Brazilian orange juice producers were denied a request on Thursday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow a higher tolerance of fungicide in juice imports.

The decision will see that Brazil, the world’s top orange juice producer, stops exporting orange juice that is made from concentrate to the U.S.

A variety of orange juice made from concentrate contains much smaller levels of carbendazim, a chemical used to help fight mold on orange trees.

Carbendazim is permitted up to a limit in imports to the European Union, which is the main buyer of Brazil’s orange juice.

Brazil asked the FDA to give it until June 2013 to eradicate carbendazim from its juice, which would have extended a ban on the chemical that was put into place in 2009.

Coca Cola alerted the FDA after it had discovered that carbendazim was present in laboratory tests of Brazilian orange juice.

The FDA began to check all imports for the chemical in January, prompting Brazil to ask the regulator for an extension on the 2009 ban.

Brazil asked the FDA to distinguish between frozen concentrate and not-from-concentrate, meaning a 60 parts per billion (ppb) carbendazim tolerance for frozen concentrate.  FDA’s current policy requires orange juice in the U.S. to be in the form of diluted not-from-concentrate, containing a content of 10 pbb of carbendazim.

The FDA refused Brazil’s proposal, but one source in the industry told Reuters that, “by the end of the year it is probable that things will be back to normal and we will be shipping concentrated juice to (the U.S.) again.”

The Juice Products Association said it was “disappointed” by the FDA decision, since the Environmental Protection Agency declared that carbendazim levels of up to 80 ppb were no threat to human health.

“The United States cannot grow enough oranges to satisfy American consumer demand for orange juice and therefore juice processors must rely on orange juice concentrate from other countries to assure adequate supplies,” it said in a statement.

FDA said it would not accept the requests of Brazil’s juice industry because laws prohibited it from making exceptions that would accommodate it.

“We recognize that the use in Brazil of a pesticide not authorized in the U.S. and FDA’s detention of shipments bearing illegal residues has affected the orange juice market and has economic impacts,” the regulator wrote in a 1,600 word statement.

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On the Net:

• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Juice Products Association
• FDA Sampling of Import Orange Juice/Juice Products for Carbendazim

New research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that when a person is experiencing a prolonged seizure, quick medical intervention is critical, becoming harder to stop the seizure with each passing minute, placing the patient at risk of severe brain damage and death.
It is for this reason that paramedics are trained to administer anticonvulsive medications as soon as possible — typically giving them intravenously before arriving at the hospital.
But according to findings in the new study, a major clinical trial has shown that using an auto-injector (similar to an EpiPen) to inject drugs into the thigh is just as safe and may be more effective.
The new research was conducted as part of the Rapid Anticonvulsant Medication Prior to Arrival Trial (RAMPART), which included researchers from the University of Cincinnati and local paramedics studying status epilepticus (prolonged seizure lasting more than five minutes). The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
The researchers wanted to determine whether intramuscular injection was as safe and effective as giving medicine intravenously. The study compared how well delivery by each method stopped patients´ seizures by the time the ambulance arrived at the ER.
The trial involved 17 cities and 79 hospitals around the country, and involved 4,314 paramedics who treated 893 patients ranging from several months old to 103 between 2009 and 2011.
The researchers compared two medicines that are effective in controlling seizures: midazolam and lorazepam. Both are benzodiazepines, a class of sedating anticonvulsant drugs. Midazolam was a candidate for injection because it is rapidly absorbed from muscle. But lorazepam must be given by IV.
The study team found that 73 percent of patients in the midazolam group were seizure-free upon arrival at the hospital, compared to 63 percent of those who received the IV treatment. Patients also treated with midazolam were also less likely to require hospitalization than those receiving the lorazepam IV.
“Patients with status epilepticus can suffer severe consequences if seizures are not stopped quickly. This study establishes that rapid intramuscular injection of an anticonvulsant drug is safe and effective,” said Walter Koroshetz, MD, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the NIH, which funded the study.
“This project is a great example of the importance of community-based emergency research and the combined strength of a city´s entire health care system, when we all work together,” said J. Claude Hemphill III, MD, MAS, who led the San Francisco part of the clinical trial. Hemphill is Chief of Neurology at SFGH and co-director of the UCSF Brain & Spinal Injury Center.
“It´s much easier to give intramuscular injections than have to start an IV,” said Hemphill. “Given the results of RAMPART, it is time for every emergency medical system in the United States to move toward intramuscular injection of midazolam as a first treatment to stop seizures in the pre-hospital setting.”
And auto-injectors may someday be available for use by epilepsy patients and their family members, but more research is currently needed, said the researchers. Because of the strong sedative effect of midazolam, on-site medical supervision is required for safety of the patient.
The RAMPART study was a unique form of clinical trial, eligible under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirement of “exception from informed consent.” The federal regulation was created to protect patients who are involved in research when consent is not possible because of their medical condition. RAMPART researchers held community consultation meetings prior to the study launch to get feedback.
AS investigators planned the trial, they learned that the US Defense Department and the Dept. of Health and Human Services were already working with a midazolam auto-injector and the study was an opportunity to confirm its effectiveness in patients with seizures.
“There was great synergy when we realized that RAMPART was studying a similar problem that was of concern to the chemical defense community. This led to a perfect collaboration between HHS and DoD,” said David Jett, PhD, program director for NIH CounterACT and NINDS. “The broader implication of RAMPART is that we now have critical information from studies in humans that a safe and effective tool may one day be available to enhance our public health preparedness. Auto-injectors provide a highly practical way to treat hundreds of people quickly during an emergency.”
“Few other areas of medicine are as time-dependent as injury to the brain. In epilepsy, even a few minutes can be important. With every minute the seizure continues, it becomes harder to stop. RAMPART offers first responders an important treatment tool that will have a meaningful impact on the lives of many people with epilepsy,” said Robert Silbergleit, MD, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, lead author of the paper.
“The use of the auto-injectors could further improve the excellent care our paramedics provide to their patients every day,” said Jason McMullan, MD, RAMPART co-investigator and assistant professor of clinical emergency medicine at UC. “While the auto-injectors are not yet commercially availability, this trial provides an opportunity to change the way that paramedics everywhere deliver time critical treatment for status epilepticus and improve the potential outcomes for our patients.”
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On the Net:

• New England Journal of Medicine

Researchers from Dartmouth reported today that potentially high levels of arsenic have been found in brown rice syrup, a primary ingredient in many organic foods.

Environmental chemist Brian P. Jackson found what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers dangerous amounts of arsenic in several organic food products, including organic infant formula whose main ingredient is brown rice syrup.

Other products that include the sweetener are some cereal bars, energy bars and energy “shots” consumed by many athletes, according to the study published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The list of products, not listed by brand name, follow recent reports about trace levels of arsenic discovered in apple juice and previous reports of the poison in rice. Researchers point out that rice is among one group of plants that are efficient in taking arsenic from the soil.

Jackson explained to Makiko Kitamura of Bloomberg: “In the absence of regulations for levels of arsenic in food, I would certainly advise parents who are concerned about their children´s exposure to arsenic not to feed them formula where brown rice syrup is the main ingredient.”

