leave for my monthly cancer blood test at 8 a.m. tomorrow.

Don pulls out the tray, puts it in the sink, and props up a little stick in the freezer, pushing up the ice maker’s metal wand in an attempt to stop the leak. Might work, might not… I’ll stay awake to see whether the deluge stops. When an unexpected disaster arises, I diminish its significance by comparing it to the worst of my cancer treatments a few years ago. I can do this because my current condition remains stable with an experimental drug.

Yet as I contemplate all the chairs and sofas and rugs that have to be donated to Goodwill, the mattresses and box springs to be given to the St. Vincent de Paul society, my late mother’s files and cabinets, Don’s late wife’s luggage and papers, his massive collection of 78 r.p.m. records, the yards of books on the shelves in the studies, our daughters’ stored memorabilia and their children’s baby equipment, the sheer volume of stuff seems daunting.

We are moving from a house of 4,000 square feet to an apartment less than half that size. One reason for our relocation: Don and I want to release our girls from the responsibility of dealing with the detritus accumulated over decades. We also have to leave because he cannot negotiate the stairs and both of us together cannot manage the upkeep.

Throughout the weeks and then the months when our beloved but aging house has to be repaired so we can sell it, workers arrive to shore up the porch, to fix the bowed ceiling supports in the garage, the cracks over the foyer doorway, a foundation that needs to be anchored to keep the structure from shifting, broken screen doors, mold in basement closets, chipped kitchen cabinets, and (oh!) a tree appears to be growing out of the chimney, and (yup!) an inspector found clogged drains — which suggest there might be trouble with the septic tank.

People tell me that moving ranks high up there on the stress index. But the commotion comes nowhere close to the terrifying havoc of cancer and its traditional treatments. Throughout the weeks and then the months of removals and renovations, the rhythms seem downright soothing, if measured against the ghastly tempos of surgeries, radiological interventions and chemotherapies.

The magnitude of cancer provides a scale against which everything else falls happily short. Cancer can be so bad that it imparts a sense of proportion. The poet Jane Kenyon once said that leukemia and a bone marrow transplant dispelled her fear of flying.

In the midst of all this chaos, I will postpone treating my recently diagnosed osteoporosis — I’m not clear yet about the efficacy of various remedies — but what about the cataract surgery? With or without glasses, I cannot see clearly and I have become the designated driver. Given the boxes mounting everywhere as well as the appointments of various people who are coming to take away the piano and the records and some paintings we won’t have room for, should I cancel? No way, I decide: a piece of cake, in contrast to cancer.

Ever shifting, the cancer terrain is treacherous to negotiate, its perilous landscape always unstable. There are roadmaps, but they often seem indecipherable. With surgeons, radiologists, and oncologists, I advance without a clear sense of how I will end up where and when.

As a cancer patient, I feel like an immigrant in a strange land. The customs of the country bewilder me. Dazed by unfamiliar sounds, sights, tastes, and touches, I had to learn a whole new language quite distinct from the idioms of every day discourse. I will never master it.

I speak of genetic mutations, chemicals and my anatomy in a grammar so simple that it resembles a 2-year-old’s. Terms must be adopted — debulking, PICC, port, PARP inhibitor — for processes I cannot really conceptualize. Frequently, physicians and nurses have to write down or spell out their prescriptions or directions. I mispronounce or stumble over words — anastomosis, extravasation, Gastrografin — that seem foreign.

So even this unsettling removal from a country house to an apartment strikes me as a change I can take in stride. After all, I know the address of my destination, the date of my prospective arrival, the route the truck will take and the neighbors speak my native tongue.

I’m staying up very late and can attest to the fact that the kitchen floor has remained dry. Don and I will travel to the hospital tomorrow and return. I will have cataract surgery and we will reside in a town whose byways may be easier to navigate with improved vision.

When you have cancer, you don’t just have cancer: You might have a broken refrigerator and cataracts and osteoporosis and loads of other issues. But you also have a unique perspective which, in a curious way, helps me keep on moving on.

Susan Gubar is the author of the new book “Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal.”

To Stem Obesity, Start Before Birth

Paul Rogers

To stem the current epidemic of obesity, there’s no arguing with the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As every overweight adult knows too well, shedding excess pounds and keeping them off is far harder than putting them on in the first place.

But assuring a leaner, healthier younger generation may often require starting even before a baby is born.

The overwhelming majority of babies are lean at birth, but by the time they reach kindergarten, many have acquired excess body fat that sets the stage for a lifelong weight problem.

