Arkansas governor vetoes bill banning abortions at 20 weeks
|
|
Democratic Governor Mike Beebe on Tuesday vetoed a bill to ban most abortions in Arkansas at 20 weeks into pregnancy, though state lawmakers can override his decision with a simple majority vote.
The measure, which had been approved by an 80 to 10 vote in the state House and by a 25 to 7 vote in the state Senate, would provide exceptions only in cases of rape, incest or to save a mother’s life. It is one of several bills introduced by Republicans this year seeking to restrict abortion. This is the first time the party has controlled both chambers since the Reconstruction era.
Beebe said in his veto letter that because it “would impose a ban on a woman’s right to choose an elective, nontherapeutic abortion before viability, (the bill), if it became law, would squarely contradict Supreme Court precedent.”
Arkansas currently limits abortions after 25 weeks.
Studying the health of same-sex couples
|
|
Same-sex couples that live together report worse health than people of the same socioeconomic status who are in heterosexual marriages, according to a national study that could have implications for the gay marriage debate.
Research has shown that married people are healthier than the unmarried. Yet, while gay marriage is gaining support in Michigan and around the country, most same-sex cohabiters do not have the option of legally marrying their partners, noted Hui Liu, Michigan State University sociologist and lead investigator on the study.
While Liu’s research does not directly assess the potential health consequences of legalizing same-sex marriage, she said it’s plausible that allowing same-sex couples to legally wed could improve their health.
“Legalizing same-sex marriage,” Liu said, “could provide the benefits associated with marriage – such as partner health-insurance benefits and increased social and psychological support - which may directly and indirectly influence the health of people in same-sex unions.”
Researchers explore PKC role in lung disease
|
|
New research examines the role of PKC in airway smooth muscle contraction and raises the possibility that this enzyme could be a therapeutic target for treating asthma, COPD, and other lung diseases.
In the lungs, pathological increases in the contraction of the smooth muscle cells (SMCs) lining airway walls- a process that decreases airflow - contribute to the chain of events leading to asthma and COPD, two common lung diseases. Jose Perez-Zoghbi and colleagues from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center designed a series of experiments to investigate the role of the enzyme PKC in this process. The results, which appear in The Journal of General Physiology, provide new insight into the mechanisms involved in regulating luminal diameter of small airways and reveal PKC as a potential target for drug therapies.
The researchers used phase-contrast video microscopy, confocal microscopy, Western blot analysis, and pharmacological activators and inhibitors to investigate the role of PKC in airway SMC contraction in mouse lung slices.
Just say don’t: Doctors question routine tests and treatments
|
|
Now there are 135.
That’s how many medical tests, treatments and other procedures - many used for decades - physicians have now identified as almost always unnecessary and often harmful, and which doctors and patients should therefore avoid or at least seriously question.
The lists of procedures, released on Thursday by the professional societies of 17 medical specialties ranging from neurology and ophthalmology to thoracic surgery, are part of a campaign called Choosing Wisely. Organized by the American Board of Internal Medicine’s foundation, it aims to get doctors to stop performing useless procedures and spread the word to patients that some don’t help and might hurt.
“Americans’ view of healthcare is that more is better,” said Dr Glenn Stream, a family physician in Spokane, Washington, and board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, which has identified 10 unnecessary procedures. “But there are a lot of things that are done frequently but don’t contribute to people’s health and may be harmful.”
Degenerative cervical spine disease may not progress over time
|
|
Follow-up data on patients with degenerative disease of the upper (cervical) spinal vertebrae show little or no evidence of worsening degeneration over time, according to a study in the February 15 issue of Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
For many patients with “unstable” cervical degenerative spondylolisthesis, observation may be a better choice than surgery, according to the new research by Dr Moon Soo Park and colleagues of Medical College of Hallym University, Republic of Korea. They write, “Our results suggest that the majority of these patients may be stable and do not develop progression of disease or catastrophic neurologic deficits.”
