March 12, 2006, 11:24 PM CT

Smokers' Children Carry Higher Levels of Harmful Bacteria

A number of of the medical risks associated with smoking, such as cancer, emphysema and heart attacks, are well-known to physicians and the general public. However, there is new evidence that more children exposed to tobacco smoke carry Streptococcus pneumoniae than children without smoking exposure, as per an article in the April 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

S. pneumoniae often exists in the nose and throat, and children are more likely than adults to carry it. If the bacteria, also called pneumococci, grow out of control, infection can result in minor illnesses like ear infections or lead to more serious diseases like sinusitis, pneumonia and meningitis.

Scientists in Israel conducted a surveillance study of more than 200 young children and their mothers. They swabbed the noses and throats of the subjects to determine bacterial carriage rates, and then analyzed the data based on the children's and mothers' exposure to smoking. Seventy-six percent of the children exposed to tobacco smoke carried pneumococci, compared to 60 percent of those not exposed. Exposed children were also more likely than non-exposed children to carry pneumococcal serotypes responsible for most of the invasive S. pneumoniae disease. In the mothers, differences were also noted-32 percent of mothers who smoked carried S. pneumoniae, compared with 15 percent of mothers who were exposed to smoking and 12 percent of mothers not exposed to smoking.........

Posted by: Janet      Permalink         Source

March 12, 2006, 10:28 PM CT

Drug-eluting Stents Outperform Radiation

In the first published trial of its kind, a multi-center clinical study has shown that drug-eluting stents outperform the current "gold standard" radiation therapy in managing coronary restenosis and in preventing further clogging of coronary arteries.

Results of the TAXUS Express stent trial led by Columbia University Medical Center scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia were reported in the March 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study results were also presented March 12 at the American College of Cardiology's annual scientific meeting in Atlanta.

The trial studied 396 patients whose bare metal stents had become clogged with scar tissue, a common complication called restenosis. About half of the patients received paclitaxel-eluting stents, while the other half received vascular brachytherapy, which delivers radiation to the inside of the artery via a catheter. Vascular brachytherapy is currently the only FDA-approved therapy for restenosis after bare metal stent implantation. Paclitaxel is a drug that inhibits cell migration and prevents restenosis. The TAXUS Express stent is made by Boston Scientific Corp.

After 9 months, the trial showed that the paclitaxel-eluting stents reduced by 40 percent the number of patients needing additional procedures to clear the artery, compared to vascular brachytherapy. Angiographic measurements in both groups showed that patients who had drug-eluting stents experienced less than half as much restenosis (14.5 percent) as those who had brachytherapy (31.2 percent).........

Posted by: Daniel      Permalink         Source

March 12, 2006, 9:22 PM CT

Computer Suggests New HIV Drug Target

For more than a year, scientists watched patiently as a few computer-simulated HIV protease molecules squirmed into more than 15,000 slightly different shapes. In real time, this contortion takes only a fraction of a second. In the end, however, this suspended animation paid off, as the simulations uncovered a potential new drug target to fight drug-resistant AIDS.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers made the discovery while studying how one rare strain of HIV can evade a usually prescribed class of drugs used to treat the virus that causes AIDS. The strain of HIV contained mutations that are often seen after failure of therapy with protease inhibitors, drugs that block the action of the enzyme protease and prevent the virus from making mature, infective copies of itself. When protease inhibitors fail -- as they often do with a fast-mutating virus like HIV -- new drug targets become vital.

"Recognizing these variations in conformation -- the three-dimensional arrangement of the amino acids that make up a protein -- is the first step in identifying a new drug target," said Alex Perryman, first author of the study published early online in the journal Biopolymers on February 28, 2006.

Perryman did the research when he was an HHMI predoctoral fellow in the lab of Andrew McCammon, an HHMI investigator in the Biomedical Sciences program at the University of California, San Diego. Perryman is now an Amgen postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Stephen Mayo, an HHMI investigator at the California Institute of Technology.........

