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To understand where fat comes from, you have to start with a skinny mouse. By using such a creature, and observing the growth of fat after injections of different kinds of immature cells, scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rockefeller University have discovered an important fat precursor cell that may in time explain how changes in the numbers of fat cells might increase and lead to obesity. The finding could also have implications for understanding how fat cells affect conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. "The identification of white adipocyte progenitor cells provides a means for identifying...

Employees who take long spells of sick leave more than once in three years are at a higher risk of death than their colleagues who take no such absence, particularly if their absence is due to circulatory or psychiatric problems or for surgery, concludes a study on bmj.com today. Previous research shows that medically certified sickness absences may well capture the full range of illnesses employees experience and that they could be a good global measure of health differentials between employees. It has been suggested that the specific reasons for absence such as psychiatric problems or heart disease may improve...

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), on Tuesday linked the current economic downturn with problems in the U.S. health care system, the AP/Kansas City Star reports. Elizabeth Edwards, who has incurable cancer, has made several recent public appearances in support of efforts to expand health insurance to all residents. During a conference call on Tuesday, she said that problems with payments of medical bills often lead to home foreclosures, a major factor in the current economic downturn. Elizabeth Edwards also said that residents without health insurance often are less productive because...

What's an aneurysm? What happens is a blood vessel becomes like a bulge, and that's due to a weakening of the wall of the blood vessel itself. The ones that we're most concerned about are occurring in the arteries. They can occur in arteries that feed the brain and they can occur in arteries in the body, as well. [In the case of brain aneurysms] the concern is that eventually that bulge will burst. And when it does burst, it leads to bleeding in one of the spaces of the brain called the subarachnoid space—the area [under the skull] that...

Quick test: Which presidential candidate offers the most radical new approach for health care coverage in the United States? If you listen to the spin-meisters denouncing universal health care as “socialized medicine,” you’d answer Democrat Barack Obama. But by far, the most radical plan belongs to John McCain. The Republican candidate would essentially destroy the foundation on which the current health insurance system is based and replace it with a dubious plan to let the marketplace work its magic. “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade with banking,...

"Canadian officials want to know why a wheelchair-bound man waited for 34 hours in a Winnipeg hospital's emergency waiting room before dying from a bladder infection..."

HONEY, used for generations to soothe sore throats, could soon be substituted for antibiotics in fighting stubborn ear, nose and throat infections, according to a new study. Ottawa University doctors found in tests that ordinary honey kills bacteria that cause sinus infections, and does it better in most cases than antibiotics. The researchers have so far tested manuka honey from New Zealand, and sidr honey from Yemen. "It's astonishing," researcher Joseph Marson said of bees' unexplained ability to combine the nectar of flowers into a seemingly potent medicine. The preliminary tests were conducted in laboratory dishes, not in live patients,...

Remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have eased the impact of the U.S. financial crisis on the Philippine economy, local media reported on Sunday. Diwa Guinigundo, deputy governor of the Philippine central bank, said the OFWs' foreign-exchange remittances have buttressed the local economy even as the global financial markets reeled from the effects of the U.S. subprime crisis, the Philippine Star reported. The U.S. downturn has left giant institutions shuddering, including investment banks Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, and insurance giant American International Group. "OFWs are now saving and investing their hard-earned money which helps generate economic activity," Guinigundo said....

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The White House Writers Group and West Wing Writers have come together from opposite sides of the political spectrum to host a bipartisan forum, America's Health Care At Risk: Finding Cure, on Sept. 17 and 18 at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Hotel in Florida. Across the nation there is significant agreement that the health care system needs to be fixed and the next president -- no matter who takes office -- will have to approach Members of Congress and find champions on both sides of the aisle to enact change. With the upcoming...

<p>In yet another revealing moment for nationalized health care, a highly respected British ethicist said that dementia sufferers should get euthanized in order to preserve resources for healthier people. Baroness Warnock, described as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”, said that the government should license people to be “put down”</p>

The principal rationale for the $3 billion spent to decode the human genome was that it would enable the discovery of the variant genes that predispose people to common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. A major expectation was that these variants had not been eliminated by natural selection because they harm people only later in life after their reproductive years are over, and hence that they would be common. This idea, called the common disease/common variant hypothesis, drove major developments in biology over the last five years. Washington financed the HapMap, a catalog of common genetic variation in the human...

