South Korea stem cell scientist guilty of fraud
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A South Korean court Monday found disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk guilty of fraud and handed down a suspended sentence in a case that sent shockwaves throughout the global scientific community.
Hwang, once a scientist with rock-star like status for bringing South Korea to the forefront of stem cell studies, had faced trial on charges of fraud, misusing state funds and violating bioethics laws.
“He was guilty of fabrication,” the Seoul court said in a verdict in the trial that stretched more than three years and included painstaking details about the scientific work Hwang and his team had performed at Seoul National University.
Heart attacks up for women, but survival is too
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The good news: Younger women’s survival after heart attack has improved substantially over the past decade, according to a new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The not-so-good news: Women younger than 55 are still less likely to survive a heart attack than their male counterparts, Dr. Viola Vaccarino of Emory University in Atlanta and her colleagues found. And another study in the same journal found heart attacks are becoming more common among women 35 to 54 years old.
Vaccarino and her team first reported a major gender difference in heart attack survival in people under 60 in 1999, a finding other investigators have since confirmed. To investigate whether things might have gotten better, they looked at a registry of more than 900,000 people hospitalized for a heart attack from 1994 to 2006.
Healthcare system wastes up to $800 billion a year
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The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.
The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.
“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial,” the report reads.
Deadly Stomach Infection Rising in Community Settings
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Mayo Clinic researchers have found that a sometimes deadly stomach bug, Clostridium difficile, is on the rise in outpatient settings. Clostridium difficile is a serious bacteria that can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon. These findings were presented today at the 2009 American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Annual Meeting in San Diego.
VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources are available on the Mayo Clinic News Blog.
Clostridium difficile, often called C. difficile or “C. diff”, is a bacterium that is resistant to some antibiotics and is most often contracted by the elderly in hospitals and nursing homes.
Feelings of Stigmatization May Discourage HIV Patients from Proper Care
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The feeling of stigmatization that people living with HIV often experience doesn’t only exact a psychological toll —new UCLA research suggests it can also lead to quantifiably negative health outcomes.
In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers from the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA found that a large number of HIV-positive individuals who reported feeling stigmatized also reported poor access to care or suboptimal adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART).
In fact, individuals who experienced high levels of internalized stigma were four times as likely as those who didn’t to report poor access to medical care; they were three times as likely to report suboptimal adherence to HIV medications.
Iron Overload: Treatment for Common Genetic Disorder
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Absorbing and storing too much iron can cause an array of health problems—for starters, joint pain, fatigue, weakness and loss of interest in sex. This condition, called hemochromatosis, is the most common genetic disorder in the United States, most frequently occurring in people of Northern European descent.
The October issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter provides an overview of hemochromatosis, including its genetic cause, subtle early symptoms, potential health risks and treatment.
When people have hemochromatosis, their bodies absorb and store too much iron from their normal diet. Over decades, the iron levels can build up in various organs, most often the liver and heart. Without treatment, iron levels accumulate to 20 times that of a person without the disorder. The result can be irreversible scarring of the liver (cirrhosis), liver cancer, diabetes, heart failure, heart rhythm problems, arthritis, impotence or darkening of the skin.
Sensor biochips could aid in cancer diagnosis and treatment
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It is very difficult to predict whether a cancer drug will help an individual patient: only around one third of drugs will work directly in a given patient. Researchers at the Heinz Nixdorf Chair for Medical Electronics at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have developed a new test process for cancer drugs. With the help of microchips, they can establish in the laboratory whether a patient’s tumor cells will react to a given drug. This chip could help in future with the rapid identification of the most effective medication for the individual patient.
Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the Western world. According to the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, approximately 450,000 people develop cancer every year in Germany. Although the doctors who treat cancer have numerous cancer drugs at their disposal today, the treatment must be precisely tailored to the patient and the type of cancer in question to be as effective as possible. If it takes a second or third try to find a drug that works, the patient loses valuable time in which the tumor can continue to grow.
In the future, miniature laboratories could provide the fast help required here. A lab-on-a-chip is a device—made of glass, for example—that is just a few millimeters across and has bioelectronic sensors that monitor the vitality of living cells. The chips sit in small wells, known as microtiter plates, and are covered with a patient’s tumor cells. A robot changes the culture fluid in each well containing a chip at intervals of just a few minutes.
Researchers find ways to encourage spinal cord regeneration after injury
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Animal research is suggesting new ways to aid recovery after spinal cord injury. New studies demonstrate that diet affects recovery rate and show how to make stem cell therapies safer for spinal injury patients. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health.
In other animal studies, researchers identified molecules that encourage spinal cord regeneration and ways to block molecules that discourage it. The findings may help shape therapies for the more than one million people in North America who have spinal cord injuries.
Research released today shows that:
Iraq to shut thousands of schools over H1N1 flu
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Iraq will temporarily shut down thousands of schools in two provinces and some in Baghdad after discovering 36 new cases of the H1N1 flu virus, Iraqi officials said on Tuesday.
