Public Health
Arkansas governor vetoes bill banning abortions at 20 weeks
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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
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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.”
Just say don’t: Doctors question routine tests and treatments
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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
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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.
Stay cool and live longer?
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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.
Food, drink industries undermine health policy, study finds
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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.
African-Americans still more likely to die from cancer
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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
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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
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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.
Free clinics reduce emergency department visits
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People who receive primary care from free clinics are less likely to use the emergency department for minor issues, according to a team of medical researchers.
Nationally, the number of emergency departments (EDs) has decreased yet the number of ED visits has gone up, the team reported. Therefore, it is important to figure out how to reduce unnecessary ED visits.
According to the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, there are more than 1,200 free clinics nationwide. Many of these clinics work in cooperation with one of their local hospitals.
Wenke Hwang, associate professor of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues analyzed records of uninsured patients from five hospitals and four free clinics across neighboring Virginia communities.
Limited impact on child abuse from visits, intervention: study
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Home visits and doctor’s office interventions to prevent child abuse appear to have only limited success, with evidence mixed on whether they help at all, according to a U.S. analysis based on ten international studies.
As a result, the government-backed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) said this week that current evidence is “insufficient” to recommend such programs for dealing with the hundreds of thousands of children reported to be abused each year.
“There have been a few studies done… (but) there’s inconsistency in the results across these trials,” said David Grossman, from Group Health Research institute in Seattle who is a member of the USPSTF panel. “I wish we could be more definitive on this.”
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, about 675,000 children were reported as victims of child abuse or neglect in 2011, just under one percent of children nationwide.
ADHD rates creeping up in California
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More children are being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) now than were a decade ago, according to new research from a large California health plan.
It’s not clear what’s behind that trend, researchers noted. Possible explanations include better awareness of the condition among parents and doctors or improved access to health care for kids with symptoms, according to Dr. Darios Getahun, the study’s lead author.
Prior research has also shown an increasing trend in ADHD diagnoses, according to Getahun, from the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Medical Group in Pasadena.
However, his team had strict criteria for determining which kids had ADHD, requiring a clinical diagnosis and prescriptions for ADHD medications. Past studies have relied on parent and teacher reports alone, Getahun noted.
How cells know when it’s time to eat themselves
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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a molecular mechanism regulating autophagy, a fundamental stress response used by cells to help ensure their survival in adverse conditions.
The findings are published online in the January 17 issue of Cell.
Senior author Kun-Liang Guan, PhD, a professor of pharmacology at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and colleagues report that an enzyme called AMPK, typically involved in sensing and modulating energy use in cells, also regulates autophagic enzymes.
Autophagy, which derives from the Greek words for “self” and “eat,” is triggered to protect cells when times are tough, such as when cells are starved for nutrients, infected or suffering from damaged organelles, such as ribosomes and mitochondria. Much like the human body in freezing conditions will reduce operations in extremities to preserve core temperatures and organ functions, cellular autophagy involves the degradation and synthesis of some internal cellular elements to ensure survival of the whole.
NTU study looks at national attitudes towards homosexuals
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Attitudes of Singaporeans and permanent residents toward gays and lesbians although sharply polarised and predominantly negative, have shifted slightly over a five-year span to become a little more favourable. This was found by a research team from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
A nationally representative survey found that people with higher levels of education and freethinkers tend to have more positive attitudes. Those who had higher interpersonal contact with gay men and lesbians and watched more films and television shows with homosexual characters were also likely to express more positive attitudes toward gays and lesbians, and to show greater acceptance.
“This study is a continuation of an earlier one in 2005, which was initiated to provide a nationally representative and objective examination of public attitudes toward homosexuality in Singapore and to contribute to scholarship on homosexuality in Asia. By investigating some of the predictors of attitudes towards lesbians and gay men, it can help to inform public debate and guide future policy recommendations,” said Professor Benjamin Detenber, Chair of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, who led a team of researchers to conduct this study in early 2010.
The study of 959 adult Singaporeans and permanent residents (PRs) found that while there has been a slight change in attitudes towards lesbians and gays in Singapore between 2005 and 2010, the change is significant, as it suggests a temporal shift in Singaporeans’ values and views about homosexuals.
Colorado man awarded $7.2 mill in “popcorn lung” lawsuit
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A U.S. federal court jury on Wednesday awarded a Colorado man $7.2 million in damages for developing a chronic condition known as popcorn lung from a chemical used in flavoring microwave popcorn.
Jurors agreed with the claims by Wayne Watson, 59, that the popcorn manufacturer and the supermarket chain that sold it were negligent by failing to warn on labels that the butter flavoring, diacetyl, was dangerous.
The condition is a form of obstructive lung disease that makes it difficult for air to flow out of the lungs and is irreversible, according to WebMd.
Watson, of suburban Denver, was the first consumer of microwave popcorn diagnosed with the disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, his attorney Kenneth McClain said.
