One of the largest individual studies of the effects of alcohol on the risk of breast cancer shows that it makes no difference whether a woman drinks wine, beer, or liquor. It is the alcohol itself (ethyl alcohol) and the quantity consumed that increases breast cancer risk. In fact, the increased breast cancer risk from drinking three or more alcoholic drinks a day is similar to the increased breast cancer risk from smoking a packet of cigarettes or more a day, according to researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. Researchers presented the findings at the European Cancer Conference in Barcelona.

 

Paying close attention to how a canary learns a new song has helped scientists open a new avenue of research against Huntington’s disease—a fatal disorder for which there is currently no cure or even a treatment to slow the disease. In a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center have shown how stem-cell therapy might someday be used to treat the disease. The team used gene therapy to guide the development of endogenous stem cells in the brains of mice affected by a form of Huntington’s. The mice that were treated lived significantly longer, were healthier, and had many more new, viable brain cells than their counterparts that did not receive the treatment. The researchers said that while it’s too early to predict whether such a treatment might work in people, it does offer a new approach in the fight against Huntington’s.

 

A University of Georgia researcher who has developed a means for producing large numbers of neural cells from a small number of embryonic stem cells is working in collaboration with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and hopes to use these neural cells to detect chemical threats. Using the cells in a device that looks like a small tool box, the researcher said they can detect changes in the cells’ electrical activity as a sign of exposure to toxins. Right now the device uses neural cells from mice, but they die fast and react differently to chemical exposures than human cells do. The researcher says human neural cells last up to six months. He sees these devices eventually being deployed to subway systems, airports, and the front lines of wars. They can detect a wide range of chemicals; however, at this time they can’t identify which ones they are.

 

In a study appearing in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, University of Queensland researchers report that decreased inhibitory ability in late adulthood may be caused by physiological changes in the brain. As people age, their brains slowly shrink in volume and weight. This includes significant atrophy within the frontal lobes, the seat of executive functioning. Executive functions include planning, controlling, and inhibiting thought and behavior. In the aging population, an inability to inhibit unwanted thoughts and behavior causes several social behaviors and cognitions to go awry. The changes can lead to unintended prejudice, social inappropriateness, depression, and gambling problems. While social changes commonly occur with age, they are widely assumed a function of changes in preferences and values as people get older. The researchers argue that there may be more to the story and that some of the changes may be unintended and brought about by losses in executive control.

 

Despite strong evidence that cardiac rehabilitation reduces disability and prolongs life, fewer than one in five people receive rehabilitation services after a heart attack or coronary bypass surgery, according to a Brandeis University study in the journal Circulation. The study found that despite Medicare coverage of cardiac rehabilitation sessions among Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and above, women participated less than men, older people less than younger, and non-whites significantly less than whites. The researchers said that further study is needed of potential approaches to increase use of this effective service. These include analyzing reimbursement rates for cardiac rehabilitation in relation to their costs, studying referral patterns in high use states, and seeing whether the utilization rate of rehabilitation services among Medicare patients should be made a quality indicator for cardiac care.

 

Researchers in Australia have shown that positron emission tomography, or PET, that uses a radioactive sugar molecule is more useful than mammography and ultrasound in predicting a breast tumor’s response to chemotherapy and, therefore, the patient’s ultimate likelihood of survival. In research presented at the European Cancer Conference in Barcelona, researchers from the Monash Breast Cancer Research Consortium, Monash Medical Centre, Melbourne, Australia reported that when the scanning procedure was used to measure the accumulation of radioactive glucose fluorodeoxyglucose in tumor tissue from patients with locally-advanced breast cancer before and after preoperative chemotherapy, women who had the highest accumulation at the beginning and who then had the highest percentage drop in accumulation after four cycles of chemotherapy were more likely to have a complete response to their treatment. However, measurements taken using mammography or ultrasound were not able to predict a pathological response accurately.

 

Determining the genetic profile of a particular lung tumor can help clinicians make the crucial decision about which chemotherapy treatment to try first. A new study led by researchers from the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy found distinct differences in the susceptibility different tumors have to widely used chemotherapy drugs. In a study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the researchers report that they were able to predict which tumors would be most likely to respond to standard first-line therapy and which would respond better to what has traditionally been a second-line therapy based on gene expression profiling. Standard therapy often includes administration of what is called platinum-based chemotherapy, which works by damaging DNA and interrupting the chain of cellular events that leads to cancer proliferation. Up to 80 percent of patients getting this treatment do not see their tumors shrink in response to therapy. Those patients may go on to receive what is known as second-line therapy: drugs such as pemetrexed or docetaxel, which work by interrupting the cellular machinery of tumor cells.

 

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: RADIOLOGISTS IDENTIFY EARLY BRAIN MARKER
Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging have found a new marker which may aid in early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published in the journal Radiology. The findings of the study implicate a potential functional, rather than structural, brain marker—separate from atrophy—that may help enhance diagnosis and treatment monitoring of Alzheimer’s patients, researchers at Duke University Medical Center said. While some areas of the brain activate when a person tries to remember something, other areas deactivate. Results from this study showed that along the spectrum from healthy people at low risk, to people with mild memory problems, to patients with Alzheimer’s disease, there was increasingly impaired activation in the MTL, an area of the brain associated with episodic memory that normally turns on during a memory task. More surprising, however, was increasingly impaired deactivation in the posteromedial cortices, an area recently implicated with personal memory that normally suppresses its activity during a memory task. The magnitude of deactivation in the PMC was closely related to the level of memory impairment in the patients and significantly correlated with their neuropsychological testing scores.