A new government study published Monday has found that the medicines most often prescribed for schizophrenia in children and adolescents are no more effective than older, less expensive drugs and are more likely to cause some harmful side effects. The standards for treating the disorder should be changed to include some older medications that have fallen out of use, the study’s authors said. The results, being published online by The American Journal of Psychiatry, are likely to alter treatment for an estimated one million children and teenagers with schizophrenia and to intensify a broader controversy in child psychiatry over the...

When Claire, a pixie-faced 6-year-old in a school uniform, heard her older brother, James, enter the family’s Manhattan apartment, she shut her bedroom door and began barricading it so swiftly and methodically that at first I didn’t understand what she was doing. She slid a basket of toys in front of the closed door, then added a wagon and a stroller laden with dolls. She hugged a small stuffed Pegasus to her chest. “Pega always protects me,” she said softly. “Pega, guard the door.” James, then 10, had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder two years earlier. He was...

A new type of drug could alleviate pain in a similar way to cannabis without affecting the brain, according to a new study published in the journal Pain on Monday 15 September. The research demonstrates for the first time that cannabinoid receptors called CB2, which can be activated by cannabis use, are present in human sensory nerves in the peripheral nervous system, but are not present in a normal human brain. Drugs which activate the CB2 receptors are able to block pain by stopping pain signals being transmitted in human sensory nerves, according to the study, led by researchers from...

Really? THE FACTS Aloe vera has been a common skin-care remedy since the Greek physician Dioscorides advocated using it for burns in the first century A.D. But only in recent years have scientists conducted research to determine whether it lives up to its reputation. Some have found that aloe contains certain anti-inflammatory compounds and may act as an antibacterial agent. But studies on its effects on minor and moderate burns have been mixed. In 2007, for example, a study in the journal Burns analyzed data from four controlled clinical trials involving a total of 371 patients, some were treated with...

With a nearly paralyzed right side, Chloe Levine was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 1. A year later, she can say her nickname and is walking normally and jumping on beds. With one simple word from the back seat of a car cruising between North Carolina and New York, 2-year-old Chloe Levine signaled a great leap forward. "Coco," the Colorado toddler said, uttering her nickname for the first time. Those two syllables marked a milestone in stem-cell therapy, helping prove that infusing a baby with its own stem cells can repair a brain ravaged by cerebral palsy. Before a one-time...

Ten years ago, a clinical research paper triggered widespread and persistent fears that a combined vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella — the so-called MMR vaccine — causes autism in young children. That theory has been soundly refuted by a variety of other research over the years, and now a new study that tried to replicate the original study has provided further evidence that it was a false alarm. The initial paper, published in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, drew an inferential link between the vaccine, the gastrointestinal problems found in many autistic children and autism. In...

HHMI investigators have detected a multitude of broken, missing, and overactive genes in pancreatic and brain tumors, in the most detailed genetic survey yet of any human tumor. Some of these genetic changes were previously unknown and could provide new leads for improved diagnosis and therapy for these devastating cancers. The discoveries, described in two reports published September 4, 2008, in Science Express, which provides early electronic publication of selected Science papers, emerged from the sequencing of nearly all the known protein-making genes in pancreatic cancers and in the most common form of brain tumors, glioblastomas. The study adds numerous...

Reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MDAre there really certain foods that can help you lose weight and keep it off? We're not talking about any so-called miracle food that "melts the fat" (does the cabbage soup diet ring any bells?). These are foods that really can help you lose or maintain weight, either by helping you to eat less or to burn more calories -- or, in some cases, maybe even helping to decrease your body fat.Experts say there are two basic categories of foods that can be considered "keeping it off superfoods" because they fill your tummy without piling on...

Genes alone don’t make the man — after all, humans and chimps share roughly 98 percent of their DNA. But where, when and how much genes are turned on may be essential in setting people apart from other primates. A stretch of human DNA inserted into mice embryos revs the activity of genes in the developing thumb, toe, forelimb and hind limb. But the chimp and rhesus macaque version of this same stretch of DNA spurs only faint activity in the developing limbs, reports a new study in the Sept. 5 Science. The research supports the notion that changes in...

