Slow walking speed, memory complaints can predict dementia

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A study involving nearly 27,000 older adults on five continents found that nearly 1 in 10 met criteria for pre-dementia based on a simple test that measures how fast people walk and whether they have cognitive complaints. People who tested positive for pre-dementia were twice as likely as others to develop dementia within 12 years. The study, led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, was published online on July 16, 2014 in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.The new test diagnoses motoric cognitive risk syndrome (MCR). Testing for the newly described syndrome relies on measuring gait speed (our manner of walking) and asking a few simple questions about a patient’s cognitive abilities, both of which take just seconds. The test is not reliant on the latest medical technology and can be done in a clinical setting, diagnosing people in the early stages of the dementia process. Early diagnosis is critical because it allows time to identify and possibly treat the underlying causes of the disease, which may delay or even prevent the onset of dementia in some cases.”In many clinical and community settings, people don’t have access to the sophisticated tests — biomarker assays, cognitive tests or neuroimaging studies — used to diagnose people at risk for developing dementia,” said Joe Verghese, M.B.B.S., professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of medicine at Einstein, chief of geriatrics at Einstein and Montefiore, and senior author of the Neurology paper. “Our assessment method could enable many more people to learn if they’re at risk for dementia, since it avoids the need for complex testing and doesn’t require that the test be administered by a neurologist. The potential payoff could be tremendous — not only for individuals and their families, but also in terms of healthcare savings for society. All that’s needed to assess MCR is a stopwatch and a few questions, so primary care physicians could easily incorporate it into examinations of their older patients.”The U.S. …


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#Academy, #Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #American, #Cancer, #Faculty, #Mcr, #Medicine, #Neurology, #Professor, #Science

University of Pennsylvania"s Mesothelioma Program Receives $8 Million Grant from NCI

The National Cancer Institute awarded an $8 million grant to the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine to study the effects of photodynamic light therapy (PDT) in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma. The grant will fund a clinical trial and additional studies looking at the effects of PDT on the patient’s immune response, the mesothelioma tumor cell , and the blood vessels surrounding the tumor.Dr. Eli Glatstein is the principal investigator of the program. He is also the professor and vice chair of Radiation Oncology, and member of Penn’s Mesothelioma and Pleural Program. According to Dr. Glatstein, “This trial represents a major step in understanding the combination of treatment modalities that will offer patients the best hope for survival and extended remission.”The study expects to …


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Effect of Health Store In The Life Of A Man

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Staying healthy is the first and foremost thing in everyone’s life. Being healthy essentially means having good physical, mental and spiritual health. There are various factors which directly or indirectly enable us to be healthy. Having a proper, nutritious diet is the first thing. It should be ...

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#Health-Care-Tips, #Life-Style, #Medicine

Greece"s deepening health crisis a result of continued healthcare budget cuts, says study

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Greece’s health crisis is worsening as a result of continued healthcare budget cuts, says a new study published in the medical journal, The Lancet. Researchers say the harmful effects of austerity are linked to the increasing inability of patients to access the health system, large rises in the incidence of infectious disease, and a deterioration in the overall mental health of Greek people.The authors from the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine find that Greece has had the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe, as the bailout package capped public expenditure at 6% of GDP. For example, from 2009 to 2011, the public hospital budget was reduced by over 25%. Greece’s public spending on health is now less than any of the other pre-2004 European Union members.Lead author of the study, Alexander Kentikelenis of Cambridge University, said: ‘The data reveals that the Greek welfare state has failed to protect people at the time they needed support the most. A rapidly growing number of Greeks are losing access to healthcare from budget cuts and unemployment.’Senior author Dr David Stuckler from the University of Oxford said: ‘The Greek government -along with their European partners — appears to have been in denial about austerity’s severe impact on health. The cost of austerity is being borne mainly by ordinary Greek citizens, who have been affected by the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe in modern times. We hope this research will help the Greek government mount an urgently needed response to these escalating human crises.’At a time of increasing health need and falling incomes, Greece’s bailout agreement stipulated shifting the cost of healthcare to patients. The Greek government introduced new charges for visits to outpatient clinics and higher costs for medicines. General health services were also eroded, says the paper. The authors’ analysis of the latest available data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions revealed a 47% rise in people who felt they did not receive medically necessary healthcare. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Health, #Iceland, #Income, #London, #Medicine, #Science, #State, #Story, #University

