Spousal spats may harm heart health
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The manner in which husbands and wives argue over such hot-button topics such as money, in-laws, and children, may be a factor in their risk of developing coronary atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries of the heart.
In a study of 150 couples, mostly in their 60s, researchers found that women who behaved in a hostile manner during marital disputes were more likely to have atherosclerosis, especially if their husbands were also hostile.
In men, hostility—their own or their wives—was not related to atherosclerosis. However, men who behaved in a dominating or controlling manner—or whose wives behaved in that way—were more likely to have clogged coronary arteries.
Length of time using Vioxx seen key in Merck trial
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Opening arguments in the next Vioxx liability trial start on Monday as Merck & Co. faces the lone lawyer who has beaten the company in one of these cases - this time representing two long-term users of the painkiller who say it caused their heart attacks.
So far, two juries have found Merck not liable, while Mark Lanier, a flamboyant Texas lawyer, helped secure a $253 million judgment for the widow of a Vioxx user last August.
The trial, set to begin next week in New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic City, marks the first involving plaintiffs who took the painkiller for more than 18 months.
Acupuncture shown to relieve migraines: study
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Acupuncture, one of the most popular complementary treatments, works as well as standard drugs for migraines, German researchers said on Thursday.
They compared the effects of real and fake acupuncture with drug treatments for migraine and found all equally effective.
“The main finding is that Chinese acupuncture is as effective as drug treatment for the prophylaxis of migraine,” said Hans-Christoph Diener, a neurologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
Japanese researchers find new way to make Tamiflu
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A team of Japanese researchers has developed a new way of producing the anti-flu drug Tamiflu that does not rely on natural ingredients and may help ensure more stable supplies, the head of the team said.
Tamiflu, produced by Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche Holding AG, is considered one of the best defenses against bird flu in humans, and there are fears of a possible shortage in the event of a global flu pandemic.
Arthritis drug may work better second time around
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Even if an initial course of methotrexate for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) gives disappointing results, persistence may pay off. A second course may be more successful, researchers report.
As they note in the journal Arthritis Research & Therapy, many patients continue to have active disease in spite of intensive therapy with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs).
Dr. Daniel Aletaha, from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and associates in Austria identified patients who underwent one course of DMARD that failed and then tried another type of treatment.
Breathing training can help heart failure patients
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People with heart failure and difficulty breathing may benefit considerably from using a device to train the muscles involved in breathing, Brazilian researchers report.
The Threshold Inspiratory Muscle Trainer (Healthscan Products, Inc.) applies a load while subjects breathe in, thus training the muscles to become stronger.
Dr. Jorge P. Ribeiro of Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Allegre and colleagues randomly assigned 32 patients to either a 12-week home-based program using the device with an inspiratory load maintained at 30 percent of maximal inspiratory pressure, or to a placebo program in which the participants had no inspiratory load.
Eat more whole grains to lower diabetes, heart risk
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A diet high in whole grains may lower a person’s likelihood of developing diabetes and heart disease, new study findings show.
Among more than 900 healthy men and women, those who reported consuming the most whole grains had lower levels of cholesterol and various markers of heart disease and better-controlled blood sugar.
“This suggests that people with a high whole-grain intake may have lower risks of diabetes and ischemic heart disease,” said study author Majken Karoline Jensen, of Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark.
C-reactive protein helps identify progressive precancerous lesions in the lung
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C-reactive protein (CRP), a biomarker for inflammation in the blood, can help to identify individuals whose abnormal precancerous lesions will advance closer to invasive lung cancer.
The results appear in the first issue for March 2005 of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.
Stephen Lam, M.D., F.R.C.P.C., of the Lung Tumour Group, British Columbia Cancer Agency at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and three associates measured CRP, lung function and other inflammatory markers in 65 individuals. All participants had at least one abnormal cell site in their lungs (bronchial dysplasia) greater than 1.2 millimeters in size, which was biopsied at the start of the study and re-examined 6 months later.
Cannabis destroys cancer cells
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Researchers investigating the role of cannabis in cancer therapy reveal it has the potential to destroy leukaemia cells, in a paper published in the March 2006 edition of Letters in Drug Design & Discovery.
Led by Dr Wai Man Liu, at Barts and the London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, the team has followed up on their findings of 2005 which showed that the main active ingredient in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, has the potential to be used effectively against some forms of cancer. Dr Liu has since moved to the Institute of Cancer in Sutton where he continues his work into investigating the potential therapeutic benefit of new anti-cancer agents.
Lab confirms first Swiss bird flu case was H5N1
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Laboratory tests have confirmed that a duck that died of bird flu last week in Geneva, Switzerland’s first case, had the H5N1 strain, the Swiss Veterinary Office said on Wednesday.
The tests were carried out by the European reference laboratory in Britain, the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, which announced the result on its website.
“VLA confirms highly pathogenic avian influenza of H5N1 subtype in a common merganser (a variety of duck) from Switzerland,” the laboratory said.
Fibulins inhibit both tumor growth and blood-vessel formation
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Researchers at National Jewish Medical and Research Center report in the March issue of Cancer Research that a pair of promising proteins, known as fibulins 3 and 5, slow the growth of cancer tumors in mice by preventing blood vessels from sprouting. The proteins are promising candidates for use in cancer therapy.
“Healthy humans produce fibulin proteins, which regulate cell proliferation, migration and invasion. In the past, we have seen that they are depleted in numerous metastatic cancers, and that they inhibit the formation of new blood vessels in cell culture,” said William Schiemann, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Program in Cell Biology at National Jewish. “Our current findings show that fibulins can inhibit both tumor growth and blood-vessel formation in mice.”
Family docs fine for breast cancer follow-up
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Women who have been treated for early-stage breast cancer can safely rely on their family physicians for their follow-up care, according to a new report.
“I think the most important message is that patients should be told frankly about what the limitations and potential benefits of follow-up are,” Dr. Eva Grunfeld from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, told Reuters Health.
“They should be informed that follow-up can be provided by their family physician so that they can make an informed choice about their follow-up arrangements,” she explained.
MRI rules out appendicitis during pregnancy
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Pregnant women are prone to a number of conditions that can mimic appendicitis, so diagnosis of acute abdominal pain can be tricky in this situation. Now a team of physicians has shown that magnetic resonance imaging is accurate for excluding appendicitis in pregnant women.
Dr. Ivan Pedrosa and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston note that while ultrasound is the preferred imaging method in pregnancy, it often fails to visualize the appendix.
Pedrosa’s team took a look back at the diagnostic performance of MRI in 51 pregnant patients with suspected acute appendicitis who were seen between 1999 and 2004.
Poverty, not race, lowers prostate cancer survival
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The racial gap seen in the outcome of prostate cancer among older men is primarily due to differences in socioeconomic status, according to the results of a large community-based study.
The exception is Hispanic men, who have the highest rates of survival, but a socioeconomic status on par with African American men.
“Lower socioeconomic status appeared to be one of the major barriers to achieving comparable outcomes for men with prostate carcinoma,” Dr. Xianglin L.
Girls drinking more sodas and less milk
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According to researchers in the U.S. concerns that teens are drinking too many sodas and fruit drinks are well founded.
A study in which food diaries kept by girls over a ten year period were examined, have shown that milk consumption decreased by over 25% during the course of the study, while soda intake, on average, nearly tripled, becoming the number one beverage consumed by older girls.
