Cell Press

By targeting RNA molecules that tangle and clump in the nervous systems of patients with the most common genetic form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), researchers have shown they can effectively limit those damaging elements in cells taken from patients. The results reported in the Cell Press journal Neuron on August 14th show that RNA is a viable drug target for the two overlapping and incurable neurodegenerative diseases. The abnormal proteins derived from that aberrant RNA might also serve as biomarkers in clinical trials to test the new ALS and FTD drug candidate and otherwise monitor the diseases, the new study finds.

ALS is caused by a progressive loss of motor neurons, leading to severe impairment of mobility, speech, swallowing, and respiratory function that is usually fatal within two to five years, the researchers explained. In FTD, brain regions that support higher cognitive function are affected instead to produce disabling changes in behavior, personality, and language. At present, no effective treatment is available for either condition. However, experts believe that a better understanding of the underlying disease processes will expedite the development of effective therapies, say Leonard Petrucelli of the Mayo Clinic and Matthew Disney of The Scripps Research Institute.

Indeed, Petrucelli, Disney, and their colleagues say that they were pleasantly surprised at how quickly they were able to identify a small molecule capable of interrupting the disease process in cells carrying the C9ORF72 gene. The disease variant is characterized by an expansion of repetitive DNA, which leads to the production of lengthy RNA tangles and the translation of abnormal proteins, both of which can apparently “set in motion distinct toxic chains of events that ultimately lead to neuronal death.”

When the neurodegeneration targets motor neurons, the result is ALS. When it happens in brain regions that support higher cognitive function, then FTD develops. In some cases, affected people show signs of both conditions, which made it clear to Petrucelli and Disney that the aberrant RNA molecules were attractive targets for fighting the diseases.

In search of promising small molecules for the job, the research team first examined the shape of the culprit RNA. The goal then was to identify compounds capable of binding to it, and they got lucky.

“We found that the RNA repeat that causes c9FTD/ALS has some structural similarities to the RNA that causes fragile X-associated tremor ataxia syndrome, to which we already identified a small molecule that could affect dysfunction,” Disney said.

By testing that compound and others that were chemically similar, they rather quickly identified two that selectively target c9FTD/ALS repeat RNA in cells. One of the two compounds cut the accumulation of RNA tangles in cell lines derived from ALS patients in half, they report, with no apparent toxicity. Petrucelli and Disney are now working on ways to improve it even further.

Importantly, the researchers also found that they could detect aberrant proteins in the spinal fluid of ALS patients with the C9ORF72 mutation, which might be useful when it comes to testing their compound or others in clinical trials.

“A decrease in the levels of c9RAN proteins in patient blood or cerebrospinal fluid in response to treatment would demonstrate the drug is working,” Petrucelli said. “While additional studies must be done, this finding suggests that c9RAN proteins may provide a direct means to measure a patient’s response to experimental drugs that target abnormal repeat RNA.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin or ibuprofen could significantly lower breast cancer recurrence rates in overweight or obese women, according to new research appearing in Friday’s edition of the journal Cancer Research.

In the study, Dr. Andrew Brenner of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CRTC) at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and his colleagues found that women whose body mass index (BMI) was greater than 30 and who had the most common form of breast cancer had a 52 percent lower rate of recurrence and a 28-month delay in time to recurrence if they were taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

Dr. Brenner and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin, the START Center for Cancer Care in San Antonio, and the University of Texas Health Science Center used a retrospective analysis of human subjects and cell cultures to determine that using aspirin or other types of NSAIDs reduced the recurrence rate of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα)-positive breast cancer – though they cautioned that the findings were only preliminary.

“Our studies suggest that limiting inflammatory signaling may be an effective, less toxic approach to altering the cancer-promoting effects of obesity and improving patient response to hormone therapy,” explained Dr. Linda A. deGraffenried, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Texas in Austin.

“These results suggest that NSAIDs may improve response to hormone therapy, thereby allowing more women to remain on hormone therapy rather than needing to change to chemotherapy and deal with the associated side effects and complications,” she added. “However, these results are preliminary and patients should never undertake any treatment without consulting with their physician.”

The study authors obtained blood samples from 440 CRTC breast cancer patients, 58.5 percent of whom were obese and 25.8 percent of whom were overweight. Approximately 81 percent of the subjects took aspirin while the remainder took a different type of NSAID, 42 percent took statins, and 25 percent took omega-3 fatty acids.

They compared the prognoses of those who took NSAIDs with those who did not, then conducted a second study to investigate how breast cancer cells behave in a person’s body. To do so, they conducted a series of experiments designed to simulate a tumor filled with cancer cells, fat cells and the immune cells that promote inflammation.

They discovered that the factors associated with obesity serve as the catalyst for signals that promote growth and resistance to treatment within the tumor environment. While the mechanism that causes breast cancer to be more aggressive and less responsive to treatment in obese women is not well understood, the study authors believe that inflammation plays a key role and suggest that it also makes some cancer drugs less effective.

“Overweight or obese women diagnosed with breast cancer are facing a worse prognosis than normal-weight women,” said Dr. deGraffenried in a separate statement. “We believe that obese women are facing a different disease. There are changes at the molecular level. We want to reduce the disease-promoting effects of obesity.”

Based on their findings, the CTRC and the University of Texas in Austin have launched a pilot anti-inflammatory trial, and are looking to secure funding for a larger study. The authors state that their goal is to determine which women would benefit the most from the addition of NSAIDS to their regular treatment programs.

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Let Me Get This Off My Chest: A Breast Cancer Survivor Over-Shares by Margaret Lesh

By Marc Weisblott, Concordia University

Does a baby know that a dog can jump a fence while a school bus can’t? Can a toddler grasp that a cat can avoid colliding with a wall, while a table being pushed into a wall can’t?

A new study from Concordia shows that infants as young as 10-months old can tell the difference between the kinds of paths naturally taken by a walking animal, compared to a moving car or piece of furniture.

That’s important information because the ability to categorize things as animate beings or inanimate objects is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows toddlers to better understand the world around them.

The study, published in Infant Behavior & Development, looked at about 350 babies — who participated at 10, 12, 16 and 20 months — to find out when children clue in to the fact that animals and objects follow different motion paths.

Since the study subjects could not express much in words, the researchers used a technique called the “visual habituation paradigm,” which measures how long one looks at a given object.

“You can understand something about what babies know based on how long they look at something,” explains former doctoral student Rachel Baker, who collaborated on the study with fellow researcher Tamara Pettigrew and Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor in Concordia’s Department of Psychology and member of the Centre for Research in Human Development. “Babies will look at something new longer than they will look at something that is already familiar to them.”

Since computer animations of a bus or a table jumping over a wall held the attention of infants for longer than a bus or table bumping into a wall, it indicated the former was newer to them than the latter. In contrast, infants’ attention was held just as well by a cat jumping over a wall as by a cat rebounding after running into a wall, indicating that infants think that cats can both jump and rebound.

This matches real life, says Baker, who obtained her PhD from Concordia and is now a research and statistical officer at the Cape Breton District Health Authority. “Animals do bump into objects — if I’m not paying attention to where I’m going, I’ve been known to bump into things. The bigger picture is that the motion of objects is more predictable than the motion of animals. This research shows that even 10-month-old babies have some understanding of this.”

