health tips

Deadly MERS virus found in Saudi Arabian camel

The Saudi Health Ministry says it has discovered a deadly virus in a camel in Jiddah province, on the western coast of Saudi Arabia.

The ministry’s statement released Monday is considered an important development in the search for the origin the deadly illness. There have been more than 60 deaths from the virus known as Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, with all but a handful of the fatalities in Saudi Arabia.

The ministry said a sample from the camel was tested near the home of a patient infected with the virus.

An international research team in August found the mysterious virus that is related to SARS in a bat in Saudi Arabia. They suspected it was perhaps another animal that was spreading the virus directly to humans.

Source: The New Zealand Herald

Link Between Diabetes and Osteoporosis

What is the link between diabetes (both type 1 and type 2) and bone mineral density/osteoporosis in postmenopausal women?

Ashraf Kardousha, MD

Adult women with type 1 diabetes have relatively decreased bone mass, increased fracture risk, and delayed fracture healing compared with healthy women without diabetes. In addition, researchers have show that the biomechanical integrity of diabetic bone may be impaired. However, patients with type 2 diabetes usually do not have a decreased bone mass and, in fact, may be relatively protected from osteoporosis.

Early onset of diabetes, in particular, is associated with reduced bone density, and patients with type 1 diabetes show evidence of low bone mass following adolescence. This finding may explain the higher incidence of hip fracture reported for postmenopausal women with type 1 diabetes. The osteopenia associated with diabetes appears to be associated with a decreased bone turnover associated with impaired osteoblastic maturation and function. This is reflected in a decrease in serum markers of bone formation, such as osteocalcin. Bone resorption and formation are usually tightly coupled, but this has not been well studied in patients with diabetes. The few available studies suggest that the rate of bone resorption in diabetes is normal and therefore elevated relative to the decreased rate of bone formation. Evidence that there are significant alterations in serum parathyroid hormone levels or function is lacking. Boullion and colleagues[3] showed reduced serum levels of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), osteocalcin, and bone-specific alkaline phosphatase in adolescents with type 1 diabetes, but not all markers were reduced in adults. Studies in diabetic animals show that there is enhanced apoptosis of osteoblastic cells and, although there is sufficient production of immature mesenchymal tissue, there is failure to adequately express genes that regulate osteoblast differentiation.

In contrast to findings in type 1 diabetes, patients with type 2 diabetes do not have low bone mass and may be relatively protected from osteoporosis. It is not known whether adolescents with type 2 diabetes will demonstrate a low bone mass. However, it is hypothesized that this is unlikely since most of these children are also obese. Our own studies in type 2 diabetes show that, while bone turnover is suppressed in patients in poor glycemic control, bone metabolism returns to normal with normalization of glycemia. Recent studies suggest that a negative correlation may exist between levels of osteocalcin and glycemic control. It is not clear if hyperglycemia per se is responsible or if the associated absolute or relative insulin deficiency might be involved. Bone cells have receptors for both insulin and IGF-1, and in vitro insulin has been shown to increase proliferation and function of osteoblasts. In animals, insulin deficiency suppresses osteoblastic activity. Levels of IGF-1 tend to be low in patients with poorly controlled diabetes mellitus and improve with improving glycemic control. A correlation between IGF-1 and osteocalcin levels has been shown for both type 1 and type 2 patients, and IGF-1 has been shown to stimulate osteoblastic differentiation, maturation, and function.

The difference in bone loss between the 2 forms of diabetes is often attributed to the degree of adiposity. Increased body weight has been associated with an increased bone mass in both normal and diabetic individuals, and may account for the relative protection seen in patients with type 2 disease. In addition to the mechanical effects of increased weight bearing, many women who are obese and relatively insulin-resistant have elevated levels of androgens, which may contribute to bone maintenance. In addition, it is not clear whether bone cells are insulin-resistant, similar to other tissues in type 2 diabetes. If not, then high circulating insulin levels could be expected to increase osteoblast function and have a beneficial effect on bone mass. It has been suggested that hyperinsulinemia may be partially responsible for the association of both diabetes and obesity with a higher BMD in women. It should be noted that there is some evidence of higher fracture risk in type 2 patients despite normal bone mass. Other factors, such as neuropathy and impaired vision, may contribute to the increased fracture risk.

