Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A group of 40 organizations have joined together to try and influence the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revoke its approval of the prescription drug Zohydro.

The group of health care professionals and consumer and addiction treatment groups say they are “echoing the concerns” of members of Congress and the State Attorneys General regarding the FDA’s decision to approve Zohydro for use.

“On behalf of consumer safety organizations, health care agencies, addiction treatment providers, community-based drug and alcohol prevention programs, professional organizations, and other groups on the front-line of our nation’s opioid addiction epidemic, we ask you to put the public’s health ahead of industry interests,” the group wrote in the letter. “In the midst of a severe drug epidemic fueled by overprescribing of opioids, the very last thing the country needs is a new, dangerous, high-dose opioid.”

The organizations said if the FDA’s decision to approve the painkiller was based on existing policies, then those policies need “urgent revision.” The group is essentially pointing to the growing problems of prescription drug abuse in the country, where thousands of lives have been lost from overdose and hundreds of thousands of people have become addicted.

“Over the past 15 years, prescriptions for opioids have skyrocketed,” the letter read. “We implore you to take these painful lessons into account.”

According to the organizations, the US consumes more than 84 percent of the world’s entire oxycodone supply and more than 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone supply, despite being only about 5 percent of the Earth’s population. The CDC says that the increase in prescription drug use has led to increases in addiction and overdose deaths.

“Since 1999, overdose deaths have skyrocketed, especially among middle-aged individuals prescribed opioids for chronic pain,” the group wrote. ”Opioid analgesic overdose deaths have increased by 415% in women and 265% in men.”

According to the group, Zohydro’s maker, Zogenix, said the drug is safer than existing hydrocodone products because it does not contain acetaminophen. However, the authors say the drug is not safe because it contains 5 to 10 times more hydrocodone than Vicodin or Lortab.

“Someone unaccustomed to taking opioids could suffer a fatal overdose from just two capsules. A single capsule could be fatal if swallowed by a child,” the group said.

They point out that patients who may be unable to take painkillers with acetaminophen already have alternatives.

“There is no need for another high-dose, single-entity opioid,” the group said. “Too many people have already become addicted to similar opioid medications and too many lives have been lost. We urge you to exercise your authority and responsibility to protect the public’s health by keeping Zohydro off the market.”

Despite the group’s claim, Zogenix says that the drug’s benefits outweigh the risks. Dr. Brad Galer, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Zogenix, told CNN in an email that they do not believe the drug will increase the overall use of opioids. He also said they will be focusing its marketing on doctors with good experience prescribing opioids so only appropriate patients would receive the drug.

[ Watch The Video: Treating Phantom Limb Pain After An Amputation ]

Johanna Wilde, Chalmers University of Technology

Max Ortiz Catalan, researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, has developed a new method for the treatment of phantom limb pain (PLP) after an amputation. The method is based on a unique combination of several technologies, and has been initially tested on a patient who has suffered from severe phantom limb pain for 48 years. A case study shows a drastic reduction of pain.

People who lose an arm or a leg often experience phantom sensations, as if the missing limb were still there. Seventy per cent of amputees experience pain in the amputated limb despite that it no longer exists. Phantom limb pain can be a serious chronic and deteriorating condition that reduces the quality of the person´s life considerably. The exact cause of phantom limb pain and other phantom sensations is yet unknown.

Phantom limb pain is currently treated with several different methods. Examples include mirror therapy, different types of medication, acupuncture and hypnosis. In many cases, however, nothing helps. This was the case for the patient that Chalmers researcher Max Ortiz Catalan selected for a case study of the new treatment method he has envisaged as a potential solution.

The patient lost his arm 48 years ago, and had since that time suffered from phantom pain varying from moderate to unbearable. He was never entirely free of pain.

The patient’s pain was drastically reduced after a period of treatment with the new method. He now has periods where he is entirely free of pain, and he is no longer awakened by intense periods of pain at night like he was previously.

The new method uses muscle signals from the patient’s arm stump to drive a system known as augmented reality. The electrical signals in the muscles are sensed by electrodes on the skin. The signals are then translated into arm movements by complex algorithms. The patient can see himself on a screen with a superimposed virtual arm, which is controlled using his own neural command in real time.

“There are several features of this system which combined might be the cause of pain relief” says Max Ortiz Catalan. “The motor areas in the brain needed for movement of the amputated arm are reactivated, and the patient obtains visual feedback that tricks the brain into believing there is an arm executing such motor commands. He experiences himself as a whole, with the amputated arm back in place.”

Modern therapies that use conventional mirrors or virtual reality are based on visual feedback via the opposite arm or leg. For this reason, people who have lost both arms or both legs cannot be helped using these methods.

“Our method differs from previous treatment because the control signals are retrieved from the arm stump, and thus the affected arm is in charge” says Max Ortiz Catalan. “The promotion of motor execution and the vivid sensation of completion provided by augmented reality may be the reason for the patient improvement, while mirror therapy and medicaments did not help previously.”

A clinical study will now be conducted of the new treatment, which has been developed in a collaboration between Chalmers University of Technology, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, the University of Gothenburg and Integrum. Three Swedish hospitals and other European clinics will cooperate during the study which will target patients with conditions resembling the one in the case study – that is, people who suffer from phantom pain and who have not responded to other currently available treatments.

The research group has also developed a system that can be used at home. Patients will be able to apply this therapy on their own, once it has been approved. An extension of the treatment is that it can be used by other patient groups that need to rehabilitate their mobility, such as stroke victims or some patients with spinal cord injuries.