For the researchers, the study reveals that even the youngest among us absorb more details than some might think, through eyes that are usually open wider than adult ones.

“Babies are really quite smart,” says Baker. “The secret to finding out what they know is to be creative and tap into behaviours they do naturally. By doing so, we’ve shown that babies understand something about animals and objects even though they can’t yet put that knowledge into words.”

The Lancet

Close to half (40%) of the adult population of the USA is expected to develop type 2 diabetes at some point during their lifetime, suggests a major study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. The future looks even worse for some ethnic minority groups, with one in two (> 50%) Hispanic men and women and non-Hispanic black women predicted to develop the disease.

A team of US researchers combined data from nationally representative US population interviews and death certificates for about 600 000 adults to estimate trends in the lifetime risk of diabetes and years of life lost to diabetes in the USA between 1985 and 2011.

Over the 26 years of study, the lifetime risk of developing type 2 diabetes for the average American 20-year-old rose from 20% for men and 27% for women in 1985, to 40% for men and 39% for women in 2000. The largest increases were in Hispanic men and women, and non-Hispanic black women, for whom lifetime risk now exceeds 50%.

Dr Edward Gregg, study leader and Chief of the Epidemiology and Statistics Branch, Division of Diabetes Translation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, “Soaring rates of diabetes since the late 1980s and longer overall life expectancy in the general population have been the main drivers of the striking increase in the lifetime risk of diabetes over the last 26 years. At the same time, a large reduction in death rates in the US population with diabetes has reduced the average number of years lost to the disease. However, the overwhelming increase in diabetes prevalence has resulted in an almost 50% increase in the cumulative number of years of life lost to diabetes for the population as a whole: years spent living with diabetes have increased by 156% in men and 70% in women.”

He concludes, “As the number of diabetes cases continue to increase and patients live longer there will be a growing demand for health services and extensive costs. More effective lifestyle interventions are urgently needed to reduce the number of new cases in the USA and other developed nations.”

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Lorraine Lipscombe from Women’s College Hospital and the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada says, “The trends reported by Gregg and colleagues are probably similar across the developed world, where large increases in diabetes prevalence in the past two decades have been reported…Primary prevention strategies are urgently needed. Excellent evidence has shown that diabetes can be prevented with lifestyle changes. However, provision of these interventions on an individual basis might not be sustainable. Only a population-based approach to prevention can address a problem of this magnitude. Prevention strategies should include optimisation of urban planning, food-marketing policies, and work and school environments that enable individuals to make healthier lifestyle choices. With an increased focus on interventions aimed at children and their families, there might still be time to change the fate of our future generations by lowering their risk of type 2 diabetes.”

Craig Boerner, Vanderbilt University

High-dose influenza vaccine is 24 percent more effective than the standard-dose vaccine in protecting persons ages 65 and over against influenza illness and its complications, according to a Vanderbilt-led study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

The multi-center study enrolled 31,989 participants from 126 research centers in the U.S. and Canada during the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 influenza seasons in the Northern Hemisphere in order to compare the high-dose trivalent vaccine versus the standard-dose trivalent vaccine in adults over 65 years of age.

“The study was done to see if using a high-dose vaccine protected older adults better than the usual vaccine. Until this trial came out we didn’t know if it was going to be clinically better or not and now we know it is better,” said lead author Keipp Talbot, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine, who served as coordinating investigator for the more than 100 study sites.

“Older adults are the most vulnerable to influenza; they become the sickest and have the most hospitalizations. This vaccine works better than the standard dose and hence I would tell my patients to get the high-dose vaccine every year.  In the meantime, we will continue to work to find newer and better vaccines for older adults.”

Researchers concluded that the high-dose vaccine is safe, induces significantly higher antibody responses, and provides superior protection against laboratory-confirmed influenza illness compared to standard dose among persons over 65 years of age.

Study data also indicated that the high-dose vaccine may provide clinical benefit for the prevention of hospitalizations, pneumonia, cardio-respiratory conditions, non-routine medical visits, and medication use.

Between 1990 and 1999, seasonal influenza caused an average of 36,000 deaths and 226,000 hospitalizations per year in the U.S. Adults over 65 years old are particularly vulnerable to influenza complications, accounting for most seasonal influenza-related hospitalizations and deaths.

“Prevention of influenza should lower hospitalizations, deaths, heart attacks, and pneumonia,” Talbot said. “This vaccine does have some more arm soreness than the usual vaccine because it is a higher dose.  With this increased soreness comes greater protection.”

Known as the Fluzone High-Dose vaccine, and made by Sanofi Pasteur, the inactivated influenza vaccine contains four times the amount of antigen that is contained in the standard-dose Fluzone vaccine.

“Fluzone High-Dose vaccine is the only influenza vaccine in the U.S. that is designed specifically to address the age-related decline of the immune system in older adults,” said David P. Greenberg, M.D., vice president, Scientific & Medical Affairs, and chief medical officer, Sanofi Pasteur U.S.

Study authors said about one-in-four breakthrough cases of influenza could be prevented if the high-dose vaccine were used instead of the standard-dose vaccine.

“I see older adults hospitalized every year with influenza and many of them come into the hospital with pneumonias and heart failure because they had influenza,” Talbot said “But I have to say our seniors in Nashville are very good at getting vaccinated. Locally they are very good and they do much better than their counterparts who are less than 65 years old. About 76 percent of this community of older adults are vaccinated for influenza each year.”

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Michael Sutphin, Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech researchers who were using a disinfectant when handling mice have discovered that two active ingredients in it cause declines in mouse reproduction.

Although the chemicals responsible for the declines are common in household cleaning products and disinfectants used in medical and food preparation settings, including hand sanitizers, academic scientists have never published a rigorous study, until now, on their safety or toxicity.

“It is likely that you have these chemicals in your house,” said Dr. Terry Hrubec, a research assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. “The answer to the question, ‘Are these chemicals harmful to humans?’ is that we simply don’t know.”

Hrubec and her research team at the veterinary college saw a decline in reproductive performance of her mice. Stumped by her initial findings, Hrubec noticed animal care staff in her laboratory wetting their hands with a disinfectant before touching the mice.

This observation led her to a letter published in Nature by co-author Patricia Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University, who had made the same discovery. These two independent observations were the impetus for the study. When Hrubec tested whether the disinfectant might be causing reproductive decline, she came up with the unexpected finding.

“These chemicals have been around for 50 years,” said Hrubec, who is also an associate professor of anatomy at Blacksburg, Virginia’s Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. “They are generally considered safe, but no one has done rigorous scientific research to confirm this.”

The two active ingredients in the disinfectant — alkyl dimethyl benzalkonium chloride and didecyl dimethylammonium chloride — are typically listed by their abbreviations, ADBAC and DDAC, on ingredient lists.

They are a part of a larger class of chemicals called “quaternary ammonium compounds,” which are used for their antimicrobial and antistatic properties as well as their ability to lower surface tension between two liquids or a liquid and a solid. They are found in commercial and householder cleaners, disinfectants, hand sanitizers, preservatives in makeup and other cosmetics, fabric softeners, and dryer sheets.

“We just tested the two active ingredients in the disinfectant, not the entire class of compounds,” Hrubec explained. “To be on the safe side, we need to do more research on these chemicals and find out how they could be affecting human health.”