Recent studies indicate that the reason so many American children become overweight is far more complicated than consuming more calories than they burn, although this is certainly an important factor. Rather, preventing children from acquiring excess body fat may have to start even before their mothers become pregnant.

Researchers are tracing the origins of being overweight and obese as far back as the pre-pregnancy weight of a child’s mother and father, and their explanations go beyond simple genetic inheritance. Twenty-three genes are known to increase the risk of becoming obese. These genes can act very early in development to accelerate weight gain in infancy and during middle childhood.

In the usual weight trajectory, children are born lean, get chubby during infancy, then become lean again as toddlers when they grow taller and become more active. Then, at or before age 10 or so, body fat increases in preparation for puberty – a phenomenon called adiposity rebound.

In children with obesity genes, “adiposity rebound occurs earlier and higher,” said Dr. Daniel W. Belsky, an epidemiologist at Duke University School of Medicine. “They stop getting leaner sooner and start putting on fat earlier and put on more of it.”

Still, twin and family studies have shown that many children with these genes remain lean. Furthermore, these same genes were undoubtedly around in the 1960s and 1970s when the obesity rate in children was a fraction of what it is today.

So what is different about the 2000s? Children today are surrounded by a surfeit of unwholesome, easy-to-consume calorie-dense foods and snacks accompanied by a deficit of opportunities to expend those extra calories through regular physical activity. And countering a calorie-rich, sedentary environment is now harder than it should be, with the current heavy emphasis on academics, parental reluctance to let children play outside unattended, and intense competition from electronics. All these circumstances may give obesity genes a greater chance to express themselves.

“There is no going back to a world in which calories are scarce and obtaining them is physically demanding,” Dr. Belsky wrote in an editorial in JAMA Pediatrics. “And governments and their publics have shown little enthusiasm for regulations restricting access to palatable, calorie-dense foods.”

Curbing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and keeping calorie-dense junk food out of the house and other settings where young children spend time is crucial. This is especially important for infants and children with large appetites that are not easily satisfied.

It’s also essential that parents model good eating habits, experts agree. “If you do it, they’ll do it,” David S. Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston, said. “Young children are like ducklings, they want to do what their mothers do.”

Equally important, Dr. Belsky said, is “allowing children in institutional settings – in day care, preschool and elementary school – to be as active as they choose to be rather than forcing them to sit quietly in chairs most of the day. Being physically active encourages a healthy metabolism. Active children are not constantly hungry.”

He added, “In the face of the obesity epidemic, eliminating the handful of opportunities for kids to be active during the day is a shame. Sedentary behavior becomes a life pattern.”

Another critical issue is the vicious cycle of overweight that starts with future mothers and fathers who are overweight or obese. “If we want healthy kids, we need healthy moms before pregnancy and during pregnancy,” Dr. Belsky said. “There are multiple pathways by which unhealthy levels of weight before and during pregnancy can influence a child’s weight going forward.”

As Dr. Ludwig explained, “Although genes are not modifiable, the weight of the mother before and during pregnancy is. Excessive weight gain during pregnancy predicts not just the baby’s birth weight but also the likelihood of obesity in middle childhood.”

The father’s weight is also turning out to be important, Dr. Ludwig said. “Acquired factors influence gene expression,” he said. “Being heavy alters DNA in the father’s sperm that changes gene expression and can be passed down to the next generation.”

Most, though not all, studies have linked a longer duration of breast-feeding to a reduced risk of overweight in children. Although Dr. Ludwig said that the effect “is not dramatic,” a more important benefit of breast-feeding may be “exposing the baby to a wider range of tastes based on what a mother is eating. If a breast-feeding mom eats a large variety of nutritious foods, the child is more likely to like them.”

Antibiotics given early in life, however, may counter any potential benefits of breast-feeding for weight gain, a new study found. Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland reported that when breast-fed infants are treated with antibiotics, the antibiotics kill off health-promoting bacteria that live in the gut. “The protective effects of breast-feeding against infections and overweight were weakened or completely eliminated by early-life antibiotic use,” the team wrote in JAMA Pediatrics last month.

Even if children have already started on a path of poor eating habits and excess weight gain, Dr. Ludwig said it is not too late to make healthful changes. As founder of the Optimal Weight for Life program and author of “Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Child to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World,” he advocates an authoritative, but not an authoritarian, parenting style that eliminates stress and conflict over what and when a child eats.

“Never force food on a child,” he insists. “Stand your ground in a gentle but firm way and be prepared to do a little negotiating. When a child refuses to eat the dinner that’s served, put it away in the fridge to be eaten later. If the child says ‘I’m not going to eat it,’ the response should be, ‘Fine, just go to bed,’ not ‘O.K., I’ll make you mac and cheese.’