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Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Cedars-Sinai animal study may lead to human trial of experimental, compact intraoperative device to aid removal of malignant brain tumors
Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute and Department of Neurosurgery have developed a unique, compact, relatively inexpensive imaging device to “light up” malignant brain tumors and other cancers.
The experimental system consists of a special camera designed and developed at Cedars-Sinai and a new, targeted imaging agent based on a synthetic version of a small protein – a peptide – found in the venom of the deathstalker scorpion. The imaging agent, Tumor Paint BLZ-100, a product of Blaze Bioscience Inc., homes to brain tumor cells. When stimulated by a laser in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, it emits a glow that is invisible to the eye but can be captured by the camera.
Results of animal studies, published as the feature article in the February issue of Neurosurgical Focus, provide the basis for the launch of human clinical trials. The system would be used during surgery to determine if it enables neurosurgeons to remove more tumor and spare more healthy tissue.
Malignant brain tumors called gliomas are among the most lethal tumors, with patients typically surviving about 15 months after diagnosis. “We know that survival statistics increase if we can remove all of a tumor, but it is impossible to visualize with the naked eye where the tumor stops and brain tissue starts, and current imaging systems don’t provide a definitive view,” said Keith Black, MD, chair and professor of the Department of Neurosurgery, the article’s senior author.
“Gliomas have tentacles that invade normal tissue and present big challenges for neurosurgeons: Taking out too much normal brain tissue can have catastrophic consequences, but stopping short of total removal gives remaining cancer cells a head start on growing back. That’s why we have worked to develop imaging systems that will provide a clear distinction – during surgery – between diseased tissue and normal brain,” said Black, director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute, director of the Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Brain Tumor Center and the Ruth and Lawrence Harvey Chair in Neuroscience.
In studies in laboratory mice with implanted human brain tumors, the new device clearly delineated tumor tissue from normal brain tissue. Also, with near-infrared light’s ability to penetrate deep into the tissue, the system identified tumors that had migrated away from the main tumor and would have evaded detection.
Pramod Butte, MBBS, PhD, research scientist and assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, the article’s first author, said the tumor-imaging process consists of two parts: deploying a fluorescent “dye” that sticks only to cancer cells, and using a laser and a special camera to make an invisible image visible.
To get the dye to the tumor, it is linked to a peptide called chlorotoxin, which, contrary to its name, is not toxic. It completely ignores normal tissue but seeks out and binds to a variety of malignant tumor cells. It first was derived from the venom of the yellow Israeli scorpion, also called the deathstalker. Article co-author Adam Mamelak, MD, professor of neurosurgery and director of functional neurosurgery, has studied the synthetic version of chlorotoxin and its tumor-targeting properties for more than a decade.
In this study, chlorotoxin was bonded to a molecule, indocyanine green, a near-infrared dye, a version of which already is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The chlorotoxin-indocyanine green combination – Tumor Paint BLZ-100 – emits a glow when stimulated by near-infrared light.
“Injected intravenously, the chlorotoxin seeks out the brain tumor, carrying with it indocyanine green, which has been used in a variety of medical imaging applications. When we shine a near-infrared laser on the tissue, the tumor glows. But the glow emitted by the tumor is invisible to the human eye,” said Butte, whose MBBS is India’s equivalent of an MD. The camera device, designed in Butte’s lab, solves this problem by capturing two images and combining them on a high-definition monitor.
“Other experimental systems we have seen – which use different tumor-targeting methods – are larger and bulkier because they consist of two cameras,” Butte said. “Our single-camera device takes both near-infrared and white light images simultaneously. This is achieved by alternately strobing the laser and normal white lights at very high speeds. The eye just sees normal light, but the camera is capturing white light once, near-infrared light next, over and over. We then superimpose the two HD images. The image from the laser shows the tumor, and the image produced from white light shows the visible ‘landscape’ so we can see where the tumor is in context to what we actually can see.”
The prototype is compact, but the authors said they are working to make the next generations even smaller, lighter and portable so the device will require very little space in operating room, allowing the neurosurgeon to focus on the operating microscope and give little attention on the imaging system. “We hope that eventually the camera can be transported in a small bag, but we are not sacrificing image quality for portability,” Butte said. “In fact, most systems that use two cameras lose a lot of light. But because of the special filters we use and the way we arrange them, we lose very little light. And from what we have seen and tested, our device provides about 10 times greater sensitivity and contrast than others.”
In an editorial accompanying the journal article, David W. Roberts, MD, from the Section of Neurosurgery at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, said the Cedars-Sinai “paper presents a newer direction in which fluorescence-guided surgery may well be headed.” He noted that the researchers overcame one of the limitations of near-infrared technology – that it is outside of the visible portion of the spectrum. “In this regard, Butte and colleagues have contributed to the field with their implementation of an optical system that is sensitive and efficient. They have characterized well its performance in phantom and animal models, demonstrating proof-of-concept and feasibility.”
—

Rachel Champeau, University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences

Tuberculosis is a major global problem, affecting 2 billion people worldwide and causing an estimated 2 million deaths annually. Western countries are once again tackling the disease, with recent outbreaks in Los Angeles and London.

The rise of drug-resistant TB, called a “ticking time bomb” by the World Health Organization, and the high cost of fighting the disease highlight the need for new approaches to treatment.

In findings published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Immunology, UCLA researchers investigating the role of nutrients in helping the immune system fight against major infections show that vitamin A may play an important role combating TB.

The UCLA team describes for the first time the mechanism by which vitamin A and a specific gene assist the immune system by reducing the level of cholesterol in cells infected with TB. This is important because cholesterol can be used by TB bacteria for nutrition and other needs, the researchers said.

“If we can reduce the amount of cholesterol in a cell infected with tuberculosis, we may be able to aid the immune system in better responding to the infection,” said senior author Philip Liu, an assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of dermatology and orthopedic surgery at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and Orthopaedic Hospital Research Center. “Understanding how nutrients like vitamin A are utilized by our immune system to fight infections may provide new treatment approaches.”

Although vitamin A circulates in the body in an inactive form known as retinol, it’s the active form of the nutrient — all-trans reinoic acid — that is responsible for activating the immune system.

To investigate the role of this active form of vitamin A in immune defense, the UCLA team first compared its effects on cells to the effects of a similar nutrient, vitamin D, which the group had previously studied. The researchers thought the two vitamins might use the same mechanism to aid the immune system, but this wasn’t the case. They found that when the vitamins were added to human blood cells infected with tuberculosis, only vitamin A decreased the cells’ cholesterol levels.

The researchers also discovered that the action of vitamin A was dependent on the expression of a gene called NPC2. Further experiments in the lab showed that even if an infected blood cell was stimulated with vitamin A, it would not be able to fight the tuberculosis bacteria if the cell couldn’t express the NPC2 gene.

