Lawmakers in 2 states pass new abortion restrictions
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Legislators in both Indiana and Florida passed sweeping abortion restrictions on Wednesday.
The Indiana House passed a bill, already approved by the Senate, that would ban abortions after 20 weeks and cut funding to Planned Parenthood of Indiana.
If the bill is signed by Governor Mitch Daniels, Indiana will become the fifth state to ban late-term abortions based on the contested idea that a fetus feels pain at this point.
New Gene Therapy Technique on Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Holds Promise in Treating Immune System Disease
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Researchers have developed an effective technique that uses gene therapy on stem cells to correct chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) in cell culture, which could eventually serve as a treatment for this rare, inherited immune disorder, according to a study published in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology.
CGD prevents neutrophils, a type of white blood cell of the immune system, from making hydrogen peroxide, an essential defense against life-threatening bacterial and fungal infections. Most cases of CGD are a result of a mutation on the X chromosome, a type of CGD that is called “X-linked” (X-CGD).
While antibiotics can treat infections caused by X-CGD, they do not cure the disease itself. Patients with X-CGD can be cured with a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplant from healthy bone marrow; however, finding a compatible donor is difficult. Even with a suitable donor, patients are at risk of developing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a serious and often deadly post-transplant complication that occurs when newly transplanted donor cells recognize a recipient’s own cells as foreign and attack the patient’s body.
Vitamin E helps diminish a type of fatty liver disease in children
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A specific form of vitamin E improved the most severe form of fatty liver disease in some children, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Results appear in the April 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. A previous study found vitamin E effective in some adults with the disease.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common chronic liver disease among U.S. children. NAFLD ranges in severity from steatosis (fat in the liver without injury) to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis or NASH (fat, inflammation, and liver damage). Fatty liver increases a child’s risk of developing heart disease and liver cirrhosis. The only way to distinguish NASH from other forms of fatty liver disease is with a liver biopsy. Weight loss may reverse the disease in some children, but other than dietary advice, there are no specific treatments. Excess fat in the liver is believed to cause injury by increasing levels of oxidants, compounds that damage cells.
Most children with fatty liver disease are overweight and resistant to insulin, a critical hormone that regulates energy. Boys are more likely affected than girls, as are Hispanic children compared to African-Americans and whites.
Report names U.S. cities with foulest, cleanest air
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The nation’s 25 most smoggy cities improved air quality over the last year, but half the nation’s residents still live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to an American Lung Association report released on Wednesday.
Weighing the pluses and minuses in U.S. air quality over the past year, the “State of the Air 2011” report concluded that the U.S. Clean Air Act, the federal law aimed at limiting pollution in the nation’s skies, is working.
“The progress the nation has made cleaning up coal-fired power plants, diesel emissions and other pollution sources has drastically cut dangerous pollution from the air we breathe,” Lung Association President Charles Connor said in a statement.
The most dramatic improvement has been controlling ozone, commonly known as smog. The report found all 25 cities most polluted by ozone had cleaner air than they did last year.
Low Health Literacy Associated with Higher Rate of Death Among Heart Failure Patients
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An examination of health literacy (such as understanding basic health information) among managed care patients with heart failure, a condition that requires self-management, found that nearly one in five have low health literacy, which was associated with a higher all-cause risk of death, according to a study in the April 27 issue of JAMA.
Health literacy is the degree to which individuals can obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions, as defined by the Institute of Medicine. According to background information in the article, many U.S. citizens and as many as 1 in 3 Medicare enrollees have low health literacy. Heart failure is a common and complex chronic disease with a high risk of illness and death. “Although patients with heart failure are frequently hospitalized, much care for heart failure is performed on a daily basis by individual patients outside of the hospital. This self-care requires integration and application of knowledge and skills. Therefore, an adequate level of health literacy is likely critical in ensuring patient compliance and proficiency in self-management. Little is known about the association between health literacy and outcomes among patients with heart failure,” the authors write.
Pamela N. Peterson, M.D., M.S.P.H., of the Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, and colleagues evaluated the association between low health literacy and all-cause mortality and hospitalization among a population of outpatients with heart failure.
Topical treatment may prevent melanoma
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While incidents of melanoma continue to increase despite the use of sunscreen and skin screenings, a topical compound called ISC-4 may prevent melanoma lesion formation, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.
“The steady increase in melanoma incidence suggests that additional preventive approaches are needed to complement these existing strategies,” said Gavin Robertson, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology, pathology, dermatology and surgery, and director of Penn State Hershey Melanoma Center.
Researchers targeted the protein Akt3, which plays a central role in 70 percent of melanoma by preventing cell death and has the potential to prevent early stages of melanoma.
Unique AED pads give hearts a second chance
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An invention by Rice University bioengineering students in collaboration with the Texas Heart Institute (THI) is geared toward giving immediate second chances to arrhythmia victims headed toward cardiac arrest.
For their capstone design project, a team of Rice seniors created a unique pad system for automated external defibrillators (AEDs), common devices that can shock a victim’s heart back into a proper rhythm in an emergency.