“Children should be allowed to control their bodies, but parents have to provide the guidance and control the environment,” Dr. Ludwig said.

This is the second of two columns on childhood obesity. Read the first: “The Urgency in Fighting Childhood Obesity.”

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The Urgency in Fighting Childhood Obesity

Paul Rogers

Life-threatening ailments like heart disease, cancer, stroke and Type 2 diabetes most often afflict adults. But they are often consequences of childhood obesity.

Two new studies, conducted among more than half a million children in Denmark who were followed for many years, linked a high body mass index in children to an increased risk of developing colon cancer and suffering an early stroke as adults. The studies, presented at the European Obesity Summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, this spring, underscore the importance of preventing and reversing undue weight gain in young children and teenagers.

One study, of more than 257,623 people, by Dr. Britt Wang Jensen and colleagues at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, in Bispebjerg, Denmark, and Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, grouped children according to standard deviations from a mean B.M.I., adjusted for a child’s age and sex.

They found that each unit of increase in being overweight at age 13, generally corresponding to a two- to three-point increase in B.M.I., increased the risk of developing colon cancer by 9 percent and rectal cancer by 11 percent.

The second study, involving 307,677 Danish people born from 1930 to 1987, used a similar grouping of B.M.I. The risk of developing a clot-related stroke in early adult life increased by 26 percent in women and 21 percent in men for each unit of increase in being overweight at all stages of childhood, but especially at age 13.

Although neither study proves that excess weight in childhood itself, as opposed to being overweight as an adult, is responsible for the higher rates of cancer and stroke, overweight children are much more likely to become overweight adults — unless they adopt and maintain healthier patterns of eating and exercise.

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, obesity most often develops from ages 5 to 6 or during the teen years, and “studies have shown that a child who is obese between the ages of 10 and 13 has an 80 percent chance of becoming an obese adult.”

In a study published in 2014 in The New England Journal of Medicine, Solveig A. Cunningham and colleagues at Emory University found that “overweight 5-year-olds were four times as likely as normal-weight children to become obese by age 14.” The study, which involved a representative sample of 7,738 kindergartners, found that the risk of becoming obese did not differ by socioeconomic status, race or ethnic group, or birth weight. Rather, it showed that excess weight gain early in life is a risk factor for obesity later in childhood across the entire population.

Children are generally considered obese when their B.M.I. is at or above the 95th percentile for others of the same age and sex. Currently, about one-third of American children are overweight or obese. By 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, 18 percent of children and 21 percent of adolescents were obese.

The adverse effects of excess weight in childhood and adolescence don’t necessarily wait to show up later in life. In a review of complications resulting from youthful obesity, Dr. Stephen R. Daniels, a pediatrician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital in Denver, found that problems in many organ systems were often apparent long before adulthood. They include high blood pressure; insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes; high blood levels of heart-damaging triglycerides and low levels of protective high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol; nonalcoholic fatty liver disease; obstructive sleep apnea; asthma; and excess stress on the musculoskeletal system resulting in abnormal bone development, knee and hip pain, and difficulty walking.

Problems of youthful obesity go beyond physical ones. Obese adolescents have higher rates of depression, which in itself may foster poor eating and exercise patterns that add to their weight problem and result in a poor quality of life that persists into adulthood.

In a study conducted in Singapore, researchers reported that “individuals who were obese in childhood are more likely to have poor body image and low self-esteem and confidence, even more so than those with adult onset obesity.”

Another study by Dr. Jeffrey B. Schwimmer of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues found that obese children and adolescents reported a diminished quality of life that was comparable to that of children with cancer.

Taken together, the data speak to the critical importance of preventing undue weight gain in young children, a task that depends largely on parents, who are responsible for what and how much children eat and how much physical activity they engage in. As researchers from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands put it, “Early recognition of overweight or obesity in children by their parents is of utmost importance, allowing interventions to start at a young age.” Yet, they found in a study of the parents of 2,203 5-year-olds, “parents underestimated their overweight child in 85 percent of the cases.”

Though it seems logical that parents who think their children are overweight would make a special effort to assure they would “grow into” their weight as they get older, research has shown the opposite. Such children tend to get even fatter, according to findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children reported in April in the journal Pediatrics by Eric Robinson of the University of Liverpool and Angelina R. Sutin of Florida State University College of Medicine.