“We were very surprised that this particular gene was involved, since it has traditionally been associated with cholesterol transport and not immune defense,” said co-first author Elliot Kim, who was a research technician in Liu’s lab at the time of the study and is currently a graduate student in the department of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at the Geffen School.

However, once the team took a closer look at the actions taking place in the cells, it made sense.

Cholesterol is stored in lysosomes, compartments in a cell that also play an integral role in fighting infections. If the lysomome is full of cholesterol, it supplies the bacteria with needed nutrition instead of killing it.

Vitamin A induces the cell to express NPC2, which helps the cell effectively remove cholesterol from the lysosomes so the bacteria can’t access it. This allows the lysomomes to once again become effective in killing the bacteria.

When activated correctly, lysomomes fuse with the area of the cell containing the bacteria and dump antimicrobial material onto the bacteria to kill it, similar to a helicopter dropping water and retardant on a forest fire.

“The cells need vitamin A to trigger this defense process and NPC2 to carry it out,” said co-first author Matthew Wheelwright, a medical and doctoral student at the University of Minnesota who was an undergraduate research assistant in Liu’s lab when the research was conducted. “We may be able to target these pathways that regulate cholesterol within a cell to help the immune system respond to infection.”

The next stage of research will focus on better understanding how the immune system takes retinol, the inactive form of vitamin A, and creates all-trans retinoic acid, the form of the nutrient that can activate the infected cells against the tuberculosis bacteria.

The UCLA team notes that this is an early study and that more research needs to be done before recommending vitamin A supplementation to combat tuberculosis or other infections.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Thoughts of suicide, sexual difficulties and emotional numbness are all known side-effects of anti-depressants. A new study from the University of Liverpool reveals that these side-effects may be more widespread than previously thought. The findings were published in a recent issue of Psychiatry Research.
The research team, led by psychology Professor John Read of the University’s Institute of Psychology, surveyed 1,829 people who had been prescribed anti-depressants. They found that large numbers of people—over half in some cases—reported psychological problems due to their medication. This has led to increasing concern about the scale of the problem of over-prescription of these drugs.
“While the biological side-effects of antidepressants, such as weight gain and nausea, are well documented, the psychological and interpersonal effects have been largely ignored or denied. They appear to be alarmingly common.”
The participants completed an online questionnaire that asked about twenty possible adverse effects while factoring in people’s level of depression. The survey also asked the participants to report on how they felt while taking the medication. The participants were all located in New Zealand and had been on anti-depressants in the last five years.
Of those in the study between the ages of 18 and 25, over half reported suicidal feelings. In the total sample, 62 percent reported sexual difficulties, 60 percent reported feeling emotionally numb, 52 percent reported feeling not like myself, 42 percent reported reduction in positive feelings, 38 percent reported caring less about others and 55 percent reported withdrawal effects. Eighty-two percent, however, reported that the medications had helped alleviate their depression.
“Effects such as feeling emotionally numb and caring less about other people are of major concern. Our study also found that people are not being told about this when prescribed the drugs.”
“Our finding that over a third of respondents reported suicidality ‘as a result of taking the antidepressants’ suggests that earlier studies may have underestimated the problem.”

[ Watch the Video: The Health Benefits Of Strawberries ]

FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

A team of volunteers ate half a kilo of strawberries a day for a month to see whether it altered their blood parameters in any way. At the end of this unusual treatment, their levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides reduced significantly, according to the analyses conducted by Italian and Spanish scientists.

Several studies had already demonstrated the antioxidant capacity of strawberries, but now researchers from the Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM, Italy), together with colleagues from the Universities of Salamanca, Granada and Seville (Spain), conducted an analysis that revealed that these fruits also help to reduce cholesterol.

The team set up an experiment in which they added 500 g of strawberries to the daily diets of 23 healthy volunteers over a month. They took blood samples before and after this period to compare data.

The results, which are published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, show that the total amount of cholesterol, the levels of low-density lipoproteins (LDL or bad cholesterol) and the quantity of triglycerides fell to 8.78%, 13.72% and 20.8% respectively. The high-density lipoprotein (HDL or good cholesterol) remained unchanged.

Eating strawberries also improved other parameters such as the general plasma lipid profile, antioxidant biomarkers (such as vitamin C or oxygen radical absorbance capacity), antihemolytic defenses and platelet function. All parameters returned to their initial values 15 days after abandoning ‘treatment’ with strawberries.

As Maurizio Battino, researcher at UNIVPM and Director of the study, tells SINC: “This is the first time a study has been published that supports the protective role of the bioactive compounds in strawberries in tackling recognized markers and risk factors for cardiovascular diseases.”

The researcher admits that there is still no direct evidence about which compounds of this fruit are behind their beneficial effects, “but all the signs and epidemiological studies point towards anthocyanins, the vegetable pigments that afford them their red color.”

The research team confirmed in other studies that eating strawberries also protects against ultraviolet radiation, reduces the damage that alcohol can have on the gastric mucosa, strengthens erythrocytes, or red blood cells, and improves the antioxidant capacity of the blood.

In fact, this year they will publish another study in the journal Food Chemistry in which they will demonstrate that consuming strawberries increases the antioxidant function of blood flow, erythrocytes and mononuclear cells.

References:

José M. Alvarez-Suarez, Francesca Giampieri, Sara Tulipani, Tiziana Casoli, Giuseppina Di Stefano, Ana M. González-Paramás, Celestino Santos-Buelga, Franco Busco, Josè L. Quiles, Mario D. Cordero, Stefano Bompadre, Bruno Mezzetti, Maurizio Battino. “One-month strawberry-rich anthocyanin supplementation ameliorates cardiovascular risk, oxidative stress markers and platelet activation in humans”. Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry 25 (3): 289-294, marzo de 2014.

Sara Tulipani, Tatiana Armeni, Francesca Giampieri, José M. Alvarez-Suarez, Ana M. Gonzalez-Paramás, Celestino Santos-Buelga, Franco Busco, Giovanni Principato, Stefano Bompadre, José L. Quiles, Bruno Mezzetti, Maurizio Battino. “Strawberry intake increases blood fluid, erythrocyte and mononuclear cell defenses against oxidative challenge”. Food Chemistry 156: 87-93, agosto de 2014

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a paper test that could improve cancer diagnosis rates.

