Supplemental Breast Ultrasound Boosts Cancer Detection
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Among women at high-risk of developing breast cancer, breast ultrasound combined with mammography may detect more cancers than mammography alone, according to results of a multicenter trial that included UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers.
Overall, 40 participants were diagnosed with breast cancer. Of those cases, a dozen lesions were suspicious only on ultrasound and eight were suspicious on both ultrasound and mammography.
The most recent findings, presented in the current issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, are from the first round of screening in the American College of Radiology Imaging Network’s ACRIN-6666 trial. More than 2,800 women at high risk of developing breast cancer participated. The median age of the participants was 55 years and more than half had a personal history of breast cancer.
Girls, Young Women Can Cut Risk of Early Breast Cancer Through Regular Exercise
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Mothers, here’s another reason to encourage your daughters to be physically active: Girls and young women who exercise regularly between the ages of 12 and 35 have a substantially lower risk of breast cancer before menopause compared to those who are less active, new research shows.
In the largest and most detailed analysis to date of the effects of exercise on premenopausal breast cancer, the study of nearly 65,000 women found that those who were physically active had a 23 percent lower risk of breast cancer before menopause. In particular, high levels of physical activity from ages 12 to 22 contributed most strongly to the lower breast cancer risk.
The study, by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Harvard University in Boston, will be available online May 13 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Drug Therapy for PKU Reverses Heart Damage
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A pricy drug used to treat a rare but well-known genetic disorder may hold wider promise as a treatment for millions of Americans with potentially lethal enlarged hearts, due mainly to high blood pressure, a study from Johns Hopkins shows.
The common denominator in both phenylketonuria (PKU) and cardiac hypertrophy is the chemical tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4). In PKU, this enzyme coworker helps break down the molecule phenylalanine whose buildup is toxic to the brain. In the heart, BH4 helps build the chemical nitric oxide, which is needed for normal heart function and neutralizing toxic chemicals, called oxygen free radicals.
Doctors have used BH4 and diets that exclude phenylalanine for almost a decade to treat PKU, a so-called inborn error of metabolism that if left untreated causes irreversible brain damage. It affects an estimated 15,000 newborns in the United States each year.
Office initiative reduces headaches and neck and shoulder pain by more than 40 percent
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Office staff who took part in an eight-month workplace initiative reported that headaches and neck and shoulder pain fell by more than 40 per cent and their use of painkillers halved, according to research published in the May issue of Cephalalgia.
They also reported that pain levels were less severe at the end of the study than at the start.
Italian researchers compared 169 staff in Turin’s registry and tax offices with 175 colleagues who hadn’t taken part in the educational and physical programme. Using daily diaries completed by both groups, they compared the baseline results for months one and two of the study with months seven and eight to see if there had been any changes. The study group started following the programme in month three.
Female sex offenders often have mental problems
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Women who commit sexual offences are just as likely to have mental problems or drug addictions as other violent female criminals. This according to the largest study ever conducted of women convicted of sexual offences in Sweden.
Between 1988 and 2000, 93 women and 8,500 men were convicted of sexual offences in Sweden. Given that previous research has focused on male perpetrators, knowledge of the factors specific to female sex offenders has been scant.
A group of researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now looked into incidences of mental illness and drug abuse in these 93 convicted women, and compared them with over 20,000 randomly selected women in the normal population and with the 13,000-plus women who were convicted of non-sexual crimes over the same period.
OHSU Cancer Institute researchers pinpoint how smoking causes cancer
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Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute researchers have pinpointed the protein that can lead to genetic changes that cause lung cancer.
The research will be published Tuesday, May 12, in the British Journal of Cancer.
Researchers discovered that the production of a protein called FANCD2 is slowed when lung cells are exposed to cigarette smoke. Low levels of FANCD2 leads to DNA damage, triggering cancer. Cigarette smoke curbs the production of ‘caretaker’ proteins, like FANCD2, which normally prevent cancer by fixing damages in DNA and causing faulty cells to commit suicide.
MS can affect children’s IQ, thinking skills
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Multiple sclerosis (MS) typically starts in young adulthood, but about five percent of cases start in childhood or the teen years. Children with MS are at risk to exhibit low IQ scores and problems with memory, attention and other thinking skills, according to a study published in the May 13, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Children who developed the disease at a younger age were more likely to have low IQ scores than children who were older when the disease started.
“It’s possible that MS can show an even more dramatic effect on the thinking skills and intelligence in children than in adults, since the disease might affect the brain at a time when it is still developing,” said study author Maria Pia Amato, MD, of the University of Florence in Italy.
Novel mechanisms controlling insulin release and fat deposition discovered
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Scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have in two recent studies shown that a receptor called ALK7 plays important roles in the regulation of body fat deposition as well as the release of insulin from beta-cells in the pancreas. These findings have implications for the development of treatments against diabetes and obesity.