British citizens suffering from lung cancer are half as likely to survive for five years compared with Americans diagnosed with the disease. The American survival rate for leukemia is almost 50% while the European rate is significantly lower, just 35%. Esophageal carcinoma is often deadly, but compared with their European counterparts, American patients are more than twice as likely to survive the disease for five years...

20 Drugs the FDA Is Watching First New Quarterly Report IDs Drug Side Effects Under FDA Investigation By Daniel J. DeNoonWebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD Sept. 5, 2008 -- The FDA is "evaluating" new adverse-event reports for 20 drugs, the agency announced today.A 2007 federal law requires the FDA to disclose all its investigations into reports of possibly drug-related adverse events. Today's list is the first of this series of quarterly reports.The list includes adverse events reported between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2008. FDA officials say it will be "weeks or months" before more recent reports...

Observatory Marijuana may be something of a wonder drug — though perhaps not in the way you might think. Researchers in Italy and Britain have found that the main active ingredient in marijuana — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — and related compounds show promise as antibacterial agents, particularly against microbial strains that are already resistant to several classes of drugs. It has been known for decades that Cannabis sativa has antibacterial properties. Experiments in the 1950s tested various marijuana preparations against skin and other infections, but researchers at the time had little understanding of marijuana’s chemical makeup.

A common household substance may be the key to reducing the number of babies born each year with cerebral palsy, a study being published today has found. Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine found that infusing pregnant women at risk of premature birth with magnesium sulfate -- commonly known as Epsom salts -- just before they delivered cut their chances of having a baby with cerebral palsy in half. The study's authors say the findings could translate into immediate application by doctors in clinical settings, where about 3 of every 1,000 babies end up being diagnosed...

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the...

The Vatican newspaper has re-opened the debate over whether brain death — defined as the cessation of all brain functions — marks the definitive end of life, as opposed to the moment when the heart stops beating. In a front page article in L'Osservatore Romano, Lucetta Scaraffia, Professor of Modern History at a Rome university and a regular contributor to the newspaper and the Italian media, noted that the Vatican had adopted brain death as a criterion for declaring a person dead after the publication of a landmark report by Harvard Medical School 40 years ago. Professor Scaraffia said that...

Black women are less likely to get radiation, Houston study says The latest study showing a racial disparity in American breast cancer treatment found that black women are less likely than white women to receive radiation after surgery to remove the tumor, according to Houston scientists. University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researchers found that about three-quarters of whites and two-thirds of blacks who have a lumpectomy also get the follow-up treatment considered the standard of care for early stage breast cancer. "These findings underscore that this is a problem across the United States," said Dr. Grace Li Smith,...

New research further debunks any link between measles vaccine and autism, work that comes as the nation is experiencing a surge in measles cases fueled by children left unvaccinated. Years of research with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, better known as MMR, have concluded that it doesn't cause autism. Still, some parents' fears persist, in part because of one 1998 British study that linked the vaccine with a subgroup of autistic children who also have serious gastrointestinal problems. That study reported that measles virus was lingering in the children's bowels. Only now have researchers rigorously retested that finding, taking...

When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol-lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug. The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin. Aided by extensive consumer advertising, sales...

A seven-year-old girl with a rare illness is being kept alive by four doses of Viagra a day.Medics thought Natalie Archibald was suffering from over-excitement when she collapsed after opening her presents on Christmas Day two years ago. But she was later found to be suffering from the lung condition primary pulmonary hypertension and was referred to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Doctors prescribed Viagra, better known as a treatment for male impotence, and the drug has since transformed her life. Her mother Janis, from Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, said that she was surprised to learn the nature of the...

Doctors say Vytorin-cancer link can't be ruled out MUNICH, Germany - Results from three studies of the cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin are not enough to prove or rule out a possible link to a higher risk of cancer, so the drug should be used with great caution until more is known, editors of a leading medical journal urged Tuesday. The New England Journal of Medicine published results of the studies, which also were presented at a cardiology conference in Munich. Vytorin is a combination of Merck's Zocor, a long-sold statin drug, and Schering-Plough's Zetia, a newer type of medicine that lowers...

