Prescription Drugs Abuse on the Rise Among Americans: Study

Drugs Abuse on the Rise Among Americans

The number of Americans who used illegal drugs or abused prescription medications rose last year to reach its highest level since 2002, a survey released Thursday showed. Nearly 22 million Americans aged 12 and older used illegal drugs in 2009, a rise of nine percent from 2008, the survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found.Some seven million Americans older than 12 took prescription drugs for non-medical reasons.

The bulk of the abuse of prescription medications involved painkillers, which some 5.3 million Americans used off-label last year -- a rise of 20 percent from 2002. Among teens, the rate of nonmedical prescription painkiller use rose 17 percent year on year, with most youngsters saying they got the meds from friends, family or an unsecured medicine cabinet. The rise in the use of illegal drugs was driven in large part by an increase in the use of marijuana, which 77 percent of the survey respondents said they had used in the past month.

Among teens, marijuana use rose nine percent in 2009, partly because "discussions of legalization, so-called medical marijuana and a proliferation of pro-drug messages" have left America's youth "misinformed about a drug whose potency has tripled in the past 20 years," SAMHSA said. Sixty percent more Americans used methamphetamine in 2009 versus 2008, and three-quarters of a million used ecstasy in 2009, the highest number of users since 2002.

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Enzyme Responsible For Brain Tumors Discovered

Brain Tumors

Tom Wurdinger, a Dutch researcher who is connected to Harvard (Boston) and the VUmc Cancer Center in Amsterdam, has discovered the enzyme playing a very important role in the return of malign brain tumor after surgery and radiation. By making this enzyme inactive, the cancer cell can become disorganized and blow itself up. "Potentially an effective supplementary treatment method has been discovered for this very aggressive and practically always deadly type of cancer. Proof of the importance and potential of the Dutch life sciences & health sector," says Willem de Laat, managing director of the Life Sciences & Health Innovation Program.

The most common and aggressive type of brain tumor is glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The standard treatment for GBM is generally surgery, followed by a combination of radiation and chemotherapy, causing the DNA of the remaining cancer cells to be damaged. The DNA of the cancer cell determines what the cell should do, for example, double in size causing the tumor to grow. Since the cancer cells have the capacity of repairing the damaged DNA, for now the treatment is only partially effective, and eventually the tumor will always keep growing.

Killer dismantled

"We have discovered a certain type of enzyme that is responsible for the repair of the broken DNA in the brain tumor cell," says the 31 year old Tom Wurdinger, co-director of the Neuro-oncology Research Group (NRG) of the VUmc."If this specific enzyme is slowed down by a chemical substance, that is, a potential remedy, we have discovered that we can confuse the cancer cell. It can't find its way and will split up without repairing the damaged DNA. In this way the cell basically blows itself up."

Life sciences and health according to the American model

De Laat, who lived and worked in America for several years, points out the positive development in the way in which the research organizations and medical centres are now organizing themselves by specializing and physically concentrating close by to each other. Wurdinger also confirms that this would never have been possible for him if his laboratory was not just a bridge away from the clinic. "In the VUmc, medical specialists and researchers are able to work so closely together because we are physically very close. A bridge was literally built across the Boelelaan in Amsterdam, between my workplace and the hospital. The neurosurgeons provide me with cancer cells that were removed from somebody's head an hour earlier. This is invaluable to me."

De Laat also points out the fact that the University Medical Centres understand more and more that pre-clinical research is very important. "Now they are organized in specialised national work groups which contribute to very short lines of communication. With breakthrough researches like this one and the collaboration between national work groups, the Cancer Centre at VUMC puts the Dutch life sciences & health sector on the map," says Willem de Laat.

Zero percent chance of survival

At present, the healing percentage of the most aggressive brain tumor, GBM, is basically zero percent. Treatments are palliative: they aim at stretching a patient's life and controlling and reducing symptoms as much as possible.

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Next Generation Antibiotics Under Development In Israel

Next generation antibiotics in order to take on the drug-resistant superbugs.Dr. Micha Fridman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Chemistry says the key is in the bacteria itself.