Arsenic has long been recognized as a contaminant in found primarily in drinking water, with dangerous levels pegged at federal limit of 10 parts per billion, there are currently no federal thresholds for arsenic in juices or most foods.

Legislation was introduced earlier this month in the US House of Representatives calling on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish standards for arsenic and lead in fruit juices, writes Kitamura for Bloomberg.

The FDA has been sampling and testing a variety of “more conventional” rice products, including rice crackers and rice cereals, “to evaluate what the risk is and what the levels are in these products” said Siobhan DeLancey, a spokeswoman for the agency´s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told Anne Allen of ABC News.

Depending on what the testing reveals, she said there was “a possibility” that the agency would set a threshold for arsenic levels in rice. The FDA previously set a “level of concern” of 23 parts per billion of arsenic for fruit juices, the only other food to have such a designated level.

“The bottom line is this shows there´s a need for FDA to figure out some limits on this and put that out there,” Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group in Washington, D.C., told Allen. She said FDA needs to take a broader approach toward arsenic in what we eat, rather than going “food by food.”

Consumer Reports magazine published results of arsenic testing last month showing nearly 10 percent of juice samples from five brands exceeded federal drinking-water standards for arsenic. Most of the arsenic was inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen, according to the study.

The potential presence of the chemical element in formula is “particularly worrisome for babies because they are especially vulnerable to arsenic´s toxic effects,” the Dartmouth researchers said.

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On the Net:

• Dartmouth College
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• Environmental Health Perspectives Abstract
• FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
• Food and Water Watch
• Consumer Reports

Roche Genentech is warning doctors and patients that counterfeit vials of its cancer drug Avastin have been distributed in the U.S.
The fake drugs do not contain the key ingredient in Avastin, which is used to help treat cancers of the colon, lung, kidney and brain.
A spokeswoman for Roche Genentech said the counterfeit drug has been distributed to health care facilities in the U.S., but it´s unclear how many vials are in circulation in the U.S.
The company said it is working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to track down the counterfeit vials and analyze their contents.
“We’re still analyzing what it is, we know it doesn’t contain the active ingredient in Avastin,” Genentech spokeswoman Charlotte Arnold said in a press release. “It’s an infused medicine and not something a patient would have in their hands, so it’s really health care providers who should be on the lookout.”
The counterfeit vials do not have “Genentech” printed on their packing, which appears on all the original packing of the drug.
Also, the original Avastin contains a six-digit lot number with no letters, and all the packaging text should be in English.
The FDA said on Tuesday that it has contacted 19 medical practices that may have purchased the unapproved drugs from a company called Quality Specialty Products.
The agency said the foreign supply company may also do business as Montana Health Care Solutions.
“FDA has requested that the medical practices stop using any remaining products from these suppliers,” the agency said in a statement.
Foreign health regulators alerted Genentech to the problem originally, and officials believe the counterfeits were imported from another country.
The original Avastin drug is packaged in manufacturing facilities in South San Francisco, California.
Avastin works by choking off blood supply that feeds tumors, and it was the first drug of its kind approved by the FDA.
Data tracking firm IMS Health said that the drug was the 14th best-selling drug in the U.S. in 2010.
This is not the first time counterfeit drugs have made their way into doctors´ hands in the U.S.  A contaminated blood thinner called heparin was connected with dozens of deaths and hundreds of allergic reactions across the U.S. in 2008.
An FDA investigation concluded the drug had been intentionally contaminated with an ingredient that mimics heparin.  The drug was imported from China.
About 80 percent of active ingredients used in U.S. prescription drugs are now manufactured overseas, according to congressional investigators.
Recent legislation could give FDA the authority to inspect foreign drug imports.  A separate legislation would create a mandatory barcode system to monitor the authenticity of all prescription drugs.
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On the Net:

• Roche Genentech
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Methotrexate, a lifesaving drug used to treat childhood leukemia and rheumatoid arthritis, is in such short supply that hospitals across the country fear supplies could be exhausted in just a few weeks, leaving thousands of children at risk, health officials say.

Despite looming fears, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said this week that the shortage should ease before hospitals run out. But drug makers are giving few details about how they will find a long-term solution.

The FDA´s drug shortage program associate director, Valerie Jensen, said officials are working with the three makers of Methotrexate to come up with a solution to the problem.

The drug, which cures up to 90 percent of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), has been in short supply for the past year-and-a-half, and in far shorter supply in recent weeks because a leading maker of the drug shut down some of its factories last year.

“This is dire,” said Jensen. “Supplies are just not meeting demand.”

Ben Venue Laboratories was one of the nation´s largest suppliers of injectable preservative-free Methotrexate, but the company suspended operations at its Bedford, Ohio plant because of “significant manufacturing and quality concerns,” the company announced.

Since then, drug supplies have gradually dwindled.

“This is a crisis that I hope the FDA´s hard work can help to avert,” Dr. Michael P. Link, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, told the New York Times. “We have worked very hard to take what was an incurable disease and make it curable for 90 percent of the cases. But if we can´t get this drug anymore, that sets us back decades.”

Ben Venue said in a statement that it is working closely with the FDA to bring Methotrexate back to market as soon as possible, and understands “the urgent need” for the medication.

“Since we suspended the production of all products in November 2011, our team has been working around the clock to implement changes needed to ensure a more sustained supply of the medicines we produce, and to address the manufacturing related issues at our facility noted in recent inspections by the FDA and other global regulatory agencies,” the company said.

“Over the past three years, we have invested more than $250 million to upgrade our facilities, and continue to invest millions more in order to restore production as quickly as possible. “¦ We are committed to doing all that we can to help seek a solution to this urgent need, and are hopeful that some of the other companies licensed to manufacture Methotrexate will be able to increase production while we work to restore manufacturing at our facilities,” it added.

“In the meantime, our inability to produce Methotrexate and other medicines critical to patient care weighs heavily on us all,” the statement concluded.

Jensen told The Associated Press (AP) that the three drug companies should be starting to ship doses of Methotrexate by the end of the month. She noted that federal regulations bar the FDA from discussing plans of specific companies, as it is considered proprietary information.

Elizabeth Raetz, a pediatric oncologist at the NYU Langone Medical Center, Liz Szabo of USA TODAY that the Methotrexate shortage is a matter of life and death for the 3,500 kids diagnosed with ALL each year. They endure two to three years of exhausting therapies but are nearly always cured of their disease, and there is no replacement therapy for Methotrexate; going without it, or even delaying it, could leave children vulnerable to a fatal relapse, she said.

FDA officials “have been reassuring in discussions that this is not going to be a prolonged shortage,” Dr. Peter Adamson, chairman of the Children´s Oncology Group, a network of 200-plus North American hospitals treating children with cancer, told the AP. But until the drug is delivered, we can´t be sure, he noted.

According to the AP’s Linda A. Johnson, multiple hospitals and cancer specialists say they still have enough of the drug to treat its current patients. But a survey of 204 oncologists in January found at least 40 percent believed that one or more patients in the past year either died prematurely or suffered a tumor recurrence because of the shortage of Methotrexate.

Though Link praised the FDA for working so fast, he said the US still needs to find a long-term solution to the problem. Methotrexate shortages is only one of a long list of 286 other drugs that are facing supply exhaustion.