The research team found that the female mice took longer to get pregnant and had fewer offspring when they did. Forty percent of the mothers exposed to ADBAC and DDAC died in late pregnancy or during delivery. Graduate students Vanessa Melin and Haritha Potineni in the veterinary college’s Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology assisted with the study.

Hrubec drew comparisons between her research team’s work and similar research on bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA. In 1998, Washington State’s Hunt discovered the toxic effects of BPA, which could be found on baby bottles, medical and dental devices, and coatings on beverage cans, among other uses. Hrubec and Hunt are co-authors on the Virginia Tech study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of Reproductive Toxicology, a leading journal on the effects of toxic substances on the reproductive system.

“If these chemicals are toxic to humans, they could also be contributing to the decline in human fertility seen in recent decades, as well as the increased need for assistive reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization,” Hrubec said.

Quaternary ammonium compounds like the ones used for the disinfectant in Hrubec’s lab were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Although some toxicity testing took place during this period, it was conducted by chemical manufacturers and not published.

“These industry-sponsored studies took place before toxicity studies were standardized,” Hrubec said. “In the 1980s, toxicity researchers developed and implemented Good Laboratory Practices, or GLPs. These are guidelines and rules for conducting research so that it is reproducible and reliable. All of the research on these chemicals happened before that.”

Although these chemicals are harmful to mice, Hrubec explained that they might not be dangerous for humans. But considering the widespread human exposure to the compounds through cleaning products and disinfectants, more research is needed to verify human implications. Hrubec noted that an epidemiological study could determine whether people who have a high rate of exposure to the chemicals, such as healthcare workers or restaurant servers, have a harder time becoming pregnant.

In addition to the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, the study received funding from the Passport Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that sponsors research on product safety.

View the journal article in the online edition of Reproductive Toxicology.

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Consuming too much salt has long been associated with risk of high blood pressure, but cutting back too much on sodium could also be hazardous to your health, according to research appearing in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Lead author Dr. Martin O’Donnel of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and his colleagues concluded in their study that consuming less than three grams of sodium per day increased the risk of death or major cardiovascular event by 27 percent versus those who consumed four to six grams each day, said Reuters reporter Gene Emery.

The study followed over 100,000 people from 17 different countries for an average of over three years, added Ron Winslow of the Wall Street Journal. The controversial findings “are the latest to challenge the benefit of aggressively low sodium targets – especially for generally healthy people.”

While the study “has shortcomings, and as an observational study it found only an association, not a causative effect, between very low sodium and cardiovascular risk,” Winslow said that it has “spurred calls to reconsider” recommendations from the American Heart Association and other health groups that most people consume between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams (though US daily recommendations call for about 3,400 milligrams of salt).

NBC News reporters Judy Silverman and Lisa Tolin noted the study suggests that efforts to reduce the salt content in foods in order to help prevent high blood pressure and the cardiovascular ailments associated with it could be misguided. American Heart Association president Dr. Elliott Antman, however, has taken issue with the fact that sodium was measured through urine samples and noted that it might have ignored other potential health issues.

“We don’t know the diet the subjects who gave a urine specimen were eating and for how long they ate it after. It was one point in time, and the researchers followed them for 3.7 years and try to draw a relationship between one-spot urine and events that occurred over the next 3.7 years,” he told NBC News. Dr. Antman also noted that the study was too short to draw long-term conclusions, since it can take decades for cardiovascular disease to surface.

University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Dr. Suzanne Oparil, the author of an editorial accompanying the study, told reporters that the study, while flawed, provides evidence supporting the notion that consuming too little salt could be dangerous. She added that low-sodium targets are “questionable health policy” without evidence from randomized trials to support such claims.

A second study, also published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined the effect of sodium on blood pressure and found that people consuming a moderate amount of salt did not benefit from reducing their consumption as those consuming higher amounts.

“Previously it was believed that the lower you go the better. What these studies show collectively is that there is an optimal level, and lower is not necessarily better,” McMaster University’s Dr. Andrew Mente, lead author of that study, told Reuters. “If people are eating a very high level of sodium and they reduce their intake, you get a large reduction in blood pressure. But if you’re eating a moderate level of sodium – about what most North Americans eat – and you reduce it to a lower level, you’re not really getting much in return as far as blood pressure reduction is concerned.”

A third NEJM paper, however, reported that one-tenth of all cardiovascular deaths occur to people consuming more than 2,000 milligrams of sodium per day. What that means, said lead author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian of Tufts University, is that approximately 1.65 million people each year die as the result of heart disease and stroke directly caused by excessive sodium consumption.

Dr. Mozaffarian and his co-authors looked at data from 205 surveys of sodium intake representing approximately 75 percent of the global adult population, and discovered that the average sodium intake in 2010 was 3.95 grams per day – nearly double the daily recommendation set by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Honor Whiteman of Medical News Today.

“All worldwide regions had sodium intakes above the WHO recommendation. These ranged from 2.18 g per day in sub-Saharan Africa to 5.51 g per day in Central Asia,” Whiteman said. “The researchers found that 4 out of 5 global deaths attributable to excess sodium intake occurred in low- and middle-income countries.”

“The bulk of the available evidence to date suggests that reduced sodium intake is associated with reduced blood pressure, which itself is associated with a reduction in cardiovascular events,” Dr. Antman said in a statement. “Along with improving overall diet, controlling weight, and increasing physical activity, lowering sodium intake is key to lowering blood pressure in the general population and improving blood pressure control in those with hypertension.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Obesity increases a person’s risk of developing 10 of the most common forms of cancer, and is believed to cause an estimated 12,000 additional cases of the disease each year, experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Farr Institute of Health Informatics claim in a new study.
The research, which was published online Thursday in the UK medical journal The Lancet, looked at the medical data of five million UK adults and discovered a link between higher body mass index (BMI) and increased risk of cancers affecting the uterus, gallbladder, kidney, liver, cervix, thyroid, and colon, as well as leukemia, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
Weight-related increases in cancer risk varied by tumor type, with uterine cancer having the highest (a 62 percent increased risk) followed by gallbladder (31 percent) and kidney (25 percent), according to BBC News. They found that every 28 to 35 pounds (13 to 16 kg) of extra weight was clearly linked with an increase in the risk of these three diseases, as well as cervical cancer, thyroid cancer and leukemia.
“If we could magically remove excess weight from the population, we would have 12,000 fewer cancers,” lead investigator Dr. Krishnan Bhaskaran, National Institute for Health Research Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSHTM, told The Guardian on Wednesday, adding that even the study authors were surprised by how strong the relationship was.
“The number of people who are overweight or obese is rapidly increasing both in the UK and worldwide. It is well recognized that this is likely to cause more diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Bhaskaran added in a statement. “Our results show that if these trends continue, we can also expect to see substantially more cancers as a result.”
The LSHTM and Farr Institute researchers reported that obesity increased the risk of liver cancer by 19 percent, cervical cancer and colon cancer by 10 percent each, thyroid and ovarian cancers by 9 percent each, leukemia by 9 percent and breast cancer by 5 percent, though they noted that those effects varied by underlying BMI and other individual-level risk factors such as sex and menopausal status.
While they found some evidence that higher-weight people faced a slightly reduced risk of prostate cancer and premenopausal breast cancer, the results of the National Institute for Health Research, Wellcome Trust, and Medical Research Council-funded study suggest that obesity could account for 41 percent of all uterine cancer cases, and at least one-tenth of all gallbladder, kidney, liver, and colon cancers in the UK.
If the obesity epidemic continues to spread, it could be responsible for as many as 3,500 new cancers every year, the researchers noted. The study’s findings have prompted some experts to call on regulators to do more to encourage people to eat healthier while punishing companies that sell high-calorie foods, noted Sarah Knapton, Science Correspondent for The Telegraph.
“We have to ditch this love-in with the food industry and start penalizing those who continue to make unhealthy food.” Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum told Knapton. “We are now starting to reap the rewards of decades of inaction and unwillingness to do anything about obesity and its consequences.”
“The public is still not aware of the harm that being overweight or obese does and we have become too worried with making fat people thin rather than preventing people getting that way in the first place,” she added. “From the earliest age, children should be educated at school about the dangers, otherwise we are just mopping up the water without turning off the tap.”
Weight Watchers 50th Anniversary Cookbook – 280 Delicious Recipes for Every Meal

