Polish bishops wade into IVF debate
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Bishops of Poland’s influential Roman Catholic Church have branded in vitro fertilisation (IVF) “the younger sister of eugenics” in a letter aimed at swaying lawmakers ahead of a parliamentary debate.
But their intervention, two weeks after the church condemned the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize for medicine to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, triggered an unusually sharp response from lawmakers who say the clergy should not meddle in politics.
“The in vitro method comes at great human cost. To give birth to one child ... many humans suffer death at different stages of the medical process,” said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.
Areva, Gabon launch plan to help ill uranium workers
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Gabon and French mining giant Areva have launched a health initiative to treat more than 1,000 former miners who fell ill after working in a uranium mine in the Central African nation.
The mine workers became ill after working in the COMUF mine, which produced more than 26,000 tonnes of uranium over 38 years and was controlled by Areva from 1986 until it closed down in 1999.
Production stopped due to falling uranium prices but Areva has since secured new permits to look for uranium in the region, in the south of Gabon.
Fish oil no help for mom’s mood, baby’s development
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Fish oil capsules are a cheap and easy way to get omega-3 fatty acids, but they don’t help pregnant women steer clear of postpartum depression.
Nor do they boost mental development in their babies, according to researchers from Australia who tested the effect of daily supplements during the second half of pregnancy—a period that spans the growth spurt in the fetus’ brain.
The researchers gave more than 2,000 women either vegetable oil or fish oil containing docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which earlier studies have hinted—but not proved—might improve pregnancy outcomes.
Climate Change May Alter Natural Climate Cycles of Pacific
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While it’s still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.
El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki is a Japanese term for “similar, but different”).
Last year, the journal Nature published a paper that found climate change is behind this shift from El Nino to El Nino Modoki. While the findings of that paper are still being debated, this latest paper in Nature Geoscience presents evidence that El Nino Modoki drives a climate pattern known as the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).
Right foods aid memory and protect against disease
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For the first time researchers have found out what effect multiple, rather than just single, foods with anti-inflammatory effects have on healthy individuals.
The results of a diet study show that bad cholesterol was reduced by 33 per cent, blood lipids by 14 per cent, blood pressure by 8 per cent and a risk marker for blood clots by 26 per cent. A marker of inflammation in the body was also greatly reduced, while memory and cognitive function were improved.
“The results have exceeded our expectations! I would like to claim that there has been no previous study with similar effects on healthy subjects”, says Inger Björck, professor of food-related nutrition at Lund University and head of the University’s Antidiabetic Food Centre.
Key to blood-brain barrier opens way for treating Alzheimer’s and stroke
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While the blood-brain barrier (BBB) protects the brain from harmful chemicals occurring naturally in the blood, it also obstructs the transport of drugs to the brain. In an article in Nature scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet now present a potential solution to the problem. The key to the BBB is a cell-type in the blood vessel walls called pericytes, and the researchers hope that their findings will one day contribute to new therapies for diseases like Alzheimer’s and stroke.
“Our new results show that the blood-brain barrier is regulated by pericytes, and can be opened in a way that allows the passage of molecules of different sizes while keeping the brain’s basic functions operating properly,” says Christer Betsholtz, professor of vascular biology at the Department of Medical Biochemistry, who has led the study.
The blood-brain barrier is a term denoting the separation of blood from tissue by blood vessels that are extremely tight? Impermeable?. In other organs, the capillary walls let certain substances carried by the blood, such as the plasma proteins albumin and immunoglobulin, out into the surrounding tissue. In the brain, however, this pathway is closed off. This is essential for many reasons, one being that the plasma proteins are harmful to nerve cells.
Study warns that over-the-counter weight-reducing products can cause harm and may even kill
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The desire for a quick-fix for obesity fuels a lucrative market in so-called natural remedies. But a study of medical records in Hong Kong revealed 66 cases where people were suspected to have been poisoned by a “natural” slimming therapy. In eight cases the people became severely ill, and in one case the person died. The study is published today in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
The researchers looked at the ingredients in the 81 slimming products that these people had taken. They found 12 different agents that fell into five categories: undeclared weight-loss drugs; drug analogues (unlicensed chemical derivatives of licensed drugs); banned drugs; drugs used for an inappropriate indication; and thyroid hormones.
“People like the idea of using a natural remedy because they think that if it is natural, it will be safe. There are two problems here. Firstly not all natural agents are harmless, and secondly the remedies also contain potentially harmful manufactured drugs,” says Dr Magdalene Tang, who works at the Toxicology Reference Laboratory at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong.
Online health services need tighter rules: report
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Online health information and disease-risk tests can mislead, confuse and create needless anxiety, and governments should do more ensure the people who use them know what they are buying, UK experts said on Tuesday.
A report by a British medical ethics group said private DNA tests may be “medically or therapeutically meaningless” and could give false results or information that is “unclear, unreliable or inaccurate.”