Cancer mortality rates can be drastically reduced with early detection, but some of these methods, such as mammography and colonoscopy, are unable to be used in developing nations. Cancer rates in these countries now account for 70 percent of mortality around the world, so a new method to detect the disease earlier is essential.

Researchers developed a paper test that works much like a pregnancy test, helping to reveal whether a person has cancer within minutes. This test could not only improve diagnoses rates, but also could help get people treated earlier.

The new technology uses nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins known as proteases. These proteins can trigger the release of hundreds of biomarkers that are easily detectable in a person’s urine. The team simply took advantage of these biomarkers by using a highly specialized instrument to do the analysis.

“For the developing world, we thought it would be exciting to adapt it instead to a paper test that could be performed on unprocessed samples in a rural setting, without the need for any specialized equipment,” MIT professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sangeeta Bhatia, said in a statement. “The simple readout could even be transmitted to a remote caregiver by a picture on a mobile phone.”

In order to develop the test strips, the team had to coat nitrocellulose paper with antibodies that are able to capture the peptides. Once these peptides are captured, they flow along the strip and are exposed to several invisible test lines made of other antibodies specific to different tags attached to the peptides. If one of these lines becomes visible, it means the target peptide is present in the sample.

Researchers were able to use the new technology to accurately identify colon tumors in mice. This test represents the first step towards a new type of diagnostic device that could one day be used in humans in developing nations.

“This is a new idea — to create an excreted biomarker instead of relying on what the body gives you,” says Bhatia, senior author of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “To prove this approach is really going to be a useful diagnostic, the next step is to test it in patient populations.”

She said the device will first be applied to high-risk populations, such as people who have had cancer previously, but eventually it would be used for early detection. Developed nations may also be able to use the device as a simple and inexpensive way to diagnose cancer.

“I think it would be great to bring it back to this setting, where point-of-care, image-free cancer detection, whether it’s in your home or in a pharmacy clinic, could really be transformative,” Bhatia said in a statement.

Joan Robinson, Corporate Communications Manager, Springer-Verlag
There’s more to dieting than just sheer willpower and self-control. The presence of friends, late night cravings or the temptation of alcohol can often simply be too strong to resist. Research led by Heather McKee of the University of Birmingham in the UK monitored the social and environmental factors that make people, who are following weight management programs, cheat.
The study is published in the Springer journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Eighty people who were either part of a weight-loss group or were dieting on their own participated in the one-week study. They were given mobile phones on which they kept an electronic diary of all the temptations that came their way, and the situations during which they gave in to these temptations. This helped the researchers to make a complete real-time record, known as ‘ecological momentary assessment,’ of participants’ dietary temptations and lapses.
Participants lapsed just over 50 percent of the time when tempted, and were especially vulnerable at night. They were more likely to give in to alcoholic temptations than to eat a sugary snack or to overindulge. Their willpower was also influenced by the presence of others, regardless of whether a dietary temptation was unexpected or whether the dieter went looking for something to eat. The stronger the dietary temptation, the more likely a participant was to lapse. Not surprisingly, most participants reported that they were more aware of their eating behavior while keeping their diet diaries.
The findings could be valuable for dietary relapse and weight maintenance programs. They highlight the possible future use of mobile phone applications to support people who are dieting. Following a lapse in such programs, the findings also stress the importance of including specific coping mechanisms and reinforcing a person’s self-efficacy, in other words, bolstering their belief in their own ability to reach their goals.
“The findings help piece together the complex jigsaw surrounding the daily predictors of dietary temptations and help us to better understand how dietary temptations and lapses operate,” says McKee. “In the fight against obesity, we need to help people become more aware of the various personal, situational, and environmental factors that expose them to dietary temptations. In doing this, we can help them to develop the necessary skills to cope successfully with dietary temptations and prevent lapses.”

Mathilde Weirsøe, Aarhus University

In a study to be published in Psychological Science, researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen demonstrate that brain cells in what is called the mirror system help people make sense of the actions they see other people perform in everyday life.

Using magnetic stimulation to temporarily disrupt normal processing of the areas of the human brain involved in the production of actions of human participants, it is demonstrated that these areas are also involved in the understanding of actions. The study is the first to demonstrate a clear causal effect, whereas earlier studies primarily have looked at correlations, which are difficult to interpret.

One of the researchers, John Michael, explains the process:

“There has been a great deal of hype about the mirror system, and now we have performed an experiment that finally provides clear and straightforward evidence that the mirror system serves to help people make sense of others’ actions,” says John Michael.

Understanding autism and schizophrenia

The study shows that there are areas of the brain that are involved in the production of actions. And the researchers found evidence that these areas contribute to understanding others’ actions. This means that the same areas are involved in producing actions and understanding others’ actions. This helps us in everyday life, but it also holds great potential when trying to understand why people with autism and schizophrenia have difficulties with social interaction.

“Attaining knowledge of the processes underlying social understanding in people in general is an important part of the process of attaining knowledge of the underlying causes of the difficulties that some people diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia experience in sustaining social understanding. But it is important to emphasize that this is just one piece of the puzzle.”

“The findings may be interesting to therapists and psychiatrists who work with patients with schizophrenia or autism, or even to educational researchers,” adds John Michael.

Facts about the empirical basis

The participants (20 adults) came to the lab three times. They were given brain scans on the first visit. On the second and third, they received stimulation to their motor system and then performed a typical psychological task in which they watched brief videos of actors pantomiming actions (about 250 videos each time). After each video they had to choose a picture of an object that matched the pantomimed video. For example, a hammer was the correct answer for the video of an actor pretending to hammer.

This task was intended to gauge their understanding of the observed actions. The researchers found that the stimulation interfered with their performance of this task.