The influenza vaccine, which has been strongly recommended for people over 65 for more than four decades, is losing its reputation as an effective way to ward off the virus in the elderly. A growing number of immunologists and epidemiologists say the vaccine probably does not work very well for people over 70, the group that accounts for three-fourths of all flu deaths. The latest blow was a study in The Lancet last month that called into question much of the statistical evidence for the vaccine’s effectiveness. The authors said previous studies had measured the wrong thing: not any actual...

OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- 08/31/08 -- The Honourable David Emerson, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Honourable Peter Gordon MacKay, Minister of National Defence and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, today announced that Canada is providing assistance with the evacuation of those in the path of Hurricane Gustav. At the request of the United States government, a Canadian Forces CC-177 aircraft left Canada earlier today for the southern U.S. Gulf Coast. The Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, indicated that he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff to offer further assistance. "Canada and the United States...

LIZETTE IRVIN, HEAVILY PREGNANT, reclined on a hospital bed, relaxed, considering the circumstances. A bag of fluid dripped into her blood through an IV line as Irvin sucked on ice cubes, trying to pass the time. The ice helped to minimize the metallic taste and heat in her mouth from 5-fluorouracil, an antimetabolite, which entered her bloodstream via a catheter inserted in her chest. It was June 16, Irvin’s fourth round of chemotherapy. She was 32 weeks pregnant and had breast cancer. Before she left the chemo suite at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Irvin, who is...

MUNICH, GERMANY (AP) - Fish oil supplements may work slightly better than a popular cholesterol-reducing drug to help patients with chronic heart failure, according to new research released Sunday. Chronic heart failure is a condition that occurs when the heart becomes enlarged and cannot pump blood efficiently around the body.

Engineers at Georgia Tech have used skin cells to create artificial bones that mimic the ability of natural bone to blend into other tissues such as tendons or ligaments. The artificial bones display a gradual change from bone to softer tissue rather than the sudden shift of previously developed artificial tissue, providing better integration with the body and allowing them to handle weight more successfully. The research appears in the August 26, 2008, edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "One of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine is to have a graded continuous interface, because anatomically...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29, 2008 – Though Iraq’s military medical system has gained significant capability over the past five years, recruiting qualified physicians remains a challenge, the coalition’s top advisor to the Iraqi surgeon general said. Only 160 out of 800 available positions for physicians in the Iraqi military medical system have been filled, U.S. Army Col. (Dr.) John Powell, director of health affairs for Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq, told bloggers and online journalists in a teleconference Aug. 26. “The biggest piece right now,” Powell said, “is personnel … who have medical capabilities, who can do what’s necessary to diagnose...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE HAMMER — During a recent air assault operation in the Diyala province, the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division medical team once again demonstrated its excellence. The group, which consisted of one physician, three physician assistants, one mental health provider, a preventive medicine officer and numerous skilled combat medics, delivered seamless and exceptional medical care, despite harsh conditions. Several of the team members flew by helicopter, carrying everything needed to set up a rapid aid station with them. A rapid aid station is able to provide immediate treatment for any injuries sustained during the early phase of an...

Contact: Jessica Guenzel jguenzel@wfubmc.edu 336-716-3487 Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. –A class of oral drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes may make heart failure worse, according to an editorial published online in Heart Wednesday by two Wake Forest University School of Medicine faculty members. "We strongly recommend restrictions in the use of thiazolidinediones (the class of drugs) and question the rationale for leaving rosiglitazone on the market," write Sonal Singh, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of internal medicine, and Curt D. Furberg, M.D., Ph.D., professor of public health sciences. Rosiglitazone and pioglitazone are the two major thiazolidinediones....

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2008) — An analysis of randomized trials indicates that for critically ill adults, tight glucose control is not associated with a significantly reduced risk of death in the hospital, but is associated with an increased risk of hypoglycemia, calling into question the recommendation by many professional societies for tight glucose control for these patients, according to a new article. In 2001, a randomized controlled trial (van den Berghe et al) showed that tight glucose control for critically ill surgical patients reduced hospital mortality by one-third. "Because few interventions in critically ill adult patients reduce mortality to this...