Even being labeled overweight can itself be damaging and make it harder for children to avoid bad habits, the authors suggested. A 2014 study of girls aged 10 to 19 found that “regardless of actual weight, adolescents who reported having been labeled ‘too fat’ by a family member or peer were more likely to become obese nearly a decade later.”

“I encourage parents to change the environment at home,” Dr. Daniels of the University of Colorado said in an interview. “Without being authoritarian, they should limit high-calorie-dense foods, keep sugar-sweetened beverages out of the house and assure that kids eat the right amount of fruits and vegetables and fewer calorie-dense snacks. Parents also need to be tuned into opportunities for physical activity and set hard-and-fast rules about television and time spent on electronics.”

Following the “5210” daily program endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics can help: Aim for five fruits and vegetables a day; keep recreational screen time to two hours or less; include at least one hour of active play: and skip sugar-sweetened beverages and drink water.

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The Challenges of Male Friendships

Paul Rogers

Christopher Beemer, a 75-year-old Brooklynite, is impressed with how well his wife, Carol, maintains friendships with other women and wonders why this valuable benefit to health and longevity “doesn’t come so easily to men.”

Among various studies linking friendships to well-being in one’s later years, the 2005 Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging found that family relationships had little if any impact on longevity, but friendships boosted life expectancy by as much as 22 percent.

Mr. Beemer urged me to explore ways to promote male friendships, especially for retired men who often lose regular contact with colleagues who may have similar interests and experiences.

After Marla Paul, a Chicago-area writer, wrote a book, “The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore,” about establishing meaningful friendships with other women, she was inundated with requests from men to give equal treatment to male friendships.

“A lot of men were upset because I didn’t include them,” Ms. Paul told me. “They felt that making and keeping friends was a lot harder for men, that close friendships were not part of their culture. They pointed out that women have all kinds of clubs, that there’s more cultural support for friendships among women than there is for men.”

In a study in the 1980s about the effect on marriage of child care arrangements, two Boston-area psychiatrists, Dr. Jacqueline Olds and Dr. Richard Stanton Schwartz, found that, “almost to a man, the men were so caught up in working, building their careers and being more involved with their children than their own fathers had been, something had to give,” Dr. Schwartz said. “And what gave was connection with male friends. Their lives just didn’t allow time for friendships.”

In their book, “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century,” the doctors, who are a husband-and-wife team, noted a current tendency for men to foster stronger, more intimate marriages at the expense of nearly all other social connections.

When these men are older and work no longer defines their social contacts, “there’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done” if they are to have meaningful friendships with other men, Dr. Schwartz said in an interview.

From childhood on, Dr. Olds said, “men’s friendships are more often based on mutual activities like sports and work rather than what’s happening to them psychologically. Women are taught to draw one another out; men are not.”

Consciously or otherwise, many men believe that talking about personal matters with other men is not manly. The result is often less intimate, more casual friendships between men, making the connections more tenuous and harder to sustain.

Dr. Olds said, “I have a number of men in my practice who feel bad about having lost touch with old friends. Yet it turns out men are delighted when an old friend reaches out to revive the relationship. Men might need a stronger signal than women do to reconnect. It may not be enough to send an email to an old friend. It may be better to invite him to visit.”

Some married men consider their wives to be their best friend, and many depend on their wives to establish and maintain the couple’s social connections, which can all but disappear when a couple divorces or the wife dies.

Differences between male and female friendships start at an early age. Observing how his four young granddaughters interact socially, Mr. Beemer said, “They have way more of that kind of activity than boys have. It may explain why as adults they continue to do a much better job of it.”

In defense of his gender, he observed, “Men have a harder time reaching their emotions and are less likely than women to reveal their emotional side. But when you have a real friendship, it’s because you’ve done just that.”

He has found that “it’s important to expose yourself and be honest about what’s going on. If you reveal yourself in the right way to the right person, it will be just fine. There are risks, you can’t force it. Sometimes it doesn’t work — you get a don’t-burden-me-with-that kind of response and you know to back off. But more often men will respond in kind.”

Mr. Beemer has worked hard to establish and maintain valuable relationships with other men of a similar vintage. He joined a men’s book group that meets monthly, and after about two years, he said, “it became a group where the members really mean something to one another.”

He’s also in a men’s walking group that meets three times a week and gathers after each walk to share more conversation and a snack at a local cafe. When one member of the group had a heart attack, they visited him, cheering him up with the latest gossip and a favorite cafe snack.

“What sustains relationships over time is a regular rhythm of seeing each other,” Dr. Schwartz said. “It’s best to build a regular pattern of activities rather than having to make a special effort to see one another.”

