Tag Archives: health

Nontoxic cancer therapy proves effective against metastatic cancer

The study, "The Ketogenic Diet and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Prolong Survival in Mice with Systemic Metastatic Cancer," was published online today in PLOS ONE. Led by Dominic D’Agostino, PhD, principal investigator in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the research shows the effects of combining two nontoxic adjuvant cancer therapies, the ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, in a mouse model of late-stage, metastatic cancer…

Statins linked to muscle pain, sprains

Cholesterol-lowering drugs could be tied to more muscle problems than researchers previously believed, a new study hints. Researchers compared two groups of similar people enrolled in military health insurance and found those taking a statin were about 10 percent more likely to have muscle pain, sprains or strains. Past studies have tied the popular cholesterol drugs to muscle weakness as well as the rare muscle-wasting disease rhabdomyolysis. The new study expands on those findings and suggests the muscle-related side effects of statins might be broader, researchers said. However, they don't prove statins caused the pain and injuries seen among some patients. “I would strongly recommend that no one should stop taking statins based on this study… simply because statins have been life-saving for many patients,” said the study's lead researcher, Dr. Ishak Mansi. However, he said side effects including muscle injuries are something to think about for people who are discussing with their doctor whether they really need to be on a statin. And they're another reason to try to maintain a healthy lifestyle - including exercising and not smoking - to avoid needing drugs in the first place, he added. Mansi, from the VA North Texas Health Care System in Dallas, and his colleagues compared the health records of two groups of patients who were the same age and had the same types of medical conditions. People in one group had been prescribed a statin in late 2004 and 2005; those in the other group never took statins during the study period. The researchers tracked the medical records of each of those patients - about 14,000 in total - through early 2010 for signs of muscle problems. They found 87 percent of statin users had some type of muscle or joint problem - including arthritis and muscle injuries - compared to 85 percent of people who didn't take a statin. Strains, sprains and dislocations, in particular, were reported for 35 percent of people on a statin, compared to 32.5 percent of those not taking a cholesterol-lowering drug. And medical records showed muscle pain among 73.5 percent of statin users, versus 71.5 percent of non-users, Mansi's team reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. Mansi said those proportions are a bit higher than usual both in the statin and non-statin groups - possibly because his study included military members and veterans, who are more likely to get injured. The researchers calculated that 37 people would have to be treated with statins for one more to have a muscle strain or sprain, and 58 people for one more case of muscle or joint pain. About one-quarter of U.S. adults aged 45 and older take statins to protect against heart attacks and strokes. The drugs are especially recommended for people with diabetes or a history of cardiovascular problems. Dr. Paul Thompson, chief of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, said his own research suggests about 5 percent of people will have muscle problems related to statin use. “We think it's a much bigger problem than it's given credit for,” Thompson, who wasn't involved in the new study, said. However, he said, those muscle problems don't seem to be permanent. “I encourage people to not worry about the possibilities of muscle troubles,” he said. “If they get muscle troubles, we'll stop the drug, and it will go away.” Mansi agreed that people “don't need to be excessively worried” about muscle pain or injuries tied to statins, but that they're something to consider. “Patients need to discuss with their doctors the benefit-risk ratio of statins for them specifically,” he said.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/05/statins-linked-to-muscle-pain-sprains/

Secretary Sebelius, stop hiding behind bureaucratic rules and save a child’s life