Enlarge ImageSensitive ears. Mice that received extra copies of a protein during fetal development produced more of a key hearing cell (bottom) than control mice did.Credit: David Woessner, John Mitchell, and John V. Brigande A cure for hearing loss could be closer, now that a team of scientists has produced key ear cells in mice--and for the first time verified that the cells work just like natural ones. The inner ear turns sound waves into electrical signals inside the organ of Corti, which is lined with rows of 15,000 to 20,000 hairlike cells. The cells respond to vibrations by...

Scientists have transformed one type of fully developed adult cell directly into another inside a living animal, a startling advance that could lead to cures for a variety of illnesses and sidestep the political and ethical quagmires associated with embryonic stem cell research. Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive. The experiments, detailed online yesterday in the journal Nature, raise the prospect that patients suffering from not only diabetes...

In a discovery that’s being hailed as a leap forward in regenerative medicine, researchers have found a way to transform common pancreatic cells in an adult mouse into the rare, insulin-producing beta cells that are destroyed in type 1 diabetes. Previously, researchers believed that the only way to transmute an adult cell was to first coax it back into stem cell form and then to reprogram it; this new research removes the first step entirely.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2008) — Terminally ill rodents with type 1 diabetes have been restored to full health with a single injection of a substance other than insulin by scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Since the discovery of insulin in 1922, type 1 diabetes (insulin-dependent diabetes) in humans has been treated by injecting insulin to lower high blood sugar levels and prevent diabetic coma. New findings by UT Southwestern researchers, which appear online and in a future issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that insulin isn't the only agent that is effective. Leptin, a...

Ninety years later, survivors of the worst epidemic in history still retain knowledge of the event--on a cellular level. Scientists have found that the immune systems of a group of 90- and 100-year-olds continue to produce antibodies to the virus responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed as many as 40 million people. What's more, the antibodies still work: When transferred to mice, the rodents became resistant to deadly flu infections. It doesn't take a global pandemic to rile up the immune system. Even the seasonal flu prompts immune cells called B cells to generate antibodies specific to the...

Reviewed By Elizabeth Klodas, MD, FACC 13 Million Americans Are Exposed to Dangerous Levels of Arsenic Through Drinking Water Exposure to arsenic, typically through drinking water, is linked to diabetes, according a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Thirteen million Americans — and millions more worldwide — are exposed to drinking water contaminated with more inorganic arsenic than the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed safe. The EPA standard is 10 micrograms per liter. Researchers, led by Ana Navas-Acien, MD, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, studied 788 adults who had their urine tested...

August 19, 2008, 6:00 a.m. The Real Truth about Drug CompaniesDevelopmental issues. By Henry I. Miller I never knew my maternal grandparents. During the 19-teens, my maternal grandmother died of a wound infection following a routine gall-bladder operation. A few years later, her husband, my grandfather, suffered a fatal stroke brought on by untreated high blood pressure. Both were in their thirties. Neither occurrence was uncommon back then, but a half century of new drugs has changed that. Thanks to a research-intensive (and, therefore, capital-intensive) pharmaceutical industry, pharmacy shelves now contain dozens of antibiotics and blood pressure medications. Similar...

The same California Supreme Court that created a "right" to homosexual "marriage" earlier this year has now ruled that the state may force healthcare professionals to provide services that support an immoral and physically dangerous lifestyle. California's highest court was unanimous in its decision on Monday that Christian doctors may not refuse to perform artificial insemination for homosexual patients. (See "California court says no religious exemption for doctors") Attorney Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), reacts to the ruling. "This is a clear violation of the fundamental rights of individuals to live and practice their faith," he...

WASHINGTON - A woman who has never shown symptoms of infection with the AIDS virus may hold the secret to defeating the virus, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. Infected at least 10 years ago by her husband, the woman is able somehow to naturally control the deadly and incurable virus -- even though her husband must take cocktails of strong HIV drugs to control his. She is a so-called "elite suppressor," and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said. "This is the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People who want to live a long and healthy life might want to take up running. A study published on Monday shows middle-aged members of a runner's club were half as likely to die over a 20-year period as people who did not run. Running reduced the risk not only of heart disease, but of cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, researchers at Stanford University in California found. "At 19 years, 15 percent of runners had died compared with 34 percent of controls," Dr. Eliza Chakravarty and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Any...