American Chemical Society
As countries try to rid themselves of toxic mercury pollution, some people are slathering and even injecting creams containing the metal onto or under their skin to lighten it, putting themselves and others at risk for serious health problems. To find those most at risk, scientists are reporting today that they can now identify these creams and intervene much faster than before. They’re speaking at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
The meeting, organized by the world’s largest scientific society, features nearly 12,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics and is being held here through Thursday.
“In the U.S., the limit on mercury in products is 1 part per million,” says Gordon Vrdoljak, Ph.D., of the California Department of Public Health. “In some of these creams, we’ve been finding levels as high as 210,000 parts per million — really substantial amounts of mercury. If people are using the product quite regularly, their hands will exude it, it will get in their food, on their countertops, on the sheets their kids sleep on.”
Identifying the toxic products has been a slow process, however. So, Vrdoljak turned to an instrument that uses a technique called total reflection x-ray fluorescence. He found that the machine can screen product samples for mercury content far more efficiently, and just as accurately, as its well-established but time-consuming counterpart. That means the team he works with and others around the country will be able to identify the sources of mercury poisoning and help those affected much faster than before.
“Testing one product using the old technique could take days,” he said. “Using the new instrument, I can run through 20 or 30 samples in a day quite easily. By identifying those products that contain mercury, we can direct people to remove them and clean up their households.”
Although the metal does lighten skin, dark spots and even acne, research has shown that the silvery liquid can cause a number of health problems, including lower cognitive functioning, kidney damage, headaches, fatigue, hand tremors, depression and other symptoms. As a result, the US and many other countries have set low limits on or have banned mercury in consumer products.
But demand is high among certain populations for these skin-lightening products. People bring them into the US in their personal luggage from other regions where the creams are popular, including Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Africa, Vrdoljak explains. Then they distribute the creams to friends and families or sell them through small ethnic stores — off the regulatory radar.
When cream users start noticing hand shaking, headaches and other symptoms, they visit their doctors. Through a urine test, they can find out whether they have high levels of mercury. In these cases, Vrdoljak says his team can step in. They analyze dozens of bottles and containers from the patients’ homes to root out the products that contain mercury. Their work has led to two product recalls earlier this year, but often, they find the cosmetics are homemade and come in unmarked containers.
“In the U.S., it’s hard to gauge how much of these products are being used,” Vrdoljak says. “But at least with this new technique, we can identify them much faster and help more people than before.”

University of Cambridge

A smart technology which involves smuggling gold nanoparticle into brain cancer cells has proven highly effective in lab-based tests

A “Trojan horse” treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer, which involves using tiny nanoparticles of gold to kill tumor cells, has been successfully tested by scientists.

The ground-breaking technique could eventually be used to treat glioblastoma multiforme, which is the most common and aggressive brain tumor in adults, and notoriously difficult to treat. Many sufferers die within a few months of diagnosis, and just six in every 100 patients with the condition are alive after five years.

The research involved engineering nanostructures containing both gold and cisplatin, a conventional chemotherapy drug. These were released into tumor cells that had been taken from glioblastoma patients and grown in the lab.

Once inside, these “nanospheres” were exposed to radiotherapy. This caused the gold to release electrons which damaged the cancer cell’s DNA and its overall structure, thereby enhancing the impact of the chemotherapy drug.

The process was so effective that 20 days later, the cell culture showed no evidence of any revival, suggesting that the tumor cells had been destroyed.

While further work needs to be done before the same technology can be used to treat people with glioblastoma, the results offer a highly promising foundation for future therapies. Importantly, the research was carried out on cell lines derived directly from glioblastoma patients, enabling the team to test the approach on evolving, drug-resistant tumors.

The study was led by Mark Welland, Professor of Nanotechnology and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and Dr Colin Watts, a clinician scientist and honorary consultant neurosurgeon at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. Their work is reported in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal, Nanoscale.

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Sharon Theimer, Mayo Clinic

Study: younger, older people likelier to visit ER repeatedly with gallstone pain before surgery

Gallstone pain is one of the most common reasons patients visit emergency rooms. Figuring out who needs emergency gallbladder removal and who can go home and schedule surgery at their convenience is sometimes a tricky question, and it isn’t always answered correctly. A new Mayo Clinic study found that 1 in 5 patients who went to the emergency room with gallbladder pain and were sent home to schedule surgery returned to the ER within 30 days needing emergency gallbladder removal. The surgical complication rate rises with the time lag before surgery, the researchers say.

“It makes a big difference if you get the right treatment at the right time,” says co-lead author Juliane Bingener-Casey, M.D., a gastroenterologic surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. The study is published in the Journal of Surgical Research.

Often it’s obvious who needs emergency gallbladder removal, a procedure known as cholecystectomy, who can delay it and who doesn’t need surgery at all. But sometimes patients fall into a gray area. Mayo researchers are working to develop a reliable tool to help determine the best course of action in those cases, and the newly published study is a first step, Dr. Bingener-Casey says.

How to handle gallstone patients is a cost and quality issue in health care. In the United States, 1 in 10 women and 1 in 15 men have gallstones, and more than 1 million people a year are hospitalized for gallstone disease. The fatty food common in U.S. diets is a contributing factor, Dr. Bingener-Casey says.

ER visits and emergency surgery are typically more expensive than scheduled surgeries. In addition to cost issues, patients often prefer the convenience of scheduling surgery, so they can arrange child care and leave from work, for example. But delaying a needed gallbladder removal more than six days increases the surgical complication rate and may make patients likelier to need open-abdomen surgery rather than a minimally invasive laparoscopic procedure, the researchers noted.

“Gallbladder disease is very frequent and it’s one of the most expensive diseases for the nation as a whole. If we can get that right the first time, I think we can make things better for a lot of people,” Dr. Bingener-Casey says.

Researchers studied the billing records of 3,138 patients at Mayo in Rochester between 2000 and 2013 who went to the emergency department for abdominal pain within 30 days before gallbladder surgery. Of those, 1,625 were admitted for emergency gallbladder surgery, and 1,513 were allowed to go home and schedule surgery at a later date. Of the patients who went home, 20 percent came back to the emergency room within a month needing a cholecystectomy urgently, and of those, 55 percent were back in the ER within a week for emergency surgery.