Many are calling on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow Sarah Murnaghan, a 10-year-old girl dying of cystic fibrosis, to be allowed on the adult organ transplant list.  According to current federal policy, the minimum age for her to be included on the list is 12. Currently, Sarah cannot receive an adult lung transplant until the available organs are offered to adult patients first. Of course, Secretary Sebelius could always make an exception by allowing this girl to be put on the transplant list.  Exceptions to federal regulations are made every day by the Department of Health and Human Services, whether you’re talking about the use of non-FDA approved drugs to treat cancer or the use of new technical equipment for surgical therapies. In this specific case, however, we’re talking about saving a child whose only hope is to compete among other patients for a transplant.  It is a perfect example of how rules are sometimes meant to be changed – or broken completely – especially when you’re talking about saving a person’s life. Secretary Sebelius has only ordered a revision of the policy, which could take a lengthy amount of time – something Sarah does not have.  To me, this shows lack of leadership and, certainly, lack of compassion.  Doctors and nurses make instant decisions when it comes to helping others in need, and I believe that someone who is in charge of the largest health care agency on the planet should have a more proactive approach when dealing with these kinds of emergency situations. The field of medicine has changed dramatically when it comes to the surgical techniques that transplant surgeons use.  From minimally invasive therapy to partial organ transplants, new technical miracles continue to develop. Therefore, the argument that an adult organ may not be usable in a 10-year-old is no longer valid, and certainly open for discussion in our clinical community.  As reports have told us, Sarah’s surgeons do agree that in her case, an adult transplant just might work. The rule not allowing a child to be eligible for a transplant from an adult organ until the age of 12 is archaic, and it should not have taken a case like this for Secretary Sebelius – whose tenure has lasted for the past four years – to ask for a revision today. I agree with many who have said that this child is a victim of age discrimination.  But I also agree that Sarah has been ignored by our federal health leaders and has been placed in a bureaucratic Neverland.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/04/secretary-sebelius-stop-hiding-behind-bureaucratic-rules-and-save-childs-life/

Brain surgery is an option for patients with severe OCD, study suggests

A type of brain surgery appears to be a relatively effective treatment for people with severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) who have not responded to other treatments, a new study suggests. In the study, nearly half of patients showed at least some improvement in their OCD symptoms, and 15 percent fully recovered seven years after the surgery. The findings suggest surgery may be an effective treatment for patients with very severe OCD who have not been helped by other therapies, the researchers said. Patients in the study had not responded to several medications, including serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) and antipsychotic medications, as well as psychotherapy. On average, patients had experienced symptoms for 16 years, and one-third had attempted suicide. However, the surgery has significant risks. Two of the 19 patients experienced permanent complications from the surgery, including paralysis on one side of the body and cognitive impairment. Because of this, the procedure should be considered with caution, the researchers said. [See 5 Controversial Mental Health Treatments]. Future studies should examine which patients are most likely to be helped by the surgery, so that only those who stand to gain greatest benefit undergo the procedure, the researchers said. Surgery for OCD OCD is characterized by recurrent, intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors that patients feel compelled to carry out. Patients might perform these behaviors (such as hand washing) for hours, and some are unable to leave their homes. About 20 to 30 percent of patients are not helped by medication or behavioral therapies. Brain surgery for mental disorders, called psychosurgery, has been practiced since the 1930s, although it is very controversial. Early surgeries, such as lobotomies practiced in the 1940s and 1950s, had serious side effects, including personality changes. The practice of psychosurgery declined after psychiatric medications became available, although a small number of centers today continue perform psychosurgerical procedures. Today, psychosurgery is much more carefully regulated than it was in the past, and performed only after patients determined to be appropriate candidates for the treatment by a team of psychiatrists and neurologists, said Dr. Michael Schulder, vice chair of neurosurgery at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, NY. Brain imaging technology available today helps doctors more carefully select the surgery target, said Schulder, who was not invovled in the new study. The study, conducted by researcher at Universit Laval in Quebec, Canada, involved 19 patients who underwent a type of psychosurgery called bilateral capsulotomy between 1997 and 2009. The surgery damages tissue (by creating lesions) in a part of the brain called the internal capsule. Before the surgery, patients scored an average of 34 out of 40 points (extreme OCD) on a test designed to measure the severity of the condition. After surgery, the average score decreased to 23, which is considered moderate OCD. About 37 percent of patients responded fully to the surgery, meaning their score improved by at least 35 percent, and about 10 percent partially responded to the surgery, meaning their score improved by 25 percent. After seven years, three patients fully recovered from OCD, and three had minimal symptoms, the researchers said. Those who did not respond to the surgery were more likely to have had OCD for a longer time period (an average of 20 years) than those who did respond to surgery (an average of 12 years). Psychosurgery vs. deep brain stimulation The study did not have a control group, or a group of patients who did not undergo the procedure, so it's possible the improvement seen in the study was the result of a placebo effect. However, there is little evidence for spontaneous remission or placebo effect in patients with severe OCD, the researchers said. A more recent surgical procedure for OCD, called deep brain stimulation, involves implanting a device that sends electrical impulses into the brain. Unlike psychosurgery, deep brain stimulation is reversible, and does not permanently damage tissue. In 2009, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of deep brain stimulation for OCD. However, patients with a deep brain stimulation implant may experience problems with the implant that need to be fixed right away, so they should live close to a health care center. Psychosurgery is less expensive than deep brain stimulation, and does not require that patients live close to a health care center, so there is still a place for the procedure in the field, the researchers said. Schulder said that while psychosurgery tends to have a higher complication rate than DBS, the latter procedure poses risks such as infection and erosion of the device through the skin. “There's still a good rational for doing lesioning in some patients. It's not like DBS is complication free,” Schulder said. The study is published June 3 in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, & Psychiatry. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/04/brain-surgery-is-option-for-patients-with-severe-ocd-study-suggests/