“People are panicking,” Erin Fox, manager of the drug information service at the University of Utah, told Gardiner Harris of the New York Times. “There isn´t a lot of hope that supplies will improve drastically over the next few weeks, which is why people are so worried.”

President Obama signed an executive order in October 2011 giving the FDA greater authority to manage drug shortages as well as counter price-gouging. The FDA has reversed 114 shortages in this manner since October 31, said FDA spokeswoman Shelly Burgess.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, has introduced legislation to require manufacturers to report shortfalls of all medications to the FDA. “In the Senate, it´s so hard to get an individual bill to pass.” She said she will keep fighting until this strategy works.

Today, drugmakers are required to notify the FDA of shortages only in scarce drugs for which they´re the only supplier.

Currently there are five manufacturers of Methotrexate in the US, and they are trying to increase their production. The FDA is also seeking a foreign supplier to provide emergency imports until suppliers can meet demand in the US, said Jensen.

“We´re working on many fronts, and will keep this a priority,” she added.

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On the Net:

• US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Ben Venue Laboratories
• American Society of Clinical Oncology
• NYU Langone Medical Center
• Children´s Oncology Group
• University of Utah

Chronic exposure to air pollution, even at levels typically considered safe by federal regulations, increases the risk of stroke by 34 percent and may accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, according to two separate studies published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

In one study, researchers studied more than 1,700 stroke patients in the Boston area over a 10-year period, and found exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM), generally from vehicle traffic, was associated with a significantly higher risk of ischemic strokes on days when the EPA’s air quality index for PM was yellow instead of green.

The researchers focused on tiny particles with a diameter of 2.5 millionths of a meter, less than 1/30th the width of a human hair, referred to as PM2.5.

These particles come from a variety of sources, including power plants, factories, trucks and automobiles, and can travel deep into the lungs.  They have been associated in previous studies with increased numbers of hospital visits for cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks.

“The link between increased stroke risk and these particulates can be observed within hours of exposure and are most strongly associated with pollution from local or transported traffic emissions,” said the study´s senior author, Dr. Murray Mittleman, a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Any proposed changes in regulated pollution levels must consider the impact of lower levels on public health.”

“Considering that almost everyone is exposed to air pollution and is at risk for stroke, that’s actually a pretty large effect,” said lead author Gregory Wellenius, ScD, an Assistant Professor of Community Health at Brown University.

The researchers analyzed the medical records of more than 1,700 patients who went to the hospital for treatment of confirmed strokes between 1999 and 2008.

They matched the onset of stroke symptoms in each patient to hourly measurements of particulate air pollution taken at the nearby Harvard School of Public Health’s environmental monitoring station.

The researchers then abstracted data on the time of symptom onset and clinical characteristics to estimate the hour the stroke systems first occurred.   The team included only strokes confirmed by attending neurologists, and did not rely upon insurance billing codes, which can sometimes be vague.

They compared this data with Harvard’s hourly measurements of pollution within 13 miles of 90 percent of the stroke patients’ homes to allow for close matching in time of exposure and stroke onset.

“We think that this study is novel in that it has high-quality data on both air pollution exposure and stroke diagnosis,” Wellenius said.

The team was able to calculate that the peak risk to patients from air pollution exposure occurs 12-14 hours before a stroke.

Such information may be useful to researchers who want to trace how PM2.5 might be working in the body to increase the likelihood of stroke.

The researchers also found that black carbon and nitrogen dioxide, two pollutants associated with vehicle traffic, were closely linked with stroke risk, suggesting that pollution from cars and trucks may be particularly important.

Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability and the third leading cause of death in the United States. An estimated 795,000 Americans suffer a new or recurrent stroke every year, resulting in more than 135,000 deaths and 829,000 hospital admissions.

The researchers estimate that reducing PM2.5 pollution by about 20 percent could have prevented 6,100 of the 184,000 stroke hospitalizations in the northeastern U.S. in 2007.

Although the researchers acknowledge their results need to be replicated in other cities, they note that Boston is considered to have relatively clean air.

“The levels of PM2.5 in Boston are lower than those seen in many in other parts of the country, yet we still find that within these moderate levels the risk of stroke is higher on days with more particles in the air,” Mittleman said.

Meanwhile, a separate study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center suggests that chronic exposure to particulate air pollution may accelerate cognitive decline in older adults.

The large, prospective study found that women who were exposed to higher levels of ambient particulate matter over the long term experienced more decline in their cognitive functioning over a four-year period.

These associations were present at levels of PM exposure typical in many areas of the United States.

The researchers concluded that higher levels of long-term exposure to both coarse PM (PM2.5-10) and fine PM (PM2.5) were associated with a significant acceleration of cognitive decline.

The study is the first to examine changes in cognitive function over a period of time, and whether exposure to the size of particulate matter is important.

Jennifer Weuve, MPH., ScD, assistant professor of the Rush Institute of Healthy Aging and the principal investigator of the study, and colleagues evaluated air pollution, both coarse and fine, in relation to cognitive decline in older women.  They used a study population from the Nurses’ Health Study Cognitive Cohort, which included 19,409 U.S. women ages 70 to 81 over a 14-year period dating back to 1988.

“Very is little known about the role of particulate matter exposure and its association with cognitive decline,” said Weuve.

Exposure to particulate air pollution is known to be associated with cardiovascular risk, which may itself play a role in causing or accelerating cognitive decline, the researchers said.

“Unlike other factors that may be involved in dementia such as diet and physical activity, air pollution is something we can intervene on as a society at large through policy, regulation and technology,” said Weuve.

“Therefore, if our findings are confirmed in other research, air pollution reduction is a potential means for reducing the future population burden of age-related cognitive decline, and eventually, dementia,” she said.

Both studies are published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

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On the Net:

• Study Abstract – Ambient Air Pollution and the Risk of Acute Ischemic Stroke
• Study Abstract -Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution and Cognitive Decline in Older Women
• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
• Harvard Medical School
• Brown University
• Harvard School of Public Health
• Rush University Medical Center

Scientists, long searching for a cure for Alzheimer´s, a reporting a dramatic breakthrough: a drug that quickly reverses the pathological, cognitive and memory deficits in mice afflicted with the disease.

The results point to the significant potential that the drug, bexarotene, could help the more than 5 million Americans suffering from the brain disease. However, they cautioned that the study was only used in mice, and that the research needs much more work to determine if the medication will show positive results in humans.

Current drugs on the market only slow the progression of Alzheimer´s disease. But the neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, hope bexarotene, or a similar variation, will someday work in humans as well.

The researchers, reporting in the US journal Science, said mice treated with the drug became rapidly smarter and the plaque in their brains that was causing Alzheimer´s started to disappear within hours.

“We were shocked and amazed,” lead author Gary Landreth, a professor in the Department of Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio, told the AFP news agency. “Things like this had never, ever been seen before.”

Landreth, explaining how bexarotene works, said levels of the protein Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) are boosted which then helps clear amyloid plaque buildup in the brain, a major trait of Alzheimer´s.