[ Watch: Emergency Gallstone Surgery: Do You Need It, Or Can You Afford To Wait? ]

Among those discharged from the ER, younger patients who were otherwise healthy and older patients who did have other health problems were likelier than people in their 40s and 50s to return to the emergency room within a month and need gallbladder removal urgently, the study found. That suggests that younger patients, older patients and those with other serious medical conditions may benefit from a second look before they are discharged from the emergency room, the researchers say.

Researchers analyzed test results typically considered indicators of gallbladder disease including white blood cell count, temperature and heart rate and saw no difference between those who left the ER and didn’t make a repeat visit and those who left the emergency room only to come back within a month. Such metrics may be incorporated into a decision tool if they hold up during future research.

The study was funded in part by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases award number K23DK93553.

The co-lead author is Elizabeth Habermann, Ph.D., scientific director of surgical outcomes research at Mayo Clinic’s Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery.

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Exercise is good for the body and mind. Many studies have shown that moderate, regular exercise, such as brisk walking or jogging, can help with weight loss, mood changes, the management and rehabilitation of cardiovascular disease, and even lowering the risk of death from diseases such as hypertension, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. Currently, the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans suggests 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity, or 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise to maintain optimum health. But is there such a thing as too much exercise?

According to a new study, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the answer is yes. The findings indicate a clear link between cardiovascular deaths in heart attack survivors who exercise to excess.

The research team, comprised of Paul T. Williams, PhD, of the Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Paul D. Thompson, MD, of the Department of Cardiology, Hartford Hospital, analyzed the association between exercise and cardiovascular disease-related deaths. Using the National Walkers’ and Runners’ Health Studies databases, the researchers conducted a prospective long-term study with about 2,400 physically active heart attack survivors. The National Walkers’ and Runners’ study confirmed prior results which demonstrated walking and running gave the same cardiovascular benefits, as long as the energy expenditures were the same. For example, running takes half as long to expend the same number of calories as walking.

Patients who ran less than 30 miles or walked less than 46 miles a week saw a remarkable 65 percent dose-dependent reduction in death from cardiovascular events. Much of the benefit was lost past this point, in what scientists call a reverse J-curve pattern.

“These analyses provide what is to our knowledge the first data in humans demonstrating a statistically significant increase in cardiovascular risk with the highest levels of exercise,” the researchers said in an Elsevier Health Sciences statement. “Results suggest that the benefits of running or walking do not accrue indefinitely and that above some level, perhaps 30 miles per week of running, there is a significant increase in risk. Competitive running events also appear to increase the risk of an acute event.” They caution, however, that “our study population consisted of heart attack survivors and so the findings cannot be readily generalized to the entire population of heavy exercisers.”

Another study in the same issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings describes a meta-analysis of ten cohort studies aimed at providing an accurate overview of mortality in elite athletes. Over 42,000 top athletes, participating in football, baseball, track and field, cycling were examined, including Olympic level athletes and Tour de France participants. Of the total cohort, 707 athletes were women.

“What we found on the evidence available was that elite athletes (mostly men) live longer than the general population, which suggests that the beneficial health effects of exercise, particularly in decreasing cardiovascular disease and cancer risk, are not necessarily confined to moderate doses,” comments Alejandro Lucia, MD, PhD, of the European University Madrid, Spain. “More research is needed however, using more homogeneous cohorts and a more proportional representation of both sexes.”

“Extrapolation of the data from the current Williams and Thompson study to the general population would suggest that approximately one out of twenty people is overdoing exercise,” commented James H. O’Keefe, MD, from the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, MO, and first author of an editorial entitled “Exercising for Health and Longevity versus Peak Performance: Different Regimens for Different Goals,” which appears in the same issue. O’Keefe and his colleagues explain that “we have suggested the term ‘cardiac overuse injury’ for this increasingly common consequence of the ‘more exercise is better’ strategy.” Of those same 20 people, the authors note that 10 are not getting the minimum recommended 150 minutes a week of physical activity.

O’Keefe and his co-authors, Carl “Chip” Lavie, MD, and Barry Franklin, PhD, caution that a cumulative dose of not more than five hours of vigorous exercise is the upper limit identified in several studies for long-term cardiovascular health and life expectancy. They also suggest taking one to two days a week off from vigorous exercise over all, and to refrain from a high-intensity workout on an everyday basis. Instead, the researchers suggest that people from either end of the exercise spectrum—over-exercisers and sedentary people alike—might reap more long-term health benefits by changing their physical activity levels to be in the moderate range.

“For patients with heart disease, almost all should be exercising, and generally most should be exercising 30-40 minutes most days, but from a health stand-point, there is no reason to exercise much longer than that and especially not more than 60 minutes on most days,” says Lavie, who is a cardiologist at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute, New Orleans, LA. “As Hippocrates said more than 2,000 years ago, ‘if we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.’ I and my co-authors believe this assessment continues to provide wise guidance,” he concluded.

> Read more about the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans…

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Bee stings and snake bites are not typically viewed as things that are beneficial to a person’s health, but new research out of the University of Illinois suggests that they could be powerful tools in the treatment of cancer.

[ Watch: Treating Cancer With Venom ]

In research presented at the 248th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco, California on Monday, Dr. Dipanjan Pan described how venom from bees, snakes and scorpions could form the basis of next-generation cancer-fighting drugs.

Dr. Pan and his colleagues have developed a method which utilizes nanotechnology and makes it so the venom proteins specifically target malignant cells while keeping healthy ones safe from harm. Their work would reduce or eliminate cell damage and other painful side effects usually caused by the toxins, the study authors explained.

“We have safely used venom toxins in tiny nanometer-sized particles to treat breast cancer and melanoma cells in the laboratory. These particles, which are camouflaged from the immune system, take the toxin directly to the cancer cells, sparing normal tissue,” Dr. Pan said in a statement.

There are proteins and peptides in snake, bee and scorpion venom which can attach to cancer cell membranes when they are separated from other components of the toxins and tested individually, the researchers explained. They then used nanoparticles to disguise the toxins, and found that it bypassed healthy cells.

Previous studies have indicated this activity could potentially be used to block the growth and spread of cancer, and Pan’s team noted that some substances found in these venoms could be effective anti-tumor agents. However, simply injecting venom into a patient would have noticeable side effects, such as damage to heart muscle and nerve cells, unwanted clotting or bleeding beneath the skin.

During their research, the Illinois scientists identified a substance in honey bee venom known as melittin, which they claim kept cancer cells from multiplying. Since bees do not produce enough venom for it to be extracted on a regular basis, Dr. Pan and his colleagues opted to create synthetic melittin in the laboratory.

First, they conducted computational analysis to determine how the substance would work inside a nanoparticle. Next, they conducted a test in which they injected synthetic melittin into nanoparticles. They discovered that the toxins were so densely packed that they did not expand once they reached the bloodstream, and instead went straight for the tumor. Once there, they bound themselves to cancer stem cells, preventing them from growing and spreading.

Those stem cells are “what we are interested in,” Dr. Pan told Jen Christensen of CNN.com. “Those are the cells responsible for metastasizing and also responsible for having the cancer cells grow back. If we can target better using this technique, we potentially have a better cancer treatment.”

“Unlike chemotherapy, this more targeted technique would, in theory, only affect cancer cells,” Christensen added. “If it’s successful, this natural agent found in venom could become the basis for a whole legion of cancer-fighting drugs.”