Often, the first shock doesn’t reset a heart and the procedure must be repeated, but the sticky pads on the chest must first be repositioned. The pads need to be in the right location to send current through the heart, and someone with no experience who tries to provide aid might miss the first time.
Do painkillers interfere with antidepressants?
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Certain types of antidepressants may not work as well in people that take painkillers such as ibuprofen and aspirin, suggests a new study.
The findings can’t prove that the painkillers, called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, stop antidepressants from working, the authors said. But the possible link is something for patients with depression - and the doctors treating them - to think about when treating pain and inflammation, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS.
“This is certainly something that clinicians and individuals should be keeping in mind,” Jennifer Warner-Schmidt, the study’s lead author from The Rockefeller University in New York City, told Reuters Health.
Streptococci and E. coli continue to put newborns at risk for sepsis
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Bloodstream infections in newborns can lead to serious complications with substantial morbidity and mortality. What’s more, the pathogens responsible for neonatal infections have changed over time. In recent years, however, antibiotic prophylaxis given to at-risk mothers has reduced the incidence of early-onset group B streptococcal infections among their babies.
A new nationwide, multi-site study aimed at determining current early-onset sepsis rates among newborns, the pathogens involved, and associated morbidity and mortality demonstrates that the most frequent pathogens associated with sepsis are group B streptococci (GBS) in full-term infants and Escherichia coli in preterm infants.
The study, which included nearly 400,000 newborns, also found that infection rates in newborns increased with decreasing gestational age and birth weight. The overall rate of infection was 0.98 per 1,000 live births; 0.41 per 1,000 live births involving GBS and 0.28 per 1,000 live births involving E. coli.
Blocking crucial molecule could help treat multiple sclerosis, Jefferson neuroscientists say
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Reporting in Nature Immunology, Jefferson neuroscientists have identified a driving force behind autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), and suggest that blocking this cell-signaling molecule is the first step in developing new treatments to eradicate these diseases.
Researchers led by Abdolmohamad Rostami, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, found that GM-CSF, which stands for Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, appears to be the key culprit in the onset of MS, because without it, T helper 17 cells (Th17) cells did not induce the MS-like disease in an experimental animal model.
Th17 cells have been shown to play an important pathogenic role in humans and experimental models of autoim¬mune diseases, but the mechanisms behind this have remained elusive until now.
Penn Research Using Frog Embryos Leads to New Understanding of Cardiac Development
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During embryonic development, cells migrate to their eventual location in the adult body plan and begin to differentiate into specific cell types. Thanks to new research at the University of Pennsylvania, there is new insight into how these processes regulate tissues formation in the heart.
A developmental biologist at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet, along with a colleague, Young-Hoon Lee of South Korea’s Chonbuk National University, has mapped the embryonic region that becomes the part of the heart that separates the outgoing blood in Xenopus, a genus of frog.
Xenopus is a commonly used model organism for developmental studies, and is a particularly interesting for this kind of research because amphibians have a single ventricle and the outflow tract septum is incomplete.
Addiction to sunbeds gave me skin cancer… and left me with a gaping hole in my leg
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A woman who admits her sunbed addiction left her looking like an ‘Oompa Loompa’ was left with a gaping hole in her leg after a battle with skin cancer.
Doctors were forced to gouge away part of Stacey Pickess’s leg when her twice-weekly sunbed habit left her with a malignant melanoma.
The 28-year-old beautician managed to beat the cancer - but has been left with a hole the size of a golf ball in her lower leg as a constant reminder.
Playing music as a child helps you stay sharp in old age
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Endless hours of piano practice can be the bane of a child’s life - but there might be an added benefit of sticking with it.
A study has found that learning a musical instrument as a child could keep you sharp into old age.
Pensioners who had piano, flute, clarinet or other lessons as a youngster, did better on intelligence tests than others.
Scientists take steps to making “bionic” leg
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As 20-year-old Hailey Daniswicz flexes muscles in her thigh, electrodes attached to her leg instruct a computer avatar to flex its knee and ankle—parts of Hailey’s leg that have been missing since 2005.
Daniswicz, a sophomore at Northwestern University who lost her lower leg to bone cancer, is training the computer to recognize slight movements in her thigh so she can eventually be fitted with a “bionic” leg—a robotic prosthesis she would control with her own nerves and muscles.
“We’re really integrating the machine with the person,” said Levi Hargrove, a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Center for Bionic Medicine who is leading the project.
UK immigrant screening misses most latent TB: study
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British tuberculosis screening for new immigrants fails to detect most imported cases of latent disease and screening should be widened to include more people from the Indian subcontinent, scientists said on Thursday.
Britain has recently been dubbed “the tuberculosis (TB) capital of Europe” and is the only country in Western Europe with rising rates of disease.
Current British border policies require immigrants from countries with a TB incidence higher than 40 per 100,000 people to have a chest X-ray on arrival to check for active TB.