He recalls “curing” a 70-year-old patient of his loneliness by encouraging him to join a bunch of guys who regularly dined and joked around at a neighborhood Panera Bread. “There are a lot of cafes in the Boston area where small groups of older men get together for breakfast everyday,” Dr. Schwartz said.

Dr. Olds said of her husband, “Richard has a regular group phone call with friends who live in different parts of the country. We program it into our schedule or it would disappear.”

Among other ways men can make new friends in their later years are participating in classes, activities, trips and meals at senior centers; taking continuing education courses at a local college; joining a gym or Y and taking classes with people you then see every week; volunteering at a local museum, hospital, school or animal shelter; attending worship services at a religious center; forming a group that plays cards or board games together; perhaps even getting a dog to walk in the neighborhood.

After my dentist’s wife died, he made several new friends and enjoyed lovely dinners with other men when he joined a group called Romeo, an acronym for retired old men eating out.

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No Such Thing as a Healthy Smoker

Paul Rogers

Smokers who think they are escaping the lung-damaging effects of inhaled tobacco smoke may have to think again, according to the findings of two major new studies, one of which the author originally titled “Myth of the Healthy Smoker.”

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., may be among the best known dangers of smoking, and current and former smokers can be checked for that with a test called spirometry that measures how much air they can inhale and how much and how quickly they can exhale. Unfortunately, this simple test is often skipped during routine medical checkups of people with a history of smoking. But more important, even when spirometry is done, the new studies prove that the test often fails to detect serious lung abnormalities that cause chronic cough and sputum production and compromise a person’s breathing, energy level, risk of serious infections and quality of life.

“Current or former smokers without airflow obstruction may assume that they are disease-free,” but that’s not necessarily the case, one of the research teams pointed out. These researchers projected that there are 35 million current or former smokers older than 55 in the United States with unrecognized smoking-caused lung disease or impairments. Many, if not most, of these people could get worse with time, even if they have quit smoking. They are also unlikely to be referred for pulmonary rehabilitation, a treatment that can head off encroaching disability.

Perhaps most important, those currently smoking may be inclined to think they’ve dodged the bullet and so can continue to smoke with impunity. Doctors, who are often reluctant to urge patients with symptoms to quit smoking, may be even less likely to recommend smoking cessation to those with normal spirometry results.

Referring to C.O.P.D., one of the researchers, Dr. Elizabeth A. Regan, said, “Smoking is really taking a terrible toll on our society.” Dr. Regan, a clinical researcher at National Jewish Health in Denver, is the lead author of one of the new studies, published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine. “We live happily in the world thinking that only a small percentage of people who smoke get this devastating disease,” she said. “However, the lungs of millions of people in the United States are negatively impacted by smoking, and our methods for identifying their lung disease are relatively insensitive.”

Even when the results of spirometry are normal, Dr. Regan added, “a lot of smokers have respiratory symptoms. They get sick often, are more likely to be hospitalized with bronchitis or pneumonia, and have evidence on CT scans of thickened airway walls or emphysema that impair breathing.”

Dr. Prescott G. Woodruff, lead author of the other study, published May 12 in The New England Journal of Medicine, said in an interview, “Smokers have much more lung disease than we previously thought. The 15 to 20 percent who get C.O.P.D. is a gross underestimate.” Too often, Dr. Regan’s team pointed out, symptoms like shortness of breath and limits on exercise are “dismissed as normal aging.”

The multicenter study headed by Dr. Woodruff, a pulmonologist at the University of California, San Francisco, found that smokers with normal findings on spirometry nonetheless are likely to have chronic respiratory symptoms like cough, phlegm, wheezing, shortness of breath and chest tightness; lower than normal exercise tolerance; and evidence on a CT scan of chronically inflamed airways in the lungs. They also use more antibiotics to control respiratory infections and drugs called glucocorticoids to alleviate breathing difficulty. They pay more visits to doctors and emergency rooms and have more hospital admissions because of a flare-up of respiratory symptoms.

In other words, they are far more prone than nonsmokers to experiencing terrifying episodes of troubled breathing.

Of course, while lung disease is most prevalent, it is hardly the only adverse health effect of smoking, a source of noxious substances that can damage almost every organ system in the body. The list of smoking-related diseases has grown exponentially since smoking was labeled a probable cause of lung cancer 52 years ago in the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health. The decades since have added many other deadly cancers, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, blood clots, peripheral artery disease, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cataracts and macular degeneration, as well as C.O.P.D.

