Democrats see progress in W. House healthcare talks
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With President Barack Obama urging them on, congressional Democratic leaders met for eight hours at the White House on Wednesday and reported significant progress on finding a final healthcare compromise.
In their first face-to-face talks on merging health bills in the Senate and House of Representatives, Democratic leaders worked through differences on how to pay for the overhaul, how to structure new insurance exchanges and a host of other issues.
In a joint statement afterward, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and Obama said they were “encouraged and energized” by the discussions.
US parents on trial in 4-year-old’s overdose death
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The parents of a 4-year-old girl with psychiatric problems who died after overdosing on powerful drugs are about to face first-degree murder charges in a Boston area courtroom.
Prosecutors in the Brockton Superior Court charge that Michael and Carolyn Riley of Hull, Massachusetts, deliberately overmedicated their daughter to keep her quiet. The parents have said they are innocent and attribute her 2006 death to pneumonia.
The two will be tried separately. A 16-person jury was selected for Carolyn Riley’s trial on Wednesday and opening arguments are expected in that trial next week.
Gene variant protects against Alzheimer’s
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People with a gene linked to long life and good health are also less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said people with two copies of a certain version of the cholesteryl ester transfer protein or CETP gene had significantly slower memory declines compared with people who had different versions of the gene.
“We’ve known for a long time that genetic factors matter in Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Richard Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
U.S. obesity rate appears to be slowing
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Americans are still too fat, but the obesity epidemic in the United States appears to be waning a bit, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
New government data show that 68 percent of U.S. adults are considered overweight, having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or higher. A third are obese, having a BMI of 30 or higher.
“Obesity continues to be a significant health concern,” Cynthia Ogden of the National Center for Health Statistics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a telephone interview.
Why some brains are more vulnerable to stress and resistant to antidepressants
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A new study provides insight into the molecular characteristics that make a brain susceptible to anxiety and depression and less likely to respond to treatment with antidepressant medication. The research, published by Cell Press in the January 14th issue of the journal Neuron, may lead to more effective strategies for treating depression, a major health concern throughout the world.
Although brain mechanisms associated with depression and anxiety are not completely clear, recent research has implicated a combination of stressful life events and predisposing biological factors as playing a causal role in depressive disorders. The most popular antidepressant medications, such as the commonly prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), increase serotonin levels in the brain.
“Unfortunately, more than half of all depressed patients fail to respond to their first drug treatment,” explains senior study author Dr. Rene Hen, from Columbia University. “The reasons for this treatment resistance remain enigmatic. Elucidating the exact nature of both the factors predisposing to depression and the mechanisms underlying treatment resistance remains an important and unmet need.”
Sepsis campaign improving treatment of major killer
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A reduction in hospital mortality from severe sepsis and septic shock was associated with participation in the Surviving Sepsis Campaign performance improvement initiative, according to an article published simultaneously in the February issues of Critical Care Medicine and Intensive Care Medicine and posted ahead of print at http://www.ccmjournal.com.
“A multifaceted performance improvement initiative was successful in changing treatment behavior as evidenced by a significant increase in compliance with sepsis performance measures,” says lead author Mitchell M. Levy, M.D. “These results should encourage similar efforts with other evidence-based guidelines as a means of improving patient care and outcomes.”
“Application of two time-related bundles of care based on the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines in a performance improvement program results in measurable behavior change in the care of patients with severe sepsis and septic shock,” adds Dr. Levy, a professor of medicine at Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, R.I. A “bundle” is a group of therapeutic actions, which applied together and measured for compliance, improve outcomes as compared to being applied individually.
Less sleep for kids may mean higher blood sugar
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Young children may be more apt to have high blood sugar, a precursor to diabetes, if they average 8 hours or less of sleep a night, report Chinese and American researchers.
This risk may be even greater among obese youngsters, Dr. Zhijie Yu, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and colleagues note in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
Moreover, Yu said in an email to Reuters Health, shorter sleep seemed to influence blood sugar “independently of a large variety of risk factors,” such as age, gender, birth-related influences, early life feeding or later diet, recent illness, physical activity, body mass, and waist girth.
U.S. makes progress in tobacco control, group says
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The U.S. government took major steps toward curbing tobacco use in 2009 but still needs to do more to fight tobacco-related illnesses that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, the American Lung Association said on Tuesday.
The federal government earned a grade of “A” for giving the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate tobacco, including how companies market, manufacture and sell tobacco products, the advocacy group said in its annual report card on tobacco control.
The American Lung Association was a long-time advocate of granting FDA authority over tobacco. U.S. President Barack Obama signed the FDA tobacco legislation into law in June.
In Early Heart Development, Genes Work in Tandem
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Studying genes that regulate early heart development in animals, scientists have solved a puzzle about one gene’s role, finding that it acts in concert with a related gene. Their finding contributes to understanding how the earliest stages of heart development may go awry, resulting in congenital heart defects in humans.