Type 1 diabetes does appear to be a significant risk factor for osteoporosis. Currently, we recommend that patients with type 1 diabetes be monitored more carefully than persons without diabetes or those with type 2 disease, and should be encouraged to consume a diet high in both calcium (at least 1200 mg/day) and vitamin D (400-600 IU/day). It appears that intensive insulin therapy and a stable body weight in patients with type 1 diabetes is important in preventing bone loss. Patients with diabetes and osteopenia or osteoporosis have successfully been treated with bisphosphonates, with similar bone density results as patients without diabetes. Due to impaired osteoblast function, patients with diabetes might be expected to benefit more from bone anabolic (rather than anti-resorptive) medications, but this has yet to be demonstrated in a clinical trial.

For patients with type 2 diabetes who are in good metabolic control, prevention and treatment of osteoporosis can be approached in a manner similar to patients without diabetes as outlined in the National Osteoporosis Foundation (NOF 2003) physician guidelines.

Source: Med Scape

 

GlaxoSmithKline heart drug misses goal in major study

An experimental GlaxoSmithKline drug, designed to fight heart disease in a new way, failed to meet its main goal in a major late-stage clinical study, dealing a blow to one of the company’s biggest new treatment hopes.

Darapladib’s inability to reduce the overall risk of heart attacks and strokes in the first of two big Phase III studies is disappointing, but not a huge surprise. Many analysts already had low expectations for the project.

Shares in Britain’s biggest drugmaker had fallen 1.2 percent on the news by 1050 GMT on Tuesday, and Deutsche Bank analyst Mark Clark said failure of the drug removed some “blue sky fantasy” about potential multibillion-dollar sales.

GSK obtained full rights to darapladib, along with lupus drug Benlysta, when it bought U.S. biotech firm Human Genome Sciences last year for $3 billion.

The once-daily pill did produce statistically significant reductions in serious coronary events in some of the pre-defined secondary endpoints of the trial, which GSK said required more analysis.

Darapladib is designed to prevent heart attacks and strokes in a completely different way from cholesterol-lowering statin drugs by targeting an enzyme called Lp-PLA2 that is linked to artery-clogging plaques.

While some industry analysts have suggested it could become a $10 billion-a-year seller, if it works, few have pencilled in significant sales forecasts so far, given uncertainty about the product.

Current consensus forecasts point to annual sales of only $605 million in 2018, according to Thomson Reuters Pharma.

Panmure Gordon downgraded GSK shares to “hold” from “buy” on the latest news, which it said was the second big disappointment in the year, following similarly negative results with the company’s MAGE-A3 cancer vaccine for melanoma in September.

It also predicted GSK would write down 150 million pounds ($240 million) of its investment in darapladib in the fourth quarter, even though a second Phase III trial is continuing.

“Even if that trial was successful, we believe it will be difficult to gain market registration on one trial alone,” said Panmure analyst Savvas Neophytou.

Patrick Vallance, GSK’s head of pharmaceuticals R&D, said the group would continue to investigate the role of Lp-PLA2 inhibition in coronary heart disease and other conditions, while also poring over the latest trial results.

“We will now work to better understand the data, including evaluation of the patient sub-groups, and await the outcome of a second Phase III study of darapladib in acute coronary syndrome,” he said in a statement.

The first trial, known as STABILITY, enrolled nearly 16,000 patients with chronic coronary heart disease in 39 countries and measured the differences in outcomes between giving them darapladib or a placebo pill, in addition to standard drugs such as statins, aspirin and blood pressure medicines.

A second 13,000-patient study, called SOLID-TIMI 52, is due to complete in March 2014 and is looking at patients who have already suffered an acute coronary event. It will assess if darapladib can prevent a secondary attack.