The new findings by the two investigative teams prompted Dr. Leonardo M. Fabbri of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy to write an editorial accompanying the New England Journal study titled “Smoking, Not C.O.P.D., as the Disease.” He explained that the results of the two studies “suggest that smoking itself should be considered the disease and should be approached in all its complexity.”

The challenge ahead, Dr. Fabbri wrote, is to identify patients with smoking-related lung damage who do not yet have obstructive disease and devise ways to treat them to reduce their symptoms and prevent flare-ups.

A clinical trial to begin later this year, sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, will examine whether treatments like use of a bronchodilator will help to alleviate symptoms in those without obstructive disease. Unfortunately, “the cost of bronchodilator medication has gone through the roof,” Dr. Woodruff said. Decades ago, people with breathing problems like asthma used aerosol bronchodilators that included chemicals called fluorocarbons. But these were banned for environmental reasons in the mid-1970s, and the replacements that drug manufacturers came up with are still not available in generic form, keeping prices high.

Dr. Woodruff said that rehabilitative exercise, one of the best treatments for C.O.P.D., should also help people with lung damage short of obstruction because it improves the ability of muscles to use available oxygen more efficiently.

To improve exercise tolerance, patients are encouraged to walk as fast as they can for as long as they can, rest, then walk some more. Most patients find this easiest to do on a treadmill, where speed and incline can be precisely regulated and the results measured. But if such equipment is unavailable or too costly to access, walking indoors or outdoors can be helpful if geared to a specific distance and speed that are gradually increased.

Most critical, of course, is for smokers with or without symptoms of lung disease to quit smoking, which can reduce the severity of respiratory symptoms and slow the decline in lung function, Dr. Regan’s team wrote. However, the team added, quitting smoking “does not eliminate the risk of progressive lung disease,” which means that the lungs of former smokers may need to be examined periodically.

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Being Transgender as a Fact of Nature

After surgical and hormonal treatment, George Jorgensen, a Bronx-born G.I., became Christine Jorgensen, a nightclub entertainer and advocate for transsexual rights.

After surgical and hormonal treatment, George Jorgensen, a Bronx-born G.I., became Christine Jorgensen, a nightclub entertainer and advocate for transsexual rights. Fred Morgan/NY Daily News Archive, via Getty Images

In 1952, George Jorgensen, a Bronx-born G.I., underwent surgical and hormonal treatment in Denmark to become Christine Jorgensen, a nightclub entertainer and advocate for gender identity rights. Ever since, health professionals and lay people alike have debated the origins of gender identity, the wisdom of altering one’s biologically determined sex, and whether society should accept the transgender community as a fact of nature.

There is even disagreement over whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination because of sex, also protects gender identity, a person’s inner sense of being male or female. Many more transgender people, whose identity does not match their biological sex, have come forward in recent years. Some seek sex change treatment. The Olympic gold-medalist Bruce Jenner made a high-profile announcement last year of his transition to Caitlyn Jenner, including a cover story in Vanity Fair.

This year, the Public Theater in New York presented the musical “Southern Comfort,” adapted from an award-winning 2001 documentary film about transgender people living in rural Georgia who came together to support a dying friend who developed ovarian cancer years after transitioning from female to male.

Yet the controversy now raging over the rights of transgender students to use bathroom and locker room facilities that match their gender identity rather than their birth sex reflects the persistence of widespread prejudice and misinformation about the nature and behavior of people who identify as transgender.

Those who insist that people should use only the facilities that match the sex on their birth certificates may not realize that most states allow those who change their sexual assignment to change the sex on their birth certificates. Furthermore, a transgender individual using a facility matched to his or her gender identity is no more of a sexual threat to others than anyone else using that bathroom might be. Psychosocial distress or embarrassment can be avoided simply by providing closed-door toilet and changing areas in public bathrooms and locker rooms. After all, we should be used to mixed-gender bathrooms by now: We’ve had them in our homes for years.

I recently read a most illuminating article, “Care of Transsexual Persons,” that answered many of the questions and concerns that have been raised about transsexualism, which is now more commonly referred to as being transgender. Written by Dr. Louis J. Gooren, an endocrinologist at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and a leading expert in the field, it was published in 2011 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Perhaps the most important point Dr. Gooren and others make is that a mismatch between gender identity and biological sex is not something people choose. The most common description given by transgendered individuals is a persistent, painfully distressing belief that they are females trapped in a male body, or vice versa.