Innovative method

The researchers used an innovative technique for magnetically stimulating highly specific brain areas in order to temporarily disrupt normal processing in those areas. The reason for using this technique (called continuous theta-burst stimulation) in general is that it makes it possible to determine which brain areas perform which functions. For example, if you stimulate (and thus temporarily impair) area A, and the participants subsequently have difficulty with some specific task (task T), then you can infer that area A usually performs task T. The effect goes away after 20 minutes, so this is a harmless and widely applicable way to identify which tasks are performed by which areas.

With continuous theta-burst stimulation, you can actually determine that the activation of A contributes as a cause to people performing T. This method thus promises to be of great use to neuroscientists in the coming years.

John Michael works for the transdisciplinary Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. In his work, he combines conceptual and experimental approaches to social interaction and social cognition.

[ Watch the Video: What’s Making Your Brain Shrink? ]
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers
New Rochelle, NY, February 21, 2014—Even small increases in blood sugar caused by a diet high in carbohydrates can be detrimental to brain health. Recent reports in medical literature link carbohydrate calorie-rich diets to a greater risk for brain shrinkage, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, impaired cognition, and other disorders. David Perlmutter, MD, best-selling author of Grain Brain, explores this important topic in a provocative interview in Alternative and Complementary Therapies from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. .
Dr. Perlmutter, a board-certified neurologist and fellow of the American College of Nutrition, has just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of a new peer-reviewed journal, Brain and Gut, that will debut in summer 2014.  The journal will publish leading-edge research dedicated to exploring a whole systems approach to health and disease from the intimate relationship between the brain and the digestive systems.
In the interview “Rethinking Dietary Approaches for Brain Health,” Dr. Perlmutter says, “We live with this notion that a calorie is a calorie, but at least in terms of brain health, and I believe for the rest of the body as well, there are very big differences between our sources of calories in terms of the impact on our health. Carbohydrate calories, which elevate blood glucose, are dramatically more detrimental to human physiology, and specifically to human health, than are calories derived from healthful sources of fat.”
Dr. Perlmutter will explore how brain health and cognitive function are linked to nutrition in his presentation, “The Care and Feeding of Your Brain,” to be delivered at the 2014 Integrative Healthcare Symposium taking place now in New York City.
About the Journal
Alternative and Complementary Therapies is a bimonthly journal that publishes original articles, reviews, and commentaries evaluating alternative therapies and how they can be integrated into clinical practice. Topics include botanical medicine, vitamins and supplements, nutrition and diet, mind-body medicine, acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, indigenous medicine systems, homeopathy, naturopathy, yoga and meditation, manual therapies, energy medicine, and spirituality and health. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Alternative and Complementary Therapies website.
About the Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Medical Acupuncture, and Journal of Medicinal Food. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry’s most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm’s 80 journals, books, and news magazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs
PISCATAWAY, NJ – Although some advocates want to lower the legal drinking age from 21, research continues to show that the law saves lives. That’s the finding of a new review published in a special supplemental issue to the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
Researchers found that studies done since 2006—when a new debate over age-21 laws flared up—have continued to demonstrate that the mandates work. The laws, studies show, are associated with lower rates of drunk-driving crashes among young people. And it seems they also curb other hazards of heavy drinking—including suicide, dating violence and unprotected sex.
“The evidence is clear that there would be consequences if we lowered the legal drinking age,” said lead researcher William DeJong, Ph.D., of Boston University School of Public Health.
The U.S. legal-drinking age has had a winding history. In the early 1970s, 29 states lowered their legal drinking age to 18, 19 or 20. But after a rise in drunk-driving crashes among young people, many states began to reverse course. A change in federal law eventually pushed all states to adopt a minimum drinking age of 21 by 1988.
But in recent years, the benefits of the age-21 law have been challenged.
In 2006, a non-profit called Choose Responsibility started campaigning for a change in the federal law. Two years later, a group of more than 100 U.S. university presidents and chancellors known as the Amethyst Initiative called for a re-evaluation of the legal drinking age—citing a “clandestine” culture of heavy drinking episodes among college students as one reason that the age-21 law is not working.
Those moves grabbed a lot of media attention, and public health experts responded by launching new studies into the impact of the drinking-age law. Based on DeJong’s review, that research supports what earlier work had shown: Since the legal drinking age was set at 21, young people have been drinking less and are less likely to get into drunk-driving crashes.
In one study, researchers found that, in 2011, 36 percent of college students said in the past two weeks they’d engaged in heavy episodic drinking (five or more drinks in a sitting, sometimes called “binge” drinking). That compared with 43 percent of students in 1988, the first year that all U.S. states had an age-21 law. There was an even bigger decline among high school seniors—from 35 percent to 22 percent.
Of course, many young people break the law and drink anyway. But, DeJong said, the evidence shows that the law is working despite that. That may be, in part, because minors do not want to be caught drinking, and therefore take fewer risks—like getting behind the wheel.
Plus, DeJong said, “there are many young people who do wait until they’re 21 to drink.”
DeJong said that education can help discourage underage drinking. Often, youths buy into the myth, for instance, that all college students engage in heavy drinking episodes. So giving them a more realistic picture of the true “drinking norms” can be effective, DeJong explained.
And, he said, tougher enforcement of the age-21 law, rather than a repeal, is what’s needed. “Just because a law is commonly disobeyed doesn’t mean we should eliminate it,” DeJong noted. Clinical trials have found that when college towns put more effort into enforcing the law—and advertise that fact to students—student drinking declines.
“Some people assume that students are so hell-bent on drinking, nothing can stop them,” DeJong said. “But it really is the case that enforcement works.”
DeJong, W., & Blanchette, J. (March 2014). Case closed: Research evidence on the positive public health impact of the age 21 minimum legal drinking age in the United States. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Supplement No. 17, 108-115.

Gladstone Institutes

Joint Gladstone-UCSF study highlights novel reprogramming method; offers new hope for treating liver failure

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—February 23, 2014 — The power of regenerative medicine now allows scientists to transform skin cells into cells that closely resemble heart cells, pancreas cells and even neurons. However, a method to generate cells that are fully mature—a crucial prerequisite for life-saving therapies—has proven far more difficult. But now, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have made an important breakthrough: they have discovered a way to transform skin cells into mature, fully functioning liver cells that flourish on their own, even after being transplanted into laboratory animals modified to mimic liver failure.