Some medical experts believe darapladib may have a better chance of success in the second study.

GSK has had some notable successes with its new drugs this year, including approvals of medicines for cancer, lung disease and HIV. But its failure to deliver positive results in more ambitious projects like darapladib and MAGE-A3 may cast doubt over its prowess in the most cutting-edge science.

Source: Zee News

 

S. Korea says medical tourists likely to reach 1 mln in 2020

The number of foreign medical tourists in Korea by 2020 could reach 1 million and churn out revenue of 3.5 trillion won (US$3.2 billion), the Korea Tourism Organization said Tuesday.

The organization said the number of people from abroad who visit the country for medical treatment is expected to grow from about 399,000 this year to 998,000 in 2020.

Per capita health spending in Korea by a foreign patient could hit 3.56 million won in 2020, up from 2.53 million won this year, it added. Earnings from foreign patients could reach 3.5 trillion won in 2020, up from just 1 trillion won this year.

Korean medical services, noted for their high quality and cheaper than those of the West, are getting more popular abroad, especially China. China Daily last month said 62 percent of the estimated 31,000 Chinese who visited Korea on 15-day medical tourism visas last year sought cosmetic surgery.

Source: The Korea Observer

HIV/AIDS experts awarded $5 million training grants for India, Africa

John hopkinsHIV/AIDS at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine and the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have been awarded more than $5 million by the Fogarty International Centre’s HIV Research Training Program to foster health and medical research skills in India, Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi.

The training funds, to be spread over five years, focus on places hard hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, currently estimated to infect some 33.4 million people worldwide.

Four Johns Hopkins awards were among 22 grants announced in October 2013 by Fogarty, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new funding will be used to train more than 50 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research scientists, as well as lab technologists, as part of a broader effort to develop and upgrade the health and medical research infrastructure in these countries, according to Fogarty officials.

Such added local skills, researchers say, are essential to the success of many other US government-funded HIV/AIDS initiatives aimed at preventing and treating people with the disease.

Among the Johns Hopkins faculty serving as principal investigators of the awards are Dr Robert Bollinger (HIV-TB Fogarty Research Training Program in India), Dr Ronald Gray (Male Circumcision and Use of Foreskin Tissues for HIV Prevention in Uganda), Dr Andrea Ruff (Optimizing HIV Prevention in Ethiopia through Implementation Science) and Dr Taha Taha (Training in HIV-related Non-communicable Disease Complications in Malawi).

“These training grants are desperately needed to assemble the critical mass of medical research personnel necessary to plan, organize, implement and monitor how we battle HIV disease in the countries most heavily burdened by the pandemic,” said Fogarty grant recipient Dr Robert Bollinger, a professor at Johns Hopkins and director of its Centre for Clinical Global Health Education.

Source: India Medical Times

New imaging method ‘predicts’ heart attack risk

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that around 715,000 Americans suffer a heart attack every year. Now, scientists have created a new imaging technique that could identify which patients are at high risk. This is according to a study published in the The Lancet.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK say the test – carried out using positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) – is able to “light up” dangerous fatty plaques in the arteries that are in danger of rupturing. This is a process that can cause heart attacks.

To reach their findings, the researchers analyzed 80 patients. Of these, 40 patients recently had a heart attack, while the other 40 patients had angina – restricted blood supply to the heart posing a higher risk of heart attack.

‘First step’ towards heart attack prevention

Using the PET-CT scanner, the researchers found that 90% of patients who had a heart attack showed a “lit up” yellow area in one of their blood vessels. This area corresponded exactly to the location of the plaque that caused the patients’ heart attacks, the researchers say.

The scanner also showed lit up plaques in around 40% of the patients with angina. Furthermore, the researchers found “high-risk” features in these patients that suggested a heart attack may be imminent, meaning they were in need of aggressive drug treatment or surgery.