Although being transgender is classified in the psychiatric literature as “gender identity disorder,” Dr. Gooren pointed out that “a substantial proportion of the transgender population does not have a clinically significant coexisting psychiatric condition” other than chronic suffering from feeling they are not what their bodies tell them they are.

No chromosomal or hormonal causes of being transgender have been identified. Also lacking is convincing evidence that it is caused by some aberration of family dynamics — how a child is treated or dressed by mom, dad or anyone else.

Being transgender simply happens, possibly during brain development in the womb. All brains start out female; if the fetus is male, testosterone normally programs both the genitalia and the brain to develop as male. But autopsies of a small number of male-to-female transgender people found that two important areas of the brain had a typical female pattern, suggesting an alteration in the brain’s sexual differentiation.

In individuals who transition from female to male, it is possible that excessive production of androgens during pregnancy could have programmed the brain to be male.

Among adults, male-to-female transitions are nearly three times more common than female-to-male ones. It has not been unusual for people born male to first acknowledge and express their female gender identity in midlife, often after having married and fathered children.

In young children, girls who are tomboys and boys who act more like girls are quite common and should not be assumed to be transgender. Such behavior often changes by adolescence.

However, when bodily changes at puberty differ from a child’s gender identity, they are typically a source of extreme distress. Still, experts warn that at any age, and especially in adolescence, great caution must be taken before irreversible treatments are provided to induce changes that conform to a person’s discordant gender identity.

“Persons with gender identity disorder may have unrealistic expectations about what being a member of the opposite sex entails,” Dr. Gooren wrote. Therefore, he and others say that before starting hormone treatments, the person should live for at least a year as the desired sex. Only then should hormone treatments be used to induce the secondary sex characteristics of the new sex and suppress those of the birth sex.

Surgical sex reassignment may then follow to remove and reconstruct the genitalia, breasts and internal sex organs to more closely resemble the desired sex. Some people, especially transgender males, also undergo facial reconstruction. Even after surgery, hormone treatments must continue indefinitely to maintain the desired gender characteristics.

It is especially important for transgender individuals seeking treatment to know the risks involved. Long-term studies of people who underwent sex reassignment surgery have been conducted in Sweden and Denmark, where excellent population-wide medical records are kept.

A Swedish team from the Karolinska Institute and the University of Gothenberg followed 324 people who underwent sex reassignment surgery and compared them with matched controls in the general population. After an average follow-up of 11.4 years, men and women who had sex reassignments had death rates three times higher from all causes. Suicide rates were especially high, suggesting “the need for continued psychiatric follow-up” among those undergoing sex change, the authors wrote. Cancer deaths were doubled in the surgical group, though the cancers appeared to be unrelated to hormone treatments.

The recent Danish study, by researchers in Copenhagen, investigated postoperative diseases and deaths among 104 men and women representing 98 percent of those who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Denmark from 1978 through 2010. One person in three had developed an ailment, most often cardiovascular disease, and one in 10 had died, with deaths occurring at an average age of 53.5.

The authors suggested that a host of societal factors, including social exclusion, harassment and negative experiences in school and at work, could largely contribute to the patients’ health problems. The findings underscore the importance of better postoperative support and closer attention to injurious lifestyle issues like smoking and alcohol abuse.

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War Wounds That Time Alone Can’t Heal

“Almost Sunrise”

A clip from “Almost Sunrise.”

By THOUGHTFUL ROBOT PRODUCTIONS on June 5, 2016.

No doubt in the course of your life, you did something, or failed to do something, that left you feeling guilty or ashamed. What if that something was in such violation of your moral compass that you felt unable to forgive yourself, undeserving of happiness, perhaps even unfit to live?

That is the fate of an untold number of servicemen and women who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and other wars. Many participated in, witnessed or were unable to help in the face of atrocities, from failing to aid an injured person to killing a child, by accident or in self-defense.

For some veterans, this leaves emotional wounds that time refuses to heal. It radically changes them and how they deal with the world. It has a name: moral injury. Unlike a better known casualty of war, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, moral injury is not yet a recognized psychiatric diagnosis, although the harm it inflicts is as bad if not worse.

The problem is highlighted in a new documentary called “Almost Sunrise,” which will be shown next weekend at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and on June 23 and 24 at AFI Docs in Washington, D.C. The film depicts the emotional agony and self-destructive aftermath of moral injury and follows two sufferers along a path that alleviates their psychic distress and offers hope for eventual recovery.

The new documentary “Almost Sunrise” follows Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, two troubled Iraq war veterans, walking from Milwaukee to Los Angeles.