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics called on the government to set up an accreditation scheme for providers of online health records, and for DNA testing and body scanning services to be better regulated to help protect consumers.
Life and death in the age of the bionic heart
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In September 2007, Verna Schrombeck gathered three of her six children - those who could bear it - to discuss her funeral arrangements. She had been given just months to live and was about to undergo a last-ditch, cutting-edge heart surgery. There was no guarantee she would return home.
Had she organized things well enough, she wondered, so that her eldest son, who was in charge of the estate, would not be burdened? Had she taught her handicapped son, an adult, enough life skills to take care of himself? She asked that the Ave Maria be played at her funeral.
A week later, Verna’s sister drove her 8 hours from Lowell, Indiana to Rochester, Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic, one of the country’s best hospitals for heart surgery. Her daughter flew in from Kansas. By the time Verna arrived at the hospital she could barely walk to the admissions desk. “I leaned over the railing, gasping for breath,” she said. “I told my daughter, ‘you have to get me a wheelchair.’”
New osteoporosis guidelines: Osteoporosis Canada
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Comprehensive new guidelines from the Osteoporosis Canada aimed at preventing fragility fractures in women and men over the age of 50 are published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj100771.pdf.
“Fragility fractures, the consequence of osteoporosis, are responsible for excess mortality, morbidity, chronic pain, institutionalization and economic costs,” writes Dr. Alexandra Papaioannou, McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences with coauthors. “They represent 80% of all fractures in menopausal women over age 50 and those with hip or vertebral fractures have substantially increased risk of death post-fracture.”
Fewer than 20% of women and 10% of men with fragility fractures receive interventions to prevent future fractures, writes co-author Dr. Bill Leslie, University of Manitoba.
Michael Douglas near end of throat cancer treatment
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Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas has almost completed a grueling eight weeks of chemotherapy and radiation to treat advanced throat cancer, his publicist said.
Douglas, 66, has one more treatment left this week and then “no further treatments are scheduled,” publicist Allen Burry told People magazine.
“He’s really happy about it ending,” Burry added.
Erlotinib improves progression-free survival as first-line therapy in advanced lung cancer
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For patients with advanced lung cancer whose tumors carry EGFR activating mutations, first-line treatment with erlotinib nearly tripled progression-free survival compared to a standard chemotherapy combination, show results from the first prospective Phase-III study to report findings in this setting.
The new results from the OPTIMAL trial were reported at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy.
“Erlotinib is very effective and well tolerated in advanced NSCLC patients who harbor EGFR activating mutations. It is 2 to 3 times more effective than doublet chemotherapy,” said study leader Professor Caicun Zhou of Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Tongji University, China.
How Republicans could block healthcare reform
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Republicans could keep their promises to stop healthcare reform even if they cannot repeal it, simply by blocking legislation needed to pay for it, one expert argued on Wednesday.
Control of one house of Congress could give the Republicans power to cripple the law, creating “zombie legislation,” healthcare expert Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution wrote in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Healthcare reform is President Barack Obama’s signature policy.
Americans’ life expectancy continues to fall behind other countries’
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The United States continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance—obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities, and homicide—are not to blame, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published today as a Health Affairs Web First. The study, by Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied at Columbia University, looked at health spending; behavioral risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. and 12 other nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom).
While the U.S. has achieved gains in 15-year survival rates decade by decade between 1975 and 2005, the researchers discovered that other countries have experienced even greater gains, leading the U.S. to slip in country ranking, even as per capita health care spending in the U.S. increased at more than twice the rate of the comparison countries. Fifteen-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the US have fallen relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years. Forty-five year old U.S. white women fared the worst—by 2005 their 15-year survival rates were lower than that of all the other countries. Moreover, the survival rates of this group in 2005 had not even surpassed the 1975 15-year survival rates for Swiss, Swedish, Dutch or Japanese women. The U.S. ranking for 15-year life expectancy for 45-year-old men also declined, falling from 3rd in 1975 to 12th in 2005, according to the study, “What Changes in Survival Rates Tell Us About U.S. Health Care.”
When the researchers compared risk factors among the 13 countries, they found very little difference in smoking habits between the U.S. and the comparison countries—in fact, the U.S. had faster declines in smoking between 1975 and 2005 than almost all of the other countries.
First Clinical Trial of Gene Therapy for Muscular Dystrophy Lends Insight Into the Disease
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A clinical trial designed to replace the genetic defect causing the most common form of muscular dystrophy has uncovered an unexpected aspect of the disease. The trial, based on therapy designed by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, showed that some patients mount an immune response to the dystrophin protein even before they have received the gene therapy.
The puzzling results, which came from trials at Columbus Children’s Hospital in Ohio, suggest that the immune systems of a number of patients—once thought to be completely devoid of the dystrophin protein—are actually primed by the prior existence of tiny amounts of this important component of muscle.
Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study demonstrates how such careful and critical observation in early clinical trials of new therapies can yield new insights into the causes of even the “simplest” single gene disorders.