Dr. Pan believes that synthetic peptides that mimic components of other venom, such as those from scorpions or snakes, have also proven successful as a potential cancer therapy using the nanoparticle treatment.

The next step, he added, is to examine how effective the approach is in rats and pigs. Within the next three to five years, the Illinois team hopes to launch a study involving actual cancer patients.

The Beekeeper’s Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes & Other Home Uses By Richard Jones

The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Blood expression levels of genes targeted by the stress hormones called glucocorticoids could be a physical measure, or biomarker, of risk for developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a study conducted in rats by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published August 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That also makes the steroid hormones’ receptor, the glucocorticoid receptor, a potential target for new drugs.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is triggered by a terrifying event, either witnessed or experienced. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD, which is why the study aimed to identify biomarkers that could better measure each person’s vulnerability to the disorder.
“Our aim was to determine which genes are differentially expressed in relation to PTSD,” said lead investigator Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We found that most of the genes and pathways that are different in PTSD-like animals compared to resilient animals are related to the glucocorticoid receptor, which suggests we might have identified a therapeutic target for treatment of PTSD,” said Dr. Yehuda, who also heads the Mental Health Patient Care Center and PTSD Research Program at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx.
The research team exposed a group of male and female rats to litter soiled by cat urine, a predatory scent that mimics a life-threatening situation. Most PTSD studies until now have used only male rats. Mount Sinai researchers included female rats in this study since women are more vulnerable than men to developing PTSD. The rats were then categorized based on their behavior one week after exposure to the scent. The authors also examined patterns of gene expression in the blood and in stress-responsive brain regions.
After one week of being exposed to soiled cat litter for 10 minutes, vulnerable rats exhibited higher anxiety and hyperarousal, and showed altered glucocorticoid receptor signaling in all tissues compared with resilient rats. Moreover, some rats were treated with a hormone that activates the glucocorticoid receptor called corticosterone one hour after exposure to the cat urine scent. These rats showed lower levels of anxiety and arousal one week later compared with untreated, trauma-exposed rats.
“PTSD is not just a disorder that affects the brain,” said co-investigator Nikolaos Daskalakis, MD, PhD, Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “It involves the entire body, which is why identifying common regulators is key. The glucocorticoid receptor is the one common regulator that consistently stood out.”
Co-collaborators of the study include Joseph Buxbaum, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Genetics and Genomic Sciences and the director of the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Hagit Cohen, PhD, Professor of Faculty of Health Sciences and director of the Anxiety & Stress Research Unit at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Guiqing Cai, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
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ETH Zurich
ETH Zurich researchers from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel have developed an implantable device that precisely monitors acid build-up in the body for people with diabetes and produces insulin if acidosis becomes a risk.
Many human metabolic functions only run smoothly if the acid level in the body remains neutral and stable. For humans, normal blood pH values lie between 7.35 and 7.45. By way of comparison, an empty stomach is extremely acidic, with a pH value of 1.5.
The body constantly monitors this narrow pH band and quickly restores the ideal pH values in the event of any deviations. This is because many proteins cease to function properly if fluids in the body become even slightly more acidic. These proteins become unstable and alter their structure or interactions with other proteins, causing entire metabolic pathways to break down.
People with type 1 diabetes are particularly at risk of high acid levels. Their bodies produce no insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels, so their cells cannot absorb any glucose from the blood and have to tap into another energy source: fat reserves. In doing so, the liver produces beta-hydroxybutyrate, an acid which supplies the muscles and brain with energy via the bloodstream. If the body continues to use fat reserves for energy, however, this produces so much acid that the blood’s pH value plummets while the sugar molecules circulate in the blood unused. If the lack of insulin is not noticed or treated in time, people with type 1 diabetes can die from ketoacidosis – metabolic shock resulting from an excess of beta-hydroxybutyrate.
Sensor measures acidity
A team of bioengineers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel have now developed a new implantable molecular device composed of two modules: a sensor that constantly measures blood pH and a gene feedback mechanism that produces the necessary amount of insulin. They constructed both modules from biological components, such as various genes and proteins, and incorporated them into cultivated renal cells. The researchers then embedded millions of these customized cells in capsules which can be used as implants in the body.
The heart of the implantable molecular device is the pH sensor, which measures the blood’s precise acidity and reacts sensitively to minor deviations from the ideal pH value. If the pH values falls below 7.35, the sensor transmits a signal to trigger the production of insulin. Such a low pH value is specific for type 1 diabetes: although blood pH also drops due to alcohol abuse or exercise on account of the overacidification of the muscles, it does not fall below 7.35. The hormone insulin ensures that the normal cells in the body absorb glucose again and switch from fat to sugar as their energy source for metabolism, and the pH value rises again as a result. Once blood pH returns to the ideal range, the sensor turns itself off and the reprogrammed cells stop producing insulin.
Insulin level back to normal
The researchers have already tested their invention on mice with type 1 diabetes and related acidosis. The results look promising: mice with the capsules implanted produced the amount of insulin appropriate to their individual acid measurements. The hormone level in the blood was comparable to that of healthy mice that regulated their insulin levels naturally. The implant also compensated for larger deviations in blood sugar.
“Applications for humans are conceivable based on this prototype, but they are yet to be developed,” says Martin Fussenegger. “We wanted to create a prototype first to see whether molecular prostheses could even be used for such fine adjustments to metabolic processes,” he says. Preparing a product like this for the market, however, is beyond the scope of his institute’s staff and financial resources, Fussenegger says, and would thus have to be pursued in collaboration with an industrial partner.
Extensive experience in metabolic diseases
Researchers in Fussenegger’s group have already made headlines several times with similar synthetic networks. For instance, they developed an implant with genes that could be activated with blue light, thereby producing GLP-1, which regulates insulin production. They also put together a network that eliminates metabolic syndrome, a process set in motion by an authorized blood-pressure medicine. All of these networks respond to a signal and produce a hormonally active substance. The special thing about the new feedback mechanism, however, is that the body itself produces the signal, which is then detected by a sensor that triggers a fine-tuned therapeutic reaction.
Three groups from the D-BSSE worked on the present project. Fussenegger’s group developed the genetic network; Professor of Biosystems Engineering Andreas Hierlemann and his team tested the acidity sensor with the aid of microfluidic platforms; and Jörg Stelling, a professor of computational systems biology, modelled it in order to estimate the dynamics of the insulin production.
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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
A team of bioengineers from Tufts University in Massachusetts have developed three-dimensional brain-like cortical tissue that is similar in structure and function to tissues found in the brain of a rat, exhibits biochemical and electrophysiological responses, and can be kept alive in the laboratory for more than eight weeks.
In research published in the August 11 early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), the study authors explain how they were able to create the tissue using a silk protein-based scaffold and ECM composite and primary cortical neurons.
The researchers used the tissue to investigate the chemical and electrical changes that occur within the brain immediately following a traumatic injury, and conducted a separate experiment to observe how the tissue responded to a drug. They report that their creation could serve as a better model for the study of normal brain function, as well as brain injuries and diseases, and could lead to the development of new treatments for these issues.
“There are few good options for studying the physiology of the living brain, yet this is perhaps one of the biggest areas of unmet clinical need when you consider the need for new options to understand and treat a wide range of neurological disorders associated with the brain,” senior and corresponding author Dr. David Kaplan, chair of biomedical engineering at Tufts School of Engineering, said in a statement.
“To generate this system that has such great value is very exciting for our team,” he added.
Instead of recreating a whole-brain network from the ground up, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues from the Tufts biomedical engineering, physics and neuroscience departments opted instead to develop a modular design which replicated fundamental features that are most relevant to the physiological functions at the tissue-level of the brain.
“Each module combined two materials with different properties: a stiffer porous scaffold made of cast silk protein on which the cortical neurons, derived from rats, could anchor and a softer collagen gel matrix that allowed axons to penetrate and connect three dimensionally,” the university explained. “Circular modules of cast silk were punched into doughnuts, then assembled into concentric rings to simulate the laminal layers of the neocortex.”
Each of those layers was seeded with neurons independently before they were assembled – a process that did not require glue or adhesive. The doughnuts were then immersed in the collagen gel matrix, and the combination of silk and collagen gel proved to be an optimum microenvironment for the formation and function of neural networks.
“The stiffness of the silk biomaterial could be tuned to accommodate the cortical neurons and the different types of gels, maintaining both stability in culture and brain-like tissue elasticity,” said first author Dr, Min D. Tang-Schomer, a post-doctoral scholar in biomedical engineering at Tufts. “The tissue maintained viability for at least nine weeks – significantly longer than cultures made of collagen or hydrogel alone – and also offered structural support for network connectivity that is crucial for brain activity.”
“This work is an exceptional feat,” added Dr. Rosemarie Hunziker, program director of Tissue Engineering at NIBIB. “It combines a deep understand of brain physiology with a large and growing suite of bioengineering tools to create an environment that is both necessary and sufficient to mimic brain function.”
Since the 3D brain-like tissue possessed physical properties similar to rodent brain tissue, the research team decided to test whether or not it could be used to study traumatic brain injury. They dropped a weight on the cortical tissue from various heights in order to simulate such an injury, and then recorded changes in the electrical and chemical activity in the neurons. The results were described as similar to those typically found in animal brain injury studies.
However, Kaplan pointed out that the new tissue model has advantages over animal studies, since the latter requires research to be delayed while scientists dissect the brain and prepare it for experiments. The new system, he noted, allows them to “essentially track the tissue response to traumatic brain injury in real time. Most importantly, you can also start to track repair and what happens over longer periods of time.”
He also said that the longevity of the brain-like tissue will be important in studying other brain disorders, since the fact that the tissue can be maintained in the laboratory for at least two months “means we can start to look at neurological diseases in ways that you can’t otherwise because you need long timeframes to study some of the key brain diseases.”
Kaplan and his colleagues are also looking for ways in which they can make their tissue model even more brain-like. As they reported in their new study, the cortical tissue can be modified so that the doughnut scaffold is comprised of six concentric rings, each able to be populated with different types of neurons. This set-up would mimic the six layers of the human brain cortex, each of which is home to different types of neurons, the study authors said.
Image 2 (below): This image shows confocal microscope image of neurons (greenish yellow) attached to silk-based scaffold (blue). The neurons formed functional networks throughout the scaffold pores (dark areas). Credit: Tufts University
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Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George M. Church and Ed Regis