In previous studies on liver-cell reprogramming, scientists had difficulty getting stem cell-derived liver cells to survive once being transplanted into existing liver tissue. But the Gladstone-UCSF team figured out a way to solve this problem. Writing in the latest issue of the journal Nature, researchers in the laboratories of Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, and UCSF Associate Professor Holger Willenbring, MD, PhD, reveal a new cellular reprogramming method that transforms human skin cells into liver cells that are virtually indistinguishable from the cells that make up native liver tissue.

These results offer new hope for the millions of people suffering from, or at risk of developing, liver failure—an increasingly common condition that results in progressive and irreversible loss of liver function. At present, the only option is a costly liver transplant. So, scientists have long looked to stem cell technology as a potential alternative. But thus far they have come up largely empty-handed.

“Earlier studies tried to reprogram skin cells back into a pluripotent, stem cell-like state in order to then grow liver cells,” explained Dr. Ding, one of the paper’s senior authors, who is also a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF, with which Gladstone is affiliated. “However, generating these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, and then transforming them into liver cells wasn’t always resulting in complete transformation. So we thought that, rather than taking these skin cells all the way back to a pluripotent, stem cell-like state, perhaps we could take them to an intermediate phase.”

This research, which was performed jointly at the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Research at Gladstone and the Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF, involved using a ‘cocktail’ of reprogramming genes and chemical compounds to transform human skin cells into cells that resembled the endoderm. Endoderm cells are cells that eventually mature into many of the body’s major organs—including the liver.

“Instead of taking the skin cells back to the beginning, we took them only part way, creating endoderm-like cells,” added Gladstone and CIRM Postdoctoral Scholar Saiyong Zhu, PhD, one of the paper’s lead authors. “This step allowed us to generate a large reservoir of cells that could more readily be coaxed into becoming liver cells.”

Next, the researchers discovered a set of genes and compounds that can transform these cells into functioning liver cells. And after just a few weeks, the team began to notice a transformation.

“The cells began to take on the shape of liver cells, and even started to perform regular liver-cell functions,” said UCSF Postdoctoral Scholar Milad Rezvani, MD, the paper’s other lead author. “They weren’t fully mature cells yet—but they were on their way.”

Now that the team was encouraged by these initial results in a dish, they wanted to see what would happen in an actual liver. So, they transplanted these early-stage liver cells into the livers of mice. Over a period of nine months, the team monitored cell function and growth by measuring levels of liver-specific proteins and genes.

Two months post-transplantation, the team noticed a boost in human liver protein levels in the mice, an indication that the transplanted cells were becoming mature, functional liver cells. Nine months later, cell growth had shown no signs of slowing down. These results indicate that the researchers have found the factors required to successfully regenerate liver tissue.

“Many questions remain, but the fact that these cells can fully mature and grow for months post-transplantation is extremely promising,” added Dr. Willenbring, associate director of the UCSF Liver Center and the paper’s other senior author. “In the future, our technique could serve as an alternative for liver-failure patients who don’t require full-organ replacement, or who don’t have access to a transplant due to limited donor organ availability.”

Other scientists who participated in this research include UCSF researchers Jack Harbell, MD, also a lead author on the paper, as well as Aras Mattis, MD, PhD, Alan Wolfe and Leslie Benet, PhD. Funding was provided by the following: the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Society of University Surgeons.

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

According to a new Northwestern Medicine study, every additional day spent sitting for someone 60 years or older doubles their risk of becoming disabled.

The study is the first to show how prolonged sitting adds to the risk factor for disability. The findings show that sedentary behavior is almost as strong a risk factor for disability as lack of moderate exercise.

According to the researchers, if there are two 65-year-old women, one of which is sedentary for 12 hours a day and another for 13 hours a day, the second one is 50 percent more likely to be disabled.

“This is the first time we’ve shown sedentary behavior was related to increased disability regardless of the amount of moderate exercise,” Dorothy Dunlop, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Being sedentary is not just a synonym for inadequate physical activity.”

Disability is defined by limitations in being able to do basic activities like eating, dressing, bathing, getting in and out of bed and walking across a room. Being disabled increases hospitalization risk and institutionalization, and is the leading source of health care costs.

The team’s study focused on 2,286 adults aged 60 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The researchers compared people in similar health with the same amount of moderate vigorous activity, which could be defined as walking briskly.

Participants wore accelerometers from 2002 to 2005 to measure their sedentary time and moderate vigorous physical activity. The monitoring method in the study was significant because it is objective.

Previous studies indicated a relationship between sedentary behavior and disability, but it was based on self-reports and couldn’t be verified. However, this study relied on the accelerometer data, which is impartial.

Dunlop said that discovering how being sedentary was as strong a risk factor for disability as lack of moderate vigorous activity was surprising.

“It means older adults need to reduce the amount of time they spend sitting, whether in front of the TV or at the computer, regardless of their participation in moderate or vigorous activity,” she said

The researchers made some suggestions to help people cut back on sedentary time, such as standing up while talking on the phone or during a work meeting. They also suggest to park in a spot farther away from the door when going to a grocery store, or walk around the house when having to get up to go get a glass of water.

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health say that chemicals found in packaging and processed foods could be harmful to health over the long term.

Environmental scientists wrote in a commentary piece featured in the journal about how these synthetic chemicals are able to find their way into the foods we eat. Some of these chemicals are regulated, but over time people eating packaged or processed foods are being exposed to low levels of these substances throughout their lives, the scientists say.

The authors claim that too little is known about the long term impact of these chemicals, including at crucial stages of human development. They point out that lifelong exposure to food contact materials (FCMs) – substances used in packaging and processing – is a cause for concern for several reasons.

Toxicants like formaldehyde are legally used in some materials, despite being known as a cancer causing substance as well as a way to preserve dead bodies. Formaldehyde is widely used in plastic bottles for fizzy drinks and melamine tableware. Other chemicals known to disrupt hormone production also can be found in FCMs, including bisphenol A, tributyltin, triclosan, and phthalates.

“Whereas the science for some of these substances is being debated and policy makers struggle to satisfy the needs of stakeholders, consumers remain exposed to these chemicals daily, mostly unknowingly,” the authors wrote in the journal.