Could PTSD involve immune cell response to stress? Study in mice raises question

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Chronic stress that produces inflammation and anxiety in mice appears to prime their immune systems for a prolonged fight, causing the animals to have an excessive reaction to a single acute stressor weeks later, new research suggests.After the mice recovered from the effects of chronic stress, a single stressful event 24 days later quickly returned them to a chronically stressed state in biological and behavioral terms. Mice that had not experienced the chronic stress were unaffected by the single acute stressor.The study further showed that immune cells called to action as a result of chronic stress ended up on standby in the animals’ spleens and were launched from that organ to respond to the later stressor.Mice without spleens did not experience the same reactivation with the second stressor, signifying the spleen’s role as a reservoir for primed immune cells to remain until they’re activated in response to another stressor.The excessive immune response and anxiety initiated by a brief stressor mimic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.The Ohio State University scientists are cautious about extending their findings to humans. But they say their decade of work with this model of stress suggests that the immune system has a significant role in affecting behavior. And they are the first to study this re-establishment of anxiety in animals with a later acute stressor.“No one else has done a study of this length to see what happens to recovered animals if we subject them again to stress,” said Jonathan Godbout, a lead author of the study and associate professor of neuroscience at Ohio State. “That retriggering is a component of post-traumatic stress. The previously stressed mice are living a normal rodent life, and then this acute stress brings everything back. Animals that have never been exposed to stress before were unaffected by that one event – it didn’t change behavioral or physiological properties.”The research is published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry.These scientists previously determined that in mice with chronic stress, cells from the immune system were recruited to the brain and promoted symptoms of anxiety. The findings identified a subset of immune cells, called monocytes, that could be targeted by drugs for treatment of mood disorders – including, potentially, the recurrent anxiety initiated by stress that is a characteristic of PTSD.The research reveals new ways of thinking about the cellular mechanisms behind the effects of stress, identifying two-way communication from the central nervous system to the periphery – the rest of the body – and back to the central nervous system that ultimately influences behavior.“We haven’t proffered that there is a cellular component to PTSD, but there very well might be. And it’s very possible that it sits in the periphery as we’ve been describing in the mouse,” said John Sheridan, senior author of the study, professor of oral biology and associate director of Ohio State’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research.In this model of stress, male mice living together are given time to establish a hierarchy, and then an aggressive male is added to the group for two hours at a time. The resident mice are repeatedly defeated, and this social defeat over six days leads to an inflammatory immune response and anxiety-like behavior.This kind of stress triggers the sympathetic nervous system and a commonly known fight-or-flight response. …


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #Cancer, #Health, #Medicine, #Psychiatry, #Research, #Social, #State, #Work

Whole genome analysis speeds up: 240 full genomes in 50 hours

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Although the time and cost of sequencing an entire human genome has plummeted, analyzing the resulting three billion base pairs of genetic information from a single genome can take many months.In the journal Bioinformatics, however, a University of Chicago-based team — working with Beagle, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers devoted to life sciences — reports that genome analysis can be radically accelerated. This computer, based at Argonne National Laboratory, is able to analyze 240 full genomes in about two days.”This is a resource that can change patient management and, over time, add depth to our understanding of the genetic causes of risk and disease,” said study author Elizabeth McNally, MD, PhD, the A. J. Carlson Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics and director of the Cardiovascular Genetics Clinic at the University of Chicago Medicine.”The supercomputer can process many genomes simultaneously rather than one at a time,” said first author Megan Puckelwartz, a graduate student in McNally’s laboratory. “It converts whole genome sequencing, which has primarily been used as a research tool, into something that is immediately valuable for patient care.”Because the genome is so vast, those involved in clinical genetics have turned to exome sequencing, which focuses on the two percent or less of the genome that codes for proteins. This approach is often useful. An estimated 85 percent of disease-causing mutations are located in coding regions. But the rest, about 15 percent of clinically significant mutations, come from non-coding regions, once referred to as “junk DNA” but now known to serve important functions. If not for the tremendous data-processing challenges of analysis, whole genome sequencing would be the method of choice.To test the system, McNally’s team used raw sequencing data from 61 human genomes and analyzed that data on Beagle. They used publicly available software packages and one quarter of the computer’s total capacity. …


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#Alzheimer, #Beagle, #Cancer, #Chicago, #Computing, #Gene, #Human, #Medicine, #Washington

The number of tumor cells spread to sentinel lymph nodes affects melanoma prognosis