“Think of this as a garbage disposal,” said Landreth. “When we are young and healthy, all of us can basically get rid of this (amyloid) and degrade it and grind it into small bits and it gets cleared.” But many of us are “unable to do this efficiently as we age. And this is associated with mental decline or cognitive impairment,” he said.

Within six hours of receiving the drug, soluble amyloid levels in the mice fell 25 percent, ultimately reaching a 75 percent drop over time. The authors found that the mice, soon after taking the drug, began performing better in tests, showing they were able to remember things again, were more social and were able to smell again, a sense that is commonly lost in Alzheimer´s patients.

Within 72 hours after the treatments, the mice were able to associate paper with nests and began building again — another function lost in mice with Alzheimer´s.

“This is an unprecedented finding. Previously, the best existing treatment for Alzheimer’s disease in mice required several months to reduce plaque in the brain,” said study coauthor Paige Cramer, a PhD candidate at the university´s School of Medicine.

“This is a particularly exciting and rewarding study because of the new science we have discovered and the potential promise of a therapy for Alzheimer´s disease,” added Landreth. “We need to be clear; the drug works quite well in mouse models of the disease. Our next objective is to ascertain if it acts similarly in humans.”

If bexarotene is to work in humans, it might be best targeted at people in the early stages of the disease, because, as seen in the nest building behavior of mice with Alzheimer´s, the nests are nowhere near as good as those built by healthy mice, according to the team.

The team said clinical trials for humans are currently being designed and should produce early results in the coming year.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had previously approved bexarotene for the treatment of a rare form of cancer — cutaneous T-cell lymphoma — more than a decade ago. It was initially made by US-based Ligand Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Targretin.

Eisai Pharmaceutical from Japan bought the rights for Targretin in 2006 and it is now available through Eisai in 26 countries in Europe, North America and South America.

Scott Turner, director of the Georgetown University Medical Center’s Memory Disorders Program, who was not involved in the research, told Kerry Sheridan of AFP that he was excited by the findings. “This is a brand new way to move forward in human trials of Alzheimer’s disease and it works great with mice.”

Turner, an expert in Alzheimer´s disease, cautioned, however, that more research was needed to see if the same results can be seen in humans. “One obstacle is that the mice may not be a good model of Alzheimer´s disease. We have so many things that work in mice and we try them in humans and they just completely fail,” he said.

The FDA gives bexarotene a good safety profile, although women who are pregnant or may become pregnant are urged not to use it because of possible fetal defects. Typical side effects of the drug include diarrhea, dizziness, nausea, dry skin and trouble sleeping.

Since bexarotene is prescribed for cancer patients, there are no anecdotal reports of improved memory in humans, according to Landreth. This may be because most cancer patients do not live long enough to reach the age of when Alzheimer´s usually strikes.

Alzheimer´s and other forms of dementia affect more than 35 million people worldwide, with cases expected to double by 2030, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International which puts the annual global costs of the disease at $604 billion.

Landreth said funding and support for the research came with help from the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Foundation, the Thome Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

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On the Net:

• Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
• Science
• US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Ligand Pharmaceuticals
• Eisai Pharmaceutical

A new study, titled “U.S. Teen Pregnancies, Births and Abortions, 2008: National Trends by Age, Race and Ethnicity” published by the Guttmacher Institute, has found teen pregnancy to be down among all racial groups.
Teen pregnancies are at their lowest rates in 40 years, according to the latest numbers dating 2008 which is when the latest statistics were given.
According to the report, in 2008 teens were pregnant at a rate of 67.8 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19, or around 7 percent of teenage girls were pregnant that year. This is a 42 percent decline from 1990 when the rate peaked at 116.9 per 1,000 girls.
Also the teen birthrate fell 35 percent between 1991 and 2008 from 61.6 births to 40.2 births per 1,000 teens. Following the declines is also the teen abortion rate, it declined 59 percent from 43.5 abortions per 1,000 girls in 1988 to 17.8 per 1,000 girls in 2008.
The report notes that there is also racial differences among teenage girls. Even though there are dramatic reductions in teen pregnancies across the board, in racial minority populations the pregnancy rates are 2 to 3 times as high of non-hispanic whites.
The teen pregnancy rate peaked in the early 1990´s and since then the rate has dropped by 37 percent among Hispanics, 48 percent among blacks and 50 percent among non-hispanic whites.
This trend in the minority population also follows the abortion rate. The researchers report that the abortion rates among Hispanics  were twice the rate of whites and blacks experience four times as many abortions as whites.
Kathryn Kost, the lead author of the study says, “The recent declines in teen pregnancy rates are great news. However, the continued inequities among racial and ethnic minorities are cause for concern. It is time to redouble our efforts to ensure that all teens have access to the information and contraceptive services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies.”
The rate of decline in teen birthrates has come about because more teens are practicing safer sex practices, especially improved use of contraceptives. Teens may also be doubling up on protection and increasing use of the most effective contraceptives creating lower pregnancy and abortion rates in the teen population.
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On the Net:

• Guttmacher Institute
• Read the Report (pdf)

Neuroscientists at UCLA have found a way to help improve a human’s memory by stimulating a part of the brain.

The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, could lead to a new method for boosting memory in Alzheimer’s patients.

The team focused on a brain site known as the entorhinal cortex during their study, which is an area considered to be the doorway to an area that helps form and store memories.

“The entorhinal cortex is the golden gate to the brain’s memory mainframe,” senior author Dr. Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a press release. “Every visual and sensory experience that we eventually commit to memory funnels through that doorway to the hippocampus. Our brain cells must send signals through this hub in order to form memories that we can later consciously recall.”

The researchers followed seven epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains to help pinpoint the origin of their seizures.

They monitored the electrodes to record neuron activity as memories were being formed in the patients’ brains.

They then tested whether deep-brain stimulation of the entorhinal cortex or the hippocampus altered recall.

Using a video game featuring a taxi cab, patients played the role of cab drivers who picked up passengers and travelled across town.

“When we stimulated the nerve fibers in the patients’ entorhinal cortex during learning, they later recognized landmarks and navigated the routes more quickly,” Fried said in a press release. “They even learned to take shortcuts, reflecting improved spatial memory.

“Critically, it was the stimulation at the gateway into the hippocampus — and not the hippocampus itself — that proved effective,” he added.

He said the use of stimulation during the learning phase suggests that patients do not need to undergo continuous stimulation to boost their memory, but only when they are learning something important.

This technique may lead the way to neuro-prosthetic devices that can switch on during specific stages of information processing or daily tasks.

“Our preliminary results provide evidence supporting a possible mechanism for enhancing memory, particularly as people age or suffer from early dementia,” Fried said in a press release. “At the same time, we studied a small sample of patients, so our results should be interpreted with caution.”

Future studies will determine whether deep-brain stimulation enhances other types of recall, like verbal and autobiographical memories.

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On the Net:

• UCLA
• New England Journal of Medicine
• David Geffen School of Medicine

People who are more physically active report greater levels of excitement and enthusiasm than people who are less physically active, according to Penn State researchers. People also are more likely to report feelings of excitement and enthusiasm on days when they are more physically active than usual.