Israeli researchers are trying to develop the next generation antibiotics in order to take on the drug-resistant superbugs.Dr. Micha Fridman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Chemistry says the key is in the bacteria itself. “We took the mechanism of bacterial resistance and used this mechanism itself to generate antibiotics,” explains Dr. Fridman. 

“It’s thanks to these bacteria that we can develop a better medication.” Conducted in collaboration with Prof. Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Dr. Fridman’s research was highlighted recently in the journal ChemBioChem. According to Dr. Fridman, certain bacterial strains include enzymes which help the bacteria to inactivate antibiotics. When the enzymes meet with these antibiotics, they chemically alter the drug, making the antibiotic ineffective and unable to recognize its target.
 

Turning this powerful mechanism against the bacteria itself, the team isolated the antibiotic-inactivating enzymes from the bacteria, then integrated them into the drugs. With this alteration, the modified antibiotics proved to be effective against typically resistant bacterial strains.
At the heart of this development, says Dr. Fridman, was the chemical modification of the parent drug. Once the researchers identified how the bacteria incapacitated the antibiotics, they were able to create a drug that could block bacterial resistance while maintaining the integrity of the antibiotic.

According to the Center for Disease Control, each year 90,000 people in the U.S. die of drug-resistant “superbugs” ¯ bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a deadly form of staph infection resistant to normal antibiotics.Although hospital patients are particularly susceptible as a result of open wounds and weakened immune systems, the bacteria can infect anyone. But the new antibiotics will be a vast improvement on today’s drugs, says Dr. Fridman. When fully developed, they could be used to treat infections that are now considered difficult if not impossible to treat with current antibiotics.Dr. Fridman says that, while the new antibiotics are a few years away from the marketplace, the ability to beat bacterial resistance will be invaluable for the future of health care.

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Heart Problems Triggered Off by 'Distressed' Personality

Heart patients with the 'distressed' personality type are more prone to a higher risk of further heart problems

Heart patients with the 'distressed' personality type are more prone to a higher risk of further heart problems, discovered a new study. The findings are based on an analysis of previous reports involving more than 6,000 patients.The personality classification system that identified "Type A" decades ago more recently defined Type D as a personality marked by chronic negative emotions, pessimism and social inhibition.

Researchers noted a three-fold increase for Type D heart patients in risk of future cardiovascular issues such as peripheral artery disease, angioplasty or bypass procedures, heart failure, heart transplantation, heart attack or death. "Type D patients tend to experience increased levels of anxiety, irritation and depressed mood across situations and time, while not sharing these emotions with others because of fear of disapproval," said Viola Spek, Ph.D., senior author of the study and a researcher at Tiburg University in the Netherlands.

"We found that Type D personality predicts mortality and morbidity in these patients, independent of traditional medical risk factors." Researchers analyzed 49 studies of Type D personality and future heart health or psychological health. A Type D profile was also linked to a three-fold increase in long-term risk of psychological conditions including clinical depression, anxiety or poor mental health.

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New test gives one-hour TB diagnosis

New Test Which Can Diagnose Tuberculosis In One Hour

Scientists have developed a new test which can diagnose tuberculosis in one hour, potentially helping to curb the spread of the disease, a British health agency said in a study Wednesday.The "ultra-rapid" test is far quicker than traditional methods, which can take up to eight weeks and mean that patients, who are often from transient populations, move on untreated, said the Health Protection Agency (HPA).

"We?re excited to have developed this new test because it means we can potentially diagnose someone at a TB clinic within an hour and start them immediately on the treatment they need," said Cath Arnold of the HPA, who led the study."This new test could really have an impact where it is most needed."The new, highly sensitive test works by identifying a single molecule of DNA in the TB bacterium.Current tests involve taking mucus from sufferers and growing a bacterial culture in the laboratory, which can take weeks."It will be a lot more effective," HPA spokeswoman Emma Gilgunn-Jones told AFP.

"Up to 75 percent of people with TB are transient and it is difficult if they are not treated straightaway because they can move on and infect people."But it could be at least two years before the test appears on the market as it must now undergo extensive clinical trials which are starting in Britain soon, she added.The agency's findings are due to be presented at a conference at the University of Warwick in central England on Wednesday.The announcement comes less than two weeks after US researchers said they had developed a new test also using genetic markers that could diagnose drug-resistant TB in two hours.