Posted by: Mark      Permalink         Source

March 12, 2006, 8:21 AM CT

How Fevers Cause Seizures

It's one of those unavoidable facts of life - kids get sick and have fevers. Usually, those elevated internal temperatures cause only temporary discomfort, but in some small children they spark convulsions called "febrile seizures."

These convulsions are "scary and very upsetting to parents," said Robert L. Macdonald, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of Neurology.

They've also been something of an enigma, he said. The epilepsy research community has struggled to understand how fever ignites convulsions and how to treat them.

Macdonald and colleagues including Jing-Qiong Kang, M.D., Ph.D., research assistant professor of Neurology, have now discovered a molecular mechanism that could explain febrile seizures. The research, published last week in The Journal of Neuroscience, may lead to new approaches for preventing recurrent febrile seizures in vulnerable children.

Febrile seizures affect as many as one in 15 children worldwide, generally between the ages of 6 months and 6 years. Most children will suffer no long-term consequences from the convulsions, which tend to be generalized - involving the whole body - but some will go on to develop epilepsy.

"It has been very controversial through the years: do you treat febrile seizures or not?" Macdonald said. Several studies have investigated treating children with anti-seizure medications such as phenobarbital or sodium valproate to prevent recurrent febrile seizures, but the studies showed only limited benefit to the approach, Macdonald said.........

Posted by: Daniel      Permalink         Source

March 9, 2006, 11:51 PM CT

children enter schools already overweight

A study reported in the current issue of The Journal of School Health finds that nearly one quarter of children, ages three to five years, were entering school in Chicago overweight. For the authors, this is an urgent problem reflecting the nutritional status and health influence of the children's home and community. The results signify a need for schools, in and outside the Chicago area, to develop protocol and procedures to support the physical and mental health of overweight and at risk of overweight children. "Cities that lack data on the weight status of their young children can use the data from Chicago..... to guide their planning until local data are available," the authors explain.

The height, weight, and age of more than 1,500 boys and girls from Chicago's public and Catholic schools were reviewed for the study. Twenty-four percent of the children were defined as "overweight," or having a sex- and age-specific body mass index (BMI) that was higher than ninety-five percent of their peers. This is more than twice the national prevalence of overweight children and three times that of the Midwest region. Sixteen percent were "at risk of overweight," with a BMI between the eighty-fifth and ninety-fourth percentile. "These results indicate an urgent problem facing Chicago children, families, health providers, and schools," the authors state. "Ongoing monitoring of child weight status is warranted."........

Posted by: JoAnn      Permalink         Source

March 9, 2006, 11:36 PM CT

Lights Seeking Early Cancer Signs

A novel device that could use light to harmlessly and almost instantly probe for early signs of cancer has been developed by scientists at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. The device would allow physicians to search for cancer in epithelial cells that line body surfaces, including the skin, lungs and digestive and reproductive tracts, by simply inserting a fiber optic probe.

The team has reported the first clinically practical version of their "angle-resolved low coherence interferometry" (a/LCI) technology designed to diagnose incipient cancer in the esophagus. Adam Wax, professor of biomedical engineering at the Pratt School, and graduate student John Pyhtila, lead author of the study, reported tests of their device in the March 15, 2006, Optics Letters. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Preliminary results of a further study of the latest a/LCI device in human esophageal tissue look promising, Wax said. The next step will be to test the device in human trials.

In principle, the scientists said their technology could be adapted to detect pre-malignant cells on the surfaces of any organ, where the disease most often begins.

"The majority of all cancers - some 80 percent - start in the epithelium," Wax said. "Fiber-optic probes have the potential to test for early evidence of cancer in seconds, providing biopsy-type information without removing tissue. They could also serve as a guide to biopsy, directing physicians to suspicious sites to increase the likelihood that cancer will be detected." Biopsy surveillance in the esophagus removes tissue at random, he said.........