The new documentary “Almost Sunrise” follows Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, two troubled Iraq war veterans, walking from Milwaukee to Los Angeles. Courtesy of Thoughtful Robot Productions

Therapists both within and outside the Department of Veterans Affairs increasingly recognize moral injury as the reason so many returning vets are self-destructive and are not helped, or only partly helped, by established treatments for PTSD.

Moral injury has some of the symptoms of PTSD, especially anger, depression, anxiety, nightmares, insomnia and self-medication with drugs or alcohol. And it may benefit from some of the same treatments. But moral injury has an added burden of guilt, grief, shame, regret, sorrow and alienation that requires a very different approach to reach the core of a sufferer’s psyche.

Unlike the soldiers who were drafted to serve in Vietnam, the members of the armed forces today chose to enlist. Those deployed to Iraq thought at first they were fighting to bring democracy to the country, then were told later it was to win hearts and minds. But to many of those in battle, the real effect was “to terrorize people,” as one veteran says in the film. Another said, “That’s not what we signed up for.”

That war can be morally compromising is not a new idea and has been true in every war. But the therapeutic community is only now becoming aware of the dimensions of moral injury and how it can be treated.

Father Thomas Keating, a founding member of Contemplative Outreach, says in the film, “Antidepressants don’t reach the depth of what these men are feeling,” that they did something terribly wrong and don’t know if they can be forgiven.

The first challenge, though, is to get emotionally damaged veterans to acknowledge their hidden agony and seek professional help instead of trying to suppress it, often by engaging in self-destructive behaviors.

“A lot of vets won’t seek help because what’s haunting them are not heroic acts, or they were betrayed, or they can’t live with themselves because they made a mistake,” said Brett Litz, a mental health specialist with the V.A. Boston Healthcare System and a leading expert on moral injury.

The second challenge is to win their trust, to reassure them that they will not be judged and are deserving of forgiveness.

Therapists who study and treat moral injury have found that no amount of medication can relieve the pain of trying to live with an unbearable moral burden. They say those suffering from moral injury contribute significantly to the horrific toll of suicide among returning vets — estimated as high as 18 to 22 a day in the United States, more than the number lost in combat.

The film features two very troubled veterans of the war in Iraq, Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, who decide to walk from Milwaukee to Los Angeles — 2,700 miles taking 155 days — to help them heal from the combat experiences that haunt them and threaten to destroy their most valued relationships. Six years after returning from his second deployment in Iraq, Mr. Voss said of his mental state before taking the cross-country trek, “If anything, it’s worse now.”

Along the way, the two men raise awareness of the unrelenting pain of moral injury many vets face and encourage them to seek treatment. Mr. Voss and Mr. Anderson were helped by a number of counselors and treatments, including a Native American spiritual healer and a meditative technique called power breathing. They also found communing with nature to be restorative, enabling them to again recognize beauty in the world.

Shira Maguen, a research psychologist and clinician at the San Francisco V.A. Medical Center, who studies and treats vets suffering from moral injury, said, “We have a big focus on self-forgiveness. We have them write a letter to the person they killed or to a younger version of themselves. We focus on making amends, planning for their future and moving forward,” especially important since many think they have no future.

Dr. Maguen, who studied how killing during combat affects suicidal ideation in returning vets, found that “those who had killed were at much higher risk of suicide,” even when controlling for factors like PTSD, depression and alcohol and drug abuse. She said in an interview that decades after the Vietnam War “there was still an impact on veterans who killed enemy combatants, and an even stronger effect on those who killed women and children.”

Tom Voss’ journey took 155 days, spanning 2,700 miles.

Tom Voss’ journey took 155 days, spanning 2,700 miles. Courtesy of Thoughtful Robot Productions

To overcome veterans’ reluctance to seek help for moral injury, Dr. Maguen incorporates mental health care into routine clinical visits.

In Boston, Dr. Litz and colleagues are testing a related therapeutic approach called adaptive disclosure, a technique akin to confession. With eyes closed, the vets are asked to verbally share vivid details of their trauma with an imagined compassionate person who loves them, then imagine how that person would respond. The therapist guides the conversation along a path toward healing.

“Disclosing, sharing, confessing is fundamental to repair,” Dr. Litz said. “In doing so, the vets learn that what happened to them can be tolerated, they’re not rejected.” They are also encouraged to “engage in the world in a way that is repairing — for example, by helping children or writing letters.” The goal is to find forgiveness within themselves or from others.

One fact that all agree on: The process is a lengthy one. As Mr. Voss said, “I knew after the walk I still had a long road of healing ahead of me.” Now, however, he has some useful tools and he shares them freely.

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