Vegetarian diet tied to fewer deaths over time

People who limit how much meat they eat and stick to mostly fruits and vegetables are less likely to die over any particular period of time, according to a new study. “I think this adds to the evidence showing the possible beneficial effect of vegetarian diets in the prevention of chronic diseases and the improvement of longevity,” said Dr. Michael Orlich, the study's lead author from Loma Linda University in California. In 2012, a Gallup poll found about 5 percent of Americans reported to be vegetarians. Previous research has found that people who eat mostly fruits and vegetables are less likely to die of heart disease or any other cause over certain periods of time. Another study from Europe, however, found British vegetarians were just as likely to die at any point as meat eaters, so it's still an “open question,” Orlich said. For the new study, he and his colleagues used data from 73,308 people recruited at U.S. and Canadian Seventh-day Adventist churches between 2002 and 2007. At the start of the study, the participants were asked about their eating habits and were separated into categories based on how often they ate dairy, eggs, fish and meat. Overall, 8 percent were vegans who didn't eat any animal products while 29 percent were lacto-ovo-vegetarians who didn't eat fish or meat but did eat dairy and egg products. Another 15 percent occasionally ate meat, including fish. The researchers then used a national database to see how many of the participants died by December 31, 2009. Overall, they found about seven people died of any cause per 1,000 meat eaters over a year. That compared to about five or six deaths per 1,000 vegetarians every year. Men seemed to benefit the most from a plant-based diet. Orlich cautioned, however, that they can't say the participants' plant-based diets prevented their deaths, because there may be other unmeasured differences between the groups. For example, Alice Lichtenstein, director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, said the participants who were vegetarians were healthier overall. “It's important to note that the vegetarians in this study were more highly educated, less likely to smoke, exercised more and were thinner,” Lichtenstein, who was not involved with the new study, told Reuters Health. Those traits have all been tied to better overall health in the past. Should you go veg? Dr. Robert Baron, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study in JAMA Internal Medicine, said the new evidence doesn't mean everyone should switch to a plant-based diet. “I don't think everybody should be a vegetarian, but if they want to be, this article suggests it's associated with good health outcomes,” said Baron, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Instead, he writes limiting added sugars, refined grains and saturated fats trumps whether or not to include a moderate amount of dairy, eggs, fish or meat. Previous research has found that people who were on a mostly plant-based diet still had lower cholesterol while eating a small amount of lean beef. “It's like everything else, you have to think about it in terms of the whole package,” Lichtenstein said.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/04/vegetarian-diet-tied-to-fewer-deaths-over-time/

Allergic and autoimmune diseases linked, mouse study suggests

The results of previous research had shown that people with minor variations in the BACH2 gene often develop allergic or autoimmune diseases, and that a common factor in these diseases is a compromised immune system. In this study in mice, the Bach2 gene was found to be a critical regulator of the immune system’s reactivity. The study, headed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), both part of NIH, and their colleagues appeared online in Nature, June 2, 2013. …

Potential new way to suppress tumor growth discovered

Writing in this week’s online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Willis X. Li, PhD, a professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego, reports that a particular form of a signaling protein called STAT5A stabilizes the formation of heterochromatin (a form of chromosomal DNA), which in turn suppresses the ability of cancer cells to issue instructions to multiply and grow. Specifically, Li and colleagues found that the unphosphorylated form of STAT promotes and stabilizes heterochromatin, which keeps DNA tightly packaged and inaccessible to transcription factors. …

