Elevation of fat-derived molecule foretells early insulin resistance
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A study in the June 15 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reveals that elevated levels of a molecule called RBP4 (retinol binding protein 4) can foretell early stages in the development of insulin resistance, a major cause of type 2 diabetes as well as cardiovascular disease.
The new findings, led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), offer a potential new target for the development of anti-diabetic therapies to lower serum RBP4 levels as well as an early means of identifying individuals who are at risk of developing diabetes - before the onset of overt disease.
“Type 2 diabetes is a rapidly increasing epidemic in the Western world,” explains senior author Barbara Kahn, MD, Chief of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at BIDMC and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Since it is now occurring even in childhood, predictions indicate that it could shorten lifespan in the U.S. for the first time in more than a century.”
Pesticides increase risk of developing Parkinson’s disease
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Mayo Clinic researchers have found that using pesticides for farming or other purposes increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease for men.
Pesticide exposure did not increase the risk of Parkinson’s in women, and no other household or industrial chemicals were significantly linked to the disease in either men or women.
Findings will be published in the June issue of the journal Movement Disorders.
Antidepressants linked to suicide risk in elderly
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The risk of suicide among older patients appears to be increased during the first month of therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, but this increased risk is fairly low, researchers in Canada report.
Dr. David N. Juurlink, of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, and colleagues examined coroner’s data, along with data on prescriptions, physician billing claims and hospitalization, for more than 1.2 million subjects who were at least 66 years of age between 1992 and 2000.
A total of 1138 individuals who suicide were identified and these individuals were closely matched to 4,552 subjects who served as comparison group, according to the team’s report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Researchers Say Low-Carb Diet Benefits Diabetics
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With a continuing epidemic of type 2 diabetes and dwindling resources to combat it, new approaches are clearly needed. Because it is disease of insulin and blood sugar regulation, low-carbohydrate diets have been an obvious choice for diabetic patients but have been resisted by some professionals and agencies in favor of pharmacologic approaches.
Now, medical researchers in Sweden have reported a follow-up study of patients on a low-carbohydrate diet up to 22 months and report stable improvement and reduced need for medication.
The Swedish group, led by Dr. Jorgen Vesti Nielsen, had previously reported on16 obese patients on a 20-percent carbohydrate diet over 6 months. After 22 months, patients continued to show improvement in hemoglobin A1C, a marker for long-term blood-sugar levels in diabetes.
Smokers with Heavily Lined Faces Run Five Times the Risk of Progressive Lung Disease
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Middle aged smokers, who are heavily lined with wrinkles, are five times as likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD for short, suggests research published ahead of print in Thorax.
COPD is an umbrella term for a range of progressive chronic lung diseases, such as emphysema and bronchitis, which block the airways and restrict oxygen flow around the body.
In excess of 1 million people are thought to have COPD in the UK, many of whom have not been diagnosed. And the World Health Organization estimates that it will become the third leading cause of death in the world by 2020.
India tightens laws to stop destruction of females
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India plans to tighten laws banning prenatal tests to determine the sex of the fetus in a bid to curb the killing of thousands of female fetuses, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said on Wednesday.
India’s Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act—which outlaws doctors from carrying out sex determination tests—has been in force since 1994 but social activists say local authorities lack the will to combat female infanticide.
Besides, families seek sons over daughters and unscrupulous doctors attempt to get around the law, making enforcement difficult, they say.
Parkinson’s patients stomach new drug better than conventional meds
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Several studies conducted at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston show that a new kind of orally disintegrating tablets provides improved symptom relief for patients with Parkinson’s disease. Results are reported in the journal Therapy.
A new form of the medication selegiline, used for years to manage motor complications in Parkinson’s patients, avoids first-pass metabolism and sidesteps compromises to its efficacy and tolerability. The drug is currently awaiting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for use as an adjunctive therapy to the drug levodopa in the management of the neurodegenerative disease.
“Although a variety of therapeutic options exist, there is a tremendous amount of unmet need in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease,” said co-author Dr. Joseph Jankovic, professor of neurology at BCM and director of the college’s Parkinson’s Disease Center and Movement Disorders Clinic.”
Costs pose hurdle for diabetes monitoring devices
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Monitoring systems that can help diabetics better control fluctuations in their blood sugar levels will take time to catch on because they are expensive and insurers are not yet providing coverage for the devices, physicians and analysts said.