The scientists say potential cellular changes caused by these chemicals and in those with the capacity to disrupt hormones are not being considered in routine toxicology analysis. The authors suggest that this casts serious doubts on the adequacy of chemical regulatory procedures.

The environmental scientists say establishing potential cause and effect results from these substances is not easy because there are no unexposed populations to compare it with. However, they stress that some sort of study is needed to tease out any potential links between food contact chemicals and chronic conditions like cancer, obesity, diabetes, neurological and inflammatory disorders.

“Since most foods are packaged, and the entire population is likely to be exposed, it is of utmost importance that gaps in knowledge are reliably and rapidly filled,” the authors wrote.

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A team from the University of Iowa has found that even police officers should be concerned of a sedentary lifestyle from sitting most of the day.
Researchers measured physical activity in police, which is a career that is looked at by the public as being generally active. The findings revealed that police officers burn as much energy on the job as someone sitting while holding a baby or washing dishes.
“We find that police work is primarily sedentary,” Sandra Ramey, assistant professor in the University of Iowa College of Nursing, told IowaNow’s Richard C. Lewis. “The public view, how the media portray it on shows like ‘Hawaii Five-0,’ it’s just go, go, go – it’s an intense, high-activity profession. But it’s not. It’s more like bursts of energy, with long periods of little activity.”
Ramey, author of the study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said the team’s findings are important because workers are increasingly being put in sedentary settings.
“The police are not alone, in that most jobs are associated with using higher technology at the expense of physical activity in the workplace. And, so what it means is that other occupations, like police, should increase movement on the job,” she said.
According to a 2005 study published in the journal Annual Review of Public Health, four in 10 American employees in 2000 worked in low physical-activity occupations, double the percentage of 50 years ago. The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion found that 25 percent of US adults do not exercise in their leisure time.
A lack of physical activity increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death in the US. Being able to inspire the US community to rise up from a sedentary job and add a little exercise could put a damper in the $76 billion cardiovascular disease costs the US economy each year.
The researchers measured physical activity in 119 police officers in six departments in the Midwest and Hawaii. During the study, the police officers were asked to wear armbands that measured activity continuously for 96 hours, including three work days and one day off.
On average, the team found that police officers expended 1.6 metabolic equivalents per minute of energy during their shifts, which is about the equivalent of washing dishes while standing or reclining and holding a baby.
“In other words, the physical demands of police work are generally comparable to sitting or standing,” the team wrote in the journal.
The researchers discovered that high-ranking officers moved even less than their counterparts, and university police were even more active.
“The take-home message is police officers are in a sedentary profession, and we now have something beyond self-report that shows that,” Ramey says. “We need to encourage movement.”

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

In addition to being stigmatized as less attractive, overweight men tend to have more potentially pathogenic species of bacteria in their nose, compared to slimmer, more traditionally attractive men, according to a new study in the American Journal of Human Biology.

“According to an evolutionary point of view, traits related to attractiveness are supposed to be honest signals of biological quality,” said study author Boguslaw Pawlowski, from Department of Human Biology at the University of Wroclaw. “We analyzed whether nasal and throat colonization with potentially pathogenic bacteria is related to body height and BMI in both sexes.”

In the study, scientists gathered the self-reported heights and weights of more than 100 healthy females and 90 healthy males. The study team also assessed waist and hip circumferences. Next, six potentially pathogenic bacteria were isolated and identified from nasal and throat swabs.

The study results revealed that ‘colonized’ male participants had a greater BMI than ‘non-colonized’ men. A significant similar contrast was not identified in female participants.

“To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study body morphology traits related to physical attractiveness in relation to bacterial colonization in young people,” Pawlowski said. “The results confirmed our hypothesis, but only for BMI in males.”

While researchers in Poland may have found a way to identify a man’s BMI by the cultures in his nose, a team of scientists based in Philadelphia has been able to show that a human ear wax sample provides clues to a person’s ethnic origins.

According to a new study published in Journal of Chromatography B, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the amount of odor-producing chemical compounds in human earwax varied between individuals of East Asian origin and Caucasians.

Also known as cerumen, earwax is a blend of secretions from specialized sweat glands along with fatty materials secreted in the sebaceous glands. It usually comes in one of two forms: wet with a yellowish-brown hue, or dry and white.

According to study author George Preti, an organic chemist at the University of Pennsylvania, a small change in the ABCC11 gene is connected to both underarm odor production and if a person has dry or wet earwax. People of East Asian and Native American descent have a form of the gene which codes both for dry earwax and a decreased amount of underarm body odor compared to people of other ethnic groups, the researchers said.

“Our previous research has shown that underarm odors can convey a great deal of information about an individual, including personal identity, gender, sexual orientation, and health status,” Preti said.

In the earwax study, researchers gathered earwax from eight healthy Caucasian males and eight men of East Asian descent. Each sample was placed in a vial and heated for 30 minutes, which prompted the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which were analyzed using chromatography-mass spectrometry methods. The researchers found 12 VOCs that were in the earwax of all the men, yet Caucasians possessed greater amounts of 11 of the 12 VOCs than East Asians.

“In essence, we could obtain information about a person’s ethnicity simply by looking in his ears. While the types of odorants were similar, the amounts were very different,” explained lead author Katharine Prokop-Prigge, a chemist and postdoctoral fellow at the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Most teenage boys go through hard times and some can even get depressed. A new saliva-based test can determine if these minor bouts of depression are foreshadowing major depression later in life, according to a new study based in the United Kingdom.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), the study found that teenage boys with high levels of the stress hormone cortisol and mild depression symptoms were up to 14 times more likely to experience clinical depression later in life, compared to those with low or normal cortisol levels.

The study is unique in that it offers a metric for determining risk of a condition of the mind, something historically considered somewhat ephemeral.

“This is the emergence of a new way of looking at mental illness,” said study author Joe Herbert, of the University of Cambridge in the UK. “You don’t have to rely simply on what the patient tells you, but what you can measure inside the patient.”