“You don’t have to be the fittest person who is exercising every day to receive the feel-good benefits of exercise,” said David Conroy, professor of kinesiology. “It’s a matter of taking it one day at a time, of trying to get your activity in, and then there’s this feel-good reward afterwards.”

Conroy added that it often is hard for people to commit to an exercise program because they tend to set long-term rather than short-term goals.

“When people set New Year’s resolutions, they set them up to include the entire upcoming year, but that can be really overwhelming,” he said. “Taking it one day at a time and savoring that feel-good effect at the end of the day might be one step to break it down and get those daily rewards for activity. Doing this could help people be a little more encouraged to stay active and keep up the program they started.”

The researchers asked 190 university students to keep daily diaries of their lived experiences, including free-time physical activity and sleep quantity and quality, as well as their mental states, including perceived stress and feeling states. Participants were instructed to record only those episodes of physical activity that occurred for at least 15 minutes and to note whether the physical activity was mild, moderate or vigorous. Participants returned their diaries to the researchers at the end of each day for a total of eight days. The researchers published their results in the current issue of the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

According to Amanda Hyde, kinesiology graduate student, the team separated the participants’ feeling states into four categories: pleasant-activated feelings exemplified by excitement and enthusiasm, pleasant-deactivated feelings exemplified by satisfaction and relaxation, unpleasant-activated feelings exemplified by anxiety and anger, and unpleasant-deactivated feelings exemplified by depression and sadness.

“We found that people who are more physically active have more pleasant-activated feelings than people who are less active, and we also found that people have more pleasant-activated feelings on days when they are more physically active than usual,” said Hyde, who noted that the team was able to rule out alternative explanations for the pleasant-activated feelings, such as quality of sleep.

“Our results suggest that not only are there chronic benefits of physical activity, but there are discrete benefits as well. Doing more exercise than you typically do can give you a burst of pleasant-activated feelings. So today, if you want a boost, go do some moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise.”

Conroy added that most previous studies have looked only at pleasant or unpleasant feelings and paid less attention to the notion of activation.

“Knowing that moderate and vigorous physical activity generates a pleasant-activated feeling, rather than just a pleasant feeling, might help to explain why physical activity is so much more effective for treating depression rather than anxiety,” he said. “People dealing with anxious symptoms don’t need an increase in activation. If anything, they might want to bring it down some. In the future, we plan to look more closely at the effects of physical activity on mental health symptoms.”

Other authors on the paper include Aaron Pincus, professor of psychology, and Nilam Ram, assistant professor of human development and family studies and of psychology.

National Institute on Aging and the Penn State Social Science Research Institute funded this research.

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On the Net:

• Penn State
• Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology

The student health center at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania installed a vending machine where students can get the “morning-after” pill for $25, reports Daily Mail´s Jill Reilly.

It doesn´t appear that any other vending machine in the US dispenses the contraceptive, which can prevent pregnancy if taken soon after sexual intercourse.

Shippensburg, a secluded public institution of 8,300 students in the Cumberland Valley, provides the Plan B One Step emergency contraceptive in the vending machine along with condoms, decongestants and pregnancy tests. On average, one dose is sold every day from the machine.

“I think it´s great that the school is giving us this option,” junior Chelsea Wehking told the Associated Press (AP). “I´ve heard some kids say they´d be too embarrassed” to go into Shippensburg, a small town with a permanent population of about 6,000, to buy Plan B.

Federal law makes the pill available without a prescription to anyone 17 or older, and the school checked records and found that all current students are that age or older, a spokesman said. The vending machine has been in place for about two years, and its existence wasn´t widely known until recently.

Doctor Roger Serr, university vice president for student affairs said the idea for the vending machine was from the University´s Student Association.

“We went out and did a survey of the student body, and we got an 85 percent response rate that students would be supportive of having Plan B in the health center,” he said to Ship News Now. “The vending machine is just a way to dispense it. It´s provided, it´s not necessarily promoted on a large scale,” he added.

The medical vending machine is in the school´s Health Center, which is accessible only by students and university employees, school spokesman Gigliotti said in a statement. In addition, “no one can walk in off the street and go into the health center,” he said; students must check in at a lobby desk.

Plan B must be taken within 72 hours of rape, condom failure or just forgetting regular contraception and can cut the chances of pregnancy by up to 89 percent. It works best if taken within 24 hours. Some religious conservatives consider the emergency contraceptive tantamount to an abortion drug.

History professor Alexandra Stern, from the University of Michigan, questions whether making it so easily available is a good idea. “Perhaps it is personalized medicine taken too far. It´s part of the general trend that drugs are available for consumers without interface with a pharmacist or doctors. This trend has serious pitfalls.”

Other universities in the state system such as Millersville University require students have an appointment with campus medical staff before the pill is made available.

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On the Net:

• Shippensburg University

A full breakfast that includes a sweet dessert contributes to weight loss success, say TAU researchers

When it comes to diets, cookies and cake are off the menu. Now, in a surprising discovery, researchers from Tel Aviv University have found that dessert, as part of a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that also includes proteins and carbohydrates, can help dieters to lose more weight – and keep it off in the long run.

They key is to indulge in the morning, when the body’s metabolism is at its most active and we are better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, say Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz, Dr. Julio Wainstein and Dr. Mona Boaz of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Diabetes Unit at Wolfson Medical Center, and Prof. Oren Froy of Hebrew University Jerusalem.

Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Prof. Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast – cookies, cake, or chocolate – lost an average of 40 lbs. more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.

The scale tells the tale

A meal in the morning provides energy for the day’s tasks, aids in brain functioning, and kick-starts the body’s metabolism, making it crucial for weight loss and maintenance. And breakfast is the meal that most successfully regulates ghrelin, the hormone that increases hunger, explains Prof. Jakubowicz. While the level of ghrelin rises before every meal, it is suppressed most effectively at breakfast time.

Basing their study on this fact, the researchers hoped to determine whether meal time and composition impacted weight loss in the short and long term, says Prof. Jakubowicz, or if it was a simple matter of calorie count.

One hundred and ninety three clinically obese, non-diabetic adults were randomly assigned to one of two diet groups with identical caloric intake – the men consumed 1600 calories per day and the women 1400. However, the first group was given a low carbohydrate diet including a small 300 calorie breakfast, and the second was given a 600 calorie breakfast high in protein and carbohydrates, always including a dessert item (i.e. chocolate).

Halfway through the study, participants in both groups had lost an average of 33 lbs. per person. But in the second half of the study, results differed drastically. The participants in the low-carbohydrate group regained an average of 22 lbs. per person, but participants in the group with a larger breakfast lost another 15 lbs. each. At the end of the 32 weeks, those who had consumed a 600 calorie breakfast had lost an average of 40 lbs. more per person than their peers.

Realistic in the long run

One of the biggest challenges that people face is keeping weight off in the long-term, says Prof. Jakubowicz. Ingesting a higher proportion of our daily calories at breakfast makes sense. It´s not only good for body function, but it also alleviates cravings. Highly restrictive diets that forbid desserts and carbohydrates are initially effective, but often cause dieters to stray from their food plans as a result of withdrawal-like symptoms. They wind up regaining much of the weight they lost during the diet proper.

