Testing lung tumors tailors drug treatments
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Researchers said they helped advanced lung cancer patients fare better by matching their tumors to targeted drugs, in what they said is the first significant trial to show it is possible to choose the best drug for an individual patient.
They tested four so-called targeted therapies in patients with specific biomarkers - mutations that the drugs were designed to counteract.
After eight weeks, 46 percent of the patients on the trial had their tumors grow more slowly or shrink, compared with about 30 percent of usual lung cancer patients.
U.S. Medicare panel to weigh prostate treatments
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At a time of growing debate over prostate cancer treatments, U.S. Medicare officials will take a closer look at radiation therapy and its ability to reduce deaths and side effects in men.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has asked a panel of outside experts meeting on Wednesday to say how confident they are that various types of radiation treatment can improve patient outcomes.
Researchers have found that many prostate cancers are so slow-growing that most men will die from other causes, sparking debate over whether diagnosis is too frequent and whether treatments, which also include surgery, are excessive.
Watching TV for Long Leads to Obesity in Children
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A recent study conducted by the Sydney South West Area Health Service has claimed that youngsters, who watch television for more than 2 hours in a day, are 3.5 times more vulnerable to obesity than those youngsters who watch it less.
The researchers also discovered a connection between the way these children commute to their schools and their obesity. Dr Li Ming Wen, Research and Evaluation Manager, Dr Li Ming and his team examined the weight, height, screen time and modes of commuting to school in 1300 children falling in the age group of 10-13 years.
“Almost 35 per cent of children surveyed watched more than 14 hours of television a week”, said Dr. Wen.
Obesity in Children: What Fast Food Corporations are Doing to Cause It
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Nobody can deny that fast food is unhealthy. Everyone knows that fast food is high in calories, fats, and sodium. But what causes obesity? When asked this, most people will say “fast food.” A diet high in calories and a lack of physical exercise are what cause a large percentage of the cases of obesity. Fast food explains the calories, but what about the sedentary lifestyle? Well, believe it or not, fast food can explain that as well. As it turns out, fast food corporations are a major cause of childhood obesity because they promote unhealthy foods and a sedentary lifestyle for children.
One striking factor of the fast food corporation’s link to child obesity is the abundance of fast food restaurants worldwide. “McDonald’s is the leading global foodservice retailer with more than 32,000 local restaurants serving more than 60 million people in 117 countries each day.” (“Our Company”) I even performed a search on the McDonald’s website to see how many McDonald’s restaurants there are in my area. According to the search there are at least 35 McDonald’s restaurants within a 13-mile radius of my house! This shows that there are a huge number of fast food restaurants in the world, especially since these numbers are for just one corporation. Adding on to the numerical evidence, fast food restaurants have increased 12.8% in the past 10 years (Entertaining Marketing Letter). This shows that fast food corporations are increasing the amount of restaurants they have in order to increase their profits. These numbers, although they may not look it, are in fact a big link to fast food corporations’ causing of obesity in children. The overwhelming presence of fast food restaurants means that children see the restaurants more often and that they are more likely to get their parents to stop there and eat. Also, when children are old enough, they can go to the restaurants with their friends. For example, my friends and I ride our bikes to a McDonald’s that is only about a two-minute ride from my house. If we don’t feel like having McDonald’s that day, there is a Burger King right next to it. All in all, the growing number of fast food restaurants does have an impact on childhood obesity.
Preventing childhood obesity from pregnancy on
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While applauding the First Lady’s efforts to combat childhood obesity through the Let’s Move initiative, researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco say that the campaign’s efforts focused primarily on behavioral and nutritional intervention—in school or at home—will yield “limited success.” In an editorial published online this week by the New England Journal of Medicine Drs. Janet M. Wojcicki and Melvin B. Heyman argue that any attempts to have a more substantive effect on childhood obesity must start well before children reach school age. “Indeed, prevention must start as early as possible, since school-aged children already have an unacceptably high prevalence of obesity and associated medical conditions,” they write. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one third of U.S. children are overweight.
Wojcicki and Heyman are among a growing number of obesity researchers and health professionals advocating for childhood obesity prevention beginning in infancy, pregnancy, and even earlier. In November of last year, the Institute of Medicine formed a new committee to specifically address obesity risk factors and intervention efforts for children under age 5.
Childhood obesity program should start early, say experts
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US First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign must include interventions that target pregnant women, infants, and pre-school-age children, and they should start as early as possible, say UCSF experts.
Janet Wojcicki, PhD, MPH, UCSF assistant professor of pediatrics, and Melvin Heyman, MD, MPH, professor of pediatrics and chief of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at UCSF Children’s Hospital, discuss how “Let’s Move” might have the greatest impact on reversing the childhood obesity epidemic in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Their piece will appear in the April 21, 2010, issue of the journal.
Obesity May be Evaded by Weight Loss Surgery
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Complication arising in pregnancy due to obesity can be evaded with weight loss surgery. If overweight women undergo weight loss surgery before they conceive, it may avert pregnancy complications.
