Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Sandwiches are responsible for about one-fifth of the average American’s sodium intake, according to a new study from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the new study was part of the national “What We Eat in America NHANES 2009-2010” survey and it found that sandwiches comprised a much higher percentage of total sodium intake for the average American than previously believed.
The USDA researchers said the survey used a different coding system than past surveys which allowed for the reporting of various components of a sandwich. For example, a survey respondent eating a ham sandwich would be able to report specific amounts of bread, ham, tomato, cheese, mayonnaise, etc. The survey also used a single code for fast food sandwiches, like a quarter-pound cheese burger or turkey sub.
Previous research had used a single food code for sandwiches and this led to the conclusion that sandwiches represent only about 4 percent of total sodium intake.
“In 2009-2010, only about 20 percent of all sandwiches were represented by a single food code,” explained study author Rhonda Sebastian, a nutritionist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS). “For that reason, previously published estimates of sandwich contributions to sodium intake that were based on only single-code sandwiches are considerably underestimated.”
The current USDA guidelines, released in 2010, recommend a maximum daily intake of 2,300 milligrams of sodium. For adults over 50, African-Americans, and those with certain medical conditions, the USDA recommends a maximum daily sodium intake of only 1,500 milligrams. According to the new study, “Sandwiches alone contribute 30 percent of the less restrictive guideline and 46 percent of the stricter guideline.”
USDA scientists also discovered that people who reported consuming sandwiches had noticeably greater energy intake than those who did not. Those who ate a sandwich on the survey day took in an average of around 300 kilocalories over those who did not record eating a sandwich. Sandwich eaters also had greater overall sodium intake, averaging close to 600 milligrams daily greater than those who didn’t report eating a sandwich.
“The unanticipated finding that sandwich consumption is associated with higher overall intake of energy underscores the importance of making healthful choices of sandwich ingredients,” said study author Cecilia Wilkinson Enns, an ARS nutritionist. “Many sandwiches, such as burgers and franks, and common sandwich components, such as yeast breads, cheese, and cured meats, are among the top contributors not only to sodium but also to energy in the diets of adult Americans.”
The researchers also discovered higher levels of sodium intake among sandwich reporters correlated to the higher levels of daily energy intake.
“Regardless of sandwich reporting status, sodium density was approximately 1,700-1,800 mg per 1,000 kilocalories, suggesting that the higher sodium levels of sandwich reports are explained by their higher energy intake,” Sebastian said.
In light of the study results, the USDA recommends reconsidering sandwiches when looking to reduce both sodium and caloric intake.
“Due to sandwiches’ frequent consumption and considerable contributions to sodium intake, substituting lower-sodium for higher-sodium ingredients in sandwiches could significantly impact sodium intakes,” Wilkinson Enns said.
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Provided by Joseph Caputo, Harvard University
New technology that tracks the origin of blood cells challenges scientific dogma
A 7-year-project to develop a barcoding and tracking system for tissue stem cells has revealed previously unrecognized features of normal blood production: New data from Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital suggests, surprisingly, that the billions of blood cells that we produce each day are made not by blood stem cells, but rather their less pluripotent descendants, called progenitor cells. The researchers hypothesize that blood comes from stable populations of different long-lived progenitor cells that are responsible for giving rise to specific blood cell types, while blood stem cells likely act as essential reserves.
The work, supported by a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award and published in Nature, suggests that progenitor cells could potentially be just as valuable as blood stem cells for blood regeneration therapies.
This new research challenges what textbooks have long read: That blood stem cells maintain the day-to-day renewal of blood, a conclusion drawn from their importance in re-establishing blood cell populations after bone marrow transplants—a fact that still remains true. But because of a lack of tools to study how blood forms in a normal context, nobody had been able to track the origin of blood cells without doing a transplant.
Boston Children’s Hospital scientist Fernando Camargo, PhD, and his postdoctoral fellow Jianlong Sun, PhD, addressed this problem with a tool that generates a unique barcode in the DNA of all blood stem cells and their progenitor cells in a mouse. When a tagged cell divides, all of its descendant cells possess the same barcode. This biological inventory system makes it possible to determine the number of stem cells/progenitors being used to make blood and how long they live, as well as answer fundamental questions about where individual blood cells come from.
“There’s never been such a robust experimental method that could allow people to look at lineage relationships between mature cell types in the body without doing transplantation,” Sun said. “One of the major directions we can now go is to revisit the entire blood cell hierarchy and see how the current knowledge holds true when we use this internal labeling system.”
“People have tried using viruses to tag blood cells in the past, but the cells needed to be taken out of the body, infected, and re-transplanted, which raised a number of issues,” said Camargo, who is a member of Children’s Stem Cell Program and an associate professor in Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “I wanted to figure out a way to label blood cells inside of the body, and the best idea I had was to use mobile genetic elements called transposons.”