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Cancer cell spread to the sentinel node — the lymph node to which cancer cells are most likely to spread from a primary tumor — is a risk factor for melanoma death. According to a study published in this week’s PLOS Medicine by Anja Ulmer, Christoph Klein and colleagues from the Universities of Tbingen and Regensburg, Germany, the prognosis of a patient largely depends on the number of disseminated cancer cells per million lymphocytes in the sentinel node. Even very low numbers were found to be predictive for reduced survival.The leading cause of death from skin disease is melanoma, which is the most dangerous type of skin cancer. When melanoma metastasizes and spreads to other parts of the body, treatment options become limited and the prognosis is poor. Melanoma staging (and prognosis) is currently focused on the primary tumor itself, with characteristics like tumor thickness, mitotic rate, and ulceration (break in the skin caused by the tumor) indicating the likelihood that the tumor has started to spread. Looking for tumor cells in the sentinel nodes is done for patients who are at increased risk for spread, but standard procedures for how to measure spread to the nodes and how to integrate this information with the tumor histology are needed. Since melanoma is one of the deadliest cancers, better predictors of prognosis for melanoma patients are needed for patient information and to determine treatment options.The researchers prospectively collected a large number of samples for this relatively rare cancer: 1,834 sentinel lymph nodes from 1,027 patients with melanoma who had been followed for 5 years after the samples were taken. They labelled disseminated cancer cells (DCCs) in the lymph nodes through the use of a marker for melanoma cells, counted them, and calculated DCC density. They then asked whether DCC density was related to a patient’s survival. They found that patients with high DCC density in the lymph nodes were more likely to die from melanoma within 5 years. …


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Body, #Christophklein, #Current, #Disease, #Health, #King, #Medicine, #Plos, #Standard, #Tbingen

Physician urges greater recognition of how "misfearing" influences women"s perceptions of heart health risks

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While more women die from heart disease each year than all forms of cancer combined, many are more fearful of other diseases, particularly breast cancer. This phenomenon, referred to as “misfearing,” describes the human tendency to fear instinctively and according to societal influences rather than based on facts. This trend may be a contributor to the reasons why many women fail to take enough steps — such as changing diet and fitness habits or risk-taking behaviors — to guard against heart disease.In a Perspective column today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Penn Medicine cardiologist and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, notes that although the first decade of educational campaigns to inform women about heart disease “led to a near doubling of women’s knowledge about heart disease, in the past few years, such efforts have failed to reap further gains.” Moreover, “persistent gaps in perceptions remain among minority women, who are often at greatest risk.”Simply reinforcing the facts about the prevalence and potential prevention of heart disease among women is likely not enough to improve on these results, says Rosenbaum. Instead, physicians and others in health care need to develop an understanding of the misfearing paradigm and how “social values” and “group identities” affect patients’ perceptions of disease.”The big, the dramatic, and the memorable occupy far more of our worry budget than the things that kill with far greater frequency: strokes, diabetes, heart disease,” she writes. “But interacting with many of these fear factors is another force we rarely associate with our individual health perceptions: our commitment to our cultural groups.”Women’s focus on breast cancer may be tied, according to Rosenbaum, to “intuitions about female identity” that shape their interpretation of health-related information and relevant behavior. Because breast cancer “attacks a body part that is so fundamental to female identity,” she asks if “to be a woman, one must join the war on this disease,” and consequently focus less on heart disease (which is often linked to such perceived anti-feminine contributing factors as cigarettes and obesity). Additionally, Rosenbaum asks, “Are we held up by our ideal of beauty? We can each summon the images of beautiful young women with breast cancer. Where are all the beautiful women with heart disease?”While acknowledging the very real threat of women’s cancers, Dr. Rosenbaum advocates physicians taking a different approach to conversations with female patients about cardiovascular health. …


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Cancer, #England, #King, #Medicine, #Pennsylvania, #University

