Moffitt Cancer Center Researchers Find Potential New Therapeutic Target for Treating Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
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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?
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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.
Opioid prescription is on the increase
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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
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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.
Surgical procedure appears to improve outcomes after bleeding stroke
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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
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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.
More sex for married couples with traditional divisions of housework
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Married men and women who divide household chores in traditional ways report having more sex than couples who share so-called men’s and women’s work, according to a new study co-authored by sociologists at the University of Washington.
Other studies have found that husbands got more sex if they did more housework, implying that sex was in exchange for housework. But those studies did not factor in what types of chores the husbands were doing.
The new study, published in the February issue of the journal American Sociological Review, shows that sex isn’t a bargaining chip. Instead, sex is linked to what types of chores each spouse completes.
Couples who follow traditional gender roles around the house – wives doing the cooking, cleaning and shopping; men doing yard work, paying bills and auto maintenance – reported greater sexual frequency.
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.
Breathing program may held save newborns’ lives: studies
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Training midwives and other birth attendants to help babies start breathing immediately after birth if they need help may prevent stillbirths and newborn deaths in the developing world, according to two U.S. studies.
So-called birth asphyxia - when babies are born not breathing - is one of the major causes of newborn death in regions with limited resources, said researchers whose work appeared in Pediatrics.
Reducing infant mortality in the developing world is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals - but progress has been slow, according to Jeffrey Perlman from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who helped implement the Helping Babies Breathe program in Tanzania.
Nearly half of U.S. children late receiving vaccines
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Nearly half of babies and toddlers in the United States aren’t getting recommended vaccines on time, according to a study - and if enough skip vaccines, whole schools or communities could be vulnerable to diseases such as whooping cough and measles.
“What we’re worried about is if (undervaccination) becomes more and more common, is it possible this places children at an increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases?” said study leader Jason Glanz, with Kaiser Permanente Colorado in Denver.
“It’s possible that some of these diseases that we worked so hard to eliminate (could) come back.”
Glanz and his colleagues analyzed data from eight managed care organizations, including immunization records for about 323,000 children.
Japan tsunami stress may have brought on seizures: study
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The number of seizure patients in a northern Japanese fishing community devastated by the March 11, 2011 tsunami spiked in the weeks following the disaster, according to a Japanese study.
The study, published in the journal Epilepsia, looked at 440 patient records from Kesennuma City Hospital, in a city that was devastated by the massive tsunami touched off by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Thirteen patients were admitted with seizures in the eight weeks after the disaster, but only one had been admitted in the two months before March 11.
Previous research has linked stressful life-threatening disasters with an increased risk of seizures, but most case reports lacked clinical data with multiple patients.
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.