A transposon is a piece of genetic code that can jump to a random point in DNA when exposed to an enzyme called transposase. Camargo’s approach works using transgenic mice that possess a single fish-derived transposon in all of their blood cells. When one of these mice is exposed to transposase, each of its blood cells’ transposons changes location. The location in the DNA where a transposon moves acts as an individual cell’s barcode, so that if the mouse’s blood is taken a few months later, any cells with the same transposon location can be linked back to its parent cell.
The transposon barcode system took Camargo and Sun seven years to develop, and was one of Camargo’s first projects when he opened his own lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research directly out of grad school. Sun joined the project after three years of setbacks, and accomplished an experimental tour de force to reach the conclusions in the Nature paper, which includes data on how many stem cells or progenitor cells contribute to the formation of immune cells in mouse blood.
With the original question of how blood arises in a non-transplant context answered, the researchers are now planning to explore many more applications for their barcode tool.
“We are also tremendously excited to use this tool to barcode and track descendants of different stem cells or progenitor cells for a range of conditions, from aging, to the normal immune response,” Sun said. “We first used this technology for blood analysis, however, this system can also help address basic questions about cell populations in solid tissue. You can imagine being able to look at tumor progression or identify the precise origins of cancer cells that have broken off from a tumor and are now circulating in the blood.”
“I think that not only for the blood field, this can change the way people look at stem cell and progenitor relationships,” Camargo added. “The feedback that we have received from other experts in the field has been fantastic. This can truly be a groundbreaking technology.”
This research was supported by an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2OD006472) and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
> Continue reading…
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
If you’re the type of person who drinks several cups of coffee, it may not just be because you’re feeling tired or because you enjoy the taste – your habit may be linked to one of the six newly-identified genetic variants found to be associated with habitual consumption of the caffeinated beverage.
A new large-scale study published online Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and colleagues from the Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium, found that the variants could also help explain why specific amounts of coffee or caffeine have different effects on different people.
According to Associated Press (AP) writer Malcolm Ritter, scientists had long known that a person’s DNA influenced how much coffee they consumed, but the new study is the first to pinpoint some of the specific genes responsible. They analyzed data from over 120,000 individuals looking for tiny variations in DNA which correlated with coffee consumption amounts.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross of The Verge said the findings “help explain why some coffee lovers bounce off the walls after a single cup, whereas others feel the need to invent alarm clocks that wake you up with a shot of espresso,” though Ritter noted the authors found no link between the genes and the intensity of a person’s taste for coffee.
Lead investigator Marilyn Cornelis, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her colleagues identified a total of eight genes linked to coffee consumption, although two of them had been previously identified by Cornelis and others in earlier studies. Two of the new genes were linked to metabolism of caffeine, two were associated to its psychoactive effects, and two were related to lipid and glucose metabolism.
The role of those last two genes in coffee consumption is currently unknown, and Cornelis said that they could warrant further investigation. In all, however, the newly-discovered variants explain roughly 1.3 percent of coffee-drinking behavior, and while that might not seem like a large amount, the researchers said that it is roughly equal to the percentage reported for smoking, alcohol consumption and other types of habitual behaviors.
“Coffee and caffeine have been linked to beneficial and adverse health effects. Our findings may allow us to identify subgroups of people most likely to benefit from increasing or decreasing coffee consumption for optimal health,” Cornelis said in a statement Tuesday. “The new candidate genes are not the ones we have focused on in the past, so this is an important step forward in coffee research.”
“The next question is who is benefiting most from coffee,” she told Harvard Gazette Staff Writer Alvin Powell. “If, for example, caffeine is protective, individuals might have very similar physiological exposure to caffeine, once you balance the metabolism. But if coffee has other potentially protective constituents, those levels are going to be higher if you consume more cups, so they might actually be benefitting from non-caffeine components of coffee. So it’s a little bit complex.”
While the researchers told Duhaime-Ross that they do not believe that their findings will change anyone’s current coffee consumption habits, the do feel that it will help doctors and nutritionists develop individualized caffeine consumption guidelines that have been optimized to a person’s specific genetic makeup.
Furthermore, Cornelis said that it will make it easier to study the health effects of coffee and solve some of the confusion about whether or not consuming the caffeinated beverage is good or bad for a person’s health. As The Verge reporter pointed out, even though drinking coffee is often viewed as a bad habit, it has been found to decrease a person’s risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, and oral cancer.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Facebook is currently considering entering the healthcare field by creating online support communities to connect social media users dealing with the same medical conditions, as well as launching new preventative care applications to help people improve their overall well-being, according to media reports published late last week.