“We have shown in animal studies that removing the ALK7 receptor improves insulin release by beta-cells in the pancreas, and at the same time decreases fat deposition in situations of high caloric intake”, says Professor Carlos Ibáñez, who lead the two studies that are now published as back-to-back papers in the PNAS. “The well-known connections between diabetes and obesity make our combined findings quite exciting.”
Up to 6 per cent of the world population is estimated to suffer from some form of diabetes, either due to a reduced ability to produce insulin, or to insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone required by cells in the body to absorb glucose from the blood, thereby providing them with energy. Obesity has been shown to increase the risk of developing diabetes, and as overweight becomes more prevalent in the human population, so do the cases of diabetes.
Genetic links to impaired social behavior in autism
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Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show profound deficits in social interactions and communications, and display repetitive behaviors and abnormal responses to sensory experiences. One aspect of an autistic child’s impaired social abilities is their lack of affiliative behaviors, i.e., behaviors such as touching and hugging that strengthen social bonds. On May 15th, Biological Psychiatry is publishing an article that reports new findings on genetic bases of these behaviors.
In this study, Yale University researchers recruited, genotyped, and clinically assessed a large sample of autistic children and their families. They specifically examined the genetic variants in six genes known to be involved in maternal and affiliative behaviors. Dr. Elena Grigorenko, the senior author, discusses their study, “Animal studies have taught us that genetic factors can play a crucial role in the development of close affiliative ties. With the help of Yale’s Autism Center of Excellence, led by Drs. Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar, and many families of individuals with ASD, we have registered a possible association between some of the genes identified in animal studies as controlling affiliative behaviors in ASD.” The strongest statistical findings of the study implicate the prolactin gene, the prolactin receptor gene, and the oxytocin receptor gene in these affiliative behavior deficits.
Depression and anger can plague recent university graduates: Study
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The post-university years can start out tough. The good news: it gets better.
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger. Graduates showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms over the seven years. Expressed anger also declined over time after graduation, suggesting improved mental health.
The researchers also found that while home may be a haven for young people in the early years of adulthood, the longer they stay at home, or if they return home, the more likely they are to experience symptoms of depression. Previous research has found that more than half of students under 25 in four-year university programs lived with their parents.
Human touch helps stroke survivors regain mobility
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Six months after a stroke, survivors who are able to walk but still have moderate-to-severe difficulty in doing so, make better progress in their walking ability through physical therapist-assisted training than training provided by a robotic device, according to report published in the medical journal Stroke.
“We wanted to know whether using a robotic device that guides the limb in a symmetrical walking pattern would facilitate greater improvements in walking speed and symmetry than more traditional walking interventions with a physical therapist,” lead author Dr. T. George Hornby said in an American Heart Association news release.
Hornby and colleagues at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago evaluated 48 stroke patients who had been partially paralyzed on one side of the body for more than 6 months. All of the patients participated in 12 sessions of 30-minute therapy on a treadmill while wearing a harness to support their body weight.
28 million women at risk of unwanted pregnancy
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Each year, half of American women who would rather not get pregnant will have an unplanned pregnancy, often because they failed to use their contraceptive properly or forgot to use it at all, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
As a result, 28 million women in the United States are at risk for an unintended pregnancy, according to the study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute in New York.
They found one in four women is very likely to become pregnant because of inconsistent contraception use.
Poor quality of life linked to death from diabetes
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For older adults with diabetes, longevity may depend not only on factors such as blood sugar control, but on quality of life as well, a new study suggests.
In a study of more than 1,100 Dutch adults with type 2 diabetes, researchers found that those who reported physical limitations that impaired their quality of life were more likely to die over the next 6 years.
Quality of life was linked to death risk, independently of a range of well-known factors in diabetic adults’ health—including blood sugar control, weight, blood pressure and kidney function.
DVDs help caregivers of eating disorder patients
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Caregivers of eating disorder patients who used a skills training DVD along with telephone coaching to help them cope with their loved one’s illness were highly satisfied with the program, saying it helped reduce their stress levels, UK researchers report.
With just 14 participants, the study was too small to show a significant effect of the training program on caregivers’ psychological distress or depression, but there was a trend toward users having less distress after completing the program, Dr. Ana R. Sepulveda of Guy’s Hospital, London and colleagues found.
“The high acceptance rate of this pilot study also shows that the carers of people with eating disorders seem highly motivated to receive support and take an active part in helping their relatives to recover,” the researchers say.
US obesity rates alarmingly high; hard on the heart
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New research shows “alarming levels” of obesity in most ethnic groups in the United States, principal investigator Dr. Gregory L. Burke, of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina told Reuters Health. The study also confirms the potentially deadly toll obesity exacts on the heart and blood vessels.
“The obesity epidemic has the potential to reduce further gains in U.S. life expectancy, largely through an effect on cardiovascular disease mortality (death),” Burke and colleagues warn in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Among 6,814 middle-age or older adults participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or “MESA” study, researchers found that more than two thirds of white, African American and Hispanic participants were overweight and one third to one half were obese.