London"s bicycle sharing scheme has had positive overall health effect

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London’s bicycle sharing scheme has had positive overall health effect, but benefits of cycling in central London are larger for men and older people. The authors say the potential benefits of cycling “may not currently apply to all groups in all settings.”Over 600 cities around the world have implemented bicycle sharing schemes, but there is very little published evidence on the health effects of such schemes.So researchers at the University of Cambridge, University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine set out to estimate the health impacts of London’s cycle hire scheme on its users.Using registration and usage data collected from April 2011 to March 2012, they modeled the medium term health impacts of the scheme on male and female users of different ages, by estimating changes in physical activity, road traffic injury rates, and exposure to air pollution.The authors used a composite term to describe the impact of ill health and death, known as DALYs, or disability adjusted life years.From April 2011 to March 2012, 578,607 unique cycle hire users made a total of 7.4 million cycle hire trips and thereby generated 2.1 million hours of use.This equates to 12% of the estimated 61.2 million cycle trips made by adults each year that started or ended in the cycle hire zone, and 10% of the estimated 20.8 million hours of cycling duration.Results suggest that the scheme appears to have had a positive overall health effect, with these benefits reflecting reductions in diseases affected by physical inactivity.There was no evidence that cycling on a bicycle sharing scheme was more dangerous than own bicycle cycling; indeed, if anything there was a trend in the opposite direction, further boosting the benefits of the scheme to date. However because the London Cycle Hire scheme hasn’t been operating long enough to get a very precise estimate of the true injury rates on the scheme, the researchers also repeated their analyses using background injury rates for cycling in the hire zone (i.e. injury rates for all cycling, not specifically for cycle hire cycling).When using these background injury rates, the researchers found that the ratio of benefits to harms of cycling in central London vary markedly by age and sex.At older ages (45-59 years), the benefits of cycling were much larger than the harms. But in the youngest age group (15-29 years), the medium term benefits and harms of cycling in central London were both comparatively small and potentially negative.When the researchers analyzed the results by sex, they found smaller benefits among women, largely reflecting higher background fatal injury rates for female cyclists in central London. The authors stress that these results by age and sex relate to cycling in general in central London, not specifically to cycling on the hire bikes.”Our findings indicate that benefits of cycling in central London could be substantially increased both by increasing the share of trips made by older users and by reducing the risks of injury,” say the authors.They point to the Netherlands, where a comprehensive and well maintained system of cycle tracks, physically protected from fast motor traffic, “have helped to make cycling widespread at all ages and reduce the risks of injury.”Providing similar quality infrastructure in London “might help realize the substantial potential health benefits that cycling could offer at population level,” they conclude.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Authors, #British, #Cambridge, #Cycle, #Hygiene, #Medical, #Medicine, #Scheme, #Science, #University

New blood cells fight brain inflammation

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Hyperactivity of our immune system can cause a state of chronic inflammation. If chronic, the inflammation will affect our body and result in disease. In the devastating disease multiple sclerosis, hyperactivity of immune cells called T-cells induce chronic inflammation and degeneration of the brain. Researchers at BRIC, the University of Copenhagen, have identified a new type of regulatory blood cells that can combat such hyperactive T-cells in blood from patients with multiple sclerosis. By stimulating the regulatory blood cells, the researchers significantly decreased the level of brain inflammation and disease in a biological model. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.Molecule activate anti-inflammatory blood cellsThe new blood cells belong to the group of our white blood cells called lymphocytes. The cells express a molecule called FoxA1 that the researchers found is responsible for the cells’ development and suppressive functions.”We knew that some unidentified blood cells were able to inhibit multiple sclerosis-like disease in mice and through gene analysis we found out, that these cells are a subset of our lymphocytes expressing the gene FoxA1. Importantly, when inserting FoxA1 into normal lymphocytes with gene therapy, we could change them to actively regulate inflammation and inhibit multiple sclerosis, explains associated professor Yawei Liu leading the experimental studies.Activating own blood cells for treatment of diseaseFoxA1 expressing lymphocytes were not known until now, and this is the first documentation of their importance in controlling multiple sclerosis. The number of people living with this devastating disease around the world has increased by 10 percent in the past five years to 2.3 million. It affects women twice more than men and no curing treatment exists. …


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#Alzheimer, #Blood, #Brain, #Health, #Inflammation, #Major, #Medicine, #People, #Pregnancy, #Researchers, #White