Tuberculosis killed an estimated 1.8 million people worldwide in 2008, according to the World Health Organisation, with the disease spreading fastest in South East Asia.Drug-resistant TB is becoming a serious threat to global health, especially as only a small proportion of cases are diagnosed, the WHO warned. Almost half the drug-resistant cases were estimated to have occurred in China and India.

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Researchers Report That Lung Cancer Culprit Could Offer Target For Therapy

lung cancer

A tiny molecule that spurs the progression of non-small-cell lung cancer could become a player in fighting the disease, say researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who published a study on how the molecule behaves in mice in the Sept. 14 issue of Cancer Cell.

Scientists have known that the molecule microRNA-21, or miR-21, is present in overabundant quantities in human tumors, including non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Until now, however, it was unclear whether miR-21 contributed to the development of lung cancer, or whether it was simply an indicator of the presence of the disease.

To find out, lead study author Dr. Mark Hatley, an instructor of pediatric hematology/oncology, and UT Southwestern colleagues used mice that had been altered specifically to harbor non-small-cell lung cancer. In some of these mice, they genetically engineered the animals to produce too much miR-21. In another group, they deleted the miR-21 gene altogether, which eliminated the molecule in the rodents.

In animals with cancer, the results showed that too much miR-21, or overexpression, promotes the formation, growth and survival of new tumors by turning off certain genes that normally allow cancer cells to die. In fact, at 18 weeks of age, the study group with overexpressed miR-21 had significantly more tumors than their lung-cancer-carrying littermates with normal levels of miR-21. Healthy rodents engineered to overexpress miR-21 did not develop cancer.

"These results indicate that overexpression of miR-21 alone is not enough to initiate tumors in a healthy animal. Instead, it appears that miR-21 enhances the growth and survival of existing lung cancer," said Dr. Hatley, a Pediatric Scientist Development Program Fellow sponsored by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Dr. Eric Olson, chairman of molecular biology at UT Southwestern and the study's senior author, said the experiments also show that deleting miR-21 sensitizes the animals' cancer cells to a certain kind of chemotherapy, suggesting that inhibiting miR-21 in lung-cancer patients could be of therapeutic value.

"Methods currently exist to pharmacologically manipulate molecules like miR-21," said Dr. Olson, who directs the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Center for Basic Research in Cancer and the Nearburg Family Center for Basic and Clinical Research in Pediatric Oncology. "More research will be needed before we know whether this is applicable to humans, but it's possible that a drug designed to inhibit miR-21 could help keep cancer at bay."

MiR-21 is a type of molecule called a microRNA. These small snippets of RNA - the chemical cousin of DNA - normally help coordinate and regulate the production of specific proteins in cells. When MIRNAs go awry, however, diseases such as cancer can result.

Notes:

Other UT Southwestern researchers involved with the study were David Patrick, graduate student; Matthew Garcia, research technician; Dr. James Richardson, professor of pathology, molecular biology and plastic surgery; Dr. Rhonda Bassel-Duby, professor of molecular biology; and Dr. Eva Van Rooj, adjunct instructor in molecular biology. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the Leducq Foundation and the American Heart Association.

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New drug-resistant superbugs found in 3 states

Serious public health risks due to a lack of new antibiotics at a time of rising antibiotic-resistant …

BOSTON – An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: 

Bacteria that have been made resistant to nearly all antibiotics by an alarming new gene have sickened people in three states and are popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday.The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain> in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.

How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.Scientists have long feared this — a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance,creating dangerous "superbugs."

"It's a great concern," because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "It's just a matter of time" until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person, he said.Grayson heads an American Society Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.

The U.S. cases occurred this year in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois, said Brandi Limbago, a lab chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them."We want physicians to look for it," especially in patients who have traveled recently to India or Pakistan, she said.

What can people do?

Don't add to the drug resistance problem, experts say. Don't pressure your doctors for antibiotics if they say they aren't needed, use the ones you are given properly, and try to avoid infections by washing your hands.The gene is carried by bacteria that can spread hand-to-mouth, which makes good hygiene very important.It's also why health officials are so concerned about where the threat is coming from, said Dr. Patrice Nordmann, a microbiology professor at South-Paris Medical School. India is an overpopulated country that overuses antibiotics and has widespread diarrheal disease and many people without clean water.