Though they consumed the same daily amount of calories, “the participants in the low carbohydrate diet group had less satisfaction, and felt that they were not full,” she says, noting that their cravings for sugars and carbohydrates were more intense and eventually caused them to cheat on the diet plan. “But the group that consumed a bigger breakfast, including dessert, experienced few if any cravings for these foods later in the day.”

Ultimately, this shows that a diet must be realistic to be adopted as part of a new lifestyle. Curbing cravings is better than deprivation for weight loss success, Prof. Jakubowicz concludes.

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On the Net:

• Tel Aviv University
• Steroids

Scientists have discovered that addicts and their siblings have the same disorders in the brain, meaning both are wired for addictive behavior.
However, the siblings that do not exhibit addictive tendencies give researchers hope that addiction can be cured.
Paul Keedwell, a consultant psychiatrist from Britain´s Cardiff University who was not involved in the study, told Reuters: “If we could get a handle on what makes unaffected relatives of addicts so resilient we might be able to prevent a lot of addiction from taking hold.”
Collecting data on drug addicts is difficult since they typically live on the fringes of society. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 15.3 million people globally who have drug problems and 148 countries report problems with injected drug use.
Scientists know that drug abusers have differences in their brains, but they were not sure if the drugs affected the brain or if the differences were already there before drug use.
The researchers worked around this problem by studying the brains of 50 crack addicts and their non-addict siblings and then comparing the results to the brains of other healthy people.
The scientists found that the brains of the non-addicted siblings had the same abnormalities in the part of the brain that controls behavior, the fronto-striatal systems.
According to Karen Ersche, the lead researcher, “It has long been known that not everyone who takes drugs becomes addicted, and that people at risk of drug dependence typically have deficits in self-control. Our finding now shed light on why the risk of becoming addicted to drugs is increased in people with a family history“¦Parts of their brains underlying self-control abilities work less efficiently.”
The results of the research is published in the journal Science.
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• Science

The Mexican fast food chain Taco Bell has now been connected to an outbreak of salmonella that occurred in October and November of last year and affected some 68 people across 10 states, according to a report published by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

While the CDC had for legal reasons initially refused to positively identify the food chain under investigation–calling it instead simply “Restaurant A” in its initial reports–Food Safety News reported on Thursday that the suspect chain was in fact Taco Bell, citing official documentation obtained from the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

Drawing on information from a January 19 CDC report, Taco Bell has said it believes that the infected food most likely originated at the supplier level and was not due to any unsafe practices in the restaurants themselves.

“We take food quality and safety very seriously,” read a press release from the company Wednesday evening.

Investigators believe that the surge of salmonella infections began in mid-October and continued through November. There were illnesses related to the food-borne bacteria reported in states as geographically dispersed as Texas, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma–one of several factors that led investigators to believe that the problem occurred at the supply level before the questionable food even made it into restaurants.

No deaths were reported roughly a third of the affected patients had to hospitalized, according to the CDC.

The CDC estimates that approximately one in six Americans become ill each year from food-borne contagions, of which approximately 3,000 result in death.

Salmonella infections typically last four to seven days and are usually accompanied by fever, abdominal cramps, diarrhea and vomiting.

The Taco Bell brand has suffered in recent years thanks to a series of bacterial outbreaks.

In 2006, some 71 people became infected with a strain of E. coli that the CDC said originated in a batch of contaminated lettuce served by Taco Bell restaurants in the northeastern United States.

And in 2010, the Mexican restaurant was also linked to two large salmonella outbreaks that sickened over 150 people across 21 states.

As if the bacterial outbreaks weren´t damaging enough to the fast-food chain´s image, the 2011 outbreak came hard on the heels of a flippant but reputation-damaging lawsuit over the content of the restaurant´s ground beef.

Taco Bell is a subsidiary of Yum Brand Inc, the world´s largest fast food restaurant corporation. The Fortune 500 company also licenses or operates KFC, Pizza Hut and WingStreet.

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On the Net:

• Taco Bell
• CDC
• Food Safety News
• Oklahoma State Department of Health
• Yum Brand Inc

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A group of doctors have published a report claiming sugar should be regulated and taxed by the government in much the same way as tobacco and alcohol.
They claim that sugar, at the rate most Americans consume it, is more than empty calories. Sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, alters the signaling of hormones and causes damage to the liver. These are similar to the health hazards posed by excessively drinking alcohol which is made from fermented and distilled sugar.
The researchers claim that sugar consumption worldwide has tripled over the last 50 years, and is a major cause to the worldwide obesity epidemic. But, they argue that obesity may just be a marker for the damage caused by sugar´s toxic effects.
According to Claire Brindis of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), one of the contributors to the report, people are not going to change by themselves. In order to push people away from sugar, there has to be community-wide and environmental intervention, much like what has happened with tobacco.
In other words, the researchers agree that sugar should be taxed and regulated by the government, either local or federal, thereby increasing the price and pushing people away from sugar consumption.
Some of the regulations that would be placed on sugar would be limiting its availability in schools and workplaces, especially vending machines.
Dr. Laura Schmidt (also from UCSF), who contributed to the report, said “What we want is actually to increase people´s choices by making foods that aren´t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”
But some critics disagree with the report.  The Sugar Association told CBS News that they dispute the science presented, namely the tripled sugar consumption rate that they say is based on incomplete science.
Another critic Barbara Gallani, of the Food and Drink Federation in the UK, says sugar alone is not the sole cause of heart disease and other sugar related symptoms. She told the DailyMail, “The causes of these diseases are multi-factorial and demonizing food components does not help consumers to build a realistic approach to the diet.”
The researchers published their study and commentary in the Feb. 2 issue of Nature.
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On the Net:

• University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
• Sugar Association
• Food and Drink Federation
• Nature Abstract

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has had to recall some one million packages of birth control pills after post-production investigations indicated that some of the packages may not contain enough contraceptive to prevent pregnancy.
Pfizer Inc. has voluntarily recalled 14 batches of their popular Lo/Ovral-28 tablets and 14 batches of Norgestrel and Ethinyl Estradiol tablets . The company reported that due to production irregularities some of the packages may not contain the clinically-proven amount of the contraceptive required to avoid fertilization.
In an official statement made Wednesday on their website, Pfizer explained that a number of the foil blister-packets in which the medications are packaged were found to contain too many tablets while others had too few.
A Pfizer spokesman said the problem was a result of a combination of visual and mechanical inspection errors on their packaging line.
In the statement, the company also made clear that the affected pills were in no way dangerous to women´s health but that there was a possibility that they might not be effective as a contraceptive.
Pfizer also advised customers who use the pills in question to immediately “begin using a non-hormonal form of contraception.”
The affected pills are marketed by Akrimax Pharmaceuticals, and by the time Pfizer noticed the potential production error, the pills had already been distributed to warehouses and pharmacies nationwide.
“As a result of this packaging error, the daily regimen for these oral contraceptives may be incorrect and could leave women without adequate contraception, and at risk for unintended pregnancy,” read the website.
Packages of hormone-regulating oral contraceptives typically contain 21 tablets with medication and seven inactive sugar tablets to regulate the menstrual period and prevent pregnancy.
The company says that the affected packets have expiration dates between July 31, 2013, and March 31, 2014.
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On the Net:

• Pfizer
• Akrimax Pharmaceuticals

According to a new study, post-menopausal women are 35 percent more likely to suffer a hip fracture if they take indigestion drugs, or “proton pump inhibitors” (PPIs).