Reuters reporters Christina Farr and Alexei Oreskovic, who broke the story on Friday, cited three sources familiar with the matter who requested anonymity since Facebook’s plans are still in development. Should those plans come to fruition, the social network would join fellow tech giants Apple and Google in the growing field of healthcare-related content.

The sources told Farr and Oreskovic that Facebook officials have been meeting with medical industry experts and entrepreneurs over the past several months, and is in the process of establishing an R&D team to test new health apps. While healthcare has long been an interest for the social media website, it has only recently come to realize that it might help draw people to the network, though Reuters noted Facebook is still “in the idea-gathering stage.”

Details about Facebook’s plans “are limited,” added Mashable’s Samantha Murphy Kelly, but reports also suggest the company might launch its health app under a different name in order to ease potential privacy concerns about users. She added that the website has been scrutinized for various privacy-related issues, including its role in a recent research study that manipulated users’ emotions.

“The news comes as at a time when other companies like Google and Apple are dabbling with health and fitness data,” Kelly explained. “Apple recently launched its Health app, a hub for iOS 8 users to keep track of fitness goals and health-related information, and Google is working on Google Fit for Android that tracks similar data across various platforms and wearables.”

While the Mashable reporter pointed out that it might seem unusual for Facebook to test the waters of the healthcare content field, the Reuters reporters wrote that the unexpected success of the website’s organ donor status initiative that was launched two years ago could be a factor.

“Separately, Facebook product teams noticed that people with chronic ailments such as diabetes would search the social networking site for advice,” one former Facebook insider told the news organization. “In addition, the proliferation of patient networks such as PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that people are increasingly comfortable sharing symptoms and treatment experiences online,” Farr and Oreskovic added.

If and when Facebook launches its new healthcare app and/or online support communities, the advertising built around those programs will be vastly different than those commonly seen in print or broadcast forms of media, Reuters explained. For example, pharmaceutical companies are barred from using social media to promote the sale of prescription drugs, largely due to privacy concerns related to medical disclosures.

“It remains unclear whether Facebook will moderate or curate the content shared in the support communities, or bring in outside medical experts to provide context,” said Farr and Oreskovic. The reporters said that Facebook officials declined to comment on any potential healthcare-related plans for the social network.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Subtle changes in our DNA could help explain why some people are taller than others, the international team of researchers behind the largest genome-wide association study ever conducted report in the October 5 edition of the journal Nature Genetics.
Scientists from more than 300 institutions representing the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium reviewed data from more than 250,000 subjects and identified nearly 700 variants of genome-wide significance that together explained 20 percent of all adult height. Their findings nearly double the number of known gene regions influencing height to over 400 and provides new insight of the biology of this particular trait.
“Height is almost completely determined by genetics, but our earlier studies were only able to explain about 10 percent of this genetic influence,” GIANT Consortium Leader and co-senior investigator Dr. Joel Hirschhorn from Boston Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said in a statement.
“Now, by doubling the number of people in our study, we have a much more complete picture of how common genetic variants affect height – how many of them there are and how much they contribute,” he added.
Dr. Hirschhorn and his colleagues reviewed nearly two million common genetic variants (i.e. those that showed up in at least 5 percent of their subjects) and found 697 variants in 424 genetic regions as being affiliated with height.
Co-first author Dr. Tonu Esko of Boston Children’s Hospital, the Broad Institute and the University of Tartu (Estonia) added that, in the wake of their research, his team can now explain approximately 20 percent of the heritability of height – an eight percent increase from where scientists were prior to the Consortium’s work.
According to Reuters reporter Will Dunham, many of the genes identified in the study are believed to be key regulators of skeletal growth that had not been previously linked to height. Some were related to the bone component collagen, some to the cartilage component chondroitin sulfate and others to growth plates (tissues near the ends of the body’s long bones).
Studies have suggested that up to 80 percent of the factors responsible for determining height lies in our genetic code, but it was only seven years ago that the first genes associated with the characteristic were discovered, according to BBC News. Much work must still be done, but experts believe this study could ultimately lead to a simple test to quell parents’ fears about their children’s growth.
“We study height for two main reasons,” Dr. Hirschhorn, a geneticist and pediatric endocrinologist, told Dunham on Sunday. “For over 100 years, it’s been a great model for studying the genetics of diseases like obesity, diabetes, asthma that are also caused by the combined influence of many genes acting together. So by understanding how the genetics of height works, we can understand how the genetics of human disease works.”
“It’s common knowledge that people born to tall parents are more likely to be tall themselves. Most of this is down to the variations in our DNA sequence that we inherit from our parents – the different versions of all our genes,” Professor Tim Frayling of the University of Exeter Medical School said in a statement. “In 2007 we published the first paper that identified the first common height gene, and since then the research has come on leaps and bounds.”
He added that their new study “goes a long way towards fulfilling a scientific curiosity that could have real impact in the treatment of diseases that can be influenced by height, such as osteoporosis, cancer or heart disease. It also a step forward towards a test that may reassure parents worried that their child is not growing as well as they’d hoped – most of these children have probably simply inherited a big batch of ‘short genes.’”
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Provided By Diane Duke Williams, Washington University in St. Louis

Teens who received free contraception and were educated about the pros and cons of various birth control methods were dramatically less likely to get pregnant, give birth or get an abortion compared with other sexually active teens, according to a new study.