"The ingredients are there" for widespread transmission, he said. "It's going to spread by plane all over the world."The U.S. patients were not related. The California woman needed hospital care after being in a car accident in India. The Illinois man had pre-existing medical problems and a urinary catheter, and is thought to have contracted an infection with the gene while traveling in India. The case from Massachusetts involved a woman from India who had surgery and chemotherapy for cancer there and then traveled to the U.S.

Lab tests showed their germs were not killed by the types of drugs normally used to treat drug-resistant infections, including "the last-resort class of antibiotics that physicians go to," Limbago said.She did not know how the three patients were treated, but all survived.Doctors have tried treating some of these cases with combinations of antibiotics, hoping that will be more effective than individual ones are. Some have resorted to using polymyxins — antibiotics used in the 1950s and '60s that were unpopular because they can harm the kidneys.

The two Canadian cases were treated with a combination of antibiotics, said Dr. Johann Pitout of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. One case was in Alberta, the other in British Columbia.Both patients had medical emergencies while traveling in India. They developed urinary infections that were discovered to have the resistance gene once they returned home to Canada, Pitout said.The CDC advises any hospitals that find such cases to put the patient in medical isolation, check the patient's close contacts for possible infection, and look for more infections in the hospital.Any case "should raise an alarm," Limbago said.

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Study: Whites with muscular dystrophy live up to 12 years longer than blacks

Whites with muscular dystrophy

Whites with muscular dystrophy live up to 12 years longer than their African American counterparts, according to a study published Monday in Neurology.Although medical advancements a period of 20 years increased the life span of patients with the debilitating muscle disease, those improvements haven’t been equal among different groups.White women with muscular dystrophy had a median death age of 63, versus 51 for African American women. For men, their median age at death was 33, versus 23 for African American males.

Muscular dystrophy is a group of inherited muscle diseases in which the muscle fibers are unusually susceptible to damage and progressively weaken. The condition can lead to early death due to respiratory or heart failure.Men tend to die younger, because the vast majority of patients who die have Duchenne muscular dystrophy - a particular type of the disorder that rarely affects female.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and University of Pennsylvania set out to identify trends in muscular dystrophy between 1985 to 2005 and analyzed 18,315 death certificates associated with the disease in the United States.Over this study period, both groups saw improvements in lifespan because of better lung care and other therapies, said one of the study authors, Dr. Richard Finkel.

"For white males overall, there was a 22-year increase in the age at death for whites (from about 22 to 44 years) while for blacks the increase was only about 6.6 years," said Finkel, clinical professor of Neurology at University of Pennsylvania school of medicine and director of the Neuromuscular Program at the Children's Hospital Philadelphia. "So both groups improved but not to the same extent."This racial disparity could be due to sociocultural barriers, genetic factors or other factors, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the reasons based on death certificates, Finkel said.

“There’s no way we can get beneath the surface and find out whether there are socio-economic factors that play a role,” Finkel said.  “Are there genetic factors in blacks versus whites that may play a role?  Are there other factors in blacks that compound the problem?  This study tried to take that into account- but that’s not the entire answer.”

Another finding was that cardiomyopathy, which is weakening of the heart muscle or a change in heart muscle structure, was more often reported in black men (20.9 percent) than white men (11.8 percent).The authors cautioned in the study that “this dataset did not include information about quality of life, so increases in age at death do not necessarily equate with improvements in quality of life.”

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BPA In Dental Filling Poses Danger

Dental Filling

The Bisphenol A (BPA) in dental filling could pose a danger to your health, US researchers have found. But they are suggesting continued use of dental sealants as their benefits could far outweigh risks. BPA, a man-made chemical, is found in a variety of everyday items - and in most humans, according to a new Canadian study. It is used to stiffen plastic bottles, line cans and make smooth paper receipts.