Continuous glucose monitors are an important step forward in diabetes care because they provide more frequent readings on blood sugar levels than current finger-stick tests, allowing patients to better manage the condition through diet adjustments and insulin injections, physicians said.
The systems, however, are expensive, due to the cost of their disposable wire-like sensors, which are inserted just under the skin and must be replaced every few days. The sensors measure glucose levels and transmit the data wirelessly to a pager-size receiver.
New test identifies patients who benefit from targeted cancer drugs
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The Weisenthal Cancer Group has announced that clinical data published at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) show that a new laboratory test it has developed accurately identified patients who would benefit from treatment with the molecularly-targeted anti-cancer therapies gefitinib (Iressa, AstraZeneca) and erlotinib (Tarceva, Genentech).
The new test, called the EGFRx assay, predicted accurately for the survival of patients treated with the targeted drugs. The finding is important because the EGFRx test, which can also be applied to many emerging targeted cancer drugs, could help to help to solve the growing problem of knowing which patients should receive costly, new treatments that can have harmful side-effects and which work for some but not all cancer patients who receive them.
Larry Weisenthal, M.D., Ph.D., a medical oncologist and developer of the EGFRx assay explains that the new test relies upon what he calls “Whole Cell Profiling” in which living tumor cells are removed from an individual cancer patient and exposed in the laboratory to the new drugs. A variety of metabolic and apoptotic measurements are then used to determine if a specific drug was successful at killing the patient’s cancer cells. The whole cell profiling method differs from other tests in that it assesses the activity of a drug upon combined effect of all cellular processes, using several metabolic and morphologic endpoints. Other tests, such as those which identify DNA or RNA sequences or expression of individual proteins often examine only one component of a much larger, interactive process.
Diabetes figures all set to blow out by 2050
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Researchers who carried out a study of diabetes are predicting that by the year 2050 there will be 39 million with the disease in the United States.
They have based their estimate on the figures for prevalence and incident in the period between 2000 and 2004 which show a steady rise in the national incidence of diagnosed diabetes.
This projection represents 9.3 million more people with diagnosed diabetes than previously thought.
U.N. launches “Unite for Diabetes” campaign
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The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) launched its “Unite for Diabetes” campaign this week here at the Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association, urging global support of the United Nations Resolution on diabetes.
The U.N.‘s resolution aims to raise awareness of the global burden of diabetes, and officials are calling for worldwide governmental support of this effort.
New figures announced by the International Diabetes Federation show that diabetes affects 230 million people, approximately 6 percent of the world’s adult population. Seven of the ten countries with the highest prevalence are in the developing world.
Folic acid may be the new cancer prevention therapy
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According to a new study supplements of folic acid may help prevent cancer.
Italian researchers enrolled 43 patients with untreated laryngeal leucoplakia and treated them with folic acid (5mg three times a day) and evaluated the progression of leucoplakia every 30 days for six months.
Leucoplakia appears as white patches in the mucus membranes of the mouth or throat, and can contain precancerous cells.
Roulette wheel can aid treatment decisions
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Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have developed a tool that they hope will help ease the burden of making difficult treatment decisions. It’s a roulette wheel that allows patients to visualize the probable outcomes associated with different treatment options for different diseases.
The roulette wheel can be adapted to represent any current clinical question and is based on “best current evidence,” according to its developers, Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman and colleagues.
For illustration purposes, Hoffman and colleagues describe inn the journal PLoS Medicine how a healthy 65-year-old man might use the roulette wheel to decide whether or not to be screened for prostate cancer with a standard PSA blood test.
Are we over-dosing on antibiotics?
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Dutch researchers say that a three day course of antibiotics is just as effective as the usual seven to 10 days course when it comes to treating common pneumonia.
The researchers believe that a shorter course of antibiotic treatment may also help curtail the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Lead researcher Dr. Jan M Prins, an internist in infectious diseases at the Academic Medical Center, in Amsterdam says it appears that three days of medication is sufficient in children, and it now appears to be the same for adults with mild to moderate-severe community acquired pneumonia.
Physicians can’t ethically interrogate prisoners
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Psychiatrists and other physicians should not help the military or police to interrogate prisoners, according to a new report from the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA).
Helping to plan or monitor prisoner interrogations with the “intention of intervening in the process” are actions outside the bounds of ethical behavior, CEJA said here Sunday.
Dr. Priscilla Ray of Houston, who serves as chair of CEJA said: “Physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation, because a role as physician-interrogator undermines the physician’s role as a healer and thereby erodes trust in the individual physician interrogator and in the medical profession.”