Helmholtz Zentrum München

Job strain can significantly increase the risk of developing diabetes. This conclusion was based on prospective data from a population-based study conducted by scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

Workplace stress can have a range of adverse effects on health with an increased risk of cardio-vascular diseases in the first line. However, to date, convincing evidence for a strong association between work stress and incident Type 2 diabetes mellitus is missing.

Risk of diabetes about 45 percent higher

As the team of scientists headed by Dr. Cornelia Huth and Prof. Karl-Heinz Ladwig has now discovered that individuals who are under a high level of pressure at work and at the same time perceive little control over the activities they perform face an about 45 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who are subjected to less stress at their workplace.

The scientists from the Institute of Epidemiology II (EPI II) at the Helmholtz Zentrum München (HMGU) in collaboration with Prof. Johannes Kruse from the University Hospital of Giessen and Marburg examined data prospectively collected from more than 5,300 employed individuals aged between 29 and 66 who took part in the population-based MONICA/KORA cohort study. At the beginning of the study, none of the participants had diabetes, while in the post-observation period, which covered an average of 13 years, almost 300 of them were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The increase in risk in work-related stress was identified independently of classic risk factors such as obesity, age or gender.

Holistic prevention is important – also at the workplace

According to our data, roughly one in five people in employment is affected by high levels of mental stress at work. By that, scientists do not mean ‘normal job stress’ but rather the situation in which the individuals concerned rate the demands made upon them as very high, and at the same time they have little scope for maneuver or for decision making. We covered both these aspects in great detail in our surveys,” explains Prof. Ladwig, who led the study. “In view of the huge health implications of stress-related disorders, preventive measures to prevent common diseases such as diabetes should therefore also begin at this point,” he added.

Environmental and lifestyle factors play a key role in the development of widespread diseases in Germany such as diabetes mellitus. The aim of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a partner of the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), is to develop new approaches to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the most common diseases.

Monash University

Experts believe a molecule in parasitic worms could help explain why worm infections can effectively treat a range of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

The Monash University study, published in the FASEB Journal, successfully identified peptides from parasitic worms that suppress the body’s immune response. Researchers believe this could pave the way for a new drug containing the peptide to provide relief from the symptoms of autoimmune diseases.

Affecting as many as one in 20 Australians, autoimmune diseases occur when a person’s immune system has an abnormal response against its own cells, tissues or even entire organs, resulting in inflammation and damage.

Lead researcher Professor Ray Norton from Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) said experts around the world have yet to fully understand the causes of autoimmune diseases, which have risen significantly in parts of the world.

“There are more than eighty autoimmune diseases, ranging in severity from mild to life threatening in some cases. While some affect mainly one area or organ, others can affect many parts of the body,” he said.

“Many people believe there’s a link between the rise in autoimmune diseases and an increased focus on cleanliness in western societies, because the immune system is no longer exposed to the broad range of infections that previous generations had to deal with.

“There could be some truth to this because worm infection is virtually unheard of in developed countries, yet the incidence of autoimmune diseases is high. But in developing countries the opposite is true,” Professor Norton said

The new line of research offers an alternative to helminthic therapy, where people deliberately infect themselves with parasitic worms, in an attempt to put their autoimmune disease into remission. It’s thought that the worms have a calming effect on their host’s immune systems in order to ensure their survival.

Rather than using worms, the research team searched for the active components responsible for immunomodulatory effects in parasitic worms. By creating a cDNA library from the anterior secretory glands of the parasitic hookworm Ancylostoma caninium, they identified a peptide called AcK1 that dampens the immune system by inhibiting a potassium channel (Kv1.3).

Researchers found that AcK1 closely resembles ShK, a peptide from a sea anemone, which has been shown to suppress autoimmune diseases and is currently in clinical trials for the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Dr Sandeep Chhabra from Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, said the study will help in developing new drugs to treat autoimmune diseases.

“Our research shows that it is possible to identify individual molecules responsible for this beneficial affect,” he said.

“The next step will be to see if we can develop this into a pill that could dampen the immune system in people with an autoimmune disease. That’s a whole lot cleaner than putting a worm in your body,” Dr Chhabra said.

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Academy of Finland

Vision and hearing problems reduce the active participation of older people in various events and activities. This was observed in two studies carried out by the Gerontology Research Center.