 

Cancer cells circulating in the blood, or circulating tumor cells (CTCs), are known to be associated with a bad prognosis in women with metastatic breast cancer. Now, for the first time, a group of scientists have shown that they can also detect CTCs before and after chemotherapy treatment and hence may be able to identify those patients likely to have a recurrence of their cancer after such treatment in future. Researchers at the University of Munich in Germany, told a press conference at the European Cancer Conference that the results could help improve the design of trials of chemotherapy for breast cancer, as well as reducing costs to health services. The advantage of screening for CTCs is that, unlike other predictive factors, including genetic signatures, it can be carried out after the completion of primary therapy, and, if needed, on other occasions during the duration of disease. Other predictive methods can be used only on diagnosis, and only once, say the scientists

 

An under-used colon cancer screening test now available in the United States effectively detects colorectal cancer and may help to improve colon cancer screening rates, according to researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California. The study, which appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found the improved fecal occult blood tests called the Fecal Immunochemical Tests is more effective at detecting cancers and polyps than the more widely used stool screening tests known as the guaiac tests because it is able to find human blood. The guaiac test detects peroxidase activity found in both human and non-human blood, as well as in many vegetables. This can lead to more false positives. 

 

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found nearly 350 genes related to female fertility. Their research may open the door to much wider study in the poorly understood field of infertility. These discoveries, based on studies in mice, might lead the way to eventually allowing clinicians to test whether an infertile woman has problems with a specific gene, allowing for improved diagnostic tests and tailored therapy in the future, the researchers said. About 13 percent of women suffer from infertility, with the most common cause being dysfunction of the ovary.

 

Specific variations in two genes are linked to suicidal thinking that sometimes occurs in people taking the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressants, according to a large study led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health. Depending on the particular mix inherited, these versions increased the likelihood of such thoughts from two- to15-fold, the study found. About 1 percent of adult patients were deemed to be at high genetic risk, 41 percent at elevated risk, and 58 percent at lower risk. If confirmed, the findings may hold promise for genetic testing, as more such markers are identified. Risk increased proportionately if a participant had two, as opposed to just one, of the suspect versions. Both genes code for components of the brain’s glutamate chemical messenger system, which recent studies suggest is involved in the antidepressant response.

 

Researchers from the University of Warwick and University College London have found that lack of sleep can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. However, they have also found that a point comes when too much sleep can also more than double the risk of death. In research presented to the British Sleep Society, the researchers reported that those who had cut their sleeping from seven hours to five hours or less faced a 1.7-fold increased risk in mortality from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem in particular. Fewer hours sleep and greater levels of sleep disturbance have become widespread in industrialized societies. This change, largely the result of sleep curtailment to create more time for leisure and shift-work, has meant that reports of fatigue, tiredness, and excessive daytime sleepiness are more common than a few decades ago. Individuals who showed an increase in sleep duration to eight hours or more a night were more than twice as likely to die as those who had not changed their habit, however, predominantly from non-cardiovascular diseases. The researchers said consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health.

 

Research in the last few years has raised the possibility that Alzheimer’s-related memory loss could be due to a novel third form of diabetes. Now scientists at Northwestern University have discovered why brain insulin signaling—crucial for memory formation—would stop working in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. They have shown that a toxic protein found in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s removes insulin receptors from nerve cells, rendering those neurons insulin-resistant. With other research showing that levels of brain insulin and its related receptors are lower in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, the Northwestern study sheds light on the emerging idea of Alzheimer’s being a “type 3” diabetes. The findings, published online by the FASEB Journal, could help researchers determine which aspects of existing drugs now used to treat diabetic patients may protect neurons from ADDLs, a protein that attacks memory-forming synapses, and improve insulin signaling in individuals with Alzheimer’s. 

 

A University of Utah-led study found that legalizing physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands did not result in a disproportionate number of deaths among the elderly, poor, women, minorities, uninsured, minors, chronically ill, less educated, or psychiatric patients. Of ten so-called “vulnerable groups” examined in the study, only AIDS patients used doctor-assisted suicide at elevated rates. Fears about the impact on vulnerable people have dominated debate about physician-assisted suicide, but the researchers, in a study published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, said they found no evidence to support those fears where this practice already is legal.

FDA: REPORT SAYS AGENCY DOES LITTLE TO PROTECT SAFTEY OF PATIENTS IN CLINICAL TRIALS
A report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, scheduled for release Sept. 28, said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does little to protect the safety of patients in clinical trials, the New York Times reported. The report found federal health officials did not know how many clinical trials were being conducted and audited fewer than 1 percent of the testing sites. The inspector general found when inspectors did go to clinical trial sites, they generally showed up long after the tests had been completed. The FDA has 200 inspectors, some of whom audit clinical trials part time, to police an estimated 350,000 testing sites. When inspectors found serious problems in trials, top drug officials in Washington downgraded their findings 68 percent of the time, the report said.

President George W. Bush signed legislation that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration new powers to police drugs with dangerous side effects after they have been approved, Reuters reported. The legislation comes as a response to concerns over the safety of widely used drugs such as Merck’s pain medication Vioxx. The agency can now require drugmakers to include warnings on drugs, order post-approval safety studies and fine companies up to $10 million for not complying. The legislation also renewed the agency’s ability to collect user fees from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Those fees were set to expire at the end of the month.