Dr. Marc Dweck, of the University of Edinburgh and lead study author, says their findings are a step toward heart attack prevention:

“We have developed what we hope is a way to ‘light up’ plaques on the brink of rupturing and causing a heart attack.

If we could know how close a person is to having a heart attack, we could step in with medication or surgery before the damage is done. This is a first step towards that goal.”

Potential for identifying ‘ticking time bomb’ patients

The researchers say the next stage of this research is to confirm the findings and to determine whether the PET-CT imaging technique can improve the management and treatment of patients with coronary artery disease.

Prof. Peter Weissburg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation in the UK, which part-funded the study, notes that the technique looks promising:

“Being able to identify dangerous fatty plaques likely to cause a heart attack is something that conventional heart tests can’t do. This research suggests that PET-CT scanning may provide an answer – identifying ‘ticking time bomb’ patients at risk of a heart attack.”

“We now need to confirm these findings, and then understand how best to use new tests like this in the clinic to benefit heart patients,” he adds.

Source: Medical News Today

 

Colds and sore throats not helped by ibuprofen

If you have a cold or sore throat, you might want to opt for the acetaminophen over the ibuprofen for symptom relief, a new study suggests.

Research published in the British Medical Journal shows that taking ibuprofen (commonly known by the brand name Advil) doesn’t seem to relieve symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections as well as acetaminophen (commonly known by the brand name Tylenol).

Taking ibuprofen along with acetaminophen also didn’t provide as many symptomatic benefits as taking acetaminophen alone, the University of Southampton researchers found.

Interestingly, people who took ibuprofen or ibuprofen with acetaminophen were more likely to come back to the doctor with new or worse symptoms, than those who took acetaminophen alone.

“This may have something to do with the fact the ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory. It is possible that the drug is interfering with an important part of the immune response and leads to prolonged symptoms or the progression of symptoms in some individuals,” study researcher Paul Little, a professor at the University of Southampton, said in a statement. “Although we have to be a bit cautious since these were surprise findings, for the moment I would personally not advise most patients to use ibuprofen for symptom control for coughs colds and sore throat.”

The findings are based on data from 899 patients who had symptoms of a respiratory tract infection. They were prescribed either acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or both ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and were instructed to take it either as needed, or four times a day. Some patients were also told to try steam inhalation to relieve symptoms.

Researchers also found that steam inhalation didn’t seem to provide any symptomatic benefits — and in fact led to mild scalding among 2 percent of people observed in the study who used this method.

Source: Huffington post

 

Weekly exercise by pregnant moms boost babies’ brains

A new study has suggested when to-be-moms exercised for three 20-minute sessions a week, their babies’ brains showed more mature patterns of activity.

The findings have come from a randomised controlled trial in humans to show that a pregnant mother’s exercise routine can impact her baby’s brain.

Elise Labonte-LeMoyne at the University of Montreal, said that mother’s exercise also impacts their kid’s weight gain in life, the Guardian reported.

Women joined the research group in their first trimester and were randomly assigned to an exercise or a sedentary control group.

The 10 women in the exercise group cycled, walked, ran or swam for three short sessions a week.

The eight women in other group were instructed not to exercise.

Eight to 12 days after babies were born, the researchers measured their brain activity.

They used a hairnet of 124 electrodes, and recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) while they played sleeping babies a series of beeps that were interspersed with different sounds.

Even though they were asleep, brain activity patterns showed how efficiently they were able to discriminate between old and novel sounds.

Source: DNA India

 

 

How brain uses sleep for visual task learning

Particular frequencies to consolidate learning in specific brain regions.

 In August, Brown University scientists reported that two specific frequencies, fast-sigma and delta, that operated in the supplementary motor area of the brain were directly associated with learning a finger-tapping task akin to typing or playing the piano.

The new results show something similar with a visual task in which 15 volunteers were trained to spot a hidden texture amid an obscuring pattern of lines.Takeo Watanabe, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown, said that perceptual learning in general has been found to improve the visual ability of patients who have some decline of function due to aging.