In the study, the scientists collected spit samples from over 1,800 teenagers and assessed levels of cortisol contained in the saliva, along with self-reported data on signs of depression. The teenagers were then divided into one of four groups based on both their cortisol levels and their symptoms of depression.

After tracking the study cohort for 12 to 36 months, the study team determined which group was most likely going to develop clinical depression and other psychiatric conditions in the future.

While the researchers found that boys with higher levels of cortisol and depressive symptoms were 14 times more likely to develop clinical depression, this difference was less significant in female teenage participants, who were four times more likely to develop clinical depression. The researchers took this as a sign that gender variances affect how depression progresses.

The researchers said they hope the newly discovered biomarker for depression will allow primary care services to identify high-risk boys and consider new strategies for this segment of the population.

“This new biomarker suggests that we may be able to offer a more personalized approach to tackling boys at risk for depression,” said study author Matthew Owens, a research associate at University of Cambridge. “This could be a much needed way of reducing the number of people suffering from depression, and in particular stemming a risk at a time when there has been an increasing rate of suicide amongst teenage boys and young men.”

In discussing the study with BBC News, Sam Challis, from the UK mental health charity Mind, pointed out that there are many factors besides the level of cortisol that play a role in the development of depression.

“This study claims there is a biomarker linked to depression, but it’s important to bear in mind that many factors play a part in depression, such as life events, genetic factors, side effects of medication and diet,” he said. “However, this research could help identify those who may need extra support.”

“We know that it is possible to recover from a mental health problem, and this is more likely for those who seek help straight away,” he added.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

There were more test-tube babies born in the US in the year 2012 than ever before, and they represented the highest percentage of total infant births since the advent of in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology three decades ago, according to the annual report of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART).

The SART report, which was released on Monday, said that there were a record 61,740 American babies born through the IVF process, in which eggs and sperm are mixed together under laboratory conditions.

That figure represents an increase of 2,000 so-called test tube births over the previous year, and represents 1.5 percent of all infants born nationwide, according to a story appearing in Monday’s edition of the Daily Mail.

Furthermore, the 379 infertility clinics that comprise the medical organization (which represent more than 90 percent of such facilities in the US) told Reuters that they performed 165,172 IVF procedures during the 2012 calendar year.

“The growing percentage reflects, in part, the increasing average age at which women give birth for the first time, since fertility problems become more common as people age,” the news organization explained. “The average age of first-time mothers is now about 26 years; it was 21.4 years in 1970.”

While the increasing number of children born through IVF would suggest that the process has gained mainstream acceptance, author and health/human rights advocate Miriam Zoll pointed out that the statistics – particularly when it comes to the success rate of test-tube babies – hide what she calls vast disparities.

“It’s important for people to understand that women over 35 have the highest percentage of failures,” Zoll, who in 2013 wrote the book Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High Tech Babies, told Reuters. She added that IVF births had “consistently failed two-thirds of the time” since the first procedure was completed in 1978.

According to the Daily Mail, the SART report also found that the number of IVF twin and triplet births were down. This was because infertility clinics transferred fewer embryos per cycle in 2012 than they had in 2011 – a result of criticism the industry faced over the practice of transferring multiple embryos to increase the odds of becoming pregnant.

Earlier this month, a team of American and Belgian researchers writing in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine Online described a novel method that had already resulted in the birth of sixteen healthy infants.

“This system reproducibly generates de novo the atmospheric and culture conditions that support normal fertilization and preimplantation embryogenesis to the hatched blastocyst stage without the need for specialized medical-grade gases or equipment,” the study authors wrote.

“Development from insemination to the hatched blastocyst stage occurs undisturbed in a completely closed system that enables timed performance assessments for embryo selection” involving “single-embryo transfers,” they added. The procedure could ultimately make IVF less expensive and available to more people worldwide.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Federal official are blaming a deadly combination of heroin and the powerful narcotic fentanyl for over 80 deaths around the United States in recent weeks. Often used as an anesthetic, fentanyl is typically administered in hospitals to people in end-of-life care, such as terminal cancer patients.

Dr. Karl Williams, the chief medical examiner in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, told ABC News in January that recent trends represent a “major increase in drug overdoses,” and added that the appearance of a powdered form of the drug means that it “has to be made by somebody… somewhere in a clandestine laboratory.”

“This is not accidental,” he said “Somebody is deliberately trying to make a big batch of fentanyl. It is not an extraordinarily complex molecule to synthesize, and you can find instructions on the Internet. It does not take a sophisticated chemist to do this.”

Among the recent victims of the deadly cocktail are 22 Pennsylvania residents from six different counties. If fentanyl is mixed with cocaine or heroin, it amplifies their strength, and can result in respiratory, sedation and nausea problems, officials said. They added that the illicit combination of drugs are popping up in small bags marked with popular brands, such as Theraflu, Bud Ice and Income Tax.

“A lot of those people thought that Bud Light was really hot, it’s really good stuff, it sends you over the edge,” said Joseph Coronato, a prosecutor in Ocean County, N.J. told the Daily Mail. “It’s a marketing tool, almost.”

Ocean County is another part of the country that has been severely impacted by heroin and prescription drug overdoses over the last two years. In 2012, the coastal county saw 53 overdoses and in 2013 there were 112 reported.

“The demand is so high. That’s the problem that’s out there,” Coronato said.

“A very small amount can exert a very significant effect,” warned Dr. Eric Strain, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and Research at Johns Hopkins University.

“The dealers push this as being a super high, which it is, but it’s also lethal,” added Ellen Unterwald, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at Temple University.

Last week, the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment published an analysis of data on mortality risks of users of cocaine and heroin. The study revealed that users of those drugs are at a 14-times higher risk of fatality, compared to the general population.

Among heroin users in the study, men were also 1.5 times more likely to die than women. Some of the specific risk factors in the study included mental disorders, personality traits, and social conditions surrounding drug dependence.

“This research clearly shows that drug use is unsafe and can lead to fatality. Addiction is often associated with underlying psychological disorders,” said Pax Prentiss, CEO of Passages Addiction Treatment Centers. “For individuals who have made the choice to end their dependence on substances, our treatment team has helped our clients to return to their daily lives, drug and alcohol free.”