The research, by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears Oct. 2 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study promoted the use of long-acting forms of birth control, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants, because of their superior effectiveness in preventing unintended pregnancies. Among the 1,404 teens enrolled in the Contraceptive CHOICE Project, 72 percent opted for IUDs or implants. This compares with an estimated 5 percent of US teens who choose long-acting birth control.

In the United States, most teens opt for less-reliable contraceptives such as birth control pills or condoms or no method at all because of cost and other factors.

“When we removed barriers to contraception for teens such as lack of knowledge, limited access and cost in a group of teens, we were able to lower pregnancy, birth and abortion rates,” said Gina Secura, PhD, the study’s first author and director of the CHOICE Project. “This study demonstrates there is a lot more we can do to reduce the teen pregnancy rate.”

From 2008-13, the annual pregnancy rate of teens ages 15-19 in the study averaged 34 per 1,000, compared with 158.5 per 1,000 in 2008 for sexually active US teens. During the five-year span, the average annual birth rate among teens in the study was 19.4 per 1,000, compared with 94 per 1,000 in 2008 for sexually active US teens.

The abortion rate among teens in the study also dropped dramatically. From 2008-2013, their average annual abortion rate was 9.7 per 1,000, compared with 41.5 per 1,000 in 2008 for sexually active US teens.

“The difference in pregnancy, birth and abortion rates between teens enrolled in the Contraceptive CHOICE Project and U.S. teens is remarkable,” said Jeffrey Peipert, MD, PhD, principal investigator of the CHOICE Project and the Robert J. Terry Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Among teens in the study, almost 500 were minors ages 14-17 when they enrolled. Half of these minors reported having had a prior unintended pregnancy, and 18 percent had had at least one abortion.

Although the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has declined in the past two decades, it remains far higher than in other industrialized countries. Each year, more than 600,000 teens in the United States become pregnant, with three in 10 teens becoming pregnant before they turn 20.

In addition to the negative health and social consequences suffered by teen mothers and their children, US teen births cost almost $10 billion annually in public assistance, health care and lost income, according to The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy in 2010.

The researchers analyzed data on teens enrolled in the Contraceptive CHOICE Project, a study of more than 9,000 St. Louis women and adolescents at high risk for unintended pregnancy and willing to start a new contraceptive method. Participants had their choice of a full array of birth control options, ranging from long-acting contraceptives such as IUDs and implants to shorter-acting forms like birth control pills, patches, rings, condoms or natural family planning. The teens then were followed for two to three years.

This study supports results from a previous study of the Contraceptive CHOICE Project that determined that providing birth control at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by a range of 62-78 percent compared with the national rate.

Teens in the current study who chose IUDs or implants continued to use them longer than those who opted for shorter-acting methods such as the pill. Two-thirds of teens in the study still were using IUDs and implants at 24 months after beginning their use compared with only a third of teens still using shorter-acting methods such as birth control pills.

“We were pleasantly surprised by the number of teens choosing IUDs and implants and continuing to use them,” Peipert said. “It’s exciting that this study could provide insight into how to tackle this major health problem that greatly affects teens, their children and their communities.”

Teen pregnancy has been designated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the six Winnable Battles because of the magnitude of the problem and the belief that it can be addressed by known, effective strategies. The Winnable Battle target is to reduce the teen birth rate by 20 percent, from 37.9 per 1,000 teens in 2009 to 30.3 per 1,000 teens by 2015.