BPA is classified as a so-called endocrine disruptor. While such chemicals may cause a host of health problems, most of the direct evidence regarding BPA comes from animal studies that don't automatically translate to humans.Actually dental sealants and fillings don't contain BPA, but many of them contain compounds that turn into BPA on contact with saliva. Sealants are transparent synthetic resins applied to the chewing surfaces of molars and premolars in young children and teenagers as a preventive measure against tooth decay in the occlusal pits and fissures.

Following a query from a mother on the safety of the sealants, pediatric endocrinologist Abby F. Fleisch, MD, and colleagues at the Children's Hospital, Boston, performed an exhaustive review of the scientific evidence. They came to two conclusions:

BPA does indeed form in the mouth after some dental sealants and fillings are applied. BPA can be found in the saliva three hours after dental work is completed. It's not at all clear whether this poses a health risk.

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Study Says IV Drips can be Left in Place

BMC Medicine

It has emerged that small intravenous devices (IVDs) commonly used in the hand or arm do not need to be moved routinely every 3 days. A randomized controlled trial comparing regular relocation with relocation on clinical indication, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, found that rates of complications were the same for both regimens.

Claire Rickard, from Griffith University, Australia, worked with a team of researchers to carry out the study with 362 patients at Launceston General Hospital, Tasmania. She said, "Recommended timelines for routine resite have been extended over the past three decades from 24 to 72 hours. Currently, 72- to 96-hour resite is recommended. Even with these extended durations, such policies still cause increased workload in hospitals, where the task of removing and replacing well-functioning IVDs generally falls to busy nursing and junior medical staff. Our results indicate that the average duration of IV therapy is 5-6 days and that many catheters can remain complication-free for this period, or even longer".

The researchers found that complication rates between the groups were not significantly different. The policy of resite on clinical indication led to one in two patients needing only a single cannula to receive treatment, whereas a 3-day change policy resulted in one in five patients having this scenario, with the rest requiring multiple cannulations and therefore additional pain and inconvenience. According to Rickard, "The routine resite of peripheral IVDs increases patient discomfort and healthcare costs, but does not reduce IVD complications as has traditionally been thought".

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Scientists Observe Single Ions Moving Through Tiny Carbon-Nanotube Channel

Ions Moving Through Tiny Carbon-Nanotube Channel

For the first time, a team of MIT chemical engineers has observed single ions marching through a tiny carbon-nanotube channel. Such channels could be used as extremely sensitive detectors or as part of a new water-desalination system. They could also allow scientists to study chemical reactions at the single-molecule level.

Carbon nanotubes -- tiny, hollow cylinders whose walls are lattices of carbon atoms -- are about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. Since their discovery nearly 20 years ago, researchers have experimented with them as batteries, transistors, sensors and solar cells, among other applications.In the Sept. 10 issue of Science, MIT researchers report that charged molecules, such as the sodium and chloride ions that form when salt is dissolved in water, can not only flow rapidly through carbon nanotubes, but also can, under some conditions, do so one at a time, like people taking turns crossing a bridge. The research was led by associate professor Michael Strano.

The new system allows passage of much smaller molecules, over greater distances (up to half a millimeter), than any existing nanochannel. Currently, the most commonly studied nanochannel is a silicon nanopore, made by drilling a hole through a silicon membrane. However, these channels are much shorter than the new nanotube channels (the nanotubes are about 20,000 times longer), so they only permit passage of large molecules such as DNA or polymers -- anything smaller would move too quickly to be detected.

Strano and his co-authors -- recent PhD recipient Chang Young Lee, graduate student Wonjoon Choi and postdoctoral associate Jae-Hee Han -- built their new nanochannel by growing a nanotube across a one-centimeter-by-one-centimeter plate, connecting two water reservoirs. Each reservoir contains an electrode, one positive and one negative. Because electricity can flow only if protons -- positively charged hydrogen ions, which make up the electric current -- can travel from one electrode to the other, the researchers can easily determine whether ions are traveling through the nanotube.

They found that protons do flow steadily across the nanotube, carrying an electric current. Protons flow easily through the nanochannel because they are so small, but the researchers observed that other positively charged ions, such as sodium, can also get through but only if enough electric field is applied.Sodium ions are much larger than protons, so they take longer to cross once they enter. While they travel across the channel, they block protons from flowing, leading to a brief disruption in current known as the Coulter effect.Strano believes that the channels allow only positively charged ions to flow through them because the ends of the tubes contain negative charges, which attract positive ions. However, he plans to build channels that attract negative ions by adding positive charges to the tube.