In this case the researchers, led by graduate student Ji Won Bang, devised an experiment to see how sleep may help such training take hold. They measured the brainwaves of the participants during sleep before and the training, and they measured the volunteers’ performance on the task before and after.

The researchers saw significant increases in sigma brainwave power after sleep compared to before in the visual cortical area in the occipital lobe of the volunteers’ brains.

To ensure they were measuring activity related to learning the task, the researchers purposely put the stimulus of the discrimination task in a particular quadrant of the subjects’ field of view.

That position corresponds to an anatomically distinct part of the visual cortical area. The team saw that the measured gain in sigma wave power was greater specifically in that trained part of the visual cortical area rather than in the untrained parts.

They also saw that the difference of power increase between trained and untrained regions of the visual cortical area was correlated with each individual’s performance improvement on the task.

The study has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: News Track India

 

Teenagers ‘think slim cigarettes are safer’ says report

Young teenagers rate slimline cigarettes as stylish, feminine and possibly safer than regular brands, say researchers.

Thinner cigarettes were generally seen as weaker, more palatable, and less harmful by a focus group of 15-year-olds from Glasgow.

In fact, some super-slim brands contain more dangerous tobacco chemicals than their bulkier counterparts, according to the study authors.

Teenagers were most attracted to slim and super-slim cigarettes with white filters and decorative features, describing them as “classy” and “nicer”, said Cancer Research UK.

In contrast one long brown cigarettes was viewed as particularly harmful and labelled “disgusting”, “really, really strong”, and “old fashioned”.

The researchers asked 48 teenage boys and girls about eight cigarette brands that differed in length, diameter, colour, and design.

Professor Gerard Hastings, Cancer Research UK’s social marketing expert at the University of Stirling and one of the study authors, said: “Our research confirms previous studies that both the pack and the product are powerful marketing tools in the hands of the tobacco industry which it is using to recruit a new generation of smokers. It’s time policy makers moved to standardise both.”

Co-author Allison Ford, also from the University of Stirling, said: “This important study reveals for the first time that adolescents associate slim and decorative cigarettes with glamour and coolness, rating them as a cleaner, milder and safer smoke.

“It is incredibly worrying to hear that adolescents believe that a stylishly designed cigarette gives a softer option.”

Cancer Research UK is campaigning for plain standardised packaging of cigarettes and has launched an online film accusing the tobacco industry of encouraging children to smoke.

The study found that teenagers thought white tips and longer cigarettes portrayed a cleaner, feminine image reminiscent of glamorous female stars from old movies. The image softened perceptions that smoking was harmful, said the scientists.

Cigarettes with white tips were also associated with menthol, which was perceived as weaker and less harmful.

In their paper, published in the European Journal of Public Health, the researchers wrote: “The slimmer diameters of these cigarettes communicated weaker tasting and less harmful-looking cigarettes. This was closely linked to appeal as thinness implied a more pleasant and palatable smoke for young smokers.

“This exploratory study provides some support that standardising cigarette appearance could reduce the appeal of cigarettes in adolescents and reduce the opportunity for stick design to mislead young smokers in terms of harm.”

Mumsnet chief executive and co-founder Justine Roberts, who supports the campaign, said: “Very few parenting issues are completely black and white, but nobody wants their child to start smoking. Standardised packs may not be a silver bullet, but Mumsnet users are clear that they’d be very happy to see them as part of a range of measures to discourage children from getting hooked.”

Harpal Kumar, Cancer Research UK’s chief executive, said: “This research once again highlights how the tobacco industry exploits any opportunity to lure young smokers to secure a profitable future.

“The evidence shows children are attracted to glitzy, slickly-designed cigarettes and packs and every year more than 207,000 UK children between 11 and 15 start smoking. We are urging the Government to introduce standardised packaging to discourage these children from starting this life-threatening habit and to prioritise children’s health over tobacco company profits.”

The House of Lords will debate standardising cigarette packaging over the next few weeks.

Source: The Independent