These drugs are the most common medicines used around the world and are often used to treat heartburn and acid reflex.

However, PPIs can inhibit the absorption of calcium, which leads to the increased risk of fractures.

Researchers looked at the association between PPIs and hip fractures in just under 80,000 post-menopausal women over an eight year period from 2000 to 2008.

The team found that women with a prolonged use of these drugs and who smoke could be up to 50 percent more likely to suffer from hip fractures compared to women who do not smoke.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning in May 2010 about the relationship between hip fractures and using indigestion drugs.

The team found that out of the 79,899 post-menopausal women in the study, 893 suffered hip fractures in total over the eight year period.  Correlation was found between the length of time PPIs were taken and the risk of fractures.

The researchers also found an increased use in women taking indigestion drugs.  They found that 6.7 percent of women were regularly using a PPI in 2000, jumping to 18.9 percent in 2008.

The authors wrote in a study published on bmj.com that the risk of hip fracture returned to a normal level two years after patients stopped taking the indigestion drugs.

The FDA says it hopes to revise labeling on these drugs, and the researchers stress the importance of evaluating the need for long-term use of PPIs among those with a history of smoking.

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On the Net:

• FDA
• British Medical Journal

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Have you ever imagined taking on the role of Spock in the popular Star Trek shows and films, using your mind melding abilities to read the thoughts of others. Well that could one day become a reality, in a roundabout way.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco, have demonstrated a new method to reconstruct words, based on signals from the brains of patients thinking of those words. While it is a far cry from a person being able to read another´s mind, it does give plausibility to the notion that one could read someone´s mind with the aid of a machine.
Reporting in the journal PLoS Biology, the UCB researchers said the method could one day help comatose and stroke patients communicate with the outside world. There have been several approaches in recent years that have suggested scientists were on track to tap into the minds of fellow man.
Robert Knight of UCB and Edward Chang of UCSF, senior authors of the study, said the process gives great insight into how the brain processes language. The brain breaks down words into complex patterns of electrical activity, which can be detected and translated back into an approximate version of the original sound.
Because the brain is believed to process thought similarly to how it processes sound, scientists hope the breakthrough can lead to an implant that would interpret thought into speech in people who cannot talk.
Unlike Spock, who could read people´s minds just by placing his hand in a particular fashion on the subject´s face, the technology behind this new breakthrough is precarious at best.
Any device capable of reading one´s mind is a long way off because researchers would have to make the technology much more accurate than it is now and also find a way to apply sounds which the patient merely thinks of, rather than hears.
It would also require electrodes to be placed beneath the skull onto the brain itself, because no sensors exist which could detect the tiny patterns of electrical activity non-invasively. But this doesn´t mean it could not one day be feasible.
“This is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig´s disease and can´t speak,” said Knight. “If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit.”
For the research, Knight and colleagues studied 15 epilepsy patients who were undergoing exploratory surgery to find the cause of their seizures, a process in which a series of electrodes are connected to the brain through a hole in the skull.
While the electrodes were attached, the team monitored activity in the temporal lobe — the brain´s speech processing area — as patients listened to about ten minutes of conversation. By breaking down the conversation into component sounds, the team was able to create two computer models which matched distinct signals in the brain to individual sounds.
They then tested the models by playing a recording of a single word to the patients, and predicting from the brain activity what word they had heard was.
One of the models was able to produce a close approximation of the word that scientists could guess what it was 90 percent of the time.
“This is exciting in terms of the basic science of how the brain decodes what we hear,” Knight, director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UCB, told The Guardian’s Ian Sample.
“The next step is to test whether we can decode a word when a person imagines it. That might sound spooky, but this could really help patients. Perhaps in 10 years it will be as common as grandmother getting a new hip,” Knight added.
Dr. Brian Pasley, the study´s lead author, compared the method to a pianist who could watch a piano being played in a soundproof room and “hear” the music just by watching the movement of the keys.
“This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use this for a prosthetic device, these principles would have to apply to someone who is imagining speech,” cautioned Pasley in a recent statement. “There is some evidence that perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device.”
Knight had his doubts that the method could actually work, but was impressed with the results. “His computational model can reproduce the sound the patient heard and you can actually recognize the word, although not at a perfect level,” knight said of Pasley.
The ultimate goal of the study was to explore how the human brain encodes speech and determine which aspects of speech are most important for understanding.
“At some point, the brain has to extract away all that auditory information and just map it onto a word, since we can understand speech and words regardless of how they sound,” said Pasley. “The big question is, what is the most meaningful unit of speech? A syllable, a phone, a phoneme? We can test these hypotheses using the data we get from these recordings.”
Being able to read minds is a controversial subject. Ethical concerns have arisen that such technology could be used covertly or to interrogate criminals and terrorists.
But Knight said that only exists in the realm of science fiction. “To reproduce what we did, you would have to open up someone´s skull and they would have to cooperate.” Making a device to help people speak will not be easy. Brain signals that encode imagined words could be harder to decipher and the device must be small and operate wirelessly. It would also prove difficult distinguishing between words a person wants to speak and thoughts they wish to keep secret.
Jan Schnupp, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, who thought the breakthrough was “remarkable,” said possible uses of the technology to use mind-reading devices to eavesdrop on the privacy of our minds is unjustified.
The scientists could only get their technique to work because of cooperation from patients who were willing to participate. You aren´t going to get willing parties in an interrogation setting, he noted.
“We can rest assured that our skulls will remain an impenetrable barrier for any would-be technological mind hacker for any foreseeable future,” Schnupp told Sample of The Guardian.
But the benefits of such devices could be transformative, said Mindy McCumber, a speech-language pathologist at Florida Hospital in Orlando.
“As a therapist, I can see potential implications for the restoration of communication for a wide range of disorders,” she told Jason Palmer of BBC News. “The development of direct neuro-control over virtual or physical devices would revolutionize ℠augmentative and alternative communication℠, and improve quality of life immensely for those who suffer from impaired communication skills or means.”
The report is accompanied by an interview with the authors for the PLoS Biology Podcast.
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Image 2: An X-ray CT scan of the head of one of the volunteers, showing electrodes distributed over the brain´s temporal lobe, where sounds are processed. Credit: Adeen Flinker, UC Berkeley
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On the Net:

• University of California, Berkeley
• University of California, San Francisco
• PLoS Biology
• PLoS Biology Podcast

According to a recent national survey by a leading medical research center, a doctor´s own weight may significantly influence how effectively he or she is able to care for and diagnose patients suffering from obesity.

The study was carried out by researchers at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Medical Institutions in Baltimore and published online this week in the medical journal Obesity.

They found that physicians with a high body mass index (BMI) were almost half as likely to discuss weight-management issues with overweight and obese patients than doctors with normal BMIs (18% versus 30%, respectively).

The study´s lead researcher Dr. Sara Bleich says they also found that doctors with normal BMIs felt more confident in their competency to provide weight-loss advice to patients than their overweight colleagues (53% versus 37%, respectively).