Is Unstable Spondylolisthesis Really Unstable?
The researchers analyzed the “natural history” of cervical degenerative spondylolisthesis in 27 patients. Degenerative spondylolisthesis refers to “slipped” vertebrae caused by bone degeneration. Because spondylolisthesis is commonly thought to result in instability of the cervical spine, spinal fusion surgery (arthrodesis) is sometimes considered the appropriate treatment.
Moffitt Cancer Center Researchers Find Potential New Therapeutic Target for Treating Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
|
|
Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have found a potential targeted therapy for patients with tobacco-associated non-small cell lung cancer. It is based on the newly identified oncogene IKBKE, which helps regulate immune response.
The study appeared in the Feb. 13 online issue of Oncogene.
The IKBKE gene is part of a family of enzyme complexes involved in increasing cellular inflammation. IKBKE overexpression has been associated with breast and prostate cancers. However, it had not been linked to environmental carcinogen, such as tobacco smoke, until now.
Tobacco smoke is the strongest documented initiator and promoter of lung cancer. The traditional model holds that tobacco components promote carcinogenesis through a process that leads to DNA damage.
Stay cool and live longer?
|
|
Scientists have known for nearly a century that cold-blooded animals, such as worms, flies and fish all live longer in cold environments, but have not known exactly why.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute have identified a genetic program that promotes longevity of roundworms in cold environments - and this genetic program also exists in warm-blooded animals, including humans.
“This raises the intriguing possibility that exposure to cold air - or pharmacological stimulation of the cold-sensitive genetic program - —may promote longevity in mammals,” said Shawn Xu, LSI faculty member and the Bernard W. Agranoff Collegiate Professor in the Life Sciences at the U-M Medical School.
The research was published online Feb. 14 in the journal Cell.
Scientists had long assumed that animals live longer in cold environments because of a passive thermodynamic process, reasoning that low temperatures reduce the rate of chemical reactions and thereby slow the rate of aging.
Opioid prescription is on the increase
|
|
More and more opioids are being prescribed for pain relief in Germany. This is the conclusion arrived at by Ingrid Schubert, Peter Ihle, and Rainer Sabatowski, whose study of a sample of inhabitants of the state of Hesse with health insurance from a large statutory provider is published in the latest issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2013; 110(4): 45-51).
Behind this study lies the intention to improve pain treatment with opioids, particularly for patients with cancer. Prescribing too little results in inadequate alleviation of pain, while supplying too much entails the risk of addiction, especially in patients who do not have cancer.
The proportion of persons in the sample who received opioids increased between 2000 and 2010, and so did the number of daily doses per recipient. 3.7 million inhabitants of Germany received opioids in 2010, a million more than in 2000. The frequency of prescription of WHO step 3 opioids increased - most of all in noncancer patients, in spite of the lack of good evidence for this indication.
Food, drink industries undermine health policy, study finds
|
|
Multinational food, drink and alcohol companies are using strategies similar to those employed by the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies, health experts said on Tuesday.
In an international analysis of involvement by so-called “unhealthy commodity” companies in health policy-making, researchers from Australia, Britain, Brazil and elsewhere said self-regulation was failing and it was time the industry was regulated more stringently from outside.
The researchers said that through the aggressive marketing of ultra-processed food and drink, multinational companies were now major drivers of the world’s growing epidemic of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
Surgical procedure appears to improve outcomes after bleeding stroke
|
|
A minimally invasive procedure to remove blood clots in brain tissue after hemorrhagic stroke appears safe and may also reduce long-term disability, according to late-breaking research presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2013.
Of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have intracerebral hemorrhages (ICH) each year, most are severely debilitated, said Daniel Hanley, M.D., lead author and professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md.
ICH is the most common type of bleeding stroke. It occurs when a weakened blood vessel inside the brain ruptures and leaks blood into surrounding brain tissue, causing neurological damage. There is not a specific evidence-based targeted treatment recommended for ICH and there is no long-term randomized data on surgical treatment.