Peter J. Gruber, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, led a study published this week in the Jan. 15 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Occurring in approximately 1 in 200 children, congenital heart defects represent the most common human birth defect.
“We uncovered a role for the Gata5 gene, a role that has been unappreciated in vertebrate cardiac development,” said Gruber. “Gata5 is a gene that is essential to heart development in other animals, such as frogs and zebrafish, but contrary to expectations, deleting this gene seemed to have no effect on the hearts of mammals. We found, however, that in mice, this gene cooperates closely with other genes to affect heart development. It may work similarly in humans.”
Race, obesity affect outcomes among diabetics following prostatectomy
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Obese white men who have both diabetes and prostate cancer have significantly worse outcomes following radical prostatectomy than do men without diabetes who undergo the same procedure, according to research from Duke University Medical Center appearing in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Many studies have shown that diabetes is associated with a lower risk of developing prostate cancer—at least in white men—but the effect of diabetes on outcomes after prostate cancer surgery has not been as clear.
“We found that diabetes was significantly associated with more aggressive disease in obese white men and less aggressive disease for all other subsets of men in our study,” says Stephen Freedland, M.D., associate professor of urology and pathology at the Duke Prostate Center at Duke University and member of the Urology Section, Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham.
New target discovered for treatment of cancer
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Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new way of blocking the formation of blood vessels and halting the growth of tumours in mice. A substance that exploits this mechanism could be developed into a new treatment for cancer.
For a cancer tumour to be able to grow larger than the size of a pea, the cancer cells need to stimulate the formation of new blood vessels that can supply the tumour with oxygen and nutrients, a process known as angiogenesis. A number of medicines which inhibit angiogenesis have been developed, but their effect has been limited, and there is still a major need for better medicines.
The new results concern a receptor on the surface of blood vessel cells called ALK1. When the researchers blocked ALK1 in tumours in mice, angiogenesis was inhibited and the tumours stopped growing. The ALK1 receptor is activated by a family of signalling proteins called TGF-² proteins that are very important for communication between different types of cell in a wide range of key processes in the body. The study indicates that two members of the TGF-β family (TGF-β and BMP9) work together to stimulate angiogenesis in tumours.
Does junk food at non-food stores in US add pounds?
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A new study shows that candy, soda and other junk foods are commonly sold at stores not traditionally associated with food—in a trend that researchers say may be contributing to the U.S. obesity problem.
The study, of more than 1,000 non-food retail stores across the U.S., found that 41 percent sold candy, soft drinks, chips and other sweet and salty snacks. The foods were most commonly placed at check-out counters, where they were “within arm’s reach” of impulsive buyers, the researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Nearly all drug stores and gas stations in the study sold snack foods—as did a majority of general merchandise stores, hardware and garden stores and automobile repair shops.
Scientists find new leukemia gene risk factors
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Researchers have found four new genetic variants that increase the risk of contracting one of the major forms of leukemia, confirming that risk factors for the fatal blood cancer can be inherited.
The findings mean scientists now know of 10 genetic variants associated with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), scientists at Europe’s Institute of Cancer Research who conducted the study said.
The four new genetic factors are all common in European populations and each factor contributes to an increase in the risk of the disease.
Healthy Older Adults with Subjective Memory Loss May be at Increased Risk for Mild Cognitive Impairm
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Healthy Older Adults with Subjective Memory Loss May be at Increased Risk for Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia
Forgot where you put your car keys? Having trouble recalling your colleague’s name? If so, this may be a symptom of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), the earliest sign of cognitive decline marked by situations such as when a person recognizes they can’t remember a name like they used to or where they recently placed important objects the way they used to. Studies have shown that SCI is experienced by between one-quarter and one-half of the population over the age of 65. A new study, published in the January 11, 2010, issue of the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, finds that healthy older adults reporting SCI are 4.5 times more likely to progress to the more advanced memory-loss stages of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia than those free of SCI.
The long-term study completed by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center tracked 213 adults with and without SCI over an average of seven years, with data collection taking nearly two decades. Further cognitive decline to MCI or dementia was observed in 54 percent of SCI persons, while only in 15 percent of persons free of SCI.
New approach to fighting Alzheimer’s shows potential in clinical trial
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In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, patients typically suffer a major loss of the brain connections necessary for memory and information processing. Now, a combination of nutrients that was developed at MIT has shown the potential to improve memory in Alzheimer’s patients by stimulating growth of new brain connections.
In a clinical trial of 225 Alzheimer’s patients, researchers found that a cocktail of three naturally occurring nutrients believed to promote growth of those connections, known as synapses, plus other ingredients (B vitamins, phosopholipids and antioxidants), improved verbal memory in patients with mild Alzheimer’s.
“If you can increase the number of synapses by enhancing their production, you might to some extent avoid that loss of cognitive ability,” says Richard Wurtman, the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, who did the basic research that led to the new experimental treatment. He is an author of a paper describing the new results in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