Once the researchers have these two types of channels, they hope to embed them in a membrane that could also be used for water desalination. More than 97 percent of Earth's water is in the oceans, but that vast reservoir is undrinkable unless the salt is removed. The current desalination methods, distillation and reverse osmosis, are expensive and require lots of energy. So a nanotube membrane that allows both sodium and chloride ions (which are negatively charged) to flow out of seawater could become a cheaper way to desalinate water.

This study marks the first time that individual ions dissolved in water have been observed at room temperature. This means the nanochannels could also detect impurities, such as arsenic or mercury, in drinking water. (Ions can be identified by how long it takes them to cross the channel, which depends on their size). "If a single arsenic ion is floating in solution, you could detect it," says Strano.

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Mind Disorders May Be Better Understood With a 'Brain Atlas'

Human Brain

Hoping to create a brain atlas, a researcher at Tel Aviv University is building on a previously developed tool to understand how different parts of the human brain "connect".

Dr. Yaniv Assaf of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Neurobiology is collaborating with an international team of scientistsBrain reserchers already know that autism and schizophrenia are not localized disorders - there is no one place in the brain they can be found.

That’s why a brain atlas will be an invaluable resource for understanding how parts of our brain connect to other parts within, leading to a deeper understanding of these diseases.

"It’s currently impossible for clinicians to ’see’ subtle disorders in the brain that might cause a life-threatening, devastating disability," said Assaf. For the study, Assaf looked at clusters of brain wiring, or axons, to help scientists produce a better working map of the brain for future research.

Assaf’s tool can look at larger groups of multiple axons and collect information from the group itself, information which measures the velocity and flow of information within the brain.

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Lift Stem Cell Funding Ban, US Govt Asks Court

Testing on Lift Stem Cell

The US government asked a federal appeals court to lift a court order blocking federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells. US District Judge Royce Lamberth's order causes "direct and immediate" harm to federally-funded embryonic stem cell research and "potentially blocks life-saving medical advances," Obama administration lawyers told a federal appeals court in Washington.

On Tuesday, Lamberth rejected the White House's request to drop his order to temporarily block federal funding for embryonic stem cell research pending an appeal of the decision. Lamberth first issued his injunction on August 23, ruling in favor of a coalition that included several Christian organizations by saying that stem cell research involved the destruction of human embryos.

He said the federal funding, which Obama had authorized, violated the Dickey-Wicker amendment, a federal law barring federal tax funds from being used to fund any research that would cause human embryos to be destroyed. That decision prompted the White House to say it would seek ways to keep the "life-saving" research going.

Obama's March 2009 decision to reverse the ban on federal funds research on embryonic stem cells was lauded by many researchers who believe the field has huge potential for treating serious diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes. It came after his predecessor George W. Bush had banned federal funding for research on new stem cells for moral and religious reasons. The research is fiercely opposed by religious conservatives, who believe that life begins at conception, because it involves the disposal of embryos.

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Transplant Doctors Protest at Philippine Airline's Refusal to Carry Donated Kidney

Kidney

Philippine doctors had to throw away a donated kidney after a local airline refused to fly it, transplant doctors said Thursday. Cebu Pacific Air said it was protecting passengers from possible infection or contamination when it refused to allow the team who harvested the organ to carry the Kidney in the cabin on the flight last month.

Benjamin Balmores, president of the Philippine Society of Nephrology (PSN), said the kidney could no longer be used after doctors instead tried to drive it nearly 400 kilometres (250 miles) to its destination. "According to NKTI (the government-run National Kidney and Transplant Institute), this is the first time that the team was not allowed to hand-carry the human organ," Balmores told AFP.

Cebu Pacific said it offered to carry the kidney on priority cargo, but the doctors declined because the organ was too fragile. Candice Iyog, a spokeswoman for the airline said: "The way (the kidney) was packed was not in accordance with prevailing internationally accepted standards." Balmores, whose group represents the country's kidney doctors, urged airlines to commit to a set of guidelines on transporting harvested human organs.