Growing number of chemicals linked with brain disorders in children

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Toxic chemicals may be triggering the recent increases in neurodevelopmental disabilities among children — such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and dyslexia — according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The researchers say a new global prevention strategy to control the use of these substances is urgently needed.The report will be published online February 15, 2014 in Lancet Neurology.”The greatest concern is the large numbers of children who are affected by toxic damage to brain development in the absence of a formal diagnosis. They suffer reduced attention span, delayed development, and poor school performance. Industrial chemicals are now emerging as likely causes,” said Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at HSPH.The report follows up on a similar review conducted by the authors in 2006 that identified five industrial chemicals as “developmental neurotoxicants,” or chemicals that can cause brain deficits. The new study offers updated findings about those chemicals and adds information on six newly recognized ones, including manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos and DDT (pesticides), tetrachloroethylene (a solvent), and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (flame retardants).The study outlines possible links between these newly recognized neurotoxicants and negative health effects on children, including:Manganese is associated with diminished intellectual function and impaired motor skills Solvents are linked to hyperactivity and aggressive behavior Certain types of pesticides may cause cognitive delays Grandjean and co-author Philip Landrigan, Dean for Global Health at Mount Sinai, also forecast that many more chemicals than the known dozen or so identified as neurotoxicants contribute to a “silent pandemic” of neurobehavioral deficits that is eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviors, and damaging societies. But controlling this pandemic is difficult because of a scarcity of data to guide prevention and the huge amount of proof needed for government regulation. “Very few chemicals have been regulated as a result of developmental neurotoxicity,” they write.The authors say it’s crucial to control the use of these chemicals to protect children’s brain development worldwide. They propose mandatory testing of industrial chemicals and the formation of a new international clearinghouse to evaluate industrial chemicals for potential developmental neurotoxicity.”The problem is international in scope, and the solution must therefore also be international,” said Grandjean. “We have the methods in place to test industrial chemicals for harmful effects on children’s brain development — now is the time to make that testing mandatory.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Harvard School of Public Health. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Cancer, #Children, #Disorder, #Harvard, #Harvardschool, #Health, #Medicine, #Mountsinai, #Public, #School

Child Obesity: Using Attention modification program to decrease overeating in obese children

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Among the multiple factors that can cause obesity is an abnormal neurocognitive or behavioral response to food cues. The brain becomes wired to seek — and expect — greater rewards from food, which leads to unhealthful overeating.Attention modification programs, which train a person to ignore or disregard specific, problematic cues or triggers, have been used effectively to treat cases of anxiety and substance abuse. In a novel study published this week in the journal Appetite, Kerri Boutelle, PhD, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and colleagues report using a single session of attention modification to decrease overeating in obese children.”Attentional bias is a long-studied psychological phenomenon,” said Boutelle. “Attentional bias to food means that food grabs a person’s attention. If two people were in a room with potato chips on the table, the person with attentional bias would be paying attention to, maybe looking at, the chips and the person without the bias would not really notice or pay attention to them.”We believe that there is a group of people who are inherently sensitive to food cues and, over time, eating in response to paying attention to food makes them pay even more attention. It’s based on Pavlovian conditioning.”Obesity in the United States is a well-documented problem, with more than a third of American adults considered to be obese. Child obesity is equally alarming, with an estimated one-third of American children (4 to 5 million individuals) overweight or obese. These children are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer, orthopedic and endocrine conditions and more likely to die earlier.Boutelle and colleagues investigated whether attention modification training might be another way to treat problematic eating and obesity in children. In a novel pilot study, they recruited 24 overweight and obese children between the ages of 8 and 12 and split them into two groups.One group underwent an attention modification program (AMP) in which they watched pairs of words quickly flash upon a computer screen. One was a food word, such as “cake;” the other was a non-food word, such as “desk.” After the words had flashed and disappeared, a letter appeared on-screen in the place of either the food word or the non-food word. …


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#Amp, #Attentional, #Boutelle, #Cancer, #Food, #Journal, #Medicine, #People, #Pregnancy, #Science, #Story

Cancer Researchers Discover Pre-Leukemic Stem Cell at Root of AML, Relapse

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Cancer researchers led by stem cell scientist Dr. John Dick have discovered a pre-leukemic stem cell that may be the first step in initiating disease and also the culprit that evades therapy and triggers relapse in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML).The research, published online today in Nature is a significant leap in understanding the steps that a normal cell has to go through as it turns into AML, says Dr. Dick, and sets the stage to advance personalized cancer medicine by potentially identifying individuals who might benefit from targeting the pre-leukemic stem cell. AML is an aggressive blood cancer that the new research shows starts in stem cells in the bone marrow. Dr. Dick, a Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network (UHN), and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, pioneered the cancer stem cell field by first identifying leukemia stem cells (1994) and colon cancer stem cells (2007).”Our discovery lays the groundwork to detect and target the pre-leukemic stem cell and thereby potentially stop the disease at a very early stage when it may be more amenable to treatment,” says Dr. Dick, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Biology and is also Director of the Cancer Stem Cell Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR).”Now we have a potential tool for earlier diagnosis that may allow early intervention before the development of full AML. We can also monitor remission and initiate therapy to target the pre-leukemic stem cell to prevent relapse,” he says.The findings show that in about 25% of AML patients, a mutation in the gene DNMT3a causes pre-leukemic stem cells to develop that function like normal blood stem cells but grow abnormally. These cells survive chemotherapy and can be found in the bone marrow at remission, forming a reservoir of cells that may eventually acquire additional mutations, leading to relapse.The discovery of pre-leukemic stem cells came out of a large Leukemia Disease Team that Dr. Dick assembled and included oncologists who collected samples for the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre Biobank and genome scientists at the OICR who developed sophisticated targeted sequencing methodology. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Aml, #Canada, #Cancer, #Medicine, #Oicr, #Ontario, #Pregnancy, #Princess