It is known that women who are overweight have a high chance of developing complexities during pregnancy. One example of such complication is high blood pressure, or preeclampsia, which elevates the threat of premature birth and infant death.
Wendy L. Bennett, M. D., M. P. H., Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead researcher evinces, “We have long known that women who have these blood pressure disorders are not only at an increased risk for pregnancy complications in themselves and their babies, but also for chronic diseases in the future” .
New Nutrition Regulations for Tackling Obesity
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School leaders do not have the authority to control the food available to students during the school day, which meant that students are free to eat hamburgers and French fries in place of grilled chicken and green beans.
The U. S. Secretary of Agriculture will get the authority to establish national nutrition standards for all foods sold on school campuses during the school day with a proposed change to the federal law, which governs school lunches.
Julie Paradis, who is the administrator for the Food and Nutrition Service at the U. S. Department of Agriculture, is sure that the secretary will be given that authority.
New Mississippi law another step in obesity fight
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A bill recently signed into law by Gov. Haley Barbour is another small step in Mississippi’s quest to shed its image as the unhealthiest state in the nation.
The bill provides financial incentives to schools to promote healthy environments. The monetary awards range from $2,000 to $8,000, and are given to schools that participate in the federal HealthierUS School Challenge.
Currently, five Mississippi schools are in the program that recognizes the efforts of campuses that focus on nutrition and physical activity. Schools are rated as bronze, silver or the highest level of gold.
Greens press for anti-obesity industry regulation
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The Australian Greens are continuing to press for greater food industry regulation to combat obesity, following the publication of a study in the latest Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health revealed that obesity has overtaken smoking to become the leading independent risk factor impacting health in Western Australia.
Greens health spokesperson Senator Rachel Siewert called for “firm action” on preventative health and regulatory reform of the food industry.
“We need strong action on food standards, tighter regulation on food labelling to deliver more effective information to consumers, and a comprehensive ban on the marketing junk food to children,” said Senator Siewert.
Questions raised about heart implants past age 80
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People age 80 and older who get a pacemaker or defibrillator are more likely to die in the hospital after the procedure than younger patients, raising questions about the risks of these implants when used in very elderly people, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Most clinical trials looking at implantable heart devices involve people in their 50s and 60s even though about a fifth of these implants are used in people over age 80, a group often overlooked in medical studies, the researchers said.
As such, little had been known about the benefits of these devices in people over 80, according to the researchers.
High glycemic diet may raise female heart risk: study
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Women who eat lots of high glycemic index (GI) carbohydrates like white bread and ice-cream may be at greater risk of heart disease, but men do not seem to be affected, Italian scientists said on Monday.
In a study of almost 48,000 adults, the scientists found that the 25 percent of women who ate the most carbohydrates overall had around double the risk of heart disease of the 25 percent who ate the least.
When these carbohydrates were separated into high and low glycemic index categories, the researchers found that eating more high GI foods was strongly linked to greater risk of coronary heart disease, whereas low GI foods were not.
Stress hormones accelerate tumor growth
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Chronic stress has recently been implicated as a factor that may accelerate the growth of tumors. However, the mechanisms underlying this effect have not been determined. But now, Anil Sood and colleagues, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, have generated data using human ovarian cancer cell lines and tumor specimens that indicate that stress hormones, especially norepinephrine and epinephrine, can contribute to tumor progression in patients with ovarian cancer. They therefore suggest that targeting stress hormones and the signaling pathways that they activate might be of benefit to individuals with cancer.
Anoikis is the process by which cells are triggered to die when separated from their surrounding matrix and neighboring cells. Tumor cells that spread to other sites somehow escape anoikis. In the study, exposure of human ovarian cancer cells lines to either of the stress hormones norepinephrine or epinephrine protected them from anoikis.
Study suggests new ways to improve anti-cancer chemotherapies
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A study released this week suggests that anti-cancer chemotherapies which use nanoparticles to deliver drugs deep inside tumor tissue will be more effective if the particles are positively electrically charged because they are taken up to a greater extent by proliferating cells, according to a team of chemists and chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This is because a positive surface charge allows better uptake of the nanoparticles across the cell membrane, a mechanism which the researchers found controls delivery to most tumor cells. At the same time, “negative particles, which diffuse more quickly, may perform better when delivering drugs deep into tissues,” say UMass Amherst’s Neil Forbes, with chemist Vincent Rotello and colleagues. Their description of a new “tunable” delivery system appears in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
Computer may offer better way to get informed consent
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Using an interactive computer program to get patients’ informed consent may help ensure that they actually understand the medical procedure they are agreeing to, a small study suggests.
Informed consent refers to the process by which a patient agrees to undergo a particular medical procedure, which includes discussing the procedure’s risks and benefits with the doctor. But whether those discussions, even bolstered with written information, actually give patients a full understanding of the procedure has been in doubt.
In the new study, researchers at the University of Melbourne and Austin Hospital in Australia tested a computer-based informed consent process among 40 men scheduled to undergo surgery to remove the prostate gland.