Posted by: Janet      Permalink         Source

March 9, 2006, 11:06 PM CT

Mechanisms Behind Oral Diabetic Agents

Thiazolidinediones (TZD's) are drugs usually prescribed to patients with type 2 diabetes, the most common form of diabetes. Current U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved agents are known as Actos (pioglitazone) and Avandia (rosiglitazone). These oral agents improve blood glucose levels in people with diabetes by improving insulin action in the body. While it is known that these drugs work primarily by binding to a receptor in the nucleus of cells called Peroxisome Proliferator Activated Receptor-gamma (PPARg), all of the molecular signaling events important for the drugs to work are not completely understood.

A new study by scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston helps to explain how these drugs work. The manuscript appears in the March edition of the American Diabetes Association's journal Diabetes.

In a clinical research study, Joslin scientists Allison B. Goldfine, M.D., Sarah Crunkhorn, Ph.D., and Mary-Elizabeth Patti, M.D., examined muscle and fat tissue from patients with type 2 diabetes before and after they took the drug rosiglitazone. The scientists found that levels of two proteins called Necdin and E2F4, which are important in regulating cell replication, are altered in muscle and fat after patients took the drug for two months. Dr. Goldfine is an Investigator in Joslin's Section on Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Assistant Director of Clinical Research at Joslin and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Patti is Director of Joslin's Genomics Core Lab and also an Investigator in Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Crunkhorn is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Patti's laboratory.........

Posted by: JoAnn      Permalink         Source

March 8, 2006, 10:36 PM CT

Benefit of Early Therapy in HIV-infected Infants

Antiretroviral treatment (ART) for infants born with HIV infection may be most effective when given in their first five months of life, as per a research studyreported in the April 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Uncertainty over when to start antiretroviral therapy in children infected with HIV from their mothers revolves around balancing the benefits of preventing disease progression and the risks and costs of life-long treatment begun within months of birth. Policies on when to start ART vary across Europe. Up to this point, the effect of age on clinical outcome has been difficult to assess because CD4 cell counts--an immunological indicator of HIV progression--experience considerable age-related variation.

However, Marie-Louise Newell, MD, and her colleagues in the European Collaborative Study developed a way to standardize CD4 cell counts in relation to age, and thus better evaluate immune status. They call this age-adjusted CD4 cell count the "z-score." Based on data collected over the past 20 years on infected children born to HIV-1 infected women, the researchers concluded that "children who started their most potent ART between 5 months and 5 years of age were almost 60 percent less likely to attain a 20 percent increase in their CD4 cell count z-score at any time, compared to children who started therapy before 5 months".........

Posted by: Mark      Permalink         Source

March 8, 2006, 9:39 PM CT

Pills To Lower LDL Cholesterol

A pill containing plant substances called sterols can help lower cholesterol, as per scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The scientists studied patients who already were eating a heart-healthy diet and taking statin drugs to control cholesterol. The addition of plant sterols helped further lower total cholesterol and contributed to a nearly 10 percent reduction in low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the so-called "bad" cholesterol. Results of the study were reported in the American Journal of Cardiology.

The National Cholesterol Education Program recommends that those with elevated cholesterol eat foods containing plant sterols as a way to lower cardiovascular risk, but a number of sterol-containing foods are inconvenient for some patients.

Structurally similar to cholesterol, plant sterols can reduce the absorption of cholesterol in the gut by competing with cholesterol to get absorbed and transported into the body. When consumed in the diet, sterols are known to lower cholesterol levels, but sterols are not readily absorbed in the intestine unless they have been dissolved in something that the intestine can easily absorb. Because sterols are not water-soluble, past strategies have involved dissolving them in fat.........

Posted by: Daniel      Permalink         Source

March 8, 2006, 9:25 PM CT

Ann Richards Diagnosed With Cancer

Ann Richards, former Gov of Texas has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer according to her own reports. She will undergo therapy at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Seventy two year old Ann Richards was diagnosed with esophageal cancer yesterday, said spokesman Bill Maddox. More tests are underway to determine the extent of the cancer.

Ms. Richards served as a Democratic Governor in Texas from 1991 to 1995 until, but lost re-election bid to George W. Bush. Since 2001, she has been an adviser at a public relations and lobbying firm.........

Posted by: Janet      Permalink