Impaired vision and hearing make it difficult to interact in social situations. However, social relationships and situations in which there is an opportunity to meet and interact with other people are important for older adults’ quality of life.

“Sensory impairments are common among older adults. About one third of Europeans aged 50 and older were found to have impairment in hearing, vision, or both sensory functions. Sensory problems are markedly more common amongst older age groups,” Anne Viljanen says.

“We found that older adults with hearing problems participate in group activities and meet their friends less often than those with good hearing,” Tuija Mikkola says. Group activities are challenging for older people with hearing problems, as they often have a great deal of difficulty conversing with several people in a noisy environment. The results also showed that people with hearing difficulties perceived their ability to live their lives as they would like as poorer than those with good hearing.

Tuija Mikkola’s study is part of a broader LISPE (Life-Space Mobility in Old Age) study. In the LISPE study, 848 community-dwelling persons aged 75 to 90 years were interviewed. Almost half of the subjects reported some difficulties and one in ten reported major difficulties when conversing with another person in the presence of noise.

Anne Viljanen’s study was carried out in collaboration with a research group from the University of Southern Denmark. The data gathered by the SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) project includes 11 European countries. More than 27,000 persons 50 years and older from the Nordic countries, Central Europe and the Mediterranean countries participated in SHARE. SHARE did not include Finnish participants.

“The study evaluated the prevalence of hearing and vision problems and whether these sensory impairments are linked to social activity. People with vision or hearing problems were less socially active than those without sensory problems, and those with both vision and hearing problems were least socially active,” Anne Viljanen says.

Rehabilitation is important

Anne Viljanen and Tuija Mikkola think that preventive and rehabilitative measures are important in order to support older people with sensory impairments in living socially active lives. It is possible to compensate an impairment of one sense to some extent, for example people with hearing problems are more likely to use visual cues of speech. Thus, it is important to converse face-to-face with people with impaired hearing as it helps facilitate lip-reading. Concomitant hearing and visual impairment also requires special skills from healthcare and rehabilitation personnel, as well as close collaboration between different healthcare specialists.

These studies were carried out by the Gerontology Research Center, which is a collaboration between the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Tampere. The studies are part of an international consortium called Hearing, Remembering and Living Well. The studies were funded by the Academy of Finland as a part of the ERA-AGE2 call.

The results have been published in international scientific journals.

Mikkola TM, Portegijs E, Rantakokko M, Gagné J-P, Rantanen T, Viljanen A. Association of self-reported hearing difficulty to objective and perceived participation outside the home in older community-dwelling adults. Journal of Aging and Health. In Press. DOI: 10.1177/0898264314538662

Viljanen A, Törmäkangas T, Vestergaard S, Andersen-Ranberg K. Dual sensory loss and social participation in older Europeans. European Journal of Aging 2014; 11: 155-167. DOI 10.1007/s10433-013-0291-7

FDA Approved – Deluxe Digital Personal Sound Hearing Amplifier Aid

Rayshell Clapper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers released some pretty incredible findings last week about cancer. In a multiple institute study including researchers and authors from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT looked closely at how cancers are classified. The study is part of the Pan-Cancer Initiative of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

According to a statement from the UCSC, at present “Cancers are classified primarily on the basis of where in the body the disease originates.” This means that cancers are classified based on the tissue: breast, lung, bladder, colon, et cetera. However, the researchers found what they believe will be a better way to classify cancers: based on cell type not just tissue type.

According to the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, “Scientists analyzed the DNA, RNA and protein from 12 different tumor types using six different TCGA “platform technologies” to see how the different tumor types compare to each other. The study showed that cancers are more likely to be molecularly and genetically similar based on their cell type of origin as opposed to their tissue type of origin (e.g. breast, kidney, bladder, etc.).”

Based on these findings, the researchers believe at least 10 percent of cancer patients would have their cancer reclassified. As UCSF points out, that means one out of every 10 cancer patients would have their cancers more accurately diagnosed.

Reclassification means that these patients would likely receive different and more accurate treatment thus hopefully leading to a higher likelihood of survival and remission. These findings could also lead to future research on cancer treatments to find more accurate medications and procedures according to news from UNC.

As UCSC explains, to find all this, “The research team used statistical analyses of the molecular data to divide the tumors into groups or “clusters,” first analyzing the data from each platform separately and then combining them in an integrated cross-platform analysis…All six platforms as well as the integrated analysis converged on the same divisions of the cancers into 11 major subtypes. Five of those subtypes were nearly identical to their tissue-of-origin counterparts. But some tissue-of-origin categories split into several different molecular subtypes, and some subtypes encompass tumors with several different tissues of origin.”

Specifically, the study researchers identified breast and bladder cancers as two areas where they found that the more cell-specific classification was more appropriate and accurate than the tissue-specific classification. UNC explained that in breast cancer, the breast is a very complex organ with many different cell types, which obviously leads to a variety of breast cancers: luminal, HER2-enriched, and basal-like. The Mayo Clinic defines the differences in these three types of breast cancers. First, though, it is important to understand the hormone status of breast cancer.

In breast cancer, a type may be estrogen receptor (ER) positive, progesterone positive (PR) positive, or hormone receptor (HR) negative. ER positive refers to a type of breast cancer that is sensitive to estrogen whereas PR positive means that type is sensitive to progesterone while HR  negative refers to the fact that type of cancer does not have hormone receptors thus it will not be affected by treatments focusing on blocking hormones. Additionally, breast cancers consider the genetic makeup of breast cancer. Those that have too many copies of the HER-2 gene have too much of the growth-promoting protein HER-2, so treatments focus on slowing and killing these cancer cells.

To that end, luminal breast cancers can be ER positive, PR positive but HER-2 negative (called luminal A breast cancer) or ER positive, PR negative, and HER-2 positive (called luminal B breast cancer). HER2-enriched cancers are ER negative, PR negative, but HER-2 positive. And the basal-like cancers are ER, PR, and HER-2 negative. Basal-like cancers are also called triple-negative breast cancer. It is the basal-like breast cancers where the researchers found that a more accurate way of classifying them is via cell origin rather than tissue origin because the basal-like breast cancers looked more like ovarian cancer and cancers of the squamous-cell (skin) type.

Although breast cancer shows the clearest indicators supporting the idea that cancers can and should be classified by both tissue and cell type, other cancers supported this as well, namely bladder cancer. UCSC explains that bladder cancer split into three subtypes based on cell-origin classification: bladder cancer only, bladder cancers that clustered with lung adenocarcinomas, and bladder cancers that were squamous-like cancers.

In continuing research, these five institutes will broaden samples from tumors from the 12 tumor types used in this study to 21 tumor types. All expect that more cancers will be reclassified.

Not only does this study give greater understanding to cancers, but it can and likely will lead to better treatment options. More hopefully, this study and those that follow could also lead to better cancer prevention.

According to UCSC, the work was performed as part of the UCSC-Buck Institute Genome Data Analysis Center for the TCGA project led by Stuart, Benz, and David Haussler, director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. The corresponding authors of the paper are Stuart, Benz, and Charles Perou of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The co-first authors are Katherine Hoadley of UNC; Christina Yau of the Buck Institute; Denise Wolf of UCSF; and Andrew Cherniack of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Stuart’s graduate students Sam Ng and Vladislav Uzunangelov also made significant contributions to the analysis.

Results of this research were published August 7 in the journal Cell.