In one-year results of the Phase II study, MISTIE (Minimally Invasive Surgery plus rtPA for Intracerebral Hemorrhage Evacuation), researchers found that patients treated with surgery and a clot- busting drug had less disability, spent less time in the hospital and were less likely to be in a long-term care facility than other ICH patients.
African-Americans still more likely to die from cancer
|
|
Drops in smoking may have helped drive cancer death rates down among black men during the last decade, but they are still more likely to die of cancer than whites, according to a new analysis.
“I think we see some really good news, but then we also see some trends that are going in the wrong direction,” said Carol DeSantis, the study’s lead author from the American Cancer Society (ACS) in Atlanta.
Using information from several databases, the researchers analyzed information on the number of cancers diagnosed and the number of cancer deaths reported across the U.S. between 1990 and 2009.
The biennial analysis found that improvements in cancer treatments and care have avoided nearly 200,000 cancer deaths in blacks since 1990.
Avoiding a cartography catastrophe
|
|
Since the mid-nineteenth century, maps have helped elucidate the deadly mysteries of diseases like cholera and yellow fever. Yet today’s global mapping of infectious diseases is considerably unreliable and may do little to inform the control of potential outbreaks, according to a new systematic mapping review of all clinically important infectious diseases known to humans.
Of the 355 infectious diseases assessed in the review, 174 showed a strong rationale for mapping and less than 5 percent of those have been mapped reliably. Unreliable mapping makes it difficult to fully understand the geographic scope and threat of disease and therefore make informed policy recommendations for managing it, write the authors of the study, which appears as open access on Feb. 4 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
An online, open-access database, which accompanies the study, provides a quantitative scheme for evaluating the quality of data available for each infectious disease as well as specific mapping recommendations for each disease. Among the recommendations for improving disease cartography are the use of new crowdsourcing techniques to gather data, such as analyzing the content and frequency of Twitter messages about disease. Twitter feeds during the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, for example, predicted outbreaks sooner than traditional disease surveillance methods.
A little tag with a large effect
|
|
February 4, 2013, New York, NY and Oxford, UK - Nearly every cell in the human body carries a copy of the full human genome. So how is it that the cells that detect light in the human eye are so different from those of, say, the beating heart or the spleen?
The answer, of course, is that each type of cell selectively expresses only a unique suite of genes, actively silencing those that are irrelevant to its function. Scientists have long known that one way in which such gene-silencing occurs is by the chemical modification of cytosine—one of the four bases of DNA that write the genetic code - to create an “epigenetic” marker known as 5-methylcytosine (5mC). Appropriate placement of this marker is essential to many normal biological processes, not least embryonic development. Conversely, its erroneous distribution contributes to the evolution of a broad range of cancers.
But 5mC is not the only epigenetic marker on the genomic block. About three years ago at Rockefeller University, Skirmantas Kriaucionis, currently a Ludwig researcher based at Oxford University, and Nathaniel Heintz, of Rockefeller University, discovered that a second modification of cytosine that converts it into 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) seems to play a similarly vital role in the selective expression of the genome. Since then, researchers have scrambled to figure out what precisely that role might be. In a recent issue of the journal Cell, Heintz, Kriaucionis and colleagues report that the 5hmC marker has an effect on gene expression opposite to that of 5mC, and identify how its signal is detected and broadly interpreted in the healthy brain cells of mice. Since changes in the distribution of 5hmC are known to take place in a broad range of tumor cells, these findings could prove to be of great value to cancer research.
To begin, the team mapped where exactly 5hmC is found across the genomes of three types of healthy mouse neural cells. They discovered that it is largely associated with DNA that is loosely looped about its protein scaffolding in the nucleus. The 5mC signal, meanwhile, is predominantly located on more tightly packed, less accessible stretches of DNA. It is on the loosely packed DNA that most gene expression takes place.
