Dr. Abha Gupta

Your heart has four valves. Normally, these valves open to let blood flow through or out of your heart, and then shut to keep it from flowing backward. But sometimes they don't work properly. If they don't, you could have:

• Regurgitation - when blood leaks back through the valve in the wrong direction
• Mitral valve prolapse - when one of the valves, the mitral valve, has "floppy" flaps and doesn't close tightly. It's one of the most common heart valve conditions. Sometimes it causes regurgitation.
• Stenosis - when the valve doesn't open enough and blocks blood flow

Valve problems can be present at birth or caused by infections, heart attacks, or heart disease or damage. The main sign of heart valve disease is an unusual heartbeat sound called a heart murmur. Your doctor can hear a heart murmur with a stethoscope. But many people have heart murmurs without having a problem. Heart tests can show if you have a heart valve disease. Some valve problems are minor and do not need treatment. Others might require medicine, medical procedures, or surgery to repair or replace the valve.

Bariatric surgery refers to a host of surgical procedures that help a person suffering from obesity to lose weight. Various methods are used to achieve the desired results, often times using the help of a gastric band to decrease the size of the stomach or surgically removing a small portion of the stomach.

Notwithstanding the result, bariatric surgery like any other surgery, involves certain risks. Some of them are:

1. Uncontrolled bleeding: One of the most common risks that any surgery entails is that of excessive or uncontrolled bleeding. If this condition persists, they often times lead to death.
2. Infection: Though infections seemingly appear easily preventable and easy to deal with, they often snowball into fatalistic danger to the point of no recovery.
3. Side-effects of anesthesia: Administering a general anesthesia before performing any surgery is a common practice. However sometimes it may yield certain unforeseen consequences.
4. Clotting of blood: Quite similar to excessive bleeding, even clotting of blood presents an equally if not more hazardous situation. Though sometimes timely intervention of medications resolves the situation, often it aggravates into a grievous cause of concern.
5. Hypoglycemia; Hypoglycemia refers to the condition when there is a deficiency or the lack of glucose in the blood. Though this is a side-effect of bariatric surgery, it does not appear immediately but rather surfaces many years after the operation was performed.
6. Emotional disorder: Along with physical ailments, post bariatric surgery may also affect you emotionally. Post-bariatric surgery may sometimes lead to emotional and behavioral disorders in you and sudden, incomprehensible mood swings.
7. Death: Though rare, one cannot negate the possibility of death as a plausible risk of bariatric surgery.

We've probably heard about it, read it and even watched it a few times - devices like TV and laptop take a toll on our health. But are the studies backed with statistics applicable to us? What duration crosses the limit between acceptable and dangerous. Given that both these devices are entwined in our lives not only to entertain, but also make our lives easy, how much can you really avoid them? The reality is that you can't. So here is a quick look at what impacts you the most and how you can manage it best.

1. Increased eye irritability: We are quite used to multi-screen viewing these days. We work on our laptops or iPads while we watch TV at home. While this may seem like a skilled process in multi-brain functionality, but it is subjecting our eyes continuously to artificial light, making us blink less often. Often extending to over 12 hours a day, a mix or laptop and TV viewing can cause dry eyes, irritability, and reduced vision problems.

2. Increased obesity: Having access to everything from groceries to jewelry online makes it unnecessary to move out of the house on a Sunday. This is a boon and a bane in its own right. Easy access means spending lesser time standing in supermarket queues but more time in front of the TV. This can lead to lethargy and obesity. This risk is very real in children and we are battling with an entire generation on the brink of obesity and related problems. Did you know that childhood obesity risk increases by 60% when kids watch one hour of TV! Don't even try the math for a year's worth of television!

3. Increased affinity for junk food: TV has more side effects than you think. It automatically makes us reach out for the most harmful foods that taste great but hardly have any nutritional value. From chips to pizzas to burgers to quick fix noodles some with extra cheese others with a copious quantity of salts slowly add harmful toxins to the body. The worst part is that we are so lost in our work or TV that we don't realize the quantity we are chewing down.

4. It affects your sleep cycle: Having these handy late in the night also confuses our body with artificial light, throwing our sleep cycle off balance.

5. The one-off cases are real for some people: We often hear horror stories about some 12 years old whose thighs burned up because of excessive laptop use. There are other stories about a man who came home after a workout and accidently touched his laptop's power cord to be electrocuted. There are other stories linking these gadgets to cancer risks. These stories may be played up by the media for viral effect but the fact remains that you never know when you can be that 'somebody'. If you wish to discuss about any specific problem, you can consult an ophthalmologist and ask a free question.

Do not take medicines for heart disease or high blood pressure without talking to a doctor. This could be dangerous.

Leucoderma is a genetic disorder triggered due to stress, irregular life style and constipation.