"It seems there is no standard policy nor a consistent implementation of such policy as seen in the past experience of the National Kidney and Transplant Institute retrieval team," he said. Health Secretary Enrique Ona confirmed the incident, and said the government needed to educate airlines about the importance of organ transplants.

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New Therapies for Chronic Pain Possible With Novel Discovery

Patient suffering with Chronic Pain

A major mechanism underlying the development of tolerance to chronic morphine treatment discovered by Mount Sinai researchers might lead the way for new therapies to treat chronic pain. Developing tolerance towards morphine after chronic administration is a hurdle in pain management, but it also poses other problems, such as addiction and  constipation.

Now researchers have identified how they can block this tolerance to treat pain with fewer side effects. Lakshmi Devi and her colleagues found a protein complex that excessively accumulates in areas of the brain that process pain - which may be the cause of the development of morphine tolerance.

Their next step would be to develop a drug that prevents this process by blocking individual receptors from signalling the analgesic response to morphine.

"We look forward to studying the behaviour of similar receptor complexes in diseases like obesity, alcohol-induced liver fibrosis, and neuropathic pain itself," said Devi. The findings are published in the July 20th issue of Science Signaling.

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Swine Flu Poses No Serious Threat Than Seasonal Flu: Study

Study on Swine Flu

Infection rom the 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic virus presented a lower risk of serious complications than other recent strains of the flu, according to US research presented Tuesday. Analysis of influenza cases in the midwestern US state of Wisconsin showed infected individuals were younger than in earlier strains, but complications were not as likely as with the H3N1 virus that arose in the 2007-2008 flu season, said researchers at Wisconsin's Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation.

"The pandemic 2009 influenza A(H1N1) virus caused widespread transmission in the United States and other countries," noted lead author Edward Belongia and colleagues in the September 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association(JAMA).According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, the United States saw 43 million to 89 million infections from April 2009 to April 2010, "with mid-range estimates of 274,000 H1N1-related hospitalizations and 12,470 deaths," including seasonal and pandemic strains, said the study. 

However in its localized study in the state, researchers compared the characteristics of pandemic and seasonal influenza infections occurring in that defined population, drawing from a pool of 6,874 patients in three flu seasons starting in 2007. Researchers identified 545 H1N1 pandemic influenza cases in 2009, and 221 cases of the seasonal H1N1 flu, and 632 patients with H3N2 infection from the 2007-2008 season. Children, which the 2009 H1N1 pandemic infection appeared to disproportionately affect, were not associated with more hospital admission or pneumonia cases when compared with seasonal H1N1 or H3N2, said the study.

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Obesity Due to High-fat Diet Hastens Leukemia Risk: Study

Obesity Due to High-Fat

Obesity caused due to fatty diet can directly speed up the progression of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), according to a study at The Saban Research Institute of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.Obesity has been associated with an increased incidence of many cancers, including leukemia, but it has been unknown whether the increase in incidence was a direct effect of obesity or associated with genetic, lifestyle,health, or socio-economic factors.

"Given the high prevalence of obesity in our society, we felt it was critical to determine if obesity actually caused the increased incidence of leukemia and not some other associated exposure," explained Dr. Steven D. Mittelman, a pediatric endocrinologist who led the study.The researchers used a high-fat diet to induce obesity in two mouse models of ALL. Mice were randomized to a high-fat or a control diet.

The investigators found that obesity increased the risk of ALL in both models, particularly in older mice.The finding was consistent with the type of cumulative effect seen with other exposure-related cancers, such as lung cancer related to smoking and breast cancer resulting from increased estrogen exposure.

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US Judge Denies to Lift Ban on Stem Cell Fund

Testing Labouratory

 

A US federal judge denied Tuesday the White House's request to drop his decision to temporarily block federal funding for embryonic stem cell reserch pending an appeal of the decision."In this court's view, a stay would flout the will of Congress," Judge Royce Lamberth wrote in his order."Congress remains perfectly free to amend or revise the statute. This court is not free to do so."