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that heroin deaths have risen sharply in many US states. The findings, published in a recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, were developed from death certificate data from 28 states. Despite this rise, twice as many people died from prescription opioid overdoses than heroin overdoses in these states in 2012.
According to John Tozzi of Bloomberg Businessweek, there is a link between prescription opioid abuse and heroin use. Previous research has shown that nearly 3 out of 4 new heroin users identify as having used prescription opioids before starting heroin.
Although not part of the study, the CDC finds two factors driving the increase in heroin overdoses. The first factor is widespread prescription opioid exposure and increasing rates of opioid addiction. The second factor is an increased heroin supply. The researchers do not find this relationship surprising as heroin is a type of opioid, so both drugs act on the same brain receptors to produce similar effects.
“Reducing inappropriate opioid prescribing remains a crucial public health strategy to address both prescription opioid and heroin overdoses,” CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H., said in a CDC statement. “Addressing prescription opioid abuse by changing prescribing is likely to prevent heroin use in the long term.”
The study looked at changes in heroin and prescription opioid death rates in 28 states — representing 56 percent of the total US population — between 2010 and 2012. During the study period, overall heroin deaths doubled across all 28 states. BusinessWeek reports that the researchers found 3,635 overdoses in the 28 states in 2012, up from 1,779 in 2010. In Kentucky alone, heroin deaths tripled during the study period.
As for prescription opioid rates, five states had increases, seven states had decreases and the remainder had no change. No state showed a decrease in heroin rates during the study period.
“This study is another reminder of the seriousness of the prescription opioid overdose epidemic and the connection to heroin overdoses,” said Grant Baldwin, Ph.D, M.P.H, Director, Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention. CDC and other federal agencies are working to promote a smart, coordinated approach to reduce inappropriate prescribing and help people addicted to these drugs.”
The researchers suggest that helping those already addicted to prescription opioids and heroin is as important as addressing issues with prescribing habits to prevent future addiction.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The origin of the AIDS pandemic can be traced back to a city in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, an international team led by scientists from Oxford University and the University of Leuven report in the latest edition of the journal Science.
According to first author Dr. Nuno Faria of Oxford’s Department of Zoology and his colleagues, a reconstruction of the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic concluded the pathogen originated in the city of Kinshasa, and that the common ancestor of the group is highly likely to have emerged there sometime around 1920.
Furthermore, the researchers reported that while HIV is known to have been transmitted from apes and primates to people at least 13 times, only one of those strands, the HIV-1 group M, resulted in a human pandemic.  The team’s analysis concluded there was a 95 percent chance the HIV-1 group M transmission originated between 1909 and 1930.  The spread of the HIV-1 group M from virus to pandemic is attributed to a “perfect storm” of factors, including urban growth, the advanced railway and river transportation, and changes to the sex trade.
While it is quite likely the virus crossed from chimpanzees to humans in southern Cameroon several years before the current pandemic began, the pathogen which causes AIDS remained a regional infection until it reached Kinshasa, according to The Guardian. At the time, Kinshasa was the largest and fastest growing city in the region, and records show that by the 1940s, more than one million people had passed through the city on the railways alone.

Image Above: Kinshasa’s railways helped to make it on of Africa’s best connected cities. Credit: Atlas du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi, Gaston Derkinderen, Les Transport, Elsevier, Bruxelles, 1955
By 1960, the rate of new pandemic HIV infections outpaced the growth of the regional population, the researchers reported. While trains and other forms of transportation helped spread the disease, The Guardian notes that other factors were in play as well. The UK newspaper said that records suggest Kinshasa’s predominantly male population had a high demand for sex workers, and that doctors may have helped spread the virus by using unsterilized needles at sexual health clinics in the region.
“Our genetic data tells us that HIV very quickly spread across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, travelling with people along railways and waterways to reach Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in the extreme South and Kisangani in the far North by the end of the 1930s and early 1950s,” Dr. Faria explained in a statement Friday.
“This helped establishing early secondary foci of HIV-1 transmission in regions that were well connected to southern and eastern African countries,” he added. “We think it is likely that the social changes around the independence in 1960 saw the virus ‘break out’ from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world.”
Dr. Faria and experts from Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, Spain, the UK and the US reconstructed the history of the HIV pandemic, which to date has infected nearly 75 million worldwide, using historical records and DNA samples of the virus dating back to the 1950s. The genetic material allowed them to construct a family tree that traced the ancestry of the AIDS-causing pathogen, and statistical models helped them delve back into its origins.
“You can see the footprints of history in today’s genomes, it has left a record, a mutation mark in the HIV genome that can’t be eradicated,” study co-author and Oxford professor Oliver Pybus told BBC News online health editor James Gallagher. It was those mutational marks which allowed Pybus, Dr. Faria and their colleagues to reconstruct HIV’s family trees, Gallagher added.
University of Nottingham professor Jonathan Ball told BBC’s Gallagher that the study was “a fascinating insight into the early phases of the HIV-1 pandemic. It’s the usual suspects that are most likely to have helped the virus get a foothold in humans – travel, population increases and human practices such as unsafe healthcare interventions and prostitution.” He added that the suggestion the spread “had more to do with the conditions being right” than with the disease adapting for growth and transmission in humans would “prompt interesting and lively debate.”
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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The older generation is a source of constant study for scientists seeking to understand why some of us live such long lives, and some of us die relatively early. Studies have found many predictors of death in the elderly, including broken hips, love handles and nocturia (frequent bedwetting). A new study from the University of Chicago has added loss of smell (olfaction) to that list.
The findings, published in PLOS ONE, reveal that not being able to identify scents is a strong predictor of death within five years. In fact, 39 percent of those who failed the simple smelling test died during the five year time period. For those with moderate smell loss, only 19 percent died, and for those with no smell loss, the death rate was only 10 percent.
The study, part of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP), found that the dangers of losing your sense of smell are “robust,” more so than most chronic diseases. For example, olfactory dysfunction was found to be a better predictor of death than a diagnosis of heart failure, cancer or lung disease. Only severe liver damage was found to be a more powerful predictor, and for those already at high risk, losing their sense of smell more than doubled the probability of death.
“We think loss of the sense of smell is like the canary in the coal mine,” Jayant M. Pinto, MD, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Chicago who specializes in the genetics and treatment of olfactory and sinus disease, said in a recent statement. “It doesn’t directly cause death, but it’s a harbinger, an early warning that something has gone badly wrong, that damage has been done. Our findings could provide a useful clinical test, a quick and inexpensive way to identify patients most at risk.”
NSHAP, the first in-home study of social relationships and health in a large, nationally representative sample of men and women between ages 57 and 85, provided the data for the study. Between 2005 and 2006, professional survey teams from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago conducted the first wave of NSHAP. They used a well-validated test which measures the ability to identify five distinct common odors. The test was adapted for the by Martha McClintock, PhD, of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago.
According to Smitha Mundasad of BBC News, the five scents were peppermint, fish, orange, rose and leather encased on the tips of felt tip pens named Sniffin’Sticks. Each participant was asked to identify each smell from a set of four choices.