Nanoparticles treat muscular dystrophy in mice

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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have demonstrated a new approach to treating muscular dystrophy. Mice with a form of this muscle-weakening disease showed improved strength and heart function when treated with nanoparticles loaded with rapamycin, an immunosuppressive drug recently found to improve recycling of cellular waste.The study appears online in The FASEB Journal.The investigators, including first author Kristin P. Bibee, MD, PhD, looked at a mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the most severe inherited form of the disease. Duchenne exclusively affects boys who have to rely on wheelchairs by age 12 and die from heart or respiratory failure in their 20s.The faulty gene that causes the disease prevents the body from producing dystrophin, a protein crucial for maintaining muscle cell integrity and function. The new study demonstrated that mice with muscular dystrophy, in addition to missing dystrophin, also can’t recycle cellular waste, a process known as autophagy, or self-eating.”Autophagy plays a major role in disposing of cellular debris,” said senior author Samuel A. Wickline, MD, the James R. Hornsby Family Professor of Medicine. “If it doesn’t happen, you might say the cell chokes on its own refuse. In muscular dystrophy, defective autophagy is not necessarily a primary source of muscle weakness, but it clearly becomes a problem over time. …


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#Agriculture, #Cancer, #Hospital, #Journal, #Louis, #Medicine, #Nanoparticles, #Recycling, #Study, #Weihl

Special glasses help surgeons "see" cancer​​​​​​​​

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High-tech glasses developed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may help surgeons visualize cancer cells, which glow blue when viewed through the eyewear.The wearable technology, so new it’s yet unnamed, was used during surgery for the first time today at Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.Cancer cells are notoriously difficult to see, even under high-powered magnification. The glasses are designed to make it easier for surgeons to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells, helping to ensure that no stray tumor cells are left behind during surgery.”We’re in the early stages of this technology, and more development and testing will be done, but we’re certainly encouraged by the potential benefits to patients,” said breast surgeon Julie Margenthaler, MD, an associate professor of surgery at Washington University, who performed today’s operation. “Imagine what it would mean if these glasses eliminated the need for follow-up surgery and the associated pain, inconvenience and anxiety.”Current standard of care requires surgeons to remove the tumor and some neighboring tissue that may or may not include cancer cells. The samples are sent to a pathology lab and viewed under a microscope. If cancer cells are found in neighboring tissue, a second surgery often is recommended to remove additional tissue that also is checked for the presence of cancer.The glasses could reduce the need for additional surgical procedures and subsequent stress on patients, as well as time and expense.Margenthaler said about 20 to 25 percent of breast cancer patients who have lumps removed require a second surgery because current technology doesn’t adequately show the extent of the disease during the first operation.”Our hope is that this new technology will reduce or ideally eliminate the need for a second surgery,” she said.The technology, developed by a team led by Samuel Achilefu, PhD, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at Washington University, incorporates custom video technology, a head-mounted display and a targeted molecular agent that attaches to cancer cells, making them glow when viewed with the glasses.In a study published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics, researchers noted that tumors as small as 1 mm in diameter (the thickness of about 10 sheets of paper) could be detected.Ryan Fields, MD, a Washington University assistant professor of surgery and Siteman surgeon, plans to wear the glasses later this month when he operates to remove a melanoma from a patient. He said he welcomes the new technology, which theoretically could be used to visualize any type of cancer.”A limitation of surgery is that it’s not always clear to the naked eye the distinction between normal tissue and cancerous tissue,” Fields said. “With the glasses developed by Dr. Achilefu, we can better identify the tissue that must be removed.”In pilot studies conducted on lab mice, the researchers utilized indocyanine green, a commonly used contrast agent approved by the Food and Drug Administration. …


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#Cancer, #Health, #Jewish, #Medicine, #National, #Time, #University, #Wearable