Iraq’s health ministry has discovered the flu in 22 secondary school girls and nine of their relatives in Wasit province, four students in Baghdad and a man in Dhi Kar province, General Director of Public Health Ihsan Jaafar said.
Provincial authorities in both provinces said they would briefly shut schools to prevent the virus’ spread. The officials said around 1,200 Wasit schools would close for a week and some 1,500 schools in Dhi Kar for 10 days from Wednesday.
Bowel disease drugs increase cancer risk: study
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Some treatments for inflammatory bowel disease increase the risk of infection-related cancers, French scientists said on Monday, but the benefits of the drugs still outweigh the risks.
Thiopurine drugs—immunosuppressive medicines that inhibit the body’s immune system—are regularly used to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the researchers said, but can increase the risk of cancers linked to viral infections.
Laurent Beaugerie and colleagues at the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris looked at more than 19,000 patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Around 30 percent of the patients were taking thiopurines, 14 percent had stopped taking them and 56 percent had never taken them.
More MRI machines may mean more back surgeries
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A new study suggests that the increasing availability of MRI scanners may be feeding an increase in surgery for lower back pain—despite doubts about the effectiveness of surgery for most people.
Looking at MRI availability in 318 U.S. metropolitan areas, researchers found that Medicare patients with low back pain were more likely to get a scan when they lived in an area with more MRI machines.
Greater MRI availability was also linked to higher odds of getting lower back surgery, the investigators report in the journal Health Affairs.
Loss of Tumor-Suppressor and DNA-Maintenance Proteins Causes Tissue Demise
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A study published in the October issue of Nature Genetics demonstrates that loss of the tumor-suppressor protein p53, coupled with elimination of the DNA-maintenance protein ATR, severely disrupts tissue maintenance in mice. As a result, tissues deteriorate rapidly, which is generally fatal in these animals. In addition, the study provides supportive evidence for the use of inhibitors of ATR in cancer therapy.
Essentially, says senior author Eric Brown, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the findings highlight the fact that day-to-day maintenance required to keep proliferative tissues like skin and intestines functional is about more than just regeneration, a stem cell-based process that forms the basis of tissue renewal. It’s also about housekeeping, the clearing away of damaged cells.
Whereas loss of ATR causes DNA damage, the job of p53 is to monitor cells for such damage and either stimulate the early demise of such cells or prevent their replication, the housekeeping part of the equation.
New chromosomal abnormality identified in leukemia associated with Down syndrome
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Researchers identified a new chromosomal abnormality in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) that appears to work in concert with another mutation to give rise to cancer. This latest anomaly is particularly common in children with Down syndrome.
The findings have already resulted in new diagnostic tests and potential tools for tracking a patient’s response to treatment. The research, led by scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, also highlights a new potential ALL treatment. Clinicians are already planning trials of an experimental medication targeting one of the altered genes.
This study is published in the October 18 online edition of Nature Genetics.
“A substantial proportion of children with ALL lack one of the previously identified, common chromosomal abnormalities. Also, children with Down syndrome have an increased risk of ALL, but the reasons why are unclear,” said Charles Mullighan, M.D., Ph.D., assistant member in the St. Jude Department of Pathology. Mullighan is senior author of the study, which involved scientists from 10 institutions in the U.S. and Italy. “Our results have provided important data regarding the mechanisms contributing to leukemia in these cases,” he said.
New IOF report explains importance of FRAX® in osteoporosis management
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The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) will issue a new 16-page report on FRAX® to mark World Osteoporosis Day on October 20, 2009. The report is available at http://www.iofbonehealth.org/publications/frax.html
The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) will issue a new 16-page report on FRAX® to mark World Osteoporosis Day on October 20, 2009. The report is available at http://www.iofbonehealth.org/publications/frax.html
FRAX®, or ‘WHO Fracture Risk Assessment Tool’, is a free online tool developed by the World Health Organization at http://www.shef.ac.uk/FRAX/. The tool helps clinicians to better identify women and men in need of intervention (at highest risk of fragility fractures) and thereby to improve the allocation of limited healthcare resources. FRAX® utilizes several known clinical risk factors rather than BMD alone to calculate a patient’s 10-year fracture probability, thus making it particularly useful in regions where DXA technology is scarce or not available.
FDA warns against fake online H1N1 remedy claims
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The U.S. government this week warned against the online marketing of unlicensed health remedies claiming to protect against H1N1 swine flu infection, including fake “Tamiflu” pills from India.
The Food and Drug Administration reported on Thursday that it had purchased and analyzed several products represented on the Internet as Tamiflu, Roche Holding AG’s brand name version of the antiviral drug oseltamivir.
One order, which arrived in an unmarked envelope from India, consisted of unlabeled white pills that contained talc and the common pain reliever acetaminophen, the FDA said. Others contained various amounts of oseltamivir but were not approved for use in the United States.