Image Above: Jayant Pinto, M.D., is shown with one of the Sniffin’ Sticks used to test a patient’s ability to identify scents for his research on olfactory dysfunction and aging. Credit: Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago
The team discovered that 75 percent of the participants were classified as “normosmic,” or having a normal sense of smell — of those, 45.5 percent correctly identified five out of five, while 29 percent identified four out of five. Almost 20 percent of the total cohort were classified as “hyposomic,” getting three out of five correct.
The final 3.5 percent could only identify one scent or less, classifying them as “anosmic.”
The researchers adjusted their findings for demographic variables such as age, gender, socioeconomic status (as measured by education or assets), overall health and race. Despite this, those with the poorest sense of smell were still at the highest risk.
Prof Pinto added: “The sense of smell is a little underappreciated – it plays a very important part in everyday life. But we don’t want people to panic. A bad cold, allergies, and sinus problems, can all affect your sense of smell.”
“People shouldn’t be too worried, but if problems persist they should speak to their physicians. And perhaps this study shows we need to start paying more attention to sensory health overall.”
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In the wake of recent developments involving the ongoing outbreak of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, officials from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are reaching out to make certain that people have the facts about the dangerous viral disease.
On September 30, CDC tests confirmed that a Liberian man, later identified as Thomas Eric Duncan, had become the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola while in the US. Duncan reportedly started showing symptoms approximately five days after arriving from West Africa and is currently being treated for the disease in the Dallas, Texas area.
In a statement, the CDC said that it “recognizes that even a single case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States raises concerns.” The agency added that “medical and public health professionals across the country have been preparing to respond” and that experts “have been reminded to use meticulous infection control at all times.”
On Friday, reports surfaced that a freelance cameraman who had been working with NBC News on their coverage of the outbreak had been diagnosed with Ebola. That individual, 33-year-old Ashoka Mukpo, first reported symptoms on Wednesday. He will be flown back to the US for treatment this weekend, and his colleagues have decided to voluntarily quarantine themselves for 21 days, according to William M. Welch of USA Today.
With stories like these dominating news broadcasts and print headlines, and given the fact that the CDC has declared that this is the largest Ebola epidemic in history, US health officials have been making a concentrated effort to quell concerns about a domestic outbreak of the disease. The CDC explained that the risk of a US Ebola outbreak was “very low,” that it and its partners were “taking precautions to prevent this from happening.”
Likewise, HHS officials sent out an email statement (see below) to the press Friday morning ensuring the country was “prepared” to deal with the disease, and that unlike the regions of Africa being hardest hit by Ebola, that the US “has a strong health care system and public health professionals who will make sure this case does not threaten our communities.”
According to the agency, the virus responsible for causing the viral hemorrhagic fever disease, as of Thursday, was reportedly responsible for more than 3,300 deaths worldwide. The symptoms include fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, weaknesses, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, a lack of appetite, and abnormal bleeding. Symptoms can appear anywhere from two to 21 days after exposure.
The HHS went on to explain that while Ebola was a potentially deadly disease, it is “not a highly contagious disease.” It can only be transmitted through direct contact with either the blood or bodily fluids of a person who has been infected and is showing symptoms of the disease, or through exposure to objects (such as needles) that have been contaminated with infected secretions.
Ebola is not a respiratory disease and cannot be transmitted through the air, the HHS said. Likewise, it is not transmitted through water, and a person cannot catch the viral hemorrhagic fever by eating contaminated food in the US, the agency noted. Likewise, it cannot be caught from a person who has been infected but is not showing any symptoms of the disease – a person would have to have “direct contact with an individual who is experiencing symptoms or has died of the disease,” according to the HHS statement.
“Ebola can be scary. But… the United States has a strong health care system and public health professionals who will make sure this case does not threaten our communities,” CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden explained in a statement announcing the details of the Duncan diagnosis on Tuesday. “While it is not impossible that there could be additional cases associated with this patient in the coming weeks, I have no doubt that we will contain this.”
The CDC also ensured that the agency had taken multiple steps to help prepare for the potential domestic spread of Ebola, including enhancing surveillance and laboratory testing capacity to better detect cases at the state level, for providing recommendation to help prevent infections and control the spread of the disease, and informing flight crews, emergency medical responders and other official on how to report ill travelers to the CDC.
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HHS Statement:
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the first confirmed case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States in a person who traveled from West Africa.
There’s all the difference in the world between the U.S. and parts of Africa where Ebola is spreading. The United States is prepared, and has a strong health care system and public health professionals who will make sure this case does not threaten our communities. As CDC Director Dr. Frieden has said, “I have no doubt that we will control this case of Ebola, so that it does not spread widely in this country.”
Although Ebola is a highly destructive disease, it is not a highly contagious disease.
Here are the facts you should know about Ebola:
What is Ebola? Ebola virus is the cause of a viral hemorrhagic fever disease. Symptoms include: fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, lack of appetite, and abnormal bleeding. Symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after exposure to Ebola virus though 8-10 days is most common.
How is Ebola transmitted? Ebola is transmitted through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of an infected symptomatic person or though exposure to objects (such as needles) that have been contaminated with infected secretions.
Can Ebola be transmitted through the air? No. Ebola is not a respiratory disease like the flu, so it is not transmitted through the air.
Can I get Ebola from contaminated food or water? No. Ebola is not transmitted through food in the United States. It is not transmitted through water.
Can I get Ebola from a person who is infected but doesn’t have any symptoms? No. Individuals who are not symptomatic are not contagious. In order for the virus to be transmitted, an individual would have to have direct contact with an individual who is experiencing symptoms or has died of the disease.
Click here for more: Questions and Answers about Ebola