Lamberth first issued his injunction on August 23, ruling in favor of a coalition that included several Christian organizations by saying that stem cell research involved the destruction of human embryos.He said the federal funding, which President Barack Obama had authorized, violated the Dickey-Wicker amendment, a federal law barring federal tax funds from being used to fund any research that would cause human embryos to be destroyed.That decision prompted the White House to say it would seek ways to keep the "life-saving" research going.

In Tuesday's order, Lamberth said the Obama administration was "incorrect about much of their 'parade of horribles' that will supposedly result from this Court's preliminary injunction."Obama's March 2009 decision to reverse the ban on federal funds research on embryonic stem cells was lauded by many researchers who believe the field has huge potential for treating serious diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.It came after his predecessor George W. Bush had banned federal funding for research on new stem cells for moral and religious reasons.

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UK regulators want Avandia diabetes pill pulled

Avandia diabetes pill

GlaxoSmithKline's controversial diabetes pill Avandia should be pulled from the U.K. market because of concerns that the drug can increase the risk of heart attacks, British drug regulators said Monday.The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said an independent panel of experts had advised it that the risks of Avandia outweigh its benefits, and that the drug should no longer be sold in Britain. The body said it had sent a letter to doctors in July advising them to consider alternative treatments.

The British Medical Journal also called for the immediate withdrawal of the drug, saying it should never have been licensed in the first place.Avandia was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2000 to help lower blood sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. The drug is currently under review in Europe and the U.S., and European regulators are scheduled to meet Wednesday to decide Avandia's future.GSK maintained that its extensive research involving over 50,000 patients has showed that Avandia does not increase the overall risk of heart attack, stroke or death compared to other diabetes drugs.

"We continue to believe that Avandia is safe and effective when it is prescribed appropriately," the London-based company said in a statement.But the British Medical Journal was critical of both GSK's research methods and the European approval process, outlining what were described as multiple problems associated with Avandia's safety in a report published Monday.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has placed Avandia under scrutiny since 2007, when a study suggested that patients taking the drug were 43 percent more likely to experience heart attack than those taking other diabetes drugs or no diabetes medication.

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Lack of Sleep May Put Young Kids At Risk of Obesity

Childhood Obesity

Children under the age of five who don't get enough sleep at night are more likely than kids who do get their 40 winks to become obese at a young age, a study published Monday showed. "We found a robust longitudinal association between duration of night time sleep in early life and subsequent obesity measured at five to nine years," wrote the authors of the study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers led by Janice Bell of the University of Washington, Seattle and Frederick Zimmerman of the University of California, Los Angeles, studied two lots of data -- at baseline and five years later -- for 1,930 children in the United States. The kids were separated into two groups for the study: ages zero to 59 months, and five to 13 years. The data analyzed included information known to influence whether a child develops obesity, including parents' weight and the child's physical activity level, as well as how long the children slept at night and whether they napped during the day.

On average, younger children in the study slept 10 hours a night, and older children slept around 9.5 hours, but some children in both age cohorts got as little as five hours' sleep a night. The data collected five years after baseline showed that 33 percent of the younger cohort and 36 percent of the older cohort of kids were overweight or obese.

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Backstabbing Bacteria Ditch Colleagues and Actually Lessen Infection

Backstabbing Bacteria

Backstabbing bacterial cells that act in their own interests and do not cooperate with their infection-causing colleagues can actually reduce the severity of infection. The selfish behaviour of these uncooperative bacteria could be exploited to treat antibiotic-resistant infections, according to research being presented at the Society for General Microbiology's autumn meeting today.

Bacteria work together by using a well-studied communication system called Quorum Sensing (QS). During infection, bacteria talk to each other using QS to coordinate the release of toxins. Researchers at the University of Nottingham have discovered that in Staphylococcus aureus infections, bacteria defective in QS can benefit from 'opting out' of toxin production. By doing so, they can invest more energy in reproducing - whilst taking advantage of the nutrient-rich infection that is maintained by their neighbours.

By looking after themselves in this way, QS-deficient bacteria are quickly able to outnumber other bacteria that are busy producing toxins. As a result the overall severity of infection is reduced as fewer toxins are produced. "This opens up the interesting possibility of using these uncooperative bacteria to treat infection," said Eric Pollitt who is presenting the study.

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