Vaccine exemptions rising, tied to whooping cough

The number of New York parents who had their child skip at least one required vaccine due to religious reasons increased over the past decade, according to a new study. What's more, researchers found counties with high religious exemption rates also had more whooping cough cases - even among children that had been fully vaccinated. States set their own requirements on which vaccines a child must have received to enter school. All allow exemptions for medical reasons, and most, including New York, also permit parents with a religious objection to forgo vaccination. Less than half of states permit exemptions due to personal or philosophical beliefs. But those also can get counted under religious views in places with less strict exemption policies. “Particularly in New York State, I do believe that parents are using religious exemptions for their personal beliefs,” said Dr. Jana Shaw, who worked on the study at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “There's a lot of vaccine hesitancy.” Studies have shown cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, have been on the rise across the U.S. Researchers suspect that's due to the use of a new type of pertussis vaccine - which is safer, but less effective over the long run - and to more children missing or delaying vaccination. For their study, Shaw and her colleagues tracked data from the New York State Department of Health on both religious exemptions and new whooping cough cases. Children were reported as having a religious exemption if they had been allowed to skip at least one required vaccine for non-medical reasons. Between 2000 and 2011, the proportion of religiously exempt kids increased from 23 in 10,000 to 45 in 10,000, the study team reported Monday in Pediatrics. The number of counties where at least 1 percent of children had a religious exemption also increased, from four to 13. Most of those counties were in western or northern New York. Higher religious exemption rates were tied to more reported cases of whooping cough. In counties with at least 1 percent exemption, 33 out of every 100,000 children developed pertussis each year, compared to 20 per 100,000 in counties with fewer religious exemptions. 'Overwhelming evidence' on safety Children who had been fully vaccinated were also more likely to get sick in places with high exemption rates. No vaccine is 100 percent perfect, so infectious disease prevention relies on “herd immunity” - when enough kids are vaccinated that the infection can't spread. “If you have enough exempted children in your schools and neighborhood, they will put even vaccinated children at risk,” Shaw told Reuters Health. Saad Omer, a researcher at the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta, said the pattern of increasing non-medical exemptions has been seen in other states as well, including Michigan and California. Because of the general success of vaccination, “there is less disease to go around and there's less individual and collective experience. You don't hear about the disease that often,” he told Reuters Health. “When that happens, successive cohorts of parents start evaluating the real or perceived risk of vaccines more than the risk of disease.” But those perceived risks - such as a link between vaccines and autism - have not panned out. “If you look at the risk-benefit ratio between side effects of vaccines and the benefits they render, it's not even a close call. It's hugely, heavily in favor of vaccines,” said Omer, who wasn't involved in the new research. Shaw agreed. “Vaccines are extremely safe, in spite of what the Internet and other sources have argued,” she said. “We have overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe.” Both Omer and Shaw said they don't think states and schools should pass judgment on parents' religious beliefs, but that it shouldn't be easy to get a vaccine exemption for convenience or personal preference. And, Omer added, “those who don't get (their kids) vaccinated should remember that it's not a benign choice. There are real disease risks.”source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/03/vaccine-exemptions-rising-tied-to-whooping-cough/

First non-surgical circumcision device could slow spread of AIDS in Africa, officials say

Health officials have approved a first-of-its-kind, non-surgical circumcision device hailed as a potential game-changer in the battle to forestall the spread of AIDS in Africa. The PrePex is the only circumcision method, aside from conventional surgery, to gain World Health Organization approval to date, according to The New York Times. The international health organization reportedly gave its approval to the device on Friday.    Dr. Eric P. Goosby, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, subsequently told the paper the PrePex would “truly help save lives” and that he was even considering the immediate employment of funds from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to pay for its widespread use in AIDS-ravaged Africa. Circumcision reportedly lowers the chance of a heterosexual male contracting HIV, or the virus that causes AIDS, through sexual intercourse by about 60 percent.  The Times reports the U.S. has thus-far paid for more than 2 million circumcisions in Africa to assist the continent with its spiraling AIDS epidemic. A two-nurse team reportedly employs the PrePex to kill off a male’s foreskin through the utilization of a rubber band. The procedure, The Times reported, necessitates only topical anesthesia, and is safer than surgery. The device was developed by Circ MedTech, an Irsaeli company founded in 2009, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.  source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/02/first-non-surgical-circumcision-device-could-slow-spread-aids-in-africa/