Emma Thorne, The University of Nottingham

A major medical discovery by scientists at The University of Nottingham could lead to the development of an entirely new type of painkiller.

A drug resulting from the research, published in the journal Neurobiology of Disease, would offer new hope to sufferers of chronic pain conditions such as traumatic nerve injury, for which few effective painkillers are currently available.

The work, led by Dr. Lucy Donaldson in the University’s School of Life Sciences, in collaboration with David Bates, Professor of Oncology in the University’s Cancer Biology Unit, focuses on a signal protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF).

VEGF controls the re-growth of blood vessels in tissues which have been damaged by injury. It is a widely targeted compound for cancer, eye disease and other illnesses in which abnormal blood vessel growth occurs.

Drugs are used to inhibit the VEGF in cancer, which can otherwise lead to the formation of new blood vessels that provide oxygen and nutrients to tumors.

Professor Bates and colleagues had previously discovered in 2002 that VEGF comes in two forms and acts like a switch — one which turns on the growth of blood vessels and another that blocks growth.

Pain prevention

However, this latest research has shown for the first time that these two forms of VEGF not only act on blood vessels but also differently affect the sensory nerves that control pain.

The academics discovered that the VEGF that promotes blood vessel growth causes pain, while the other, which inhibits blood vessel growth, prevents pain.

The study has centered on understanding how these two types of VEGF work and why the body makes one form rather than the other.

The academics have been able to switch from the pain stimulating form to the pain inhibiting VEGF in animal models in the laboratory and are now investigating compounds to replicate this in humans. It is thought these compounds could form the basis for new drugs to be tested in humans in clinical trials.

The research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, Diabetes UK, the British Heart Foundation and the Richard Bright VEGF Research Fund.

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Rachel Champeau, University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences

Got grapes? UCLA researchers have demonstrated how resveratrol, an antioxidant derived from grapes and found in wine, works to inhibit growth of the bacteria that causes acne.

The team also found that combining resveratrol with a common acne medication, benzoyl peroxide, may enhance the drug’s ability to kill the bacteria and could translate into new treatments.

Published in the current online edition of the journal Dermatology and Therapy, the early lab findings demonstrated that resveratrol and benzoyl peroxide attack the acne bacteria, called Propionibacterium acnes, in different ways.

Resveratrol is the same substance that has prompted some doctors to recommend that adults drink red wine for its heart-health properties. The antioxidant stops the formation of free radicals, which cause cell and tissue damage. Benzoyl peroxide is an oxidant that works by creating free radicals that kill the acne bacteria.

“We initially thought that since actions of the two compounds are opposing, the combination should cancel the other out, but they didn’t,” said Dr. Emma Taylor, the study’s first author and an assistant clinical professor of medicine in the division of dermatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This study demonstrates that combining an oxidant and an antioxidant may enhance each other and help sustain bacteria-fighting activity over a longer period of time.”

The team grew colonies of the bacteria that causes acne and then added various concentrations of resveratrol and benzoyl peroxide both alone and together. The researchers monitored the cultures for bacterial growth or killing for 10 days.

They found that benzoyl peroxide was able to initially kill the bacteria at all concentration levels, but the effect was short lived and didn’t last beyond the first 24 hours.

Resveratrol didn’t have a strong killing capability, but it inhibited bacterial growth for a longer period of time. Surprisingly, the two compounds together proved the most effective in reducing bacteria counts.