Because primary care doctors in particular can be highly influential in intervening and counseling patients struggling with their weight, the study´s authors believe that a physician´s BMI may be a critical factor in a patient´s obesity care.

Bleich´s team looked at a cross section of 500 general internists, general practitioners and family practice doctors, recruiting physicians from a pool of volunteers through the Epocrates Honors panel which has a membership of some 145,000 AMA-certified doctors.

Each participating physician was asked to fill out a questionnaire with questions relating to diagnosing obesity and weight-management strategies. They were also asked to score their own effectiveness in helping patients with weight loss, including initiating counseling and prescribing weight-loss medications.

The study also examined the doctors´ perspectives on the importance of modeling healthy behavior and whether they believed that a patient´s trust in the soundness of their doctor´s advice was connected with the doctor´s weight.

The results indicated that doctors with normal BMIs were more likely than their overweight counterparts to believe that physicians have a responsibility to serve as role models for their patients in terms of maintaining healthy weight (73% versus 57%, respectively).

A similar correlation was also observed regarding how the participants thought their patients perceive the relationship between their doctor´s weight and his competence in advising them. Some 79% of the normal-weight responders believed that patients were more likely to trust the advice of a non-overweight doctor compared with 69% of the overweight or obese doctors.

The largest discrepancy came in terms of how the MDs´ perception of their own weight affected their diagnoses and treatment recommendations for overweight patients. Of the surveyed doctors, 93% reported that they were more likely to diagnose a patient as obese if they perceived that patient´s body weight as being greater than their own compared to 7% who said they wouldn´t. Approximately the same ratio held true for whether or not they would start a conversation about weight loss with a patient they thought heavier than themselves.

While the study provides researchers with some initial orientation and insight into a largely unexplored field of weight-loss studies, the authors were quick to point out their study has a number of critical weaknesses and cannot yet be treated as medical gospel.

For one thing, the study was set-up to show possible correlation only and cannot be held up as an example of causal evidence that skinnier doctors are more effective in helping patients lose weight. Moreover, because a number of the questions relied not on the physicians´ actual BMI but rather on their self-image–the accuracy of which can vary greatly from one responder to the next–exact relationships cannot be objectively determined.

Nonetheless, the team stated, some general advice can still be gleaned from the survey.

“Physician self-efficacy to care for obese patients–regardless of their BMI–may be improved by targeting physician well being and enhancing the quality of obesity-related training in medical school, residency or continuing medical education,” their report concluded.

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On the Net:

• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Obesity

New research finds milk drinkers scored better on memory and brain function tests

Pouring at least one glass of milk each day could not only boost your intake of much-needed key nutrients, but it could also positively impact your brain and mental performance, according to a recent study in the International Dairy Journal. Researchers found that adults with higher intakes of milk and milk products scored significantly higher on memory and other brain function tests than those who drank little to no milk. Milk drinkers were five times less likely to “fail” the test, compared to non milk drinkers.

Researchers at the University of Maine put more than 900 men and women ages 23 to 98 through a series of brain tests — including visual-spatial, verbal and working memory tests — and tracked the milk consumption habits of the participants. In the series of eight different measures of mental performance, regardless of age and through all tests, those who drank at least one glass of milk each day had an advantage. The highest scores for all eight outcomes were observed for those with the highest intakes of milk and milk products compared to those with low and infrequent milk intakes. The benefits persisted even after controlling for other factors that can affect brain health, including cardiovascular health and other lifestyle and diet factors. In fact, milk drinkers tended to have healthier diets overall, but there was something about milk intake specifically that offered the brain health advantage, according to the researchers.

In addition to the many established health benefits of milk from bone health to cardiovascular health, the potential to stave off mental decline may represent a novel benefit with great potential to impact the aging population. While more research is needed, the scientists suggest some of milk’s nutrients may have a direct effect on brain function and that “easily implemented lifestyle changes that individuals can make present an opportunity to slow or prevent neuropsychological dysfunction.”

New and emerging brain health benefits are just one more reason to start each day with lowfat or fat free milk. Whether in a latte, in a smoothie, on your favorite cereal, or straight from the glass, milk at breakfast can be a key part of a healthy breakfast that help sets you up for a successful day. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend three glasses of lowfat or fat free milk daily for adults and each 8-ounce glass contains nine essential nutrients Americans need, including calcium and vitamin D.

References: Crichton GE, Elias MF, Dore GA, Robbins MA. Relation between dairy food intake and cognitive function: The Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study. International Dairy Journal. 2012; 22:15-23.

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On the Net:

• Weber Shandwick Worldwide
• National Milk Mustache “got milk?”® Campaign
• International Dairy Journal

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Elastic electronics offer less invasive, more convenient medical treatment
Imagine if there were electronics able to prevent epileptic seizures before they happen. Or electronics that could be placed on the surface of a beating heart to monitor its functions. The problem is that such devices are a tough fit. Body tissue is soft and pliable while conventional circuits can be hard and brittle–at least until now.
“We’re trying to bridge that gap, from silicon, wafer-based electronics to biological, ’tissue-like’ electronics, to really blur the distinction between electronics and the body,” says materials scientist John Rogers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he’s developing elastic electronics. The innovation builds upon years of collaboration between Rogers and Northwestern University engineer Yonggang Huang, who had earlier partnered with Rogers to develop flexible electronics for hemispherical camera sensors and other devices that conform to complex shapes.
This is circuitry with a real twist that’s able to monitor and deliver electrical impulses into living tissue. Elastic electronics are made of tiny, wavy silicon structures containing circuits that are thinner than a human hair, and bend and stretch with the body. “As the skin moves and deforms, the circuit can follow those deformations in a completely noninvasive way,” says Rogers. He hopes elastic electronics will open a door to a whole range of what he calls “bio-integrated” medical devices.
One example is what Rogers calls, an “electronic sock”–in this case, elastic electronics are wrapped around a model of a rabbit heart like a stocking. “It’s designed to accommodate the motion of the heart but at the same time keep active electronics into contact with the tissue,” explains Rogers.
Using animal models, Rogers has developed a version of the sock that can inject current into the heart tissue to detect and stop certain forms of arrhythmia.
Rogers also demonstrates prototypes of a catheter that can be inserted through the arteries and into the chambers of the heart to map electrical activity and provide similar types of therapies.
He believes that one day this technology will lead to devices like an implantable circuit that diagnoses and perhaps even treats seizures by injecting current into the brain.
The device might detect differences in brainwave activity that occur just before a seizure sets in, and could automatically counteract any electrical abnormalities. Prototypes of the circuits are being tested that can detect muscle movement, heart activity and brain waves just by being placed on the surface of the skin like temporary tattoos. The prototypes can detect the body’s electrical activity nearly as well as conventional, rigid electrode devices in use currently.
Rogers says their size could offer benefits in many important cases, such as monitoring the health and wellness of premature babies. “They are such tiny humans that this epidermal form of electronics could really be valuable in the monitoring of these babies in a manner that is completely noninvasive and mechanically ‘invisible’,” he points out.
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On the Net:

• NSF
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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