“It was like combining the best of both worlds and offering a two-pronged attack on the bacteria,” said senior author Dr. Jenny Kim, professor of clinical medicine in the division of dermatology at the Geffen School.

Scientists have understood for years how benzoyl peroxide works to treat acne, but less has been known about what makes resveratrol effective — even though it has been the subject of previous studies. Using a high-powered microscope, the UCLA researchers observed that bacteria cells lost some of the structure and definition of their outer membranes, which indicated that resveratrol may work by altering and possibly weakening the structure of the bacteria.

The researchers also cultured human skin cells and blood cells with the two compounds to test their toxicity. They found that benzoyl peroxide was much more toxic than resveratrol, which could help explain what causes skin to become red and irritated when it’s used as a topical treatment in high dose or concentration.

Taylor noted that combining the two compounds allowed for prolonged antibacterial effects on the acne bacteria while minimizing its toxicity to other skin cells. The finding could lead to a more effective and less irritating topical acne therapy.

“We hope that our findings lead to a new class of acne therapies that center on antioxidants such as resveratrol,” Taylor said.

The next stage of research will involve further laboratory testing to better understand the mechanism of the two compounds. Additional research will be needed to validate the findings in patients.

Millions suffer from acne, and it has a significant psychosocial effect on patients, but limited progress has been made in developing new strategies for treating it. According to researchers, antibiotic resistance and side effects limit the efficacy of the current treatments, which include benzoyl peroxide, retinoids, antibiotics and Accutane (isotretinonin).

Michelle Klampe, Oregon State University
Parents with children at home should use ventilation when cooking with a gas stove, researchers from Oregon State University are recommending, after a new study showed an association between gas kitchen stove ventilation and asthma, asthma symptoms and chronic bronchitis.
“In homes where a gas stove was used without venting, the prevalence of asthma and wheezing is higher than in homes where a gas stove was used with ventilation,” said Ellen Smit, an associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU and one of the study’s authors. “Parents of all children should use ventilation while using a gas stove.”
Researchers can’t say that gas stove use without ventilation causes respiratory issues, but the new study clearly shows an association between having asthma and use of ventilation, Smit said. More study is needed to understand that relationship, including whether emissions from gas stoves could cause or exacerbate asthma in children, the researchers said.
Asthma is a common chronic childhood disease and an estimated 48 percent of American homes have a gas stove that is used. Gas stoves are known to affect indoor air pollution levels and researchers wanted to better understand the links between air pollution from gas stoves, parents’ behavior when operating gas stoves and respiratory issues, said Eric Coker, a doctoral student in public health and a co-author of the study.
The study showed that children who lived in homes where ventilation such as an exhaust fan was used when cooking with gas stoves were 32 percent less likely to have asthma than children who lived in homes where ventilation was not used. Children in homes where ventilation was used while cooking with a gas stove were 38 percent less likely to have bronchitis and 39 percent less likely to have wheezing. The study also showed that lung function, an important biological marker of asthma, was significantly better among girls from homes that used ventilation when operating their gas stove.
Many people in the study also reported using their gas stoves for heating, researchers found. That was also related to poorer respiratory health in children, particularly when ventilation was not used. In homes where the gas kitchen stove was used for heating, children were 44 percent less likely to have asthma and 43 percent less likely to have bronchitis if ventilation was used. The results did not change even when asthma risk factors such as pets or cigarette smoking inside the home were taken into account, Coker said.
“Asthma is one of the most common diseases in children living in the United States,” said Molly Kile, the study’s lead author. Kile is an environmental epidemiologist and assistant professor at OSU. “Reducing exposure to environmental factors that can exacerbate asthma can help improve the quality of life for people with this condition.”
The findings were published recently in the journal “Environmental Health.” Co-authors included John Molitor and Anna Harding of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences and Daniel Sudakin of the College of Agricultural Sciences. The research was supported by OSU.
Researchers used data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics from 1988-1994. Data collected for NHANES is a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population.
The third edition of the survey is the only one in which questions about use of gas stoves were asked, Coker said. Participants were interviewed in their homes and also underwent physical exams and lab tests.
Researchers examined data from about 7,300 children ages 2-16 who has asthma, wheezing or bronchitis and whose parents reported using a gas stove in the home. Of those who reported using no ventilation, 90 percent indicated they did not have an exhaust system or other ventilation in their homes, Coker said.
Even though the study relies on older data, the findings remain relevant because many people still use gas stoves for cooking, and in some cases, for heat in the winter, the researchers said.
“Lots of older homes lack exhaust or other ventilation,” Coker said. “We know this is still a problem. We don’t know if it is as prevalent as it was when the data was collected.”
Researchers suggest that future health surveys include questions about gas stove and ventilation use. That would allow them to see if there have been any changes in ventilation use since the original data was collected.
“More research is definitely needed,” Coker said. “But we know using an effective ventilation system will reduce air pollution levels in a home, so we